I've been tagged in a meme by a good friend (thanks, Happy) who's decided that my not having posted in the last couple of weeks needs to be corrected. Never mind that my time has been consumed with travelling cross-country with my husband and three small children for his job interviews, and as a result, purchasing a house, securing a mortgage, starting to pack up our home for an interstate move. Life is feeling more than a little bit out of control. I feel like I'm making huge decisions without the time or flexibility to consider them properly. And oh, yeah. In all of this, the laundry still needs to get done, my kids need to get fed and I'm also burning a fair bit of writing energy on an ever more futile attempt to complete NaNoWriMo 2007. Don't know what posessed me to sign up for that one. The Holy Spirit maybe. Or my own cracked psyche. Or one working through the other. It somehow seemed--well, if not like a good idea, at least like something that God was for some insane reason indicating.
So then I got tagged with this thing. And actually managed to stop for all of about 30 seconds this morning and start to pray and sort of start to think about it and heard the non-audible voice of God. Jesus. That Jewish, bearded, blue-jeans and Birkenstocks clad Son of God that lurks around my subconcious. His speaking inside my head the way that characters from a book do when I'm reading or writing. "I am with you."
Christ with me. Leading me. I'm not alone in this chaos, nor is it simply random. In this insane season, Jesus is walking me through it. And, oh yeah. When Jesus first said that to his disciples it was together with the Great Comission. Maybe that's God's way of reminding me that all this feeling of being swept up is simply the way that I get to where God is taking me.
The person who started this over at Lord, I Believe asked everyone who responded to link back, so here's the link.
6 comments:
Nice. I knew He'd have something to say. :)
Hey, check this out when you get a chance:
Forgiving the Church
Thanks for participating. I like the thought that Jesus IS with us, always. I have updated the original post to include a link to here.
And good luck with the move...I have moved a lot in my life, to the point I'm good at it, but finally seem to be settled down. I note from your profile you're in Colorado - are you moving from or to it? I grew up there and have lived there two more times after that, but am in mid-Missouri now.
Oh, and you shoulda signed up for NaBloPoMo - committing to a blog post a day is MUCH easier than trying to write that novel! :-)
Hey, Jim--hope you don't mind Sara's husband popping up to answer your question. We're currently in Colorado, across the Divide from Boulder, in Grand Lake; ironically, in view of your blog, we're moving to a small town near Fort Wayne, Indiana. (Significantly bigger and farther, though; we were trying for Ossian, right near the folks you mention, but ended up in Winona Lake.) I'm a pastor, moving from my first call to my second--both Presbyterian Church (USA), though I'm actually not of that denomination.
And thanks for the good words on the move; I hate moving, am extremely bad at it, and always find this a high-anxiety time. For my wife, I try to be part of the solution, but I don't often manage it. All prayers appreciated. :)
Man, I hope that call is a GOOD one, because if I ever got a chance to live in Grand county I think you'd have to dynamite me out. I've lived in CO three times in my life, and now am in mid-MO for the foreseeable future because of family, but Les and I are hoping that some day we can move to CO and live in a little unspoiled small town in the SW part of the state we love (and that I don't mention by name - I want it to stay small and unspoiled).
Anyway, good luck on your venture!
Thank you again, Jim, for your best wishes. There are certainly many things that I am going to miss desperately from our time here. At the same time, after five years in the mountains, we're starting to understand that there are some challenges to life, and especially to ministry, in such a setting as this that we simply did not anticipate. Suffice it to say that I am thankful that God chose to use us as his tools in this place for this season, but it has become clear that what he has for is next is elsewhere . . . and one thing I'm learning is that where I want to be is where God will be able to use me most effectively for his kingdom.
On a couple of other notes--thank you for the link to NaBloPoMo. But I think that the NaNoWriMo thing has been at least in part a way of God giving me a kick in the pants and telling me to get back to work on that novel that I started on over ten years back that I still haven't finished a first draft of that I'm really supposed to finish . . . it's sort of one of the things that God's given me to do and sort of one of the ways that he's indicating that I really need to actually do it. And whether or not it's easy is beside the point.
I agree with you that the SW part of CO is simply amazing. Your small town might be next to ours that way. And I'm looking forward to seeing in the New Earth what God really meant for this part of the west, unspoiled by the legacy of strip-mining, by humans abusing the fragile eco-systems, the ravages of pine beetles, wild fires, etc., but the mountains, mesas, arches, canyons and everything else in their full unfallen splendor.
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