Correctional Classes

This is my first year in a long time that I am not teaching in a high school.  I miss it because I love teaching; that’s why I got into the profession in the first place.  But I just realized today that God has been using me to teach other women in my church.

Daniel and I have had a brutally rough year.  We experienced all the bruises and scrapes that come with learning how to undo bad habits.  For me that was speaking disrespectfully to Daniel.  For Daniel that was settling for spiritual complacency.  But at the end of that year, he and I were both transformed and our marriage was revolutionized!  Though a hackneyed analogy, we were caterpillars fighting tooth and nail in order to break free from the oppression in our relationship and move into a free, unified, and beautiful marriage.

We learned countless lessons that we felt compelled to share at our Young Marrieds group at church.  Since then, wives have been coming to me with urgency to address their disrespect; they see how toxic it is for their marriages and yet feel helpless to change it.  

One by one, women have sought help from me because I have been there and deeply understand their turmoil and hopelessness.  With each coffee or lunch date or with each prayer and phone conversation, I see that these meetings have been working themselves into a relational classroom.  God is using me, and all of my foibles that He worked me through (and is still working me through), to teach other women how to cultivate a respect for their husbands.

As I prayed and pondered for them, asking God to reveal to them and to me what they need for their particular marriage, I realized that this was a lot like lesson-planning; these women have sought me out to help them reach a certain learning goal and I have accepted the responsibility of finding the way that they need to be taught for their particular circumstances and personalities.

What a thrill to see how God is still using my penchant for teaching even though I am not employed by a school!  His plan is so perfect.  I can’t think of a better classroom than the one God creates out of our own personal trials and growth.  It’s there that He can really teach us.

The Longest Journey

Why is it that we can know things in our heads, but then live like we’ve never heard of those ideas before?  Faith is such a layered concept in that way.  We believe in God, we believe in the Bible, we believe in His promises, and yet we worry, we speak coarsely, we hoard and indulge, we doubt, we control.  We live as though we are our own gods, trying to work out every detail in our lives for our own glory.

A man who went to Israel with my tour group this past summer said the longest journey you’ll ever have to make is the 12 inch path between your head and your heart.  Only then can all of those thoughts that you know to be true be let loose inside of you and finally be able to shape the way that you feel and steer the choices you make.  It’s a matter of surrender.

My trouble is I thought I had surrendered to God, but apparently I had crept back up that 12 inch stairway back into my head.  Maybe the journey is more like a treadmill than a stairway.  

I’m constantly wowed by the God I read in the Bible and I pray as though I trust in that God and really believe He is the same God yesterday, today, and forever.  But then I walk around, moping, stuck in a puddle of self-pity, wishing I had a pianist to serenade me with that Charlie Brown sad song.  It doesn’t add up.  My heart faith is not in line with my head faith and the discrepancy is greatly affecting my practiced faith.

So where to go from here?  Good question that I really don’t know the answer to except to cling to whatever faith is active at the moment and trust that it is rooted in God’s truth.  Thankfully I don’t have to forge my own journey, I just have to follow the one marked out for me and keep my feet moving so I don’t slide off the treadmill.

The Two-hearted River

Yesterday I saw a semi driving through a river.  It was the strangest thing I have ever seen.  I should specify that the river was the LA river, which is mostly a giant wash.  Nonetheless, who drives trucks in a wash?

That sight was a hard one to miss, especially because of the steadily crescendoing woosh as the truck approached.  But I was already walking with my eyes open that morning because of the unsuspecting beauty along the river.  The bike path that sits at the top of the northern side of the wash, excuse me–river, abuts the backyards of many Culver City homes.  Usually their property lines are hidden by cascading bushels of bougenvilla, oleander, and some flower that looks like honey-suckle.  But every once in awhile someone’s well-cultivated peppers, beans, tomatoes, and fruit would hang like a rainbow in their backyard gardens.

