Between Storms

We’ve been in an onslaught of weather lately.

I drove along the ocean a few days ago in what I suspect were hurricane-force winds. The river was already beginning to overflow its banks here and there along the highway. I have friends who just got the trees off their roof from two storms ago.

One storm after another has blown through this part of Alaska and high winds, flooding and power outages have taken over the evening news. The weather forecasters say there’s another storm headed our way. I’ve lost count…I think this might be number four-in-a-row?



As I write, there are bright holes in the clouds, but the winds are picking up. The power lines outside the post office were whistling frantically this afternoon. Rainbow ends glow against purple mountains in the distance. Dark clouds like bruises are rolling across the sky, purple and gray and a strange yellow.

We’re between storms.

 

 

I’ve felt that way before (and I’m not talking about the weather now) – just barely catching my breath from one storm, and here’s another one rolling in. One of the reasons it means so much that God squeezed Himself into a human body and walked around subject to the law of gravity like the rest of us is that when He talks to us about peace-in-the-midst, we know He knows what He’s talking about.



When Jesus said He was giving us His peace, He knew exactly what a priceless treasure it would be in life on this earth.

Peace I leave with you; My [own] peace I now give and bequeath to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Do not let your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid. [Stop allowing yourselves to be agitated and disturbed; and do not permit yourselves to be fearful and intimidated and cowardly and unsettled.]

(John 14:27, The Amplified Bible)

 

 

 

Jesus said this in the middle of telling His closest friends that He was about to be betrayed, denied (by Peter), and that He would be leaving them. Jesus and His disciples were between storms and Jesus talks to them about…peace. And He could do that because He was at peace.


Peace isn’t necessarily the absence of the storm around me – it’s more about the absence of the storm within me.


When the Amplified Bible explains that Jesus is saying, “Stop allowing yourselves to be agitated and disturbed; and do not permit yourselves to be fearful and intimidated and cowardly and unsettled,” I can feel the arrow hit its mark.




And when the bad news is still ringing in your ears and lightning strikes again, there is Jesus, right in the middle, in and between the storms with you, saying, “My own peace I now give and bequeath to you…” It doesn’t get any better than God’s own peace – the peace that took Jesus to the cross and the grave and beyond.

I like the “Peace, be still” stories (see Mark 4:39), when the circumstances change in an instant. But I thank God with everything in me for the “Peace I leave with you” stories, and I know that Jesus is with me, in and between the storms.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ambushed by the God of Peace between storms,

Kimberly

 

 

Honeymooners

I know a family who is in the middle of a honeymoon with God right now. God just walked up to them one day and introduced Himself and has been dazzling them ever since. It takes my breath away to watch them!

Honeymoon with God? That’s right. He’s the ultimate romantic. He thought up romance. Throughout the Bible, God describes Himself as a husband, a lover, a pursuer. The whole idea of being “ambushed by God” is really just noticing and celebrating the surprise-love-gifts He gives.

I had a text-message from one of these honeymooners recently. It went like this:

“Awesome, awesome and more awesome…God just stole my heart! I just saw a whale 25 feet from the ferry. How does He know that I love whales? Oh, right – ‘cause He is GOD!”

Right. He’s God. He made you and He knows exactly what will make you catch your breath in wonder and fill you with joy. When He made this Honeymooner (the one on the ferry), He must have said to Himself, “This one will love My whales! They will make her happy, like they make Me happy. When she sees them, she and I will be happy together!”

This is the Love worth living - or dying - for. This is what that strange, homesick feeling that you can't put your finger on is all about. Love is what you were made for, it's the purpose in life, and Love has a name: Jesus.

"Someone or something has romanced us from the beginning with creek-side singers and pastel sunsets, with the austere majesty of snow-capped mountains and the poignant flames of autumn colors telling us of something - or someone - leaving, with a promise to return. These things can, in an unguarded moment, bring us to our knees with longing for this something or someone who is lost; someone or something only our heart recognizes."

(from "The Sacred Romance" by Brent Curtis and John Eldredge)


As for me, He knows He can ambush me with just about anything. Currently, it’s little wisps of baby hair, missing front teeth on a growing boy and a shelf full of just-canned salmon…

...oh, and watching others being love-ambushed!

Many waters cannot quench love,

nor can rivers drown it.

If a man tried to buy love

with all his wealth,

his offer would be utterly scorned.

