It’s been a while.
I intended to stop for a moment and rest. Then, life happened. Life happened all around me just as it usually does, but this time so many things so close to the heart.
I chased promises for 31 days. I found them.
The testing. Faith, belief, trust. Trust. Over and over He asked me…
do you trust me?
I wish I could say that I did. Every moment.
I wish I could say I didn’t question. Or wonder. Or doubt.
I wish I could say that I stayed buried in His life-giving words. Every. Day.
One thing I did do. I kept talking to Him. Talking and talking and talking.
The one area I missed.
The listening.
I didn’t listen quite a much as I should have.
I wandered, foolishly, away from His own words. He graciously followed me and provided me with signs, right where I was. Through friends, and strangers, He showed me again that He is in all the details.
The day I was wheeled into an operating room for a stubborn kidney stone, my dear friend called to share the diagnosis of her dear daddy. Cancer. It had been hiding everywhere. No one knew. Until that day. Two weeks later he passed. Two weeks from diagnosis to the end… the new beginning. He believed, you see. He was not afraid.
My friend, her children, her mom… they remain here. Seeking the joy in this Christmas. Though the tears blur their earthly eyes ~ hands reach out, unseeing. Reach out in the faith that cannot been seen, grasping onto a God who holds them firmly in His hand.
The day I was wheeled into this surgery, another dear girlfriend was wheeled into her own surgery. Again and again she allowed doctors to cut into her eye, attempting to restore sight. Attempting to save her sight. The surgeries at first seemed successful, but time and again they failed. Then, with a final attempt, the cut appears to have healed the wound. She waits. Grateful for what she can see… timidly reaching for what she does not. Is He really there? Is He really here?
A car accident. Yet another friend and her precious little ones. She told me that she has never felt His presence like she did the moment the cars collided. In the blur of events, prying her little girls from the crushed steel cage, collapsing from pain of her own, being placed on a board into an ambulance ~ His presence was so great… she thought she would look up and see Him. A glimpse of the unseen. The blind faith… just knowing He is here.
All this and so much more, in a matter of weeks, began the day I stopped counting His promises. I intended to write so many times, but words felt inadequate in a time of searching… a time of searching for understanding.
Then, and I hardly feel equipped or that I have the right to comment on the precious souls lost to this world just days ago, unspeakable tragedy. Only my mama heart can speak to what happened that day. I just don’t understand. There are absolutely no words. So many opinions swirl around, but our opinions are rather empty. Our hearts heavy. I just don’t understand. I can only pray… and even here, in this place of wordless pleading to God, I have nothing. No words. Then His words…
In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express.
Romans 8:26
The spirit…
He knows there are no words. He requires no words.
I read the most beautiful words from dear Ann… words of this broken place. The story of a snake… it slithered its way long and forcefully into a warm kitchen of a missionary and his wife. Answering a distressed call, a local man wielding a machete swiftly decapitated the serpent. The profound insight from the missionary during this unusual occurrence has left me with one more scale peeled from my spiritual eyes. The snake did not know he was dead. Thrashing and destroying, his tail flailed through the house. Then, his end.
We know his end… this end of evil. We know he is finished. This pure evil that continues to thrash through our world. The final outcome, he has missed in all his destructive desire. He wants us to miss it, too. It is finished. In the end… love wins.
Love wins.
Our opinions… so many of them like a swirling kaleidoscope. Do they really matter? Does it really matter what we think? I stopped writing for a while. Wondering… does it really matter what I say? What my opinion is? Not really. Opinions are based on feelings, half-truths, partial knowledge, passionate desire for justice. Opinions, in all their adamant fist pounding, desperately seek truth… understanding. We want to understand.
What does matter, what matters more than anything else is…
what He says.
His truth.
The truth about writing… it’s not an answer-giver. It’s an answer-seeker.
A desperate quest for understanding. To understand the mystery in the suffering.
My opinions do not really matter. My voice in all this noise only matters for one reason. It is just one more voice trying to muffle, to quiet, to drown out the doubting, the hating, the darkness that begs to swallow us whole. Just one more voice desperate to seek light, shed light, see light… through all this… at the end of all this.
This voice seeking to thin it’s shell of skin… to allow one more flicker of His light to shine through. Here, with all the others whose flames flicker faith, hope, peace, joy… love.
And, so, I write.
Proverbs 18:2
A fool finds no pleasure in understanding but delights in airing his own opinions.