At the Duquesne entrance to the bike path, the river smells like the ocean.  The seagulls know it; they all feed and sunbathe alongside the slimy, green water.  Occasionally other birds mingle with them, my favorite being a miniature version of a stork.  Along this same stretch, some art students had created a vivid mosaic mural of the different rivers of the world as if to entice the passerby into this secret water-side passage.

Coming home, I reversed my path and saw the parking lots across the river and the graffiti on the walls of the wash.  Several sketchy teenagers loitered with their backpacks in ominous clumps.  I walked by the same gardens, flowers, oceanic scent pockets, and murals, and yet I didn’t even notice them.  The defeated thoughts in my head must have veered my eyes towards the ugly sights along the river.  

Isn’t that just like life?

A Fresh Perspective on a Faithful Practice

In my quiet times with God, I have developed a discipline of journaling.  If I can’t journal on a given day, I still adore God, which tells me that journaling has not become an idol.  But I do try to journal, even when it’s difficult, because I focus on God much more intentionally, and I have a record of what I have learned about God.  

I read Scripture and then respond with “Who are You, Lord?” and “What Am I to Do?”  Then I record my prayers in the ACTS(L) format: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication, and Listening.  Journaling these aspects of my prayers guides me intentionally through a balanced conversation with God so that I am not the only one talking, and so that I am not only begging God for my needs or thanking Him for answering prayers.  I notice if I am resistant to looking into my heart for sin, and I check myself if my adoration is rote.  It’s been a very helpful format for me to have honest worship.  

I have held on to the conviction that this method of quiet times is objectively good because it propels one into the Word daily, provides a balanced structure for one to grow in areas of worship and prayer that might not be the most natural, and offers a visible method of both accountability and tracking God’s presence in one’s life.  What I easily forget, however, is that I love to write and many others don’t.  Not only so, but I love to read, while others don’t.

My perspective broadened a little this past weekend when my mother-in-law told me about her trip to Nepal.  While the journey was still fresh in her mind and body, she told me in great detail and with much enthusiasm of her time with the village women.  She and her friend led a conference for Nepali women that was centered upon the idea of discipling.  These women had never even heard of small groups or women’s ministries.  And even if they had, most of them couldn’t read, so leading a study would have been really difficult.  My mother-in-law and her friend had to explain abstract concepts in concrete terms so that these women would have a context for anything they said.

They broke the conference into several sessions: Knowing Him, Worshipping Him, Obeying Him, and Seeking Him.  In my mother-in-law’s talk on Worshipping Him, she shared many different ways that she spends time with God.  This was no easy task because she was speaking through a translator to a group of women who were not familiar with many of these concepts that are common to us.  She had to break down a concept into basic steps and give examples for everything she taught.

Rather than simply encouraging these women to have quiet times, she began by describing what her quiet times looked like so that the women could have a tangible picture of an otherwise intangible term.  Sometimes my mother-in-law will lay in bed and go through the alphabet, creating her own acrostic for God’s character (A-Alpha, B-Bold, C-Creative, D-Detailed, etc.) or she will just start thanking Him for her day.  Inevitably, from one of God’s characteristics or blessings, her mind will wander to people who need that aspect of God or to events in her upcoming day where she will need that aspect of God, and she will be compelled to lift up in prayer what comes to mind.  Whether it’s five minutes or forty-five, she has created a discipline of giving the first part of her day to God.

She also told of several ways of reading the Bible as worshipping God.  One was similar to a process called Lexio Divina in that she would read a passage and pray for God to let a word, image, or phrase stand out to her.  She would then contemplate that word, image, or phrase and let her mind wander around it, opening herself for God to say something to her about it.  Or she would read a story in the Bible and examine herself as if she was one of the characters.  For example, in the story of Jesus and the women at the well, is she more like Jesus who reached out to a lowly person and used the Truth to encourage the woman to repent?  Or was she more like the woman who was hiding in her sins, but once she knew Jesus’s love told everyone about His goodness?  In comparing herself to one of the characters and contrasting herself to others, she can more easily see who she is in relation to whom God has designed her to be.  Then she can invite God into those areas.

