Around and to the Edge

Without really having planned such a journey, when church was in the rear view mirror,  it seemed like the thing to do to drive around the perimeter of the farm.  It is not a big farm, but it was such a fine glorious afternoon, there was no hurry to get back to the house.  I had hardly gotten off the road into the hay field when I stopped to look at the trees in the branch that were victims of the hurricane winds.  Sitting there at the edge of the branch with the warm sunshine made me feel like a nap.  After a spell I rambled a further piece where the birds were offering such a Sunday chorus I had to stop and listen.   

There were other things to see.  My new fire pit is empty now and there are still plenty of limbs ready to be hauled that way.  I checked out one neighbor's field waiting to be planted and another's where the pine straw had been harvested.  The further I rode the more of tomorrow's work of clean up and fertilizing I started seeing.  A farm is a place where everything is never done and where change is constantly happening.  To have eyes to see is to realize that every day brings something new into view.   

Is it not so with all of us?  If we could take some drive around in our inner being, we would surely see how things are different in us because of some of the storms which have blown against us!  We would surely see the places where we have grown in our understanding of what it means to be alive.  We would be filled with gratitude that God has been the steadfast presence Who has sustained us and unfolds before us a continued sense of being useful.  It has been a glorious day here on the planet earth!  What an even more glorious day it must be in the Kingdom which though all around us is still not yet completely seen!  Thanks be to God for a trip around the farm and the edge of the Kingdom.

From Whence our Help

Once you go through a season of deep grief, it becomes obvious that going through is not exactly what happens.  When we grieve deeply, there is a sense in which we never come to a place of being finished.  Instead of being finished, we learn how to go forward with it.  We each do it differently.  We always err in judging another.  There is no right way, or wrong way.  It is a time for giving ourselves permission to be someone we have never been and to be patient with ourselves as we grow into that person.   

Walking into the valley of the shadow of death, emerging into a season of deep grief, and getting comfortable with the new person we are becoming is a much slower and more difficult journey than can be understood by those who have not yet been forced to turn onto that dark path.  When it does become our turn to follow the rough pathway walked by so many, we do eventually find ourselves getting far enough along that what is past is no longer what we give permission to guide us into our future.  

Though not yet the master of the journey, I am far enough along to see another soul struggling to get their footing as they emerge from the valley of the shadow.  I wish I had found some easy way so that I could take their hand and lead them, but I know I cannot for their journey will inevitably be different than mine.  I know the Father God is there with them ready to take their hand and lead them as He did with me.  I also know it may take them some time to see and take the Hand He is offering.  In the meantime, as He patiently waits, I will pray that that this new sojourner does not have to wait too long for our help does indeed "...come from the Lord who made heaven and earth."

Toward a New Life

In order for God to give us a new life, He has to take away the one we have.   To take hold of what is new, we have to turn loose of what is old. We cannot hold both the old and the new in our hands.  What is often difficult for us to understand is that God is constantly seeking to give us a new life.   What we experience today fits us for today, but not for tomorrow.  There is within us a spirit of resistance to this new life God is wanting to give.  We like the one we have.  We are comfortable.  We are not seeing anything new coming.  

We do not anticipate it coming so we hold tightly to what we know.  Every so often we see the glow of a new sunrise, sense the warmth of it rising in our life, and find ourselves searching the edges of the fading darkness for a sign of what a new beginning will look like in our life.  What can only be seen by faith is something we want to see with more detail and certainly than is allowed in those moments.  The moment is filled with the Spirit calling us to a moment of total abandonment.  It is a threshold which causes us to want to wait and see, but such luxury is not being offered by the beckoning Spirit.

We will be able to see what it is that God is making new for us beyond the horizon, where only the eyes of faith might possibly see, but seeing what God is about will require of us a giving of ourselves to the whatever of His future in a way that causes many of us to pause before saying "yes."  It is in the saying 'yes" to what cannot be known, or seen that enables us to move forward in the direction God is pulling us.  It is a "stepping off the cliff" moment.  We step before we know if there is a net beneath, or just a very long fall.  What is there does not matter.  In those moments of embracing what cannot be seen, it is enough to know that God is beyond what we can see.