I’m Baaaaack!
Happy October, my friend! I’ve missed you.
When I went on writing hiatus at the beginning of July, I thought I’d take a month off to get unpacked and settled into our new home in Amarillo and then resume writing in August.
Lesson #1 – When you move out of a house you’ve lived in for 32 years (and take most of your accumulated treasures with you), it is quite naive to believe that you’ll be unpacked and settled in a month.
Naive.
That’s the word we’re going with. Clueless is more accurate, but we’ll stick with naive.
We’re more unpacked and settled than we were, but if I waited until we are completely unpacked and settled, it might be August of 2025! (Don’t tell Mrs. Sweetie I said that. She doesn’t think I’m nearly as funny as I do).
We’re enjoying this new chapter of being close to our kids and grands, finding new places to eat, making new friends, and renewing some old ones, BUT we still don’t have a settled rhythm yet.
Lesson #2 – When you’ve spent 39 years of marriage building life around full-time “church work” of some kind—casting vision, leading teams, setting goals, and trying to figure out how to measure success in all those things—it takes longer than you think to adjust to a different pace.
Full confession: It took me at least a month to stop feeling like I had to hurry. I’m not sure what I was hurrying toward, but the need to get there was omnipresent.
Lesson #3 – Sometimes the best thing you can do is deliberately and intentionally alter your pace and embrace the awkwardness of the new reality.
I thought about that this morning when I was reading Joshua chapter 3. Here’s the verse that suck out for me this morning:
Joshua told the people, “Consecrate yourselves, for tomorrow the Lord will do amazing things among you.”
(Joshua 3:5, NIV)
Now, in the story, the amazing thing that was going to happen the next day was that the Lord was going to stop the flow of the Jordan River and the Israelite’s were going to cross on dry land into the land that God had promised to their forefathers.
A generation earlier, they had a similar experience when God parted the Red Sea for them to escape the pursuing Egyptian army (Exodus 14).
It’s tempting for us to read ourselves into the story and proclaim that God will do miracles for us—parting our “Red Sea” or “Jordan River” before us so that we can either escape our pursuers or move into our “Promised Land.”
But it is important that we do not approach Scripture so that we can write ourselves into the context of Scripture. What God did for the Israelites—whether in Exodus or Joshua—was what He intended to do for the Israelites in those circumstances.
Rather, we may (and should) approach Scripture by drawing from the Scriptures truths that transcend context.
Here’s one: God is always doing amazing things. They are not all as dramatic and miraculous as these incidents, but they are nonetheless amazing—sometimes, perhaps, precisely because they are not so dramatic.
And the more prepared and sensitive we are (“consecrated”), the more likely we are to be amazed by God.
Lesson #4 – Life is still amazing where we are right now. Not more so than where we were before. Not less than where we were before.
Regardless of our particular context, we are amazing when we are amazed by God and join Him in His amazing activity in our context.
I’m glad to be resuming our journey together. See you next week.
Be amazing today, my friend.