All of my mother-in-law’s ideas were ones I have heard of and practiced before, but I suppose I had been so wrapped up in my own process of quiet times that I had forgotten them.  It made me think of how narrow-minded I can be: I get frustrated that people don’t see quiet times as good and important enough to fight for.  People are too busy or too bored or too forgetful and fail to put themselves into positions that would scaffold their habits in order to build a discipline of praise and prayer.  Instead, their quiet times are run with an all-or-nothing mentality, usually falling on the side of nothing.  Though all this is usually true, in thinking this way, I don’t leave much room for grace.

Life is a series of lessons where we all start from drinking milk and then learn how to eat solid food.  Our spiritual life is certainly no different.  Sometimes even very mature Christians need scaffolding in their quiet times to get them to a place of being able to “eat solid foods.”  We need to disciple each other in order to provide this scaffolding.  Hearing my mother-in-law put words to some simple quiet-time tactics helped me to think outside of my own default system to consider other, more creative ways to worship God.

I can only imagine how helpful that must have been to women who had not had a small group or a church to teach them about quiet times.  Many of them who can’t read would have been incredibly discouraged if they were told that reading the Bible is they way to know God better.   The same goes for non-writers.  If  only share with them that journaling is an excellent way to have a quiet time with God, but journaling is a foreign and uncomfortable task for them, they will be stuck in a rut when it comes to spending time with God.

We need to share a variety of our ideas and practices with each other.  We need to put words and visuals to concepts that seem obvious to us because discipling involves going to where our brothers and sisters are and bringing them to where we are.  We need to help get them on the path before they can follow us, and we need to understand where they are before we can lead them.  While we disciple, we need to constantly be learning so that we remember how difficult it is to grow.

Many people shy away from joining a discipleship group because of the time commitment and because they know they will be pushed to shape up the unfit areas of their lives.  But if they could bank on having their teachers walk alongside them instead of in front of them, wouldn’t that be a compelling group to join?  Life would be so much easier because someone would be living it with them instead of lecturing about it to them.

As one who is about to start her own discipleship group in a few weeks, I am infinitely grateful for this insight into spiritual growth.  Even though I have taught high school for five years, I still haven’t really grasped the concept of teaching someone where he or she is rather than where I think he or she should be.  I tend to want everyone to already know what I know.  Of course, this is a notion I need to constantly fight against because it makes for terrible discipling.  

This past weekend, having little time to myself, I was forced to trade in journaling for other less time-consuming forms of quiet times.  These days have been fresh because of it!  Without even trying, my mother-in-law discipled me by sharing her experiences and examples.  She made learning a painless and joyful process because she broke everything down to where it made sense to me, and the joy in her own life made me want to follow what she was teaching.

In the Midst of History

The phrase “Where were you when _______?” must certainly apply to this past week of political happenings.  At first it seemed that whether Hillary or Obama won the Democratic nomination, we had already shattered political barriers.  The spice that Obama offers our tired politics seemed en fuego compared to traditional McCain.  But then, from left field, McCain struck back!  Unless there is some third party miracle, we will definitely have an unprecedented Executive Office: either our first African American President or our first female Vice President.  And the timing of it all, is so poetic.  Can’t you just picture God poking Dr. King in the arm, grinning, saying, “See?  And you didn’t think much was going to come of your efforts.  See?  Aren’t you glad you trusted me?”  And Dr. King would be dancing and laughing for how his dream has reached past us today and has paved a road into our future.

In this glistening moment of breaking history, I can’t help but feel a little shame too.  Maybe my ears just haven’t been open enough in the past, but I don’t recall ever hearing such a dirty election.  It seems that in all of our ground-breaking movement, we Americans let our integrity shake right out from under our feet.  These campaigns have been targeting the character and capability of the adversaries much more than should be needed to sell a candidate.  Do they have nothing good to offer about themselves that they cannot do without also bashing their opponents?  