Song of Solomon 8:7 (NLT)

Ambushed by God and loving it

(and back from a long blog-absence because I have a new Love in my world - my newest son!),

Kimberly

How to Spot a Gold Digger

I know some gold diggers. They’re always poking around, looking to see what they can get out of someone.

And I love them for it!

Ok, so I'm not referring to what most people think of when they hear the term "gold digger". You might also call these people “treasure hunters”. They’re the type who look for the gold in people, even if it’s hidden deep (really deep!) in there under a veneer of rock, a pile of rubble, or worse. They’ll search it out like a beachcomber with a metal detector and the minute they find something of any value whatsoever, they celebrate the find.

These are the people who look for potential and promise, not polish and perfection. They look past the obvious, past the difficult to spot the diamond in the rough – sometimes way in the rough. These people coax the unseen treasures in others to the surface. They see the artist deep inside the office worker, the teacher no one suspected in the shy one, and the poet who lives unknown in the accountant. They summon those in hiding to come out into the sunlight and reveal truth and beauty and God to us all.

Jesus is the ultimate gold digger. He looked at a rough fisherman with a loose-cannon-of-a-tongue and saw a disciple. He looked at a corrupt tax-collector and saw a righteous man waiting to see the light of day.

In the Gospel of Luke, chapter 7, we read about another diamond-in-the-rough recognized by Jesus when everyone else saw a dirty rock. Jesus was a dinner guest at someone’s house when a shunned woman – “an especially wicked sinner" (Luke 7:37, Amplified Bible) – crashed the party. She washed Jesus' feet with her tears and hair and poured expensive, rare perfume on them. The host of the dinner party thought to himself, “If this man were really a prophet, he’d know what sort of woman this is…” Oh, but Jesus did know. He was the only one there who knew. He immediately saw past the reputation to the gold in her heart and announced to everyone there that she was one who “loved much” and declared her forgiven and at peace.

I want to do that.
I want to recognize the treasure that is easily overlooked and call it to the surface.
After all, God saw the treasure in me.

The "treasures" my six-year-old recently found because he so patiently sifted through piles of gravel and sand the others left behind at a sluice box.










My six-year-old son is a gold digger, and a treasure hunter in every sense. He loves to draw “treasure maps”, hunt for rocks, and find the gold in those “irregular people” many of us just struggle with.

He and I like to hunt for rocks together – we have done this since he took his first steps. One day a couple years ago, he excitedly handed me a rock as we walked the beach. I took the rock, surprised he’d even noticed it. It looked very plain to me – uninteresting. There was no special color or shape to it that I could discern, but he insisted we keep it, so into the bucket it went. When we got home, we began to line up our finds on the porch railing. When I picked up his rock that had so failed to impress me, I turned it over. On the other side, it was a perfect heart. I hadn’t noticed earlier because I hadn’t bothered to turn it over, hadn’t bothered to really look.

How often have I failed to look deeper, past the plain side, past the unattractive parts, to see the treasure in someone? It is there in every single human being - they were each one made in God's image, after all. If I can't see the value there, I'm just not looking hard enough.

I want to be a gold digger.

I want to see what God sees.

For the Lord sees not as a man sees; for man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart. (from Samuel 16:7, Amplified Bible)

Ambushed by the God-who-saw-me-for-real,
Kimberly

Mother's Day Flowers

One afternoon last fall, my sons and I sat watching the wind blow some of the last of the seeds off a spent fireweed plant – a flower that was no longer what most of us would consider pretty. It had lost the vibrant pink color of its earlier summer days. The petals had dried up and fallen off. Its tall, upright fireweed shape was long gone. Instead, here was a slightly wilting, frizzy plant, about to launch the next generation on the wind.








Kind of like a mother.

She spends her years getting the next generation ready to launch into the destiny that God has written. He whispers it to her and she holds  it in her heart and in her hands.

Along the way, she eventually loses some petals, colors fade. She might not stand so straight anymore. But there is unsurpassed beauty in her on the days when the winds pick up and she celebrates the flight of her child.

Here comes the wind!
There go the seeds!









"...her children stand and bless her..." (from Proverbs 31)


Happy Mother's Day to the mothers - those who are raising children, those who've launched their children, those whose children live in Heaven, and those who've loved the children of others. May you be Ambushed by God on a windy day and see the seedlings take flight!

What – really – is the big deal about Jesus?

