Last week I talked about moving and the challenge of change. You have to pack everything up, live in a state of upheaval for weeks, if not months, and then hope you can actually make it from one place to another with your stuff and your sanity intact. With the sacrificial help of a great bunch of friends, we did.
If you’re smart, you give away a lot of stuff, and take note of how we accumulate way too many possessions, especially for those of us who profess to follow a man who owned none.
Change comes to all of us, whether we like it or not. Personally, I’ve never liked change a whole lot. I get settled in a routine and it’s hard to get me out of it.
God thinks differently, of course, than we do, on this subject as on everything else. He continually uses the pressure of circumstances to force change on us.
Next weekend, we move out of the house we have lived in for nineteen years and the community we have lived in for thirty-four years, in fact for our entire married life. We move out of a relatively secure job I have held all that time and into a who -knows-what-will-happen self-employment role.
On a down day, I think my whole life has been one long battle against fear.
There are so many things to be afraid of. My grandson is apprehensive of spiders. At least one of my daughters has inherited my fear of heights. The funny thing is how each of us is terrified of different things. The first time I entered a public speaking contest, my twelve-year old knees were shaking. I won the contest in spite of it, and now it doesn’t bother me at all to stand up in front of a crowd of people. While I’m fine about public speaking, when it came to swimming, I was scared stiff. It took me months of lessons to make it into the deep end of the pool without panic setting in. A friend said to me, “What are you afraid of? It’s only a swimming pool.” Yeah, that’s the problem!
“Thanks for being a sojourner with me in this messed up life we live.” A young friend of mine sent me this message the other day.
His battle was my battle, and it’s your battle too. In a word, the battle is forgiveness.
He had suffered a very real and awful wrong. The perpetrator, a trusted friend, had shown no remorse.
I had an amazing experience the other day. If a miracle is a direct intervention of God in the ordinary course of events, that’s just what it was. Maybe not the biggest miracle you could think of, but still a miracle.
I was praying and fasting. In mid-afternoon, I was sitting in the car by the bay asking God to resolve a specific situation. In mid-prayer, my phone buzzed. When I saw who it was from, I checked it only to discover the message was that my prayer had been answered.
