home.

I've been at home for two weeks now. The last place I ever thought I'd return to after a full year away again, post-2012's home stay. I had everything all planned out...again. Funny how "all planned out" very, very rarely ever turns out the way "we plan." But not only are God's plans different and higher than our own; they are better. There's no getting around that fact. And though, for you, they ever seem better in the moments and the minutes that you are living now, they will be. Our God is the God of redemption. Of making worse better. Of taking sickness and healing it. Of taking darkness and lightening it. Wait and watch for it, my friend. Habakkuk recorded this best:

"For the vision still awaits its appoint time; it hastens to the end--it will not lie.
If it seems slow, wait for it; it will surely come; it will not delay." (2.3)

Habakkuk saw his world crumbling, darkness closing in as political forces rallied against all things moral, and yet it seemed that God was the sovereign allowing, and--dare I say it?--orchestrating it all "as planned". 

Sometimes, it makes no sense. Even in the Bible. Take heart and take hope in that today, friend. 

And even if things are going well, take heart and take hope in His will. Hold everything with an open hand; depend on Him with all you hold dear. It's worth it. Good, bad, ugly. He's got this. He will not let you go. His right hand upholds you not just for kicks, but for good

Home is a good place to relearn trust. I wrote in a journal in India several years back now that home is "wherever the will of God takes you." I was coming home from a new home, a new place and people that had stolen my heart, my personality, my all. I was wrapped in their clothes and their culture. I was undone, forever bound to this place. And yet, there I was, on a 16 hour flight back "home." I wrote those words not because I wanted to hear them. I didn't. I woke up during the night hearing a truck drive by on the interstate down from my house, thinking it was a bus on the dirt road across from our flat. I got sick on American food, never having been sick in India. My eyes drew many tears as I gazed at my friends and my village roads that are forever etched on my heart. But I needed to hear them. Home is not a place or a people. Home is the heart of my father, turning my own heart and paths exactly where they need to be at exactly the right moment. There are things to do here, there, wherever I am, and I'm bent on finding each one of them and being obedient to the Spirit of my God within me. 

The same power that conquered the grave lives in us; I think it can conquer wherever else home takes us.

I'm home in the will of my father. Where are you? 

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