Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own understanding; think about Him in all your ways, and He will guide you on the right path. 

Proverbs 3:5-6

There's a path back there, there really is.  It winds around the little peninsula and flows into quiet, tree-lined stream curling around the back of the lake.  It's almost impossible to see until your just on it.  At least three times I tried to find it, muttering to myself the patient instructions given again at the shore, and running aground yet again on the mudflats of one more wrong turn.  

At least a dozen times I've been through it now.  I still remember the shock of the first time I finally made the right series of turns and the trees suddenly opened up to reveal the wide slow stream.  Even now I still feel that tightening of apprehension as I paddle toward that wall of trees.  Did I take the wrong turn?  Am I really going to find it this time?  It just looks like its going to deadened up here.

Then suddenly there it is; peaceful and shady, another kayak or two, an occasional fisherman, the distant murmur walkers on the trail above.  The path is suddenly clear, the directions make sense.  How could it have ever been that hard?

There are so many walls in the trails of our lives, so many deceptive mudflats.  We stumble forward, rehearsing the directions, wondering how there could possibly be a path back there.  What joy in those moments, when at least for an instant, the tangled trail unwinds into a peaceful open stream.

You will seek Me and find Me when you search for me with all your heart.

Jeremiah 29:13

I've been trying to grow morning glories on my back porch trellis for three years.  Squirrels got them one year, to the delight of the falsely accused cat.  Another was just too late and too hot and they never went anywhere.  This year I was determined.  I started visiting nurseries on the first warm weekend in spring and was told to come back in May.  Two more visits and tantalizing rows of endless varieties of 

spring blooms at last netted me three sturdy plants I was assured would quickly consume my trellis.

I forgot to ask the definition of quickly.  

It was a rather discouraging prospect.  There were no blooms on these plants like the rows of offerings I had wandered blissfully through before finally asking for help.  They looked quite spindly next to the trellis when I planted them.  The previous year, when I had tried to start them from seeds, I had plant boxes stuffed with tender shoots.  Of course they had all died before reaching the bottom of the trellis, so it seemed best to follow directions anyway.

For weeks, there seemed to be little progress.  The three plants shot straight up.  I wound them diligently along the trellis as they grew.  Somedays, they even seemed to wind themselves.  

But they didn't branch out to cover the trellis, and they didn't show the least sign of blooming.  

A week and a half of summer travel, a week and a half of leaving them to the tender mercies of my twenty-six year old son, I returned to find they'd finally reached the top.  With no where else to go, they  started winding their way back down again, finally beginning to cover more area.  Even better, tiny buds were now visible, a promise of beautiful flowers to come.  

One perfect blossom appeared at the top of the trellis one morning, a joy through the day before it withered in the heat by late afternoon.  I eagerly watched the same spot for more, checking the blooms, fretting over watering, willing an explosion of color to form across within the leaves.  Nothing happened.  

I sat on my swing one morning, poking at the dirt and wondering if they needed more water or less, when I finally saw it.  Low on the vine, almost hidden by the leaves and the trellis, another beautiful nearly formed blossom.  I teased it gently out into the open and found more just behind it.  Tiny buds, hiding shyly, trailing up and across the vine, waiting their moment to burst into color.  

Blessing of God, growing just out of view, hidden until I take the time to look. 

... for every animal of the forest is Mine,

the cattle on a thousand hills.

I know every bird of the mountains,

and the creatures of the field are Mine.

Psalm 50: 10 - 11

The cattle, the corn, the trail, and this glorious day.  The second of a two day bike trail ride; the sun is high, but the breeze still cool.  The scenery melts from farmland to river to forest.  Though an occasional airplane passes over, there's not a hint of the constant city background roar of traffic.  

Peace; 

       beauty;

                 living senses;

                            open heart.

  He doesn't need us, but He loves us.  

          He doesn't owe us, but He gifts us.

A day to glory in stunning gallery of His work.

I lie down and sleep,

I wake again

because the Lord sustains me.

I am not afraid of the thousands of people

who have taken their stand against me on every side.

Psalm 3:5-6

A feather bed on a battlefield.
            With the Lord as his encompassing shield,
                           David could lie down in complete faith.  

