Friday, January 01, 2010

Day by Day

I could almost have titled this one "Letting the Pieces Fall", but that may have come off a little melodramatic. It honestly feels that way though. It feels like there is precious little I can do to stop it without removing my foot from the path, and the only peace I have is when I surrender to it. As I write this it comes to me that this is the only way that I can travel and still follow my Lord. It is, in fact, the road that my feet having been walking for many years now, but some seasons seem to test the footwear more than others.
My diary shows that this time has been, and continues to be, the most challenging one since a certain sojourn in a certain prairie city. Now as then, there is no place in my life that offers any ease. Work is challenging on so many levels, family life is no cake walk as we transition to an entirely new life, marriage is good, but we have to consciously work at it. There are no real male friendships for me to draw from, and time for personal space would have an IPO higher than bottled youth. To be pressed on every front like this leaves me only one place to go for peace and solace, and that is the way and the heart of my Father. To say I do this perfectly would be a joke at best. To say I do it well would even feel like a stretch. To say that I do it at all is just pointless masochism, because if I didn't I would have already bailed. Truth is, the only thing that keeps me moving forward is the hope of my Father. As I wrote to a friend the other day, hope is a deadly weapon against our foe, but expectations are poison to the spirit. So I find myself somewhere in the middle of doing, and just surviving.
God is good, though, and gives encouragement and strength in its time. Never when I think I need it most, but when He knows I do. The heat of the day never disappears, but the cool winds do come, as do the pools of refreshing. I am thankful for this because if it were not so I would not be able to stand. It is hard to imagine how ugly that would look. I didn't like the view that giving up afforded from that prairie city and I certainly don't like it from here. The one thing I do know is that if I had packed it in in the prairies we would never have set foot in Hong Kong. The other thing I know is that persevering then brought me to a new depth of relationship with the Father, so this gives me even more hope here and now.
I certainly do not feel like any kind of spiritual superman. My Father once told me that my worries about that were groundless, because it is all found in Christ anyways. It is good that I too am found to be in Christ. This will be my rest.

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