Well...
We've had the most awesome time in the past three months. I'm not talking about no worries/no cares sort of awesome, because let's face it if there's one thing in this world that Satan doesn't like it's happy folk who haven't a care. No, we've had our share of frustrations and concerns. I don't mean that at all.
What I do mean is that we've faced these distractions and met these challenges with a peace that we've never had before in most circumstances. Now and then we've flaked out over something and then we swallowed hard and moved on, remembering that we'd turned ALL of our lives over to God, not just the portions we thought we might trust Him to handle.
Our birthday week was this week and John and I had a talk one afternoon about the many things God has done in our lives over the past three months. Situations that we found puzzling were revealed, challenges we hadn't faced before were met, doors that we thought we'd closed were discovered to be ajar and a moderate amount of bad feelings flowed through them still. Relationships were mended in areas we hadn't realized they needed it and caution signs and flags went up in others warning us of the need for additional prayer and great care in handling.
When John asked what I'd like for my birthday, I told him: "Let's go back to the mountain. We're in a different place than we were three months ago when we sat on that mountainside and turned ourselves over body and soul to God's care. Let's go back."
So Wednesday morning we loaded up and headed back to the mountain. John had given me a set of Cd's I very much wanted by Dustin Smith and we listened to one on the way over. We discussed some of the things that had occurred in the past three months, we laughed, we chattered, we admired the scenery. And at last we found our way to the mountain once again.
When we arrived it was hazy and smoky. We'd hoped to have the lookout to ourselves, but it was crowded with others who had come for their own reasons. We couldn't sit where we had before so we had to face another direction entirely. We stayed in the car and kept the windows rolled up so that our time could be private. We took in the view, the 'change of perspective' allowing us to see things we'd not seen before. The trees, which had only just begun to lose their leaves were bare now, but I could clearly see the buds of new leaves on each branch. I told John to look at how that had changed. When we'd first gone to the mountain the leaves were dying. Now fresh life was visible on each branch.
Then we began to pray, taking it in turns, each speaking when the other fell silent. We spoke our hearts, our fears, our joy. We cried, we laughed. We praised God and gave thanks for the blessings and the tough places we'd been, too, because we could see the blessings in them now as well. The sun shone in the windows and warmed the car so much that we had to let down a window to cool off.
As we prayed over our future, that hazy, unclear future and asked for clarity, I couldn't help but think of it as the view of the land before us, almost visible, fuzzy around the edges, not very clear. A breeze came up and blew gently. Not a heavy wind, not a breeze that would seem to have much affect really, but I looked out over the view and exclaimed to John, "Just look." The same view that had been hazy and heavy with smoke moments before as we prayed over our future, had cleared. We could see for miles from our vantage point and see clearly. I took it as a sign that we would soon have that same clarity about that future God has in store for us.
We prayed until we had nothing more to say. John looked at the clock as we started to drive off and exclaimed, "Do you realize that we were there an hour?" I shook my head. It hadn't felt like an hour of time passing at all. It felt like moments of time only had gone by.
I think it was a most excellent way to spend a birthday. I couldn't have asked for a thing more than that feeling of reassurance that we were right where we should be in our lives at the moment, that God was clearing the view ahead.
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