I don't think he even knew if he would wake up again the next morning.  It just didn't matter anymore.  He looked out on the angry throngs around him,
                                      he heard their jeering threats,
                                                  he cried out to the only one above the reach of their weapons.

The charge of his desperate prayer?
                         Not a strategy for battle
                                        or a plan for escape,
                                             not a promise of great victory tomorrow,
                               
just sleep.

         Lie down,
                      relax,
                           rest in the faith
                                        of the one
                                                who holds you in his hands.

Katy Trail Milepost 35

He is like a tree 

planted beside streams of water 

that bears its fruit in season

and

whose leaf does not wither.

Whatever he does prospers.

Psalm 1:3

In the almost quiet on a gravely trail, a bench sits silent before a tiny lagoon.  The water pools gently here as the wide Missouri lumbers on.  The trees along its edges curl forward sucking eagerly at its life-giving flow.  Lush and strong and green they thrive resting in the gifts of God. 

His word the waters of my soul; waiting, longing to sustain me, if I'm only wise enough to rest like the tree in the endless nourishing flow.

I wait for the Lord

more than the watchmen for the morning --

more than the watchmen for the morning.

Psalm 130:6

In the depths of a moonless night, a watchman stands tense, alert to every sound.  A rustle of brush, the crack of a twig could be a frightened mouse scurrying for cover; or an advancing army creeping toward the city.  

He longs for light, for vision, for the flood of information revealed by the dawn.  A battle to plan or an embarrassed laugh of relief, anything is better than the coiled spring of wondering, of waiting for what can't be seen.

Waiting for the Lord. Waiting for the light.  Living in the longing for the dawning glow that illuminates the truth of all that commotion stumbling through the night.

I waited patiently for the Lord,

and He turned to me

and heard my cry for help.

Psalm 40:1

Deep in the mists of longer ago than I want to imagine, I woke up every morning to a pair of tiny blue eyes peering over the edge of my bed.  The red headed toddler in a diaper and a trailing  "daddy shirt" didn't make a sound as he crept into my room.

He didn't cry or call out or tug at my arm as he waited.  He just stared in silence until I opened my eyes, then solemnly announced, "Cheerios".  My teasing prodding for  a hello,  a good morning,  an I love you mommy, netted me only a ornery grin and a firm repetition of "Cheerios".

In the innocent faith of a child, he stood in perfect patience.  He held no doubts that my eyes would open, that I would laugh at his antics, that I would get up and get him the breakfast he wanted.

David stood too with his eyes on God, expectant, confident, at least for that moment, that all that he needed was there, poised to be delivered.

But I am not ashamed,

because I know the One I have believed in

and am persuaded

that He is able to guard

what has been entrusted to me

until that day.

II Timothy 1:12

My mind drops instantly into old hymn mode as it brushes over this verse.  It's different here though.  The hymn I remember talks about what has been commited to God, not what has been entrusted to me.  My Bible acknowledges the alternate translation in a note, but gives this as the primary. 

What a terrifying thought, to be entrusted with a gift from God.  What if I break it?  What if I lose it?  What if I mess it up beyond repair?  How could I possibly protect something so precious?  Instead, He guards it.  Jesus himself protects and corrects and keeps it safe. 

I can rest in faith.  I can trust that I can't ruin anything too badly as long as I walk in His light.

But as for you,

continue in what you have learned

and firmly believe. 

You know those who taught you ...

II Timothy 3:14

The world is a constant droning of endless voices.  Voices pleading and voices strident, voices calm with reasoned authority, voices bellowing with the power of conviction, each convinced he's right.  Each determined to be the voice of truth.  It's learning that never rests.  It's the teachings of radio, television, internet, and endless stacks of books vying for attention, tugging at my mind. 

Who are all these people?  Some,of course, maybe even most, are earnest, Godly, Christians, hoping only reach out with the truth.  But what of the others?  How many grasp for power, prestige, and money?  How many don't know the number they hurt?  How many just don't care?

"you know those who taught you ..." Paul told Timothy.  His mother, his grandmother, and Paul himself, they were Timothy's foundation.  He knew them.  He knew how they lived.  He knew their love for him.  He knew they wanted only the best for him.  He knew they would never delibrately steer him wrong. 

In the world of constant voices, who do I know?  In the weeding and sifting of the cacophony of sounds, there's plenty of good to find, but test it, mold it, measure it to the standard of the teachers you really know. 

