God – Movement in a Mercurial World

The Last Frontier

I went to Alaska recently with my husband, little son, and parents. It was a trip we all had long anticipated. Living in Texas all my life I have grown accustomed to the intense heat and the quiet rugged beauty around me. But to be honest- the only thing blue in Texas is the sky. Which there is an abundance of… as well as the color brown. (Yes I am trying to scare more people away from moving here).

As my eyes adjusted to the splendor of Alaska, its hills draped in vivid green, the snow capped peaks towering above them, the sparkling bays, and the rivers which sang so loudly, I was struck by the immense beauty around me. A thought kept resonating in my mind, Creation is shouting the question:

Who?

Who made the otters so playful? Who showed them innately to form a “net” with their hands to keep from drifting away as they sleep? Who gave knowledge to the seal to lay on ice to warm up!! (Who knew right?!) Who made the snow to melt into cascading waterfalls feeding the bays and rivers which flow down into the oceans, to go back into the clouds to send rain and snow to the mountains to flow downhill yet again? Who created the mountain peaks- and the one that towers above them all? The magnificent majesty of Denali is unreal, it’s peak tricking you to think a triangle shaped cloud actually exists! Who painted the intricate flowers with wild oranges, soft pinks, and playful blue hues that revel the sky? Who gave the beetle his blue, red, and gold wings? (And how does he survive the winter??) Who put the fish in the streams to feed the animals and the people that inhabit the wildernesses?

Denali- the tiny white triangle middle right above the gray mountain range!

Who gave the bald eagle her eyesight? She is able to spot her prey for up to 2 miles away! Who made the seas to teem with so much life despite the frigid temperatures? Who made the trees sing each time the wind blows through them, their hands raised in praise to Someone? Who made the birds to know when to fly south, every single year before the unbearable cold comes? Who gave wisdom to the bear to stock up before the long winter? Who made the dark velvet sky to display the stars? Who made the lights to dance across it, particles from the sun escaped into the atmosphere in the long nights of winter here? Otherworldly amethysts, magentas, golds, and emeralds?

A song popped into my mind as I wrote these thoughts down-

“Who taught the sun where to stand in the morning? And who told the ocean you can only come this far?”

Those words are from the musician, Nicole C. Mullen and were sung at my small high school graduation. They have long stuck with me. The inspiration comes from last part of the book of Job. The other 30 something chapters are filled with Job’s immense suffering. As a righteous and blameless man living in a time where being good equaled a happy life- he lost everything. His children, his possessions, his wealth, his friends, the respect of his community and his wife, and his health all gone.

In the end of all the turmoil, suffering, and lament of his friends- God responds by asking Job where he was when He formed the world.

God answers our deepest life questions with Himself.

“For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.”
‭‭Romans‬ ‭1:20‬

We are without excuse because His glory is all around us. And we are vessels of His image, that same glory. We think, we create, we reason, we love, we feel, and we want to be known. What has kept us from knowing Him is the lie that we have all come from nothing.

Science and math defy this, a simple study of reproduction flies in the very face of everything evolution upholds. We produce after our kind because we are created to. This is intelligent design. The greatest lie in our culture in the last century is that we weren’t fashioned by Someone.

And it has kept us from knowing our Creator.

And knowing who we are meant to be in Him.

Job, the man who suffered, lived thousands of years before Jesus, was inspired by the Holy Spirit to write this:

“For I know that my Redeemer lives, And He shall stand at last on the earth; And after my skin is destroyed, this I know, That in my flesh I shall see God, Whom I shall see for myself, And my eyes shall behold, and not another. How my heart yearns within me!”
‭‭Job‬ ‭19:25-27‬

Job knew despite his suffering that God would renew all things. What his eyes saw around him grew his faith. And he knew one day his faith would become sight. God was coming to redeem this broken world.

“God was manifested in the flesh, Justified in the Spirit, Seen by angels, Preached among the Gentiles, Believed on in the world, Received up in glory.”
‭‭I Timothy‬ ‭3:16‬

Creator became creature- Jesus.

“And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world. Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God dwelleth in him, and he in God.” 1 John‬ ‭4:14-15‬

God makes Himself known in creation and in Jesus, the co-author of creation. We are made to know Him, and we are known and loved by Him.

