At times like these, I wish so much I hadn’t already overused words like “amazed” or “awed” to describe what I’m feeling about God. Or “blown away” or “astonished” or “stunned.” For instance, I think I recall using a few of those very words about a red bird I saw in my yard yesterday. Not that God’s handiwork displayed on the delicate wings of a bird of such brilliant color that it has its own name (cardinal red) isn’t amazing. It’s just that I feel something on a slightly larger and more personal scale right now. I wish I’d reserved a few of the synonyms for “awed” for those rarer moments when I feel it to such full measure that my skin almost feels too tight for my soul. When I’m half tempted to do nothing but sit, stare out a window, and shake my head for hours on end. Times I want to say something like, “Who is this God who pursues us so personally?” Or in the psalmist’s words, “What is man that You are mindful of him, and the son of man that You care for him?” I wouldn’t bother sharing this sense I have in my heart with you if I thought moments like these weren’t smattered on the canvases of all followers of Christ. But they are. You’ve had them, too. I’m hoping you’ll remember some of them today. And perhaps you’ve had these moment of inexpressible awe for the very same reason:

The flabbergasting (I’ve overused that word, too) timing of God.

Timing that illustrates to you once again that the God of the universe who called the heavens and earth into existence really does know you are alive and what you are presently experiencing…and even thinking.

You’ve had times like the one I’m currently experiencing. Times when God made sure you were studying a particular thing at the exact time when it spoke most profoundly into that stretch of your journey. For instance, think of a time when you didn’t get to go through a particular Bible study journey during the same set of weeks as your regular discipleship group and maybe you didn’t get around to it for several years…but, when you did, you realized that God had distinctly held it for you until then. I mean, how on earth does He know??

 

You and I know the answer to that question Biblically. God is omniscient. A meticulous planner is He. But psychologically, don’t we still find it shocking? I mean, how on earth does He have the energy to keep up with millions of His followers and exactly what we need and at exactly which time?

 

Yes, we know the answer to that question Biblically, too. But, humanly, aren’t we still sometimes taken aback by it?

 

While Melissa and I were studying James together, she got wrapped up in the Book of Deuteronomy (they have flagrant ties) and talked about it enough that I also got drawn in. Enough, in fact, that by early Fall I knew God was preparing me to teach portions of it in our Tuesday night series that would begin in late January. (She would also co-teach by writing coinciding articles for our Bible study group. It’s the one we are currently serving.)

 

In preparation for the January series, I decided to start reading the Book of Deuteronomy as part of my quiet time every morning starting in November (of 2011). I did not in any way have preconceived notions about the theme in the life of the Israelites matching up to a major move in my personal life. I chose it strictly because it would prepare me daily toward teaching parts of it several months later. Of course, I anticipated that God would speak to me through it because His Word is alive and active but I had no thought of the concept being perfectly timed for me personally.

 

As God would have it, the whole book was/is about moving to new ground. (To us this side of Christ’s ascension, this shift to a land of promise would serve powerfully as a metaphor for new ground in our fruit-bearing as obvious disciples of Jesus Christ but, for me, it happened at a time when the applications were multilayered and so much so that, to ignore it would have been a fool’s choice.) And here’s the part that left me slack-jawed. One of the most powerful messages in the Deuteronomy is the warning never to forget where you’ve been with Him, what He has done for you, and that He alone is your God and that to forget Him is total destruction to you. From Chapter 8 alone…

 

 

Let me tell you something, Sweet Thing. There is nothing quite like emptying out a house you’ve been thoroughly entrenched in for nearly thirty years to cause you to remember. Keith sat across from me a few days ago, leaned back in the chair, placed his large palms on his knees – almost as if to brace himself – and said as soberly as anything I’ve ever heard him utter, “I have relived 25 years of our lives as I have cleared out that attic.” It wasn’t the time for me to correct him on exactly how many years it had been. “Well, 27 to be exact” was not about to come out of my mouth. In fact, I hardly said anything at all. I just nodded my head and sat in silence for a few minutes with him. It was a sacred selah because I knew that some of the things he’d remembered had brought joy. And some of the things he’d remembered had brought pain. I knew because the same thing had happened to me. The next day we were in his truck together going to Dairy Queen for a chocolate malt when I brought it back up.

