Reading the Sky

Cold night. First without rain in a while. The stars talk me into stepping outside.

I trip over a bucket of water before stretching out on a bench. It´s almost midnight. Even with my jacket zipped and my arms folded around me I start shivering. But I can´t go back inside…not yet. Star-studded blackness is too eloquent to read over quickly, too rich with un-captured emotion. Perusal is not enough. I need a few more minutes, a couple more moments to even put one complete thought together from the letter written by points of starlight. 

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A starry sky can either make someone feel incredibly small and alone in the universe…or amazingly small and loved. The distance between the stars and my planet can either represent the distance separating us from heavenly realms or the distance Love traveled to prove its earnestness. All the light-years between suns and galaxies quietly show the length to which Divine Love will always go to reach us.

A wave of crashing Love pierces the Earth´s atmosphere and reaches the shores of my heart. I realize I can stop Love in its trajectory. I can refuse this space-defying, space-filling Love…it will not force its way into my soul. “But no,” I think as my vision is blurred by a tear, “I cannot pretend to shiver alone when the same Love that holds the stars in suspension is surrounding me.”   

“When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; what is man, that thou art mindful of him? And the son of man, that thou visitest him?” Psalm 8:3, 4

Because Of The Gold.

To see God digging in the dirt is shocking at first. He digs deep into the hardness. Shoulder and back muscles stiffen with repeated effort. The dirt caves in. He starts over. His hands blister. An occasional tear traces down His dust-covered face. Never resting He does not lose the determined urgency in His eyes. When He makes notable progress, a smile breaks like the dawn. 

He evidently knows something that we don´t. What is it that He seeks?

He seeks what was lost—Divine glory that once rested upon creation. We see the crust of filthiness and dross covering us…God tenaciously sees the gold. Though lost to our view, He believes it is still below the surface.  It is valuable to Him. He is willing to risk all for it.

God drew up a plan of salvation based on the belief that His Son´s cruel death would not be in vain. God trusted that at least one sin-tainted heart would submit to the power of love and grace and be made perfect. God trusted that the pure gold in us could be found and restored. He believed we could be renewed. The Divine belief in us is beyond our understanding. But it makes sense to Him. He never considers that His ongoing sacrifice is for naught…because of the gold, because of the treasure, because of the pearl of great price that He loves, because of you.

He knows our capacity for failure. He also knows our capacity to shine and excel. He will trust us until we begin to identify more with the gold that is visible to Him, than with the dross that keeps us weak and unconfident. His trust (and the pain we feel when we break that trust) will remind us that we are called to perfection…it will also remind us that He who called is faithful to perform. If He does not stalwartly believe in us, He cannot transform us. Thus, His heart will submit to being battered, for there is no other way for us to truly grow and for the gold to start emerging.

It's not a game of "make-believe" or "pretend" for Him. God actually sees the gold in us. He put it there. He glimpses it and says, “Let us trust this soul as if it were entirely worthy of our trust. Let us confidently believe in what this dross-covered mess was created to be. Let us trust in order to make what is weak, strong…what is dirty, into gold. And presently our trust will make this soul absolutely trustworthy.”   

When I see God digging in the dirt, I have to believe too. I have to accept His absolute belief. There WILL be hearts that allow God´s love to pull them from the mire and purify them as gold.  

          

Replay the song, pick the flower

I never prayed for the miracle. It found me.

I used to be afraid of miracles. I was content reading about miracles long ago and far away in Bible stories…until pure grace turned my perspective upside down. The miracle of God in my plain, unworthy life made me face my fears…the fear of seeing my own helplessness, the fear of being challenged to change, the fear of having to invest my whole life standing by a miracle that I truly believed in.

The funny thing is that my reaction has been quite the opposite. I stretch out my hands to ask for what I was previously fearful of. Songs I´ve heard often enough now break me and challenge me to radical belief. Rain-kissed flowers reflect a love story that is changing my world. I have no desire to get over my amazement and return to my comfortable routine. My only desire is for the miracle to continue…for my breath to be taken away unceasingly…for the reality of God´s kind of love to transform me.

A taste of the miraculous has made me hungry for more. The depth of God´s love is like the call of the wild. I cannot stop hearing its echoes, seeing its beauty even in darkness. I replay the song…I pick the flower…I pause in the light of the sunrise or sunset. 

I am no longer satisfied with hearing a song in a new way…I want to hear it over and over…I want the miracle to reach deeper within. I am no longer happy recognizing God´s love in a flower…I want to touch it…I want to keep its color forever between the pages of my journal.

I want to lose track of all skepticism and realize that the miracle that began many months ago is not stuck in the glorious past. The miracle will continue if I replay the song and pick the flower and let God transform all my fears into new levels of faith. This miracle is an eternal gift from God´s heart to mine and I will not forget. This is just the beginning.   

 

My Second Date

My second date* with God turned out greater than I ever could have imagined.

 

The sun was close to setting and I was feeling restless. After a day-long conference in Oakland, I was driving back up north in need of a quality moment with God. My heart beat faster as I anticipated a fresh encounter with the Lover of my soul. I hesitated in my eagerness…in the passenger seat was my 18-year-old cousin who was alternately chatting with me and staring out the window in quiet. He was oblivious to my inner restlessness. Would he think I was totally crazy if I stopped midway home and said I needed to have a date with God?

With daylight slipping fast, I exited off Hwy. 101 and expectantly proceeded down the streets of an unfamiliar town looking for somewhere to spend a moment with God. I briefly explained to my cousin what I was doing and he didn’t seem too shocked, at least not outwardly. Coming around a curve, I recognized the right place. Next to a grape vineyard. Sunset colors in the sky. An enormous persimmon tree loaded with orange fruit shining against the deep green foliage (like a tree in the Garden of Eden, I commented). I parked and gave my cousin the option to join me or not. There, sitting on the hood of my Mazda, I talked to God. An informal, open-hearted prayer. Then I was quiet, and refreshed. My cousin witnessed in silence.

We drove off. That was my second date.

Unbeknownst to me, something had been stirring in my cousin’s heart. My date with God, and my comments about what God had been doing in my life, caught his attention.

A few days later, sitting next to him on the couch, I listened in holy awe and astonishment as a prayer fell from my cousin’s lips that caused joyous outbursts in the heavenly courts. He wanted to give a true relationship with God a chance. He wanted to taste what he’d only heard about. He wanted to know what real love was.

Thus, my cousin became my brother, and my prayer partner, and my inspiration, and my companion in a conversation about God and His Love that continued for the two weeks we were together. We both sensed the miraculous in what God was doing inside of us. We knew this was just the beginning of something momentous! 

 

And that’s why I insist, my second date with God turned out greater than I ever could have imagined.         

Postscript: It’s nearing five months since this all began to transpire. In the middle of writing this, my cousin called. We both agree that this journey is not an easy one, but we will keep reminding each other of God’s call to sincere striving and true love. We hold on to the promise that God will complete the work He has begun in us!   

* Dates with God began last year in October, following a personal conviction that I was in need of a deep love experience with God. These “dates” had to be spontaneous, in some unique location, and empty of any expectation except reveling in divine love and having a heart-to-heart conversation with God.