The Last Word

A text message chat between us five family members detailed the timing of my youngest boy’s arrival home for a holiday weekend. Letting us know what time he’d be at the airport, he was wondering if anybody could be there at that time to pick him up.

“Can do.” my eldest son texted in response.

“Will do.” was my reply.

My middle son scooped us all with his one word answer: “Done.”

The next morning I had breakfast with the latter before sending him off to begin a multi-state drive back home, some travel restrictions he was dealing with causing me more than the usual concern for his safety. Yet instead of giving in to worrisome thoughts I turned the issue into a heartfelt conversation with another family member, He who is actually the Head of the household…and when I had laid my prayer request at His feet and picked up my phone again to head on with my day, there was His one-word response still showing in the last of the earlier text communications: Done.

Amazingly, as the day wore on, that word flashed again and again before me, the resulting peace closing the door on the worry that was trying to come in. Every note I wrote to myself on my phone was finished when I tapped that one word at the top right hand corner of the screen: “Done”. The pictures or comment streams I clicked on in Facebook were brought to a close the same way. It seemed to be the last word in  any of my communications that day. As a result, I went about my tasks and off to work in quiet confidence instead of the usual anxiety, and sure enough, shortly after midnight came the text message that my son had made it home safe and sound. Done.

The same answer has come back to me repeatedly in response to other prayer requests this past week, as well. A sick baby needed relief from constant seizures. Done.  Seemingly inaccessible computer files needed to be restored and properly saved. Done. A lost wallet containing a large sum of money needed to be found. Done.

While I seem to be hearing a string of favorable responses of late, I've learned to accept my share of less popular replies, as well. Many is the time I've dealt with a “Not yet.” to a prayer request, as well as the occasional outright “No.” But the fact that I have an open door to Heaven and am even able to have such honest communication with the God who lives there is an answer in itself to earlier generations that cried out to Him in the midst of their distress. They begged for forgiveness of their sins and a restoration of the relationship between them and their Creator. Then they dealt with centuries of waiting through the silence of the “not yet” response. But eventually the answer came in the form of a Savior, one who taught them to listen to and love their God and one another, then showed them how to do so by serving and loving them unconditionally Himself  in the time He lived and walked among them.

And now when it's time for us to go Home, we know we will be met upon our arrival by our older Brother, who long ago made all the necessary arrangements and had the last word in the ongoing conversation, as well.

“It is finished!”, He said.  In other words, “Done.”

 

“So when Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, 'It is finished!' And bowing his head, he gave up His spirit.”

(John 19:30 NKJV)

Sometimes Silent

The morning was cool and new and fresh, and I was enjoying its beauty, sitting on a patio chair and sipping a cup of coffee, when the peace of the moment was broken by the blare of emergency vehicle sirens. The sheer number seemed to suggest a big accident, and as I listened to them approach and then abruptly stop there was no doubt that it had occurred in the streets near our home. Quickly I said a prayer for those involved and then went on with my early morning reverie.

Later in the day a dear friend who now lives far away put out a prayer request on face book for one of her husband’s relatives who had been involved in a motorcycle accident and was fighting for his life. It wasn’t until the next day that a story in the paper made me realize that the accident I had heard the life squads responding to and the one that had injured my friend’s relative were one and the same. Truly the situation was hitting a little closer to home than I originally thought.

Sadly the injured man died as a result of his injuries, and even as arrangements were being made for his funeral a makeshift memorial was quickly developing on the side of the road near the spot where the accident had occurred. Not one, but two wooden crosses, one an intricately carved affair, were quickly being surrounded by flowers and other personal mementoes that obviously meant something to the friends who left them there. Even as I drove by the site on my way to work that afternoon I saw a red pickup truck parked near the spot and a man standing in front of the crosses, head bowed and hand over his eyes, grieving a loss that was personally hitting way too close to home.

A week passed, and Mother’s Day was soon upon us. As part of my family’s celebration we watched the movie Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the story of a young boy’s search for answers in the wake of his father’s death in the horror of 9/11. I loved the movie, but it was the title that captivated me. In an effort to more fully understand its meaning I came across an interview with the author, who simply said that there were things in the novel that were loud and close, and likewise many things that were silent and far away. 

I thought about that in relation to the accident that was weighing so heavily on my mind. As I sat on the patio that morning, the sirens were loud and the accident site was close. In the hearts of my friends in Florida, fear was loud and prayer was close. Surrounding the lives of the family and friends of the victim over the next several days, death was loud and memories were close. And to the sorrow of the wife left behind, her husband’s voice was silent and his touch was far away.

Too often we feel that way about God, that His voice is silent and His touch is far away. And yet we are surrounded by both on a daily and forever basis.

Oskar, the little boy in the movie, asks question s of his grandmother’s aged renter, a man who doesn’t speak but writes his answers on the pages of a small tablet he carries, or holds up one or the other of his hands for a “yes” or “no” response. His inability or refusal to vocalize his thoughts frustrates the little boy. We likewise bombard God with incessant questions, and although He always answer us, we get impatient when His response is not in our timing or doesn’t come in the way we expect.

Before his death, Oskar’s dad played a continual game of investigation with him, leaving him clues and encouraging him to look harder or in a different direction for answers to the questions he posed. Our Father does the same with us. Sometimes His silence is deliberate, to get us to dig a little deeper into a subject on our own or to look at the leadings He’s given us in a new way that causes us to see our life situations in a different light. Too often we rush the process, trying to make sense of a situation to which we haven’t yet accumulated all the information we need. Time is sometimes the missing puzzle piece that eventually causes all the others to suddenly fit together into a wonderful moment of discovery and revelation. God knows that the search for understanding cements His message in our minds and hearts in a way that a simple response on His part could never have done.