What’s even worse than these presidential candidates leading us into this ugly political fist-fight is that we the people cheer them on.  Obama reached his highest applause last night when he was lambasting McCain.  One commentator even said that the crowd was hungry for it.  When did we lose our civility and decency in the pursuit of the good of our nation and trade it in for savage character attacks?  Why can we not focus on real issues without having our candidates’ personal beef treated as an urgent issue?

In the glamor of new history, is it possible we have let go of the very decency that our history has always prided itself on?

Incoherent Worship

This morning I woke up unable to breathe well.  Eventually my right arm and right side of my face went numb and my words were getting all mixed up.  It was clear that a migraine was brewing.  Today was a day in which I had hoped to get a lot done, in part because it’s in my nature to be productive, and in part because I need to prepare for a tutoring job tomorrow that I feel ill-equipped for.  But I can’t read well this morning because of the migraine, and I’m struggling to type with any sense of clarity and accuracy.

Since the pain hadn’t hit initially, I plodded slowly throw my quiet time with God this morning, trying to absorb what the Bible was saying, but not succeeding much beyond a few lines here and there.  But rather than be discouraged that my day did not start with rooting my mind in the Word and that I was obviously going to have a tough time accomplishing my goals for today, I was a little excited that my mind was out of the picture.  I noticed that while I was reading, I had a whole dialogue happening in that realm of my brain that functions somewhere between consciousness and subconsciousness.  My consciousness was struggling to focus on the words I was reading, but the in-between realm was pondering my dreams from last night and was considering a conversation that I was intending to have this evening.  Even though I was struggling with words on the outer level of my consciousness, they were just fine on the next level in.  It was so strange, but oddly cool.  

It dawned on me that maybe I could worship in that next level in.  Then, even though my outer level of conscious is spurting out and taking in only fragments of coherent thought because of my migraine, maybe I could be worshipping and praying inside anyway.  I’ve always been a fairly mental person, which has many times distracted me from my faith.  For example, I’ll pray for healing of my scoliosis, but then I’ll start to tell myself that the only reason I’m praying that is for my own benefit.  If it’s a selfish prayer, then I shouldn’t be praying it.  And even though I believe God can heal my spine, I start to doubt whether He will because He has been using it this far to teach me discipline in my health habits.  And my thoughts go on, often discouraging me from praying for healing at all.

So the idea of praying without my mind as the driving force is very exciting.  If my heart can lead my worship, then maybe I can feel God’s presence and let that be worship.  Or if my spirit, without being first initiated by my mind, is connecting with the Holy Spirit, then maybe I can just be with God and let that be worship.  

I think of my friend Katherine who is recovering from a brain hemorrhage.  In her early recovery, when she was in a comma, I would ponder what her worship must have been like without consciousness.  It must have been so intimate to have her spirit and her subconsciousness commune with God.  And then as she regained her brain activity but was unable to move or speak, her worship was confined mostly to her mind.  It was quiet and not easily expressed.  And now she is able to move and speak, to worship God verbally and physically.  I wonder how experiencing specific stages of worship that most people aren’t able to separate from each other has impacted her relationship with God.  I know that I really appreciated this abnormal morning to be able to put my mind aside and all of my logical barriers to my faith and just be with God without processing the experience in any way more than simply existing in it.

Loving Wrath

Prophets are few and far between in our current culture.  Probably this is due to having the Holy Spirit dwell in us and perhaps also to our inability to take prophecy seriously (maybe they are there and we just aren’t listening).  I’ve been thinking about all this as I’ve been reading Isaiah and now Jeremiah.  Both books of the Bible are intense and show much of God’s wrath, but surprisingly, God ends up looking pretty good in these books, fiery wrath and all.  

