Three adorable sparrows darted to the birdfeeder at the very moment that I opened the curtain to the backyard. They looked like they were arguing who would be the first to bid me good morning. The broke into the sunflower seeds and tried to talk and eat millet and fight about who was first, all at the same time. They were so scared by the lightning, as was my Emma. She wet the bathroom floor, she was so scared. I saw her shaking and lying down next to the shower door. Looking into it, as if there were some comfort in the reflection of herself in the chrome of the bottom of the door. Poor dear Border Collie, we love her and her aging ways. Storms have always gotten her all out of sorts, but now she seems to have lost all control when the storms are loud as they were last night.
My memory runs to the early storms that we had here. The very first Sunday that we moved here there was a bolt of lightning that we were looking directly at when it hit our neighbor’s roof and took it completely off, looked like. Wow! The lightning comes very close, here. I had seen lightning before, but never damage to a house, right in front of us. It seemed that God was marking time for us. You will need to put on your alertness of the Lord’s Day. It was a time of transition for us. The Lord’s Day was always important to us, but job difficulties would challenge our considerations of the day.
Is 58;13 “If you turn away your foot from the Sabbath, from doing your pleasure on my holy day and call the Sabbath a delight, the holy day of the Lord, and shall honor Him, not doing your own ways, nor finding your own pleasure, nor speaking your own words, then you shall delight yourself in the Lord. And I will cause you to ride on the high places of the the earth and feed you with the heritage of Jacob, your father. The mouth of the Lord has spoken it.”
We had read that in the car to church for years and it had become a part of what we lived by. It was challenged time and time again and we had very often wondered what the promise part was of the verse, having attempted to hallow the Sabbath, for our own personal good and help. The lightning marked time for us. Like a reaping signal. I will meet you here, God seemed to say. I will not leave you, even this far from the familiar sights and sounds of home. We rejoiced in the reality of that even in the grief of the “ark”of our lives, as it were, having run aground this far inland for us. “Where’s the beach?” Where is that expression of God’s authority that has often been our source of reminder of God’s massive and overwhelming authority. It’s not the beach, here. It’s the lightning, among other things.
His eye is on the sparrow...I had read in a book somewhere, I think it was Wisdom and the Millers, where the mother used the lightning to remind her children that the God of the lightning is our friend and our kind shepherd. I had longed for the opportunity to share this with my children, first hand after having read this. So, the early storms, I would take the little fellows onto my lap, as I had seen Nancy Worthing do with her girls (big children and myself in a rocking chair, they like to pile on), and we watched the storm and I taught them whatever truth that God had placed on my heart to teach them at the moment. It was so easy when they were 3 and 8, Ezra and Ethan. (little did I know the sands of time and the moments of teachability were flying through my fingers) Isn’t God good? Amen! Was our homemade song through the storms of those days. Enoch was usually in earshot of the interaction, although he was not at all afraid of the lightning, then. It wasn’t catechism, as such. We had gone through certain books of questions, in earlier days, but it was in question and answer format.
God has overwhelmingly showed us Himself in the storms and transitions of this season of life, here in NC. This morning's lightning was a real reminder of that and I am praising God for His being more present than even the tumultuous cacophony. So, I cleaned up the mess from the dog in the bathroom this morning and thanked God that HE watches us in our fears rational and irrational and loves us anyhow, as we love Emma inspite of her rare storm induced incontinence. We can laugh about it.
No comments:
Post a Comment