Alaska opened my eyes to new beauty and grew my faith to new heights.

“And you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart.”
‭‭Jeremiah‬ ‭29:13‬ ‭

Some more pictures of creation.

The Fullness of God’s Time

Dates imprint themselves on me. Not so much in the way of long past history, or a great recollection of them, rather they become signposts. My Bible is full of notations of a day (or year) alongside verses that have marked my place in life. Verses God has given me in seasons of pain, prayer, hoping, or rejoicing. Returning to them is a remembering of God’s faithfulness and goodness in my life.

On the early morning of my one year Anniversary to my dearest (but still sleeping) husband, I sat on a porch in the backwoods of Northwestern Arkansas. My soul breathed in the beauty of God all around me.

And on the forefront of my mind was the divine ordination of this day exactly one year ago, when He joined my life with my husband’s as one.

I opened my Bible on the porch and my eyes fell to my underscoring of Psalm 68:7-8a,

”O God when You went out before your people, when You marched through the wilderness, the earth shook: the heavens also dropped rain at the presence of God.”

Beside it was written: “2-12-19, AR.” I vividly recall that season. I had gone to Arkansas to spend time in a cabin with God. It was rainy and unwelcomingly cold. I was walking through some deep soul mending, trying to cling to what I was learning: God was sovereignly weaving everything in my life for His plans and His goodness to radiate through.

The streams flooded with the winter rain made magnificent waterfalls!

I did not know then I would meet my husband a month later.

On the same page, I had also marked our wedding date, 10-03-20, beside the 6^th verse:

“God sets the solitary in families, He brings out those who are bound into prosperity.”

I am overjoyed for the earthly family He has given me in my husband. More than that, this has been a meaningful promise as a long time single- God sets his people in forever family.

That morning, I was struck by how good God is to remind us of what He has done, so that we remember who He is when life tells us otherwise. I sat inside those reminders for awhile watching the sun color the trees.

We invited the Lord into our day as we went in search of adventure. The lazy Buffalo River wound her way through hills, cutting cliffs as we hiked along her bluffs. I found a wedding band! I turned it into the park ranger station. She much too exuberantly gave me a junior ranger sticker. I guess the mask hid my 38 years well.

The Mighty Buffalo River was low, but lazily stretched on.

We went in search of more trails only to find they were quite overgrown or not marked. Our hunt for a final trail took us down a river access road. Gravelly and narrow, we gave way to an oncoming truck. Though he had room, he suddenly veered and parked. In the ditch. Perplexed I looked in the rearview and saw his truck door open. He must be going fishing in his hopefully four wheel drive.

We meandered on down to the river in search of the illusive trail. We never found it and discovered later you have to caulk the old wagon and ford the river to get to the trailhead! We drove back up the same road, dejected, our sense of adventure not satiated.

As we came to a little community church, two men were standing along the road. The younger of the two flagged us down, “Hey, could I borrow one of your phones? I don’t have any reception out here and my truck is stuck in a ditch.” We pulled over and spent the next half hour calling his brother and then AAA to come extricate his truck. The kind AAA lady tried to locate us on her GPS. The older gentleman native to the area, still in his work overalls, gently tried to guide her, “Yew see ma’am, yew just come to the end of the black top and hang a right and keep comin’.” She finally was able to locate us and send help. During all this, the man in distress was pacing back and forth, and chain smoking like he was in a foxhole. Seemed his mind was. Or he was on something other than oxygen.

His name was “C.J.”. He was very polite and grateful, but we sensed through the Spirit’s nudging that more than his truck was in the ditch. I asked him what we could pray for in his life. He starting spilling out how his life was in a bad way. How he was in a bad way when he went into that ditch. He seemed desperate, having offered his brother a substantial amount of money to come help him. He made the point he had been trying to be good, “and watch his beers.”

So we began to share what God had done for him. He said he couldn’t stop thinking of his past. We told him that Christ had nailed his past to the Cross including everything that was ever written in the law to condemn him. That Christ wanted to set him free and give him a new life. He responded and said he had read, “The truth will set you free.” “Yes, and who is the truth?” “Jesus!” we happily told him.

Jesus himself said, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life, no one comes to the Father but through Me” John 14:6.

The older gentleman nodded in agreement off to the side.