When I read the Bible, I try to see it as a conversation between God and me, and I record what I grasp from this conversation in two different ways: “Who are You, Lord?” and “What am I to do?”  Then I end up with a journal of conversations that God and I had about His Word–good reading for a rainy day.  Just this week I read through three week’s worth of “Who are You, Lord?” recordings and was shocked to find that in nearly every single recording for these readings of Isaiah and Jeremiah, I had written about how loving God is.  

These prophets told people and cities time and time again that they needed to repent or they would be headed towards destruction. Sometimes they did repent, but mostly they didn’t.  And so God destroyed them.  In my past readings of these books, I had been consumed with how fierce and vindictive God is, which I could sometimes process matter-of-factly and other times had to just flat out ignore because I didn’t know how it fit into my life.  I didn’t want to know, to be honest.  

But this past time, asking God to show me about Himself as I read, left me with a different impression of who He is.  I noticed how many trillions of times (man, were these people hard of hearing) and how many different ways God warned these people.  It got so intense that even Jeremiah complained to God that this whole prophecy thing wasn’t working; it only made people mad, which made his own life at risk.  And God would always remind Jeremiah that He was a faithful God.  He would redeem in the end; it’s just that these people needed to first experience the natural consequences of their sin if they were not going to repent.  After all, He is a just God.  

And this leads me to the second act of love that God did in His wrath: in addition to giving endless warnings, He destroyed the wicked so that the remnant that would be left would be refined.  Because He is just, God had to obliterate the wicked.  That was their penalty for their wickedness and they knew that.  But even as He was in the midst of destroying them, He would still send Jeremiah to offer them another invitation to repent and be restored.  And when they didn’t take him up on that invitation, God still saved a remnant because of His covenant with David.   

God is sick with adoration for us, just as He was for those stubborn people in Isaiah and Jeremiah.  He loves us!  There are many passages in these books that portray God as utterly grieved at the people’s choices to stay wicked rather than to be with Him.  He yearns for us to love Him back!

Of course the books of the prophets offer relevant warnings to our people and cities today too, particularly in Los Angeles.  But we have few legitimate prophets currently warning us of where this path leads.  My friend is a prophet.  She says it’s very lonely.  Few people want to hear what she has to say; few want to examine their own sin; few sense the urgency of being ready for Christ’s return.  She feels like she is speaking an alien language.

But how magnificent is it that God loves us enough to warn us about the destination of sin’s path!  And how beautiful that He loves us enough to let us choose which path we take.  Like a father, He picks us up from falling again and again.  And every time we hurt ourselves, He aches for us and helps teach us how to avoid that pain in the future.  God’s wrath is never contrary to His love, but rather it’s a necessary tool for clearing a mutual channel of love between God and His people.  

This whole idea became so relevant to me when I was talking with my friend about how difficult life seems right now because of financial strain–beautiful because God is working through the difficulty, but difficult nonetheless.  She commented on how my perspective was pretty hopeful for how bleak my circumstances seemed, and immediately I realized that my perspective was rooted in being utterly enamored with how tenderly God adores us even when His wrath is all around.  Whether my circumstances are His punishment, His discipline, His teaching, or His revealing of His glory, His love is so evident to me through having been immersed in Isaiah and Jeremiah that the difficulty seems totally worth it, whatever may come of it.

The Beauty of Baptism

I’m clearly not God, so I make no claim to know exactly what He intended for baptism, but, lack of understanding and all, I love that He created baptism for us and gave it so much importance to our faiths.

