Sticks and Bricks & Sticks and Stones

The initial pain of letting go of the house is slowly subsiding. It's only "Sticks and Bricks" as Sara calls it. I'm reminded of a line from a Mat Kearney song where he says "When all is lost, all is left to gain". I like that. Now that this piece is complete, I feel like we can move on and meet the next challenge the Lord has for us.

Speaking of the next challenge, that came and hit us broadside this morning. A personal matter that left our family reeling and wondering where the cameras were hidden. I would never compare our present trials to Job (what he went through far exceeds our perceived "problems"), but it's the similar one-after-the-other nature that leaves us scratching our heads. It seems the deeper we go in this journey, the thicker the foliage gets and the heavier the air presses on our lungs. God's not ready for us to start relying on our own strength yet.

I am amazed at the lenses by which we all view the world. It's like those optical illusions where one person sees an image of two people looking at each other and the other person sees a skull or something like that. How our past experiences and our life journey color the way we see the world. I've never been involved in a situation where this truth has played out so dramatically than this morning.

To burn off some of that energy, I grabbed my running shoes and hit to the streets, my favorite place to meet with the Lord. Whenever I enter into confrontations, afterwards I try to examine my behavior in the light of my Savior and his actions when on this Earth. You know what I think is interesting? The only times you find Jesus ripping into people is when the religious leaders and those who would make a mockery of the temple of the Lord were serving their own self-interests over those of the Lord. He saved his choice words for the "evil doers" who were intentionally distorting the truth and deceiving the people for their own empowerment. Yet for everyone else, the everyday person struggling with everyday difficulties and everyday sins He had a completely different approach. A direct rebuke, yet full of love and compassion. When Jesus tells the Samaritan adulteress at the well to "go and sin no more", you can tell that he really cared about her. That he loved her. He didn't pull any punches with the rich young ruler when he told him to "go and sell everything you have and give to the poor", but you always knew that he had his best interests in mind, the eternal and not the temporal. Up to the end, even when the crowd was hurling insults at him, spitting at him as he hung on the cross, his answer still dripped with compassion. "Father forgive them for they know not what they do." How powerful is that? And as I pounded out the miles, this statement reverberated in my mind. My response to the morning's onslaught needs to be the same. How we move forward from here to reconciliation only time will tell.

But as I neared the end of the run, I had to smile as the Holy Spirit, "the comforter", revealed to me that even this morning's events were part of his plan. Our God is bigger than we can fathom, and no situation that he allows is without its purpose. And while I am still trying to grasp the crux of this one, I know one thing. It has pulled our family even closer together than before and drawn us ever closer to the Lord. And that is always a good thing.

I read this statement in a devotional just given to me yesterday by a friend, and it stuck in my mind today. In regard to Jonah's prayer of thanksgiving while in the belly of the great fish, "The time to express gratitude to God is when in the darkness, not after deliverance." These words are incredible, and so true. To that, I say "Thank you God that you are with us during this time, and that you promise you will never leave us. Thank you God because we know that your hand will lead us out of this darkness."

JP