driving in my car

2013

When your calamity comes will you worship God? Will you curse God? Will you praise Him? Will you bless Him? The calamity will come like a rogue wind in the night bringing devastation in its wake.  It will seem absurd, it will seem meaningless, it will seem undeserved.

And yet it will come.

And it will change you.

When I was twenty nine I got a letter, over the next days my hair went seventy per cent grey. It is now white, grey and a kind of mousy dark blonde no one ever wants to be. That letter aged me, it changed me and not for the better. One of my poems from that time has gorgon hair whipping out my eyes in a frenzied attack. I was not in a good place and I spent a good deal of time asking “Why?”

But that was then and this is now. I am changed, forever changed. Dealing with stuff now, oh it is still painful, it hurts like mad sometimes, but God is with me. As I was driving today my prayer was to not make decisions on my own, to sit in the situation with His peace surrounding me, His love enveloping me and His grace abounding throughout the situation. There will come a time when decisions and conversations will have to take place but that time is not now. Now there is sadness and grief, mingled with joy.

He replied, “Because you have so little faith. Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”

Matthew 17:20

Bless the Lord in whatever situation we are in, that is one of the keys to this new life, it was a lesson I learned from Job. Job was content to sit with unanswered questions. I am content to know that God is with me, that He is active in the situation, and He gives me images of hope of a future yet to be discovered. Job’s story is recorded to give us some help in living through the stuff, not just putting on a smile for the world and crying behind it     –      but bowing reverently and trustingly before the sovereign goodness of God.

Evil tries to destroy our joy in God, to sit in a situation where there is devil written all over it, trying to water down or eradicate completely my God-centred joy through pain. Well it isn’t going to happen, at my weakest most vulnerable state, I am strong in the Lord and He will do all the work in this, I will just sit and watch in awe as He goes about His business.

Faith that is deeply rooted in those things of God change be bent, can be floored but is able to get back up again, with no bruising and no battering, in fact stronger than ever. As the situation worsens so I draw closer to the Lord. Job – you’re the man, an example to me, to worship and praise the Lord in every time, every situation, every second…tick – tick – tick.