We told C.J. that none of us could ever be good enough to meet God’s standard. But that God had made a way for relationship with Him through the Cross. Through accepting what HE did in our place and receiving His forgiveness He gives us a new heart and a new life. He listened with his eyes intent, his feet still, his soul soaking in what his mind and heart had been wrestling with when, “God put him in that ditch”. (His words.)

We told C.J. he was the answer to our prayer that day, and that we would be praying for him and encouraged him to find believers to walk out his life with. He opened his empty wallet and told us he didn’t have anything to offer us.

Isn’t that the story of grace? To get God in exchange for emptiness?

We told him we just wanted to hear his story in heaven someday.

We drove away rejoicing that God had answered our prayer and marked our day with us!

God healed some disappointments in my heart that day, over the hard circumstances that had led to us getting married a week later than planned and with much fewer loved ones. His ways and his timing had perfectly led us to celebrate our anniversary in the timeline that put us on the trajectory of a man in a ditch needing a Savior.

I told you I had a thing for dates. I guess God does too, for he graciously sent His Son in the fullness of time (Galatians 4:4). Jesus most certainly entered into the confines of time to show us just how infinite and everlasting His love is by becoming sin in exchange for giving us His righteousness.

One last gift the Lord gave. I had my husband open the first letter I ever wrote him, before I met him. God had put it on my heart to channel my desires for family through writing many years before. I hadn’t read it since.

The date I penned it was October 3, 2008.

Our wedding day.

If God is not moving on your timeline friend, stop panicking. He is able to accomplish far more in a nanosecond than you can in a lifetime of worrying. He does more in our resting than we can ever do in our doing.

I Peter 3:9 says, “The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.”

God is weaving a thousand different details in the very detail of your life you think He is most neglectful of. He redeems the years the locusts have eaten and promises to bring good from evil. Don’t get ahead of his timing. God doesn’t need our help, He just wants our trust.

Right now I am praying for His timing in other desires of my heart. I am learning that He truly sets our boundaries and time on earth with the greatest of intentionally.

Keep pressing into the God who created time, who humbly entered into it, and who has seated us with Him forever.

“Who raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus” Ephesians 2:6-7.

The Buffalo River looked quite different from the last season I had visited her in.

The wild river flooded the banks, 2-12-19.

“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.” Ecclesiastes 3:1

God knows what you need. And meets you in your wanting.

I wouldn’t say that I was overly picky when it came to dating.

I just wanted to know if a dude was “it” before we launched into a full relationship.

I think you see the problem there, before I did.

I wasn’t over particular about looks. It was more of interests that drew me in further than one’s swagger. I never liked pretty boys and as a result can’t really name many Hollywood actors. Being too pretty usually goes to your head anyways.

I wanted someone who sought to love God more than himself, and put others before him. After all loving God and loving people are inseparable.

I wanted someone who treasured and lived God’s Word, valued family and community, and upheld my desires to serve my family full time someday, as well as my heart for missions.

These are good things to want. But then there was a much longer informal second list. I am embarrassed to admit some of its contents but, hey can’t a girl dream? I kinda wanted dating to look like a friendship in fast forward. With it ending in an engagement precisely 6 months later and marriage rounding out the perfect year of a homegrown relationship.

I probably don’t need to tell you at this point that I idealized. A lot. Especially about the future of a relationship. I sometimes missed seeing what was right in front of me.

That proved to be crushing.

So I swung the other side of the pendulum, and forgot that you need to at least share the same ideal ways of actually living the day to day.

I dated all types through the trajectory of my years. Common mistakes and erratic threads binding the two ends of that line into a circle. I found myself dizzy. I spent years looking for a man with a ministry focus, associating this with godliness. I unfairly judged some based on their lack thereof, and I missed the lack of relational character in those who hid behind the idea of one.

Turns out cracks in trust don’t make for a good foundation.

I pivoted towards those who drew the deepest empathy out of me. I dated a few not-so healthy guys in an attempt to convince myself, that together we made a whole.

Come to find out in relationship, it’s two wholly broken people healed by God’s grace who are made one in Christ.

I spent a lot of time chasing after a perception of who I thought someone was, and my perception of what God wanted for me.

Sometimes we have to circle around a few times to realize we are the ones digging the trench around trust instead of placing ourselves in it.

Over and over I would have these conversations with God.

