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Vol. 2009 Issue 04 ~ April

I had a speaking engagement yesterday that went…okay. Not horribly…I didn’t trip or anything. But not amazingly either…no one came barreling up to me to tell me I had just changed her life. It was somewhere in between. In the blah zone. Which I don’t get. Because I was prayed up, just like the previous morning’s gig, which was slightly better than blah, thankfully.

This always intrigues me. I can be prayed up or I can be completely steeped in sin and one day I can be on and one day I can be off. (I don’t recommend doing it completely in sin, though.) But no pattern. Hmmm. Rephrase: no pattern I can see.

My ten year old son, Jack, is in Awana this year. His last year before youth group. He did it last year and it was fine, no big deal. But this year…this year this boy of mine is on fire. He is memorizing Scripture like there’s no tomorrow. (I made the mistake of telling him of a family that I read about years ago where the Dad offered to buy his son a car if he memorized the entire book of Philippians, or something like that, and Jack’s eyes grew wide and his jaw dropped open. I probably should’ve told him I wasn’t implying anything with that story.) Regardless of the motivation, be it more Awana bucks, his mother’s praise, the smile of Jesus on his life, or something else internal I don’t know about, he’s blowing me away. But what makes this year different than last year? Nothing I can see.

Several gals I know and I have decided to go to Liberia this summer. I’ve heard some things that have happened to them since saying yes that have made me smile. Like basements flooding, a job loss, an almost broken nose, a child experiencing seizures all of the sudden, utter discouragement. Okay, why am I smiling? Not because I’m cruel, but because isn’t it slightly interesting that saying yes to God sometimes equals life circumstances going awry? No rhyme or reason to it. Because other things have happened too like huge support checks coming in, sweet times of intimacy with God, letters of encouragement from the least expected people, emotional barriers being kicked down with power that wasn’t, seemingly, there before. Nothing I can see explains this.

Exactly. So much more is going on than our eyes can see. We have to just keep walking. Plant that seed. That’s all we’re responsible for. The harvest…what comes of it all…is not up to us. We can’t see what’s going on, really, every time we pray a prayer, every time we hold the hand of someone who is lonely, every time we fly to the other side of the world, every time we hug our child or share our hearts or commit a verse to memory or wipe a tear away or bring someone a meal or gently tell someone the hard truth or say we’re sorry…nothing we can see. But when we see no result…I have a feeling that’s when the biggest victories are being won in the spiritual realm. So keep on walking…no matter what you see.

Submitted on : 1-Apr-2009