This past June, I toured the Holy Land with my family and friends. Our tour-guide had actually been an archaeologist in Israel and his son was a Christian history scholar.  Between the two of them, we learned everything about every rock and ruin in Israel and Jordan.  In those two weeks, we became very familiar with the layout of  Byzantine churches. Their baptism pools were in the shape of a cross and were located outside of the church itself.  Because the Byzantines believed that salvation was contingent on baptism, they did not let anyone inside the church during communion without first being baptized.  They would gather anyone who repented of his sins and claimed Jesus as his Lord and Savior, and they would line up fully undressed before the cross-shaped pool.  They would go in one side, dunk, and come out the other side where they would be robed and welcomed into the church.  It was no light matter.

I was baptized Episcopal, but I am a member now of Bel Air Presbyterian Church.  Both denominations baptize by dabbing water on people’s heads.  Each person being baptized professes his or her faith before the congregation and is given a pithy benediction by the pastor. There is no music playing, just the words of the profession of faith and the prayer. It’s short, simple, and sweet.

Yesterday, Bel Air Pres had church in the Forum with Faithful Central Bible Church.  Their church had a full-immersion baptismal tank erected right in front of the stage.  Bishop Kenny Ulmer spoke to each person being baptized and then the music started.  The whole baptismal ceremony was one huge celebration.  The entire congregation was clapping and stomping and jumping and dancing.  

The Byzantine’s baptized with utmost seriousness; the Presbyterians baptize simply, without adornment; and Faithful Central baptizes with unabashed celebration.  If an alien came down to witness these three ceremonies, I doubt it would recognize them as the same event (unless of course it spoke the language and heard the profession of faith at each), and yet, these are all churches within the Body of Christ.  If we Christians would only experience other Christian churches’ worship and sacramental traditions, we would probably better grasp the mystery of God.  

I remember two years ago when Bel Air Pres worshiped with Faithful Central, Bishop Ulmer preached on Ephesians 3:18-19: “I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”  He made the point that we need each other.  Not a single one of us knows God fully, but we each know different aspects of His character in ways deeper than others.  If we actually took the time to love each other and to learn from each other, we would be more filled with God because we would be better able to comprehend Him.  

Many people aren’t aware of what aspects of God’s character they know; they feel like their testimonies are boring and they have nothing to teach anyone else.  Obviously this is not true in God’s sense of Truth, but it does make it difficult sometimes to believe that we would be better off interacting with people whom we don’t know, who irritate us, who are newer in their faiths….the list could go on. I myself am queen of making excuses not to reach out to people I don’t know, and I often put up a defensive, skeptical wall when people I don’t know reach out to me.

But having a common denominator of baptism made the differences in our understandings of who God is and what His Word says stand out as that much sweeter to me.  Even though I was baptized with a dab of water on my forehead, I have always been enamored with the strong symbolism of being fully immersed.  And though I appreciate the solemnity of such a weighty profession that the Byzantine’s practiced and the un-embellished simplicity of how the Presbyterians practice baptism, I am also overjoyed by the dancing and singing at Faithful Central’s baptism. It’s as if each church comprehends a different aspect of baptism as God meant it to be.  If we could join other denominations in worship and experience their Christian traditions rather than divide because of these differences, unity in the Church could be possible.  And we, individually, would be more filled with the fullness of God’s love because of our interdependence corporately.

A Love Note

Being a wife has grown me into a professional multi-tasker.  Sounds great, I know, and mostly it is, but my problem is, I haven’t mastered the ability to extricate my husband from my tasks.  He thinks categorically, so his natural pace is slower and his forethought is not as exercised as mine.  (Of course this can be an incredible asset. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to knock the guy.)  Inevitably, I will keep an eye on his daily responsibilities as well as my own because it’s easy for me to do that and because I’m interested in what he does and in how he’s following through with the various hats he wears.  

But apparently I nag him (according to him, of course…no, who am I kidding, it’s often true).  I’ll remember things for him and remind him to do them.  Constantly out of my mouth is, “Did you…?” or “Don’t forget to…”  In my heart, I’m just trying to help, but he hears it as if I think he’s not capable, which of course translates for him into disrespect.  Not good.

