Vocabulary Lessons

God has been working on my vocabulary lately.  I feel like I have an arsenal of inadequate words -- a kindergarten spelling list -- to describe His glory.

Words for wow:

Beautiful.

Stunning.

Incredible.

Awesome.

Epic.

Almighty. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As we come to know Him more, we come to recognize Him more.

Not just in the exalted vistas, but in our every days.  Which are never so ordinary after all.  There is something wow in this very day.  May we recognize God Almighty in it.  May we learn a new language to worship Him.

O LORD, our Lord,

how majestic is Your name

         in all the earth!

You have set Your glory

        above the heavens.

                 Psalm 8. 1

 

 

In Our Midst

We have been hiking our way through a few national parks, trekking through the wonders of God's creation.  We are amazed by the intricate design of the hand of God, each kind of tree and plant and animal interconnected and dependent on each other.  Not an eco-system that just happened, but a universe designed that way. The wilderness is never barren, but embedded with beauty around every bend in the trail. The awe that is stirred up within us is simply a call to worship, to enjoy the creation and worship the Creator.

A snapshot cannot capture the immensity.  Nor words can describe it.  One day as we ascended a trail to some alpine lakes, we could go no further because of deep snow.  We had to turn around.  The hike was not for naught, nor a failure on our part.  Because before we headed back down, I looked up through the trees and saw the blueness of sky that defied words in any language.  It was not even the color or beauty that energized me, but the glory of God breaking through and taking my breath away.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was not a matter of trying to see the divine in this, but realizing His magnificence face to face, His Presence in our midst that cannot be explained away, His fingerprints that say, "Do not fear.  I am with you." All along.  In our midst.  Even in this.

May we see life not just a series of rolling hills, ascents and recoveries, deep gullies to scramble through, unmarked trails and trials that we have not chosen nor understand, nor the steepest mountain paths that never seems to end, but God's redeeming in the present tense.

As author Wallace Stegner described more than sixty years ago, "We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.  For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope."

The geography of hope --I love that phrase-- reassures us that God is, and He has spoken.  Hope is not wishful thinking, but that on which we can stake our lives. He is God.  And we are not.  God is here among us.  The immensity of the sky uncovers His steadfast love and grace toward us, no matter what.

O LORD, our Lord,

   how majestic is Your name

   in all the earth.

                   Psalm 8.1 

 

As we walked through a sanctuary of mammoth sequoia trees, I thought about the third day of creation when God was bringing forth the beauty of this earth.  And as He was forming the trees, those huge pillars of every type that defy gravity, when He was designing the sequoias, He must have said, "Now watch this!"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

No matter where we go today, or what we do, walking through the ordinary and familiar, or through a wilderness which we do not know, may we be aware of God's wonders embedded in this day.  As blatant as the mammoth sequoias, may we not just see His wonders way off someday in the distance or in the rear view mirror way in our past, but realize His Presence in our midst.  He is bigger still.

Even today, God says to each one of us,

       "Now watch this."

 

Something Happened

The world is broken, shattered, rebellious, unkind and seeped in violence and evil.  The news is so bleak and seems bleaker by the day.  Does God care?  O God, do something!

And as I sat in the early evening shadows last night, a nail in my hand in a silent church service, the answer came to me. 

And I realized yes, He already did.  Good Friday.

Jesus did not just enter our suffering or share in it, He suffered for us.  On the cross, He whispered, "I love you too much to let you live that way."  That is the gospel.

Christmas declares that He came.  Good Friday shows us why.

Because of Good Friday, we can live forever.  Easter just underlines that.  Because there would be no Easter, if not for Good Friday.

Good Friday is not celebrated to remind us of our wrongdoing, wrong being, and guilt.  God forgave us through the sacrifice of His Son.  The debt has been paid.  

The cross was not an accident.  Or Plan B.  But the sacrifice of Jesus was foretold from almost 800 years before Christ -- proclaimed not just predicted by the prophet Isaiah.

Surely he has borne our griefs,

    and carried our sorrows;

yet we esteemed him stricken,

    smitten by God and afflicted.

