I'm lying awake in bed this morning after a VERY disturbing dream... but a dream in which God was showing up in amazing ways... and I'm hearing some very DISTURBING sounds! Creaks and groans and scratches and bangs... OH MY!
I'm pretty used to strange sounds in our rickety old house behind the shop. It's just that I'm not used to THESE strange sounds. What's going on?
The dogs aren't barking, so that's a good sign. Then the outside dog starts to bark... but quickly stops. I start to put things together. After the last big storm there was quite a lot to be done. Branches were cut down. The covering over the breezeway had to be shored up. Now the wind is whipping up in advance of the next storm and what I'm hearing is the "new and improved" strange sounds at the Bartholomew home. "It's okay," the Lord reminds me. "I'm here!"
Then He brought to mind a strange plane trip I took several years ago. I had a nice little corporate gig as a safety officer back in my mid to late 30s, and one day it took me in a small four-seat puddle-jumper from Fresno to somewhere near Solvang, in the kind of the weather we're supposed to have later on here today, only worse. The clouds hung low, the rain was coming down in sheets, the wind was howling through the desolate rifts and canyons of the southern Coastal Range, and lightning was everywhere. We were flying just a couple hundred feet up (not sure why) and the plane was bouncing all over the place. Up, down, side to side, veering left, then right.
I was riding in the back next to a guy one rung higher than I on the corporate ladder who thought (wrongly) that I was gunning for his job. He was freaking out. Just freaking out. For some God reason I was totally at peace, so much so that I fell asleep, my face jammed against the rain-streaked window, and slept like a baby. With a childlike (some might say "childish") faith that everything was fine.
Then over the next few years, life got messy, I blamed God, then it got messier and I cried out to God, and here I am. (I might have left out a detail or two.) And it's still pretty messy at times. For me and for those I care about... those GOD cares about! So what's the lesson here? Honestly, I'm not sure.
I did find that I can blame God, even get nasty-angry with Him, and He doesn't strike me with lightning. At least He hasn't yet. But I'm NOT recommending that! I don't really do that so much anymore. But at the same time I wonder: Do I trust Him like that naive young lady who just didn't know how bad things could get? "Oh," says an odd little voice in my head, which I'm pretty sure isn't God's, "you STILL don't know how bad things can get!" Time to read Job again?
So what words of comfort, and of prayer, does one offer when someone's going through their own valley of the shadow of death? Job's friends are a pretty good example... of what NOT to say! But what TO say? I'm reminded of something I quoted a few postings ago: "Sometimes I wonder if the words I use are the least important part of prayer." I would add that I sometimes wonder if the words I use are the least important part of offering comfort. And honestly, there just are no words for some situations, at least not in and of our own spirit. Come Holy Ghost!
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