Time and time again, he tells me how effective encouragement is, but I can’t seem to remember to praise him when he does follow through and to remind him of his strengths.  To me those are more of the norm and the lack of follow-through and the weaknesses are what stick out.

Finances are drained, Daniel’s work is slow, and so his whole esteem is bruised by his circumstances and inability to fix them.  But as I was thinking this morning of how proud I was of him for meeting with a client way out of his league, I started to realize that he has incredible amounts of courage.  And then I started to remember little things that lately have made me feel very loved like the fact that he noticed and signed the thank you card I left out for him and that he noticed and read the mail that I left out for him.  Normally, he comes home with his brain shut off as much as possible because work is so draining.  But these past few weeks, he’s been able to leave some of that exhaustion at the door and be present with me at home.  I also noticed that his prayers have grown more vulnerable and intentional.

I started crying (normal for me) because I was so overwhelmed by Daniel’s strengths and growth that I normally overlook.  I was so grateful that God showed me specific ways that He was working in Daniel through these current circumstances.  And it dawned on me that Daniel probably did not see them in himself.  How can any of us ever clearly grasp the situation when we are in the eye of the storm?  So I wrote him a note.  Well, it started as a note, but then I wrote front and back too on a separate sheet that I folded inside the card; it was a note to remind him of his strengths, to affirm him in his areas of growth, and, mostly, to assure him that I love him as he is.

I can’t believe I didn’t think of this sooner.  I want to call every wife I know and tell her that her husband needs a love note!  So I think I’ll start here on this blog. Wives, if you are reading this, write your husband a love note.  If you don’t know what to write, pray that God opens your eyes to see your husband’s gifts.  If you feel comfortable, let me know how it goes and let me know if you need me to pray for you in the process.

Moving and Money

Lack of money drives moving.  Moving costs money.  It’s a ridiculous conundrum to fine oneself in: can’t afford to stay, but can’t afford to move.  It seems to be the sad state for many of our friends right now.  Partly that’s because of a strained economy and dried-up industries, and partly that’s just because it’s LA, the Transient City of America.  

One couple in our Bible study is moving because the husband’s job got squeezed out in a business merger.  Another couple is moving because the company the wife works for is dysfunctional; she is  shopping an equal position in New York where she would get more money working the same job at a rival company.  Two other couples just had babies and need to move to a city where they can afford to live with a new kiddo.  Another couple is financially drained because the wife was a stay-at-home mom while the husband was finishing graduate school and working part time; they’re looking to move back to their home state.

Daniel and I seem to be the only couple in LA who is staying (yes, I am grossly exaggerating, but that’s how it feels), even though we too can’t afford to live here.  We’ve gone through multiple Bible studies that fell apart because of people moving right as we were all functioning like a unit.  It’s becoming a predictable pattern.

I never worry for the couple who moves because I strongly believe that God has a path for them that He has forged with them specifically in mind.  I take a lot of comfort in Deuteronomy 31:8: “It is the Lord who goes before you;  He will be with you.  He will not fail you or forsake you.  Do not fear or be dismayed.”  I believe that.  If He is calling them out of LA, He will provide the way and equip them.

But I struggle to root myself in that verse given that Daniel and I are not moving anywhere geographically speaking.  It’s easy to doubt that God is going before us since we feel constantly left behind and lonely.  Once we make friends, they move.  It’s as simple as that.  I know in my head that God makes paths for all of us, even if they aren’t literal or geographical paths, but in practice, I wonder sometimes if God has forgotten about Daniel and me.  I feel like asking Him, “When you go before us, God, can you bring some friends with you to leave in our path?  Please?”

But (sigh) I guess that’s why the verse follows with the reminder, “He will not fail you or forsake you,” and the admonition, “Do not fear or be dismayed.”  If there is one thing God has been teaching me this past year, it’s that His Word is not accidental.  It’s all truth, relevant truth.  So even if I can’t feel solace from it, my mind can believe in it regardless.