But he was wounded for our transgressions;

he was crushed for our iniquities;

upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,

and with his stripes we are haled.

All we like sheep have gone astray;

we have turned --everyone-- to his own way;

and the LORD has laid on him

         the iniquity of us all.

                    Isaiah 53. 4-6

It is a humbling truth that Jesus died not because of my goodness, but for my wrongdoing. That is not something we can grasp.  "Oh, you didn't have to do that for me."

"Yes, I did," He replies.

Something happened that day that changed the world.  That changes -- present tense-- everything about each one of us.

God says, "I love you more than you can know."

Lions and Tigers and Big Spiders

Finally, after torrential rains, a sunny spring day emerged, and a great time to take the grandkids to the zoo.  Apparently, everyone else had the same idea.  I have never seen so many people there.  And having come through the past two years of covid, I have not seen so many people. Period.

In some crowded sections, I did not call out "Stay where I can see you," because somehow in their minds, grandmothers have super-powered vision that can see through walls.   And so, I advised, "Stay where you can see me." 

There have been many times in my life, distracted by so much, overwhelmed by all that is going on, that I feel like God has said the same to me.  Go.  Enjoy.  But be aware of My Presence.  "Stay where you can see Me."  And sometimes even  go where you can see Me. And that gives me immeasurable freedom.  

Don't get too far ahead.  Don't lag behind.  Run with Him.

There were crowded areas in this river of people where I would suddenly feel a small familiar hand reaching for mine, one of our little ones realizing his need for someone safe.  And then, we entered the reptile house -- which always gives me the creeps.  Not because of the scaly reptiles, bats, and enormous arachnids all in thick glass shelters there, but because it is really dark inside.  And it was there that I reached for their hands, not to hold them back, but to keep them with me.  At one point, one of our five-year-olds looked up.  "Oh, you are here."  In that shadowy place, it is easy to forget.

And often in those really dark places which we ALL find ourselves at one point or another -- those unexpected bottomless pits,  dark and stormy nights, power out, no batteries in the flashlight, the sound of intruders down the hallway, where in the world am I? --we forget that we are not alone and Who has a stronghold on us.  

God has reminded His people over thousands of years in a billion different situations on foreign lands, places where we are oblivious of His Presence,  in the familiar on the most ordinary days, and right here in the crisis:

 

For I, the LORD your God,

      hold your right hand.

It is I who say to you,

"Fear not,

   I am the One who helps you."

                       Isaiah 41. 13

 

Take My hand

    and trust Me in this. 

Right here with you.

God changes what we see.

    And that would be His faithfulness.

 

 

 

Because sometimes it looks like a mess

 

Two of our grandsons were coloring the other day.  They did not want coloring books with clear cut images defined for them by heavy dark lines.  They wanted blank sheets on which they could freely imagine.

When they were done, one had carefully drawn an identifiable object.  "Good job," I said.

But the other presented me with this picture.  "Tell me about it," I asked.

And for what appeared as a mess, there was an elaborate story woven into every strand.  Nothing random, even down to the colors and to what initially looked like scribbles.

Sometimes life looks like that.

But always, God calls us to follow Him into His narrative, no matter the erratic lines, no matter the circumstances, right into His designs that we don't often recognize without the story behind it, or the story about it,  or how it all fits together.  Sometimes we just live with the temporal mystery that one day will make all the sense in the world.  We just can't see it yet from where we are standing.

But we can trust Him in it.

The naturalist John Muir explored wilderness areas his entire life more than a hundred years ago.  He not only observed the seamless weaving together of God's creation, he sought out the wonders, and lived fully in the midst of it.  He once said, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe."

There will always be a lot of stuff we don't get, because we have finite vision.  Whether we understand something or not, even if it looks like a mess, sometimes that is what God's faithfulness looks like in His grand narrative, far beyond our lifetimes.  We don't have to grasp it all, but we can follow God into it and trust Him in it, one strand and one squiggly line at a time.  And one day on the other side of life, we will gasp, "So that's why...."

Not just mystery, but the intricate beauty of His designs.

And He is before all things, 

and in Him

all things hold together.

                   Colossians 1. 17