Yesterday was Resurrection Day and the culmination of Passion Week. Last night, I was writing back and forth with a friend who commented that the day just kept getting bigger as it unfolded. It was just after midnight when I read that, and my first thought was “Yeah, it’s already stretched into tomorrow!” And then it hit me: What Jesus did, it stretches into all the tomorrows!

During all the conversation about the day yesterday, my friend sent me a copy of an old email I’d written. I’d like to repost just some of it:

I am reading Roland Buck's "Angels on Assignment" right now, and have been re-reading the same part for a week or more now because I cannot seem to move on yet. We have no idea the magnitude of what Jesus did for us! We have no idea - none of us - how much God loves us, wants us, has done (and still does!) to clear the way for us to be near Him! Even in the moments of revelation when we, with our faces overcome with emotion, think that we grasp His love and what it cost Him, we don't. Not really. How could we? We've never seen anything like what He did! And those people who were witnesses to the event still didn't see fully. If they did, the story would have been so different. And I suspect it had to be that way for the story to even be accomplished.

Can I share some excerpts from this book?God not only wants believers to come closer to him; he wants those who are far away from him to come, too. He said that if you would call to him from wherever you are, from the very farthest point in all creation, he would remove all the distance between you and him. God WANTS you. He is not looking for reasons to disown you, but he is looking for reasons to help you and to bring you closer to himself...

God says, "You can come to me now! The barriers are down! You have been reconciled by the death of my Son!"...

All of our needs are covered in the atonement. With his covering over us, God can see us and accept us...Because people are in bondage to fear, it is important to God that people know that before he made the earth, he planned that they would be covered by his atonement. This is why he had Paul write in Ephesians 1:4, "Long ago, even before he made the world, God chose us to be his very own, through what Christ would do for us; he decided then to make us holy in his eyes, without a single fault - we who stand before him covered with his love....

The reason this is of such high priority with God is that people cannot really serve him without genuine assurance that their position in him is safe. Knowing this is REAL security! God is letting people know that he will not let them go without a struggle...

Wherever Christ and his message have been carried, there has been light. Where he has not gone or where the message has failed to penetrate, there is darkness. He is the center of life! He is the heart! Without Jesus, the very life, the very heartbeat would be gone from everything. Oh, God, may we never be the same because we will see, we will know, we will feel, we will have, we will live, because of what the death of Christ has brought to us. May this be the time in our lives when we take out the contract you made with us, written in the blood of Jesus, look at it, and recognize that something very special took place. It was not merely the snuffing out of this life, and the putting to death of his human mortality!... It was more!...

The second death which faces mankind brings fear, dread and torment to him all of his lifetime. This was the death Jesus took for us...Jesus suffered pains that even the ungodly, those totally separated from God, had never felt, for the ungodly have never felt the pangs that come when the last little flicker of hope is extinguished...While living on this earth, they have never felt the weight, the hopelessness and the horror of feeling the cold side of God as he turned his back on them. Jesus suffered the torment of a damned soul! From his heart he cried out , "Oh, God, why have you forsaken me?" and the cold pangs of eternal damnation, those icy fingers gripped his life, and Jesus suffered the judgment of God. He was totally separated from God at that moment!

Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, God! I want to bring this truth to people. Build a picture before us right now. Let us see what you have done. Let us see your love for us that was so great that your only begotten Son became our substitute! ... Every lie, every sin against ourselves and others, every murder, all adultery, all immorality, all dishonesty, all cheating, all rebellion, all idolatry, all enmity through witchcraft and satanism; yes, everything we could be charged with is laid on him.

He has become the sin bearer. He has become sin, bearing all the concentrated dregs of the rottenness of billions of people. Visualize him as the bulwark against Satan's attacks. God says, “See him, discern him, because if you don't, you are often weak, you are sickly, and you are subject to the attacks, the let-down and the draining of your spiritual strength. See him, not as something of beauty, but as that sacrifice, with that rottenness upon him, with every murder, every lie, every bit of immorality, every bit of wickedness that could possibly exist, all the stench of homosexuality that caused Sodom to be burned; everything laid upon him there!”

Then as you see him, God wants you to see on that body, YOUR sin, YOUR weakness, YOUR failings, EVERYTHING that you have been worried about! They are there, but they don't have any strength! They are only the ashes of sins that used to be. Just the burned-out cinders! When you see this, sin loses its grip and its power to hurt you. You sins are nothing but ashes, because the blazing stroke of God's wrath and judgment fell on that body. With all the sins laid on him, and all of God's goodness poured into us, we can stand before God, knowing that sin has lost its power over us. ... He has turned sin into cinders. He has blotted out the records...he WANTS us! He is not looking for reasons to destroy us, but to save us.

