The Hopeful Blues of God’s Patience…

I’ve been reflecting, again, on the enduring patience of God. Extraordinary… enduring… patience. Cebu is a wicked place on par with the voodoo-plagued Caribbean. It is not only a place where every year a garishly dressed, antique, burned babydoll idol is lifted up and given homage and reverence, but it’s one of the world’s main source and transit points for human trafficking and “sex tourism.” Yet, Cebu is still here… and it’s growing in size. God’s anger burns against it, yet His enduring patience continues. Of course, it doesn’t last forever, and one day enough will be enough and His wrath will be made manifest. And because He exhibits patience, people view it as if He doesn’t exist, yet His patience is giving them not only time to repent, but reveals His great love.

And, of course, we are here, ministering to the Deaf in Cebu and Mactan and Cagayan and Manila and Baguio while His patience endures. If He ended that longsuffering this moment, we would, like Jeremiah in Egypt, face His anger towards the wickedness of this place… yet covered by His Precious Blood, thankfully.

I’ve been weeping and interceding to a heightened degree again for this place called Cebu. The Lord needs me to do that and, although not pleasant to do, I give Him my heart to do what He wills. I do not want to see His wrath visited upon these spiritually dead, poor and sad people. Oh, how I would hope that all would come to repentance and seek Christ alone!

Recently, I became aware of a young woman named Katie Spotz who is twenty-two and currently rowing a boat solo across the Atlantic to raise awareness and money for water purification for Africa (www.rowforwater.com). She is blogging as she goes via a satellite linkup on her boat and I thought it would be interesting for our kids to watch her progress and hear from her as she makes the long and dangerous journey.

Today, Ms. Spotz gave a post about her entertainment on-board. And I was once again brought face-to-face with the enduring patience of God. She has stated, in previous blogs, that she finds looking up at the magnificent stars and at the humility of being a speck on the ocean in a universe that’s so huge… yet gives no glory to The One who created it all and gives her breath and ability to do such a feat. She is listening to audiobooks about Zen-Buddhism and giving it laud for helping her through the difficulties of the trip. Yet God continues to endure it and has given her good weather on her trip at least up to this point. She gives a list of movies she has on hand, “All Harry Potter movies, Twilight, Borat, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Two Towers, and Sex and the City.” One would imagine movies of overcoming obstacles (e.g. Chariots of Fire) or at least The Blue Planet would be somewhere on the list. Sadly, no, only movies that glorify the purient and the base are on the menu.

She is certainly given leave to do whatever she wants, as God has given that ability to her… at least for a time. My comment here is not Ms. Spotz particularly, but on God’s Grace to all who live on this planet. His unmerited gift to allow us to choose evil over good, for so long, is something that boggles the mind. I can only opine that a true, amazing gift has been given Ms. Spotz… she will see things that most of us never see… have an adventure most of us will never have… have an extended time alone with her own thoughts that many of us will never be granted… and my prayer and my great hope is that if these gifts are not understood now as being from God Almighty, the Creator of Heaven and Earth, and piques an interest in her, then later she will seek to find the God who made all this wonder and find His Son who died that she might live forever. It took me 33 years… I hope with such a gift, it will be sooner for her.

And I am always reminded that if He had decided to remove His hand from underneath me and let me fall one second before I repented and accepted Christ, then I would be eternally dead. What enduring patience You have Lord God and all of us who know you say, “THANK YOU!”

A Vacuum Conundrum…

Our kids have been asking questions about storms and wind. I’ve explained to them in simple terms that ‘more always goes to less’ and it’s that transfer of dense, cold air into hot, less dense air that creates wind and can produce rain and storms.

“Nature abhors a vacuum” is the common adage. And so it does.

In a wiley thought process this morning, I’m looking at the calendar and on 3 January, I have been a baptized believer in Jesus Christ for 12 years. Then I thought of our new church plant, New Life Deaf Fellowship, and when we could have our first baptism service… thinking how it would work at the church room we’re in currently… a tub, maybe… then a hose out the window afterward to drain the tub… and it hit me.

Everything works on a ‘more goes to less’ basis… except… money.

Money is the only thing that rarely – or automatically certainly – goes from more to less.

… something to think about isn’t it?

I couldn’t sleep last night, so I perchanced on a Bloomberg interview with Max Levchin, a co-founder of Pay Pal and when it was bought out by Ebay made Mr. Levchin a multi-millionaire… but the part that made me sigh was after Pay Pal he apparently didn’t know what to do with himself. He explained in the interview how one day his new wife told him to “go rent an office somewhere and figure out what to do next.”

So he rented an office in San Francisco just to go and “figure things out.” Nice.

Truly, I was happy for him… but it struck me how great it would be if money flowed like cold air into the hot hands of, say, a missionary family looking for a way to start a simple deaf learning center for a measly couple of thousand a year (smile)… Mr. Levchin couldn’t think of anything to do so he rented a $1,200 a square foot office space and “figured out what to do.” (incidentally, he figured out the next wave on the internet is virtual worlds with virtual economies… that’s right, he explained that people are now willing to pay “real money for virtual products.”)

I say again, money is the only thing that doesn’t flow from more to less… well, that and maybe intelligence (smile).

Crossings…

We all have dreams of what we wanted to be when we grew up. One of mine was to be a bush pilot, flying fishermen and supplies to remote lakes in Alaska in my Cessna Caravan rigged, obviously, for amphibious. That didn’t pan out, so I tried for Air Traffic Control School in Missouri… made it in, had a date set. But from the beginning, I’d always wanted to be a writer… a screenwriter, a novelist, a producer/writer of radio plays (which got me interested in possible work as a foley artist as well). So there was a moment of choice. A Rubicon… or better; a River Ahava…

The fact is, that the moment of decision isn’t sitting at the Rubicon. Julius Caesar did not sit at the river and then make up his mind whether to cross it, enter Rome and start a civil war or not. He’d made up his mind long before. The river was only an obstacle to reveal the determination of his prior decision.

Ezra didn’t sit at the River Ahava deciding whether to cross it… that decision had been made. The River Ahava was the obstacle in determining in what WAY, he would cross that River and head to Jerusalem… with the king’s men for protection, or God?

And so our rivers, or obstacles, come up and we make a determination on whether our prior decisions will be carried out… what willingness do we have to see that decision through to the end? Our Lord asks us that question when He tells the disciples to count the costs of their discipleship… a question He asks you now.

I looked at my approval letter from the FAA and my time for reporting to Kansas City and although I was excited at the prospect, my decision to attempt becoming a writer had been made.

You see, our rivers are crossed either way. It’s a defining moment not as a mark of decision, but a defining moment as a mark of wholeheartedness. The priests who carried the Ark of the Covenant did not decide at the Jordan River whether they would walk into its swiftly moving waters, they’d determined to do that already… it was the obstacle to their determination – a test – to see how trusting they were of God and His Word.

We each have defining moments such as these… some are pointed out more clearly than others. Yet it is during those large moments, when we recognize them as Rubicons or Ahavas, that we make good on decisions we’ve already made… or we turn from the river and head back to where we came from.

Let us be steadfast in our walk in the Spirit and not make the mistakes we made in our youth of choosing unwisely. May God grant you His wisdom in all things.