Quiet Hours

Six month ago, I was in East Africa. I probably had not showered in a few days and I was running off chai, mandazi, & Jesus. The Invest House was always filled with noise: Tucker barking, Annie laughing, & fellow interns singing, shouting, joking, living. There was quiet during nap time but even then you could hear Irene calling from the kitchen for Ken or Annie. There was peace in every moment.

Today, I am in Knoxville. I'm sure I have showered in the last 24 hours. I am running off coffee, egg sandwiches, & praying knees. The Moose Loft has been quiet the past few days except for the occasional midnight rave happening in the apartment below ours. I am always praying for peace.

Life looks different, but you've heard that story a million times from me: from camp, to East Africa, to South Africa, Haiti, Murfreesboro, Knoxville. Life always looks different after you encounter Jesus. Bones and hearts ache after the journey, even if your travels are only those grueling 18 inches. Home is never quite what you expect it to be when you return. And so it has been for me the last 6 months. I have searched for the familiar & the comfortable and when I have found it in worldly things, I hear his Spirit whisper: this is not who you were meant to be. i have more than this for you. look and see me in this place.

Maybe it didn't hit me until I woke up at 3:30 am to a pain like the one I used to know as the aching of my growing legs. I stretched, I drank water, and I googled home-remedies, yet I was still restless. It occurred to me, then, the words I had written in my journal yesterday: Father, I want to rest from things that are taking up my time (like sleeping). and here He was, granting me just that. 

For a while, I tried to contact my friends in time zones that were awake, thinking that maybe there was something specific I needed to pray for, but the phone never rang. So I sat in my living room with the Christmas lights twinkling and the promise of dawn seeping through the windows contemplating if 5 am was too early to make breakfast. Not looking at anything but my own two feet, I just wanted to go back to bed. So I prayed for God to take the pain away, but that did not happen. 

I opened my bible and started to read Job. His wife asked him why, in the midst of great pain and suffering, he would not curse God and just die to escape, but he replied with, "you speak as a foolish woman would." and his friends came from far away, not to make him breakfast or pray for him or to comfort him, but to sit with Job in his suffering. "maybe," I thought, "this was Gods way of sitting with me." So I continued sifting through my bible.

I flipped back to Joshua to reread what I had written between the texts all summer and I stopped on the story of the Israelites coming to the edge of the Jordan. Joshua commands one man from each tribe to go into the river and get a stone so that their children would know the faithfulness of the Lord later on. Before stepping foot into the Promised Land, before they could go home, this new generation was circumcised. There was a cutting away that had to be done before entering this land.

For the 12 tribes of Israel, home looked different. "The Journey" was over but nothing would look the same again. There was pain and anguish upon returning but you have heard that story a thousand times. And for us, the 12 interns, life has not looked the same either (no matter how much we think it might). There has been a refinement that has occurred which leaves us feeling like we are walking in new territory. Throw out the familiar and the comfortable because we are just pitching tents until heaven.

 

Many of us voiced this summer our very real fears of forgetting what God did on Journey, myself included. So when my 6-month-letter-to-self arrived last week, the word that I wrote over and over again was remember. It was the stone that I had carried out of the Jordan to remind myself later on the faithfulness of God.

I have not written since the day I left for Journey 2016. I have wanted to, but could not seem to wrap my mind around picking up where I left off or trying to tell this story in a few thousand words. But when I woke up this morning at 3 am in pain and I sat with God in my living room, I knew it was time to write again. I knew that the only way that I could get some peace was to sit at my counter in the quiet hours and tell you that God is not changing.

He is not going anywhere.

and He is not waiting for you to get your act together before he starts to love you.

He is in the pain, in the cutting away, in the refinement process. but He is also in the joy of every day life. 

He is with you in every moment, every season, and every valley, mountain, or in between that you may find yourself in. And He is holding up the stone to remind you of His faithfulness until that day, when you walk into the Promised Land.

E