Today is the end

I got an email yesterday from the Realtor which let me know that the property is being closed on today. It is probably happening right now, or it is already over. I can picture them all sitting around a large oval table that has been polished to a rich sheen (possibly papers slide across it more easily that way).

It is bittersweet day for me. I had high hopes, but I am also glad to have closure.

My highest hopes are that whoever has bought it will love it and enjoy it and care for it. It is a treasure and like most treasures it is rare and costly.

Soli Deo Gloria

prayer

Praying for God to bring our family to live on the farm where I lived as a young child seems very selfish in the light of the current destruction, human suffering and death in Japan where the tide is bringing in a harvest of dead bodies. Another tide of radiation is flowing over the land. The tide of suffering and brokenness that flows from the heart of each victim, each family member, each volunteer, each and every person that is witness to these catastrophic events, is so great that only our Heavenly Father can comprehend it's magnitude. Only he can bear the burden of so much sorrow.

Spring seems surreal suddenly; the gentle beauty of blades of fresh green grass pushing up in small tufts from beneath the brown vestiges from last autumn, the flight of the mourning doves as they flit about looking for a safe nesting spot, the crisp clean fragrance of the air as it is filled with the scent of all the things growing anew in the damp earth. Once we even woke up to a landscape sprinkled by a gentle spring rain, something that we don't usually experience in this arid climate.

Spring is happening. It is not any less real then last year or any year before.

And neither is our God. He is still as real, still as powerful, still as interested in the minute details of our everyday lives. My heart breaks for the people of Japan and all those who are suffering everywhere. I am called by God to be like him, to be caring, compassionate, and empathetic. I am called to intercede in prayer for those who suffer. How any one's heart cannot call out to the Lord on behalf of these victims is incomprehensible to me. We should never be so caught up in our own lives that we cannot "weep with those who weep, and morn with those who morn". Yet God has room for all our requests, one does not eclipse the other. Now I have more petitions to bring before the Lord, more reasons to humble myself before him and to throw myself upon his mercy and grace. Persistence in prayer is so important. It is so easy to tire when we see no immediate results. There is no fast-prayer drive up, no express prayer aisle (10 times or less!), and no one-click praying. Prayer is about relationship and knowing God. Interceding on behalf of the victims in Japan is the privilege to come into the throne room of grace. I get to humble myself before the Creator of the Universe and beg him to intercede, comfort and heal. No request is too large or too small to be of importance to our Heavenly Father.

Our answered prayers seem insignificant in the light of the great need we perceive. Yet the needs of humanity are no larger today then they were last week. It is just harder for us to ignore them when they are visible to us. Now we are seeing physical evidence of destruction, but sin is ravaging humanity every day. The urgency is ALWAYS this great even though we don't always see it.

"He did it with all his heart and prospered."

-2 Chronicles 31:21

"Whole-heartedness shows itself in perseverance; there may be failure at first, but the earnest worker will say, "It is the Lord's work, and it must be done; my Lord has bidden me do it, and in His strength I will accomplish it." Christian, art thou thus "with all thine heart" serving thy Master?"

-from the March 15th Evening reading, Morning and Evening by C.H. Spurgeon

For a recording of "If with all your hearts" by Mendelssohn (which is an adaptation of Jeremiah 29:13) click here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUfyGNwbxYw

I have sung this song multiple times and the promise of God's presence is a comfort and shield to me.

a year later

It is so strange that it has been almost exactly a year since my last post. A year before that I was in NJ trying to find some way to fund the purchase of my childhood home.

Our brain must store hope and pain, longing and desire in some way that it is rekindled by the seasons, awakened once again by the cycle of time that courses on year after year. I thought perhaps I had "gotten over" this whole thing. Yet I was saddened by my lack of persistence and how easily our minds give way to the "tyranny of the urgent".

Spurgeon, my constant mentor through his enduring work "Morning and Evening" convicted me once again of my inconstancy in prayer.

"The more spiritual the exercise, the sooner we tire in it. The choicest fruits are the hardest to rear: the most heavenly graces are the most difficult to cultivate. Beloved, while we do not neglect external things, which are good in themselves. we ought also to see to it that we enjoy living, personal fellowship with Jesus." -Evening of January 24 from "Morning and Evening"

As long as I felt that there was still something I could do, some hope in my works, I kept my hand to the plow and my heart in prayer. Once all my options had been expended, all hope of human aid gone, my heart grew weary in hoping. So much for " faith is substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen" Hebrews 11:1. If I needed some viable options to keep me going then I was hoping in what I could see and not in the unseen.

I admit it, I no longer feel certain that God is going to give us the farm. I feel concerned that I was presuming upon the Lord, finding in his word an assurance of what I so desperately wanted to see, an earthly hope. God is constantly showing me that my hope is in him, for this world and the next. Do I think God will still miraculously give us the farm? All I can say is that HE CAN! It may be his will to show himself strong in this way. I know that he calls upon me to be persistent in prayer and to trust in him alone. It hurts to want something, to long for a home that may never be mine again. But God calls us to bring our requests before him and to trust him with our longings and hopes.

"Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus." Philippians 3:6-7

I need that peace about this issue, oh how I need it. My heart aches because I may never walk that broken asphalt drive between house and barn again. I may never see my children run the pathway between house and cottage, the cottage my father built for my mother and he to share while I was waiting inside my mother's womb. These things may never be mine to share but the ache is real and my hope persists. So I call upon the name of the Lord, Creator of Heaven and Earth as he hears my prayer. I know full well that my longing is is some part for heaven and also for a childhood lost so I trust him for his answer and his peace.