Many things are loud without being audible. Colors can be loud to get our attention, for instance, and actions speak even louder than words, so we‘ve heard. God uses both on a regular basis to communicate with us. When we feel that He is quiet and distant we need only consider that it was not by accident that His blood ran a brilliant red on our behalf, but rather His deliberate intent that it be shed to span the distance between us forever, an extremely loud expression of love from His heart to remind us that He is always incredibly close to His home in ours.

“But the word is very near you, in your mouth and in your mind and in your heart…”
(Deuteronomy 30:14 AMP)

Snake in the Room

The morning started off with a bang. Literally. I was getting coffee in the kitchen, and my son was in the process of waking up on the living room couch, when suddenly we heard BANG!… Crash!… Thump!…coming from the spare bedroom down the hall.

I just looked in that direction in bewilderment, but my son and his dog got up and headed that way to investigate. They both entered the room, but soon the beagle was ejected and the door closed again, only adding to my confusion. A few minutes later my husband, Jim, emerged and headed rapidly for the front door, holding a lump of cloth in his hands extended out before him. Minutes passed before he once again came into the house, calmer now, and began his explanation.

He had gone into the bedroom to get my laptop from the desk and was startled to see a snake curled up in the middle of the floor! Jim hates snakes, but he wasn’t about to let this one get away. Looking around for something to grab it with, he spied a cloth book bag in the closet nearby. He stuck his hand inside and bravely made a move for the intruder…except that the snake didn’t want to be caught; hence the banging and crashing and thumping we heard as the chase continued around the room. My husband emerged from the battle victorious, but there was more to his excitement than just an evicted trespasser.

Weeks earlier he had begun looking for a particular computer disk that he needed and didn’t seem able to find in its usual spot. He searched high and low, through all the piles of papers crowded around the computer, in stacks of the same piled around the room…everywhere…with no luck. He began praying, saying, “God, you know where that disk is! Please show me!” 

And so God did. After emptying the book bag he had used that morning of its reptilian content, Jim started looking at it a little more closely. There, in a zippered compartment in the back of the thing he found the very computer disk he had been searching for. We laughed together over the absurdity of it all and asked God if in the future if we could please have our answers to prayer minus the snakes!

But there was more than a computer disk in that book bag; there was also a message, as I found out the next Sunday at church. Our pastor’s son was the stand-in preacher that week for his recuperating father, and he had a sermon prepared and passion in his heart on the subject of breakthrough…only to find that he needed one that morning himself. His long-standing issues with anxiety were hitting him full force as he sat in the back of the building; in short, there was a spiritual snake in  the room.

Summoned by his wife, several believers began to pray for him, their voices loud even against the worship music delivered by the musicians on the stage up front. But it was a battle that he had to fight himself, one that only he could win. And when he eventually stood up and headed to the podium at front, I knew that he had done just that; he had grabbed that snake by the tail and thrown him out where he belonged. In doing so he demonstrated the very subject he was preaching on that morning. He found victory…for that moment, on that day.

In Exodus 4 we see that Moses likewise struggled with the idea of delivering a message; his, to Pharaoh in Egypt. God asked him what he had in his hand, and then told him to throw the staff he was carrying on the ground. When he did so, it became a slithering snake that Moses ran from in fear. God then told him to reach out and grab the snake by the tail. When Moses somehow managed to do so, it became a staff again, one that God told him to take with him always to use as a sign to those who would question the authority he carried after God had appeared to him.

Note that Moses carried the staff before He initially met with God, and he kept it with him long after that first meeting. And perhaps it’s true that the burdens we carry are actually tools God can use to show His power and authority on a day to day basis when we like Moses cast them down and then go after whatever it is that afflicts us instead of running from it, overcoming it again, each time demonstrating to those around us the power and authority we carry in Christ. The apostle Paul likewise talks of a thorn in the flesh that God allowed the enemy to use to buffet him on a recurring basis, that in his own personal weakness the power of God was shown to be strong. It could be that the victory we so desire is a moment by moment, day by day kind of thing…on purpose. Perhaps when the enemy sees that what he meant for harm is persistently being used to glorify God, he will abandon that particular form of torment altogether.

My husband and I wondered how the snake got into the room in the first place. Jim tore the place apart looking for an entrance hole. And then we remembered that with all the beautiful weather we’ve been having of late, we’d opened the window, even though the screen was off. We simply let the creature crawl in ourselves. And surely life is difficult enough without giving the enemy easy access to our lives by neglecting to use the spiritual filters God has given us to guard our hearts and minds.

I shudder to think that the snake was somewhere in the room that morning when I spent a good number of hours in there myself. Even in my most unobservant moments I surely would have noticed a snake curled up in the middle of the room, yet it was hidden in there somewhere. Similarly some things we carry with us a long time before they make their presence known, usually when we are least prepared to stumble across them.

Finally, I remember how Jim walked to the front door that day, holding the snake as far from his body as he could keep it. He wanted no part of it. And whatever our personal affliction, that’s exactly how we feel about it. But it’s when we allow God to use us in even our most difficult moments that He is glorified… and we may be surprised to find the answers to questions we’ve asked at last.

“And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.”
(Romans 8:28 MKJV)