 

“Keith, don’t you think it is so incredibly odd that God made sure you were out of town while I (and the movers) packed the house up for our move then you did the whole attic by yourself because I was back at work? Do you think it could be any coincidence that God had each of us by ourselves to remember so much of our lives there?”

 

Same house. Same children. Many of the same exact occurrences. But two completely different people with distinct DNA who processed the same events very differently. Just as Amanda would have. Just as Melissa would have. Just as even Michael would have after his seven short years in our home. You and I share many corporate events with the people in our familial circles: births, deaths, disappointments, celebrations, routines, great surprises, sudden crises. But, if we’ll let Him, God tends to us all uniquely and intimately and means each of us to glean something distinct in the process. Maybe something altogether opposite from the person sitting right beside us at the time.

 

The kinds of things we unearthed in the move seemed strategically planted by God, set right there for us to find one at a time as if we were following closely to a dog-eared treasure map.

Several of them came to me in a box Keith found in the attic. I’d forgotten it existed.

 I took the lid off and saw this:

Very uncharacteristically, Keith had looked through the whole thing before giving it to me. Don’t think that won’t make a woman nervous. In it, he’d found the first card he ever gave me. We laughed until our sides split over how beautifully it depicted us. It was like we’d had a word of knowledge about what was coming. Our whole 33 year old marriage has been the steady recycling of this exact same card given back and forth to one another:

Inside the box was the very first prayer journal I suppose I ever owned. I think that I recall a revival pastor coming to my church at the time and telling us about these little notebooks and I purchased one. I smile as I try to estimate how many I’ve purchased since. I used one this very morning.

It’s so moving to find keepsakes that you actually dated and penned with your own (young!) hand. I would have sensed the call of God on my life and walked the aisle at my church to make it public one summer before.

I read many things in that first journal that made me smile and others that pooled the tears in my eyes. Others out right mystified me. To say that I was in denial over my past childhood abuse is a mind-boggling understatement but that’s another subject for another time.  Let me just say for now that I watched my own pen flat-out lie to me over and over again. I even thanked God for the relationship I had with someone who’d abused me. Nuts. That very malfunction would put me in counseling in my early thirties. I woke up alright. That subject aside, I want to show you a specific page out of the journal because it held significant tenderness for me.

See the very top entry? That was intercession for the young people I got to serve at my home church. I was sponsoring that very group at a church camp when I first sensed a vocational call. See that second entry? I did hurt that person. A very wonderful person who deserved far better. I didn’t want to hurt him. But I surely did. I was on a terrible rebound and couldn’t be trusted emotionally. See that third entry? It was about a possible internship at a church in the Houston area. (The town is Humble, Texas. Not the name of the church. I wonder now if I meant First Baptist Humble but I’m not sure. Back then, I might not have known the difference. Grin.) They didn’t hire me and, at the time, I almost talked myself into believing that I’d made up the whole calling. I find it interesting and pathetic how quickly we (I) tend to give up and think God has passed us (me) by. I’d have made a terrible Abraham.

Now, look back up at that last entry from the page in my first journal. I fell head-over-heels in love with a young man in college who I dated for the better part of two years. He never even pretended to feel the same way about me (not his fault, God’s will) and my beaten-up heart finally shattered into a thousand pieces as I accepted it as a lost cause and bowed out. Fast forward 35 years. What makes this discovery in the journal so tender is that I received a call several weeks ago from my college roommate telling me in tears that this young man – who was now in his mid-fifties – had died that very morning of a heart attack. No warning. No prior heart problem. I had not seen him in many years. I grieved immediately and deeply for his lovely wife who he adored and who would miss him terribly. Only God could have had the tenderness to let me see this page only a short time later and have a moment’s personal mourning and remembrance over someone I’d felt much for many years earlier. God did not owe me that. It was tender mercy. Who but Christ does something like that??

There were other treasures found elsewhere. Like this picture of Keith and me boarding a cruise liner the morning after we married. (Our honeymoon was our wedding gift from his parents. We wouldn’t have two extra nickles to rub together for many years.)