“If you would just change his heart towards me.”

“If you would just change him.”

At one point even praying, “God, open my heart.”

There was a good reason it wasn’t.

God showed me that essentially there are two places for my faith-trust to be planted.

One- In Him, fully confident that every “no” brought a greater “yes.” (Certainly not all seen in this lifetime.) And to trust that God was walling my way in with great care and kindness.

Or I could believe that the painful doors closed were purposeless and careless of God as he “tried” to orchestrate good from the ground zero of mine and other’s disastrous choices. He appeared to be failing miserably as my health tanked more with every risking of my heart. I couldn’t see the imminent good from the piles of smoke and ash as I kept circling.

Or He just wasn’t finished yet.

Psalm 139:5-6 became an anthem for me in my resolve to trust, “You hem (wall) my way in, before and behind me, You lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, I cannot attain it.”

I didn’t know if marriage was something God had for me at age 36. But I was learning to trust that His ways really were good. And what I needed. And more than that, God was what I needed most.

About the time I surrendered again for the 100th time and was learning to let go of my ways, when I was contemplating why arranged marriages were not valued in our culture…

Enter Cap K.

He lived 1,234 miles away.

Who serenaded me with Kip songs. (As in Napoleon Dynamite. Told you I don’t care much for the bright lights of Hollywood.)

Did I mentioned how far away he was?

Who called me consistently.

This technology thing isn’t really the old fashioned love story I had in mind.

Who showed me he was really listening by lifting up my friends, family, and their stories in his prayers with me every evening. Before he even met them.

So… why isn’t he married??

Who flew down with renewed hope in his step and faith in his long-journeyed heart to meet a girl he had only talked to on the phone.

What kind of man does that?

Who confessed his faults. And showed me grace in mine.

This kind of man freaks me out a little. Ok, a lot.

And in whose broad shoulders I finally felt at home, at rest.

I could be me.

He was genuine.

Together we fit.

It’s as if God arranged it all along.

Where my heart finally found trust. Saginaw, MI

It turns out His severest kind of mercies were truly His kindest.

PRAISE GOD FOR ALL THE PAINFUL NO’S!

God knew in my health struggles I needed a man who would support and provide for me, not just financially/physically, but who would uphold and treasure my empathetically big heart, and encourage my spirit and giftings with his quiet, steady strength.

God knew I needed someone whose ministry was everyone around him, because that’s what my life had become, without even realizing it. (Through trial pursuit of far and away doors, God kept bringing me right back to where I was. “To be all here-” Jim Elliot.)

I am not trying to say that in finally letting go it all happened. I had let go 1,000 times before. We certainly don’t get everything we want. Thank God! But sometimes the wanting is hard. I learned that our journey through our desires is about trusting a God who is good, who hears our prayers, and is moving on our behalf, for our good. Always.

I am still learning this.

It’s coming up on two years now, of that fatal moment when we met. It wasn’t quite love at first sight. I was still a bit blind. God graciously knew my heart needed to set its vision on the right order of things. So He sent me the most patient man on earth.

We wholly committed our dating to the Lord. And slowly, God said yes through a thousand little flashes of sight into each other’s hearts. Like the fireflies that dance in quiet harmony, their illumination is only seen against the falling of time.

The fireflies, a personal reminder of God’s sovereignty, lit up the fields of Ohio, his home state.

A year later, after Cap K courageously had answered all the questions in my head, I answered his question with a resounding, “Yes!” from the depths of my heart.

At our wedding, we had our parents gather around us and pray. The beautiful irony of God ‘arranging’ our meet up through their life long prayers and love was not lost on me.

Psalm 139 was the passage my beloved brother unknowingly wrote our wedding sermon on.

Along the way of God “walling” me in, it taught me to look up. It caused me to trust in painfully real ways, but it brought me deeper into His goodness.

He filled the trenches of my weary walking with His unmeasured grace. The altar of trust I had encircled for many years had cost Him everything. What was the mere measure of my laying down what was not mine to own?

It’s amazing how God uses the disappointments of our wants to bring us to what we need.

Him.

Lake Superior, where we spent some of the happiest days of our dating.

This is written in honor of my husband of 6 months. Happy two years of growing in our wanting of each other, and having all we need supplied in Christ Jesus our God for all eternity.