Day 30

It has been longer than I had anticipated since I'd written here.  The delay has been due to a number of obstacles.  I apologize to those of you who have been genuinely interested to follow this.

Day 30...  I'm just about at the my halfway point.

My thoughts are terribly jumbled.  I haven't a leading to go any particular way with this post.  There are many experiences I could cover, but I do not have the stamina nor memory to relay them all to you here. But know this, friends, God has proven himself faithful to his promises through it all.  This should be comforting to you all, as it is to me.  Perhaps one of the most encompassing of them that I've been clinging to is the simple, "Seek and you will find."  I'm glad to know there's a light at the end of the tunnel where the sun will gleam upon my confusion, revealing the perfect completion of whatever my circumstance may currently be.  If I take the mental, spiritual, and even physical labor of seeking that light, I will find it, and have in many instances already.  All the while, I can find God in the journey of seeking such light, but only if I am heart conscious of the fact that he can indeed be found in the midst of trial (not just at the end of it).  Often times, we go through our day and, I believe, are ultimately found faithless in the many trials we encounter!  Though, God, in his mercy, is only found faithful.  So many times we see God's work in hindsight, but I believe that since we seem to consistently be finding his presence there, reasonably, we should be able to actually find Him while in the midst of it.  Without this, we are surely missing out on the most needful blessings.  We miss opportunity to grow in the grace of our Lord.  This is to our spiritual detriment.

Although God's silence generally seems to prevail in these circumstances, he sometimes will directly get our attention.  During the first workteam that I was on, I was lying on my cot trying to sleep, after a good, hard day of construction.  I suddenly started feeling nauseous and also like something else was going on at the other end... sorry... anyway, due to the recent influx of cholera, I was naturally curious if I had contracted.

I laid in bed, with a thousand scenarios running through my mind of what the possible outcomes were.  Now I'll have to wake up Tim, and find some water to replenish my fluids, it'll make a big scene, everyone will get up and wonder what's going on with Tim running around finding water bottles, they'll look at me funny and ask me tons of questions, few will get sleep tonight, so tomorrow will be a slow work day, they won't get as much accomplished because they'll be tired, and they'll be grumpy and make snide semi-joking remarks to me about why I had to get sick and wake everyone up last night, and on and on... yes, i know... it's a slippery slope.

Throughout this internal narrative, I had decided the first step would be to go outside to vomit.  I trudged out across the sidewalk to the back of the school we were putting the roof on.  As I was keeled over slobbering into the dirt/mud from the excess saliva, I heard something speak to my heart, "Look up."

I did, and what I saw was marvelous.  The firmament declaring, "GLORY!"  The moon was on the other side of Earth so the stars shone brightly.  It must have been very similar to what Abraham had seen when God made a covenant with him regarding his descendants.  Immediately the nausea left me.

I stood there in awe, as another figure approached.  A middle-aged gentlemen from the team came over and started talking to me, thinking I was someone else.  He soon realized I wasn't who he'd thought, and he started asking me if I like to look at the sky.  "Yes, I do." I replied.  "Me too." he said.  He then proceeded to show me some cool apps on his Android and we found the planets and constellations on his star map thing.  It was great.

Two other fellows came behind, and after some conversation, they found out that I sing.  So, we proceeded to sing some hymns in a quartet.  I was blessed immensely by their fellowship and harmony.

My point... God revealed his love to me by drawing me to fall more in love with him that night.  He used initial discomfort to drive me into a more comfortable place. -- in His arms I find relief and perfect peace.

The other day I was reading my Bible and somehow I kept running into this Enoch man.  You are likely aware that, "Enoch walked with God."  Then, in the same reading period, I came across Adam and Noah.  They also "walked with God".  I was glad that God told me that.  I want to experience that more fully -- constant communion in God's presence.  I take courage that God has shown me through past experience that he holds true to his word.  I know without a doubt that if I seek, I will also find.  This is exciting.

Other wonderful happenings!!

Hurricane Tomas!  It passed right between us and Cuba!  This path goes against the storm's history as well as people's predictions.  It turns out that last week as we were praying with all the missionaries at Bible Study that Haiti would be protected from the devastation that Tomas could bring, that records show around that very time the storm veered into an unprecedented, sharp turn to get into it's eventual final path to weave between the two land masses.  So, we were left largely unscathed!  How fantastic is that!?

Tomorrow Brent and I will be headed down to the Reinhard's at 5:20 AM to meet in order to deliver some materials into the mountains for our next workteam coming in that afternoon.  They were postponed in their journey due to the hurricane, and the original job site has become unreachable due to washed-out roads.  The current plan for the construction is the "Plan B" we didn't know we had until just over a day ago when they found the roads impassable.

There is so much more to tell... but for another time.

So with this I yield to my heavy eyelids.

God is good... all the time.