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.
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 6th 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.
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.
“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.” Ecclesiastes 3:1
Movement in a Mercurial World 