Home

August 12, 2013

Home.  What a wonderful word.  What a wonderful place.  What meaning one word can hold!  How good it feels to be home and finally together as a family.  It’s kind of overwhelming.  I can’t tell you how many times in the last thirty-six hours I have spontaneously burst out laughing or crying or a weird combination of both.  How full our lives and home have become.  The funny thing is how normal it actually feels.  We are home and it feels like we just kind of fit.  Its like this is where they have always belonged and we have all known it all along and now they are here and its just fits.  I don’t know what I thought it would be like, but it’s not weird or awkward or foreign.  Its home….they are home…we are all home, finally!  Yes, I am bawling as I write.  Have you ever been overwhelmed by God’s completely underserved kindness and gentle love?  Overwhelmed….like where maybe you might stop breathing, or your soul might actually explode from unexpected joy?  That’s me tonight!  God is good.  He is always good.  He has always been good.  I came to know that goodness, though, in the dark valleys of my life.  I came to crave that goodness and nearness of His love that I found in those wrenching hard places of my journey.  In many ways I think I even grew suspect of claims of God’s goodness amidst sunshine because I guess I supposed it was just being confused with pleasure over one’s circumstances.  Sure it’s easy to be happy when things are good, I thought.  But, to know joy in sorrow is so much deeper and real because it’s where you have nothing but Jesus to be filled with and He is so much more satisfying than any fleeting pleasure.  And, He is!  But I have found much to my soul’s delight and awe how sweet His sunshine on my face feels.  Its so undeserved….so unexpected yet so His nature and a piece I haven’t known so deeply.  It’s a place where “thank you” is so inadequate, so insufficient.  So I just sit here sobbing and laughing tears streaming down my face in absolute delight.  Jesus is enough and will be again on darker days, but today I’m overcome by the sunshine poured out in my life.  I asked God to deal gently with me on this road, but I never expected this.  It’s more than I could have imagined.  I told Paul the other day, I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop….and realized how twisted my concept of God is.  It is as if I think He is in heaven just waiting for me to get too happy about something and then squash it out of me and remind me that He is the only One that can make me happy.  Wow, that sounds terrible.  It is terrible and while I know it’s not theologically correct, that’s really how I think sometimes.  So, maybe, that’s why the dark valleys are so comfortable to me, there’s not much to loose in a dark valley.  But, I think what I am coming to learn is that with Jesus there never is anything to loose.  If He is my everything, then, whether sunshine or darkness, I’m satisfied.  But, the piece of His nature that surprises me is to think that in my overwhelmed sobbing/laughing in worship over His kindness and gentleness towards me, He might just be laughing too, pleased for me know Him in this way.