I know that was a lot to quote. I could quote more, but I'll stop there. I'm beside myself! It's more than we can comprehend! How is it that God is so good? He is so good! He is the standard of all that is good and none of what we call good compares to Him!

As I re-read this now, a year later, I’m still amazed by a Savior who would go to such great lengths to rescue me - and more. He got rid of anything that stood between God and me. And all of it – every barrier – was my own fault! Every selfish choice, every hurtful word, every shred of hatred and deceit and wickedness and every fear in me, Jesus overcame for me. He became the scapegoat for everything that was horrible in me in order to do what I couldn't. He really is better than anything we call good.

So...what – really – is the big deal about Jesus?

He did the greatest thing anyone could ever or will ever do, and what He did will last forever and ever, into your tomorrow and mine and all the tomorrows for always.

He is why we even HAVE tomorrows.

Ambushed by the God-Who-Overcame,
Kimberly

(Thank you, Kathy, for sending me that email to re-read!)

Excerpts from "Angels on Assignment" by Roland Buck, copyright 1979 Roland H. Buck, published by Whitaker House.

A Good, New Life

When I was a little girl, I was always bothered that we call today “Good Friday”. It seemed wrong to call it “good” – what Jesus suffered on that day.


But “Good Friday” is the right name. We had nothing good to offer, and our lack of goodness was killing us. Goodness Himself came and did the greatest thing anyone had ever, could ever, would ever do in all of history and throughout all of eternity. He did it for us.

That’s the standard of “good” – Jesus. His perfect sacrifice.

And now we can have goodness, a new life. A good, new life.



One man died for everyone. That puts everyone in the same boat. He included everyone in his death so that everyone could also be included in his life, a resurrection life, a far better life than people ever lived on their own.

Because of this decision we don't evaluate people by what they have or how they look. We looked at the Messiah that way once and got it all wrong, as you know. We certainly don't look at him that way anymore. Now we look inside, and what we see is that anyone united with the Messiah gets a fresh start, is created new. The old life is gone; a new life burgeons!

Look at it!

(excerpted from 2 Corinthians 5, The Message)


Ambushed by God and given a good, new life,
Kimberly

Not Just Any Port in a Storm

An afternoon storm caught me out with my camera today. Wind, then rain, thunder and finally hail chased me toward shelter.

And I found it in the prayer house.

Darkening skies

A church where we're visiting right now has built a small, beautiful prayer house. It’s mostly glass and it’s up on a hill. That’s where I ran when the hail started. I could still hear the storm out there. I could see it all around me. But in there…it was…still. The storm made itself known, but it couldn’t touch me in there.

“But let all those who take refuge and put their trust in You rejoice; let them ever sing and shout for joy, because You make a covering over them and defend them; let those also who love Your name be joyful in You and be in high spirits.”
(Psalm 5:11, Amplified Bible)

First raindrops

Outside the glass walls I could see hawks soaring in the distance, riding the currents on the edge of the storm. Trees waved wildly. Rain fell in sheets.

Inside, there was a fountain quietly murmuring. Storm-sounds drowned it out from time to time, but it was still there, bubbling up and over. I could see it. I could feel the occasional stray drop splash on my skin. It was closer than the storm that was all around me.

That’s what it’s like to find your shelter in God. You most likely can still see the storm, and it may rage so loudly that it is all you can hear for a moment. But if you find your shelter in Him, no storm can really touch you.

“You are a strong tower, where I am safe from my enemies. Let me live with you forever and find protection under your wings, my God.”
(Psalm 61:3-4, Contemporary English Version)

There were others in the prayer house today, too. They found their way there before or during the same storm. We smiled silently at each other, This is a great place to be during a storm.

It's not just any port in a storm - it matters which one you run to.

Rain on window

You who sit down in the High God's presence, spend the night in Shaddai's shadow,
Say this: "God, you're my refuge. I trust in you and I'm safe!"…

…"If you'll hold on to me for dear life," says God,
"I'll get you out of any trouble.
I'll give you the best of care if you'll only get to know and trust me.
Call me and I'll answer, be at your side in bad times;
I'll rescue you, then throw you a party.
I'll give you a long life, give you a long drink of salvation!"

(The opening and closing verses excerpted from Psalm 91, The Message)


Ambushed by God and given refuge in any storm,
Kimberly