That was the man I was meant to marry. And we have continued to ride many waves. It was deeply significant to me that God not only planned for me to find treasures from my spiritual journey. He also had similar intentions for Keith. I had never seen these certificates and Keith had no memory of them being placed in his possession by his parents. 

 

 

We found a whole bag of cassette-taped messages from Buddy Walters, the mentor that God used to strike a flaming desire in my heart to study Scripture. He was my first Bible doctrine teacher. These messages were preached years later at the church in North Carolina where he served as associate pastor.

Curtis converted them into CD’s for me last week. I’ve been listening to them and hearing the echo of that strong voice of authority and affection for the Lord Jesus Christ that took my breath away in my mid-twenties. Buddy died in his mid-forties and has been with the Lord for many years now but his ministry is poured into every message we have at Living Proof. God’s ways are so strange and beautiful. God knew that I could not fully “remember” my journey with Him without remembering the sound of this mouthpiece. My deepest love affair with Jesus through His Word began under that man’s teaching.

You can quite imagine that we unearthed artifact after artifact from our children’s lives. Stuffed animals. Artwork. Report cards. Clothes. You name it. I hadn’t seen this picture in so long. We were at Keith’s baby sister’s wedding. Oh, mercy, I love these two little girls so much. In this mother’s heart, they are about this same age.

I shared with you in a post soon after we moved (Dec. 2011) that I’d declared to Keith that I’d never leave that house. I also told you that one (irrational, unexplainable) reason was the fear that our time with Michael (who lived with us for seven years) would seem less real, further removed, and the door permanently closed. It was real alright. In this move, we’ve discovered him all over our house. Stacks and stacks of pictures, albums, artwork, report cards, etc, etc, etc. I found this letter that we received some months after he left.

Spud was our nickname for him. I also found this particular school picture. It was the year he departed our home. Wasn’t he beautiful?

As it turned out, the move did not distance us further nor close the door permanently. I have seen him as recently as two weeks ago and get to stay in regular communication with him. God is so gracious. Michael looks fairly different now but he is still so darling. He is a tattoo artist and has practiced a good deal on himself. I am smiling. I love him. And I am so, so proud of him. 

The 8th chapter of the Book of Deuteronomy says to remember “the whole way” (V.2) the Lord has led you. The “terrible” (NASB) and “terrifying” (ESV) wilderness (V.15) and the miracles of manna and water from the flinty rock. (Vv.15-16) Translation? Remember the awful times. Remember the awesome times. I not only dug up sweet memories. I’ve stumbled upon some terrifying ones. Some that I wish to heaven I could have forgotten. Some that make my skin crawl. I found journal entries from a time of such utter darkness in my life that only God could have brought me through in one piece. Reading my pleas from that time stirred up such strong emotions that I could have thrown up. I kept having to remind myself to keep my memories in the light of God and not let them descend into the darkness of the enemy. When I remember them before God who delivered me, I am helped. When I remember them before the enemy who full-well meant to destroy me, I am haunted. Oh, the grace and mercy God has had upon my life. He is the only good in me. I’m sure Keith found reminders of some dark days of his own. And those are between God and him. I’ll leave you with one last picture. Keith sent me this one from his phone two days ago to let me know that the house was completely empty. Don’t think it wasn’t significant to me.

 

Oh, yes, Lord. I definitely remember the heaps of trash. Thank You for assuring us that, through Your mercy, all of it – EVERY SINGLE BIT OF IT – has been thrown into the depths of the sea, swallowed up in a fountain of blood.YOU ALONE are our God. YOU ALONE delivered Keith and I from such miry clay. YOU ALONE have kept my family in tact. YOU ALONE have spared us so much shame and lifelong defeat. You alone persistently dogged us with Your Holy Spirit and Your Word until we could no longer cover our ears. You alone saw people worth fixing in our brokenness. And You still do. I never want to forget, Lord. Never. 

“Take care lest you forget the Lord your God…who brought you out of the house of slavery.”

Deuteronomy 8:16 says something so riveting that I can hardly read it without having a visceral reaction. It says that God TESTS us and HUMBLES us “to do you good in the end.”

In the end. Seems like we’ve heard that somewhere before. Somewhere this side of the Cross.

“And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to His purpose.” Romans 8:28 ESV

 

 

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