No one serving as a soldier

gets entangled

in the concerns of civilian life:

he seeks to please

the recruiter

II Timothy 2:4

Entanglements abound in a school in the spring.  State testing absorbs a week of precious time.  Field trips and farewell plans, awards and frantic last minute curriculum jostle and battle for the few fleeting days remaining.  A constant jumble of thoughts and plans and readjustments in hopeless endless effort to keep up the pace and please everyone involved.  

Disentangle, step back and breathe.  Who do I really need to please?  Where is loyalty, the focus, on the one who brought me this job.  The one to whom I owe the fullfillment of it as a ministry.

The Lord will rescue me

from every evil work

and will bring me safely

into His heavenly kingdom

II Timothy 4: 18

There wasn't going to be any rescue.  Paul knew that.  The entire book is his final farewells, his last exhortations, his aching love for the man he considered his son. 

He was in prison.  He was cold and lonely.  He knew his race was over.  He knew he would shortly be killed.  So why would he write with such confindence of rescue? 

It wasn't a physical battle on his mind.  He had no fear of physical death.  He longed only for safe passage to the heavenly kingdom.  He rested at peace in unwavering faith that he would receive it. 

You, therefore, my son,

be strong in the grace

that is in Christ Jesus

II Tiimothy 2:1

Grace and strength; they sound so opposite.  I'm used to admonitions to stay strong in the faith.  Hang on, stand firm, resist.  It's work.   It's a firm resolve, a constant vigilance.  The strength is in the effort, in the exercise of developing muscles.

 But grace, grace is a gift.  No effort can make it stronger, greater, more abundant.  It just is.  It holds me, surrounds me and draws me in.  All I can do is to rest in it, and in the rest become infused with strength.. 

I want to know Christ

and the power of his resurrection

and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings,

becoming like him him in his death,

Philippians 3:10

I want to know... the heartfelt ache of the most influential figure in Christianity.  It's easy to think of him as the one who knew Jesus best, but of course he didn't really know him as a man at all.  He stood before those who had walked with him, who had laughed with him, who had touched the very hands of those he had healed.  He faced their doubts over his sincerity, their fears that he was only there to trap them, perhaps their disdain that he would have the gall to speak of Jesus at all. 

Was it the reason he worked so hard?  The reason he was so often impatient with them?  He longed to be where they had been, to know what they had known, as they longed for the lost moments, the misunderstanding of all the time they did have.

Hearts through the centuries, reaching toward heaven, longing for the day we can brush away the fog

and know him as he has known us. 

He has saved us and called us

with a holy calling,

not according to our works,

but according to His own purpose and grace,

which was given to us in Christ Jesus

before time began.

II Timothy 1:9

A tiny baby in his proud father's arms, a beaming mother and teary eyed friends.  A fledgeling family huddled before God to dedicate this new life to Him.  A promise, a prayer,  an awed plea for wisdom, a longing to see this child envelope the love that surrounds him. 

Noone asks what that child has done to deserve such an outpouring of love.  Noone demands that he prove himself worthy of the hopes and the plans of his parents.  He'll never remember this day.  He'll see only funny old fashioned pictures in the albums pressed on his giggling date.  He won't understand the pride and the terror of that day until he marches his own first born to front of the church.

We're called with a holy calling; we're consecrated, we're dedicated by God himself.  Unworthy, untested, before time even began, to rest in the arms of a love we can never truly comprehend. 

Woe to those who are heros at drinking wine,

who are fearless at mixing beer,

Isaiah 5:22

It's not really meant to be funny I guess, but it made me laugh.  A dash of hyperbole in the midst of judgement and doom.  A cartoon image of the foolishness we so often choose to honor. 

Who really are the heros of our world?  The courageous, the caring, the ones who serve others, who rescue those in danger, who give all they have to make life better for someone else?  I think those are the answers we would like to give.  The one we would like to believe mirror our choices. 

But are they?  Sports, movies, musicians, and money; that's where the focus of the world lands.  What do they offer?  A couple hours distraction.  An insolation from the pain of the world.  A refuge from the responsibility to act in what I no longer take time to see.  No different really than cheering at the pouring of another drink. 

Woe to those who drag wickedness

with cords of deceit

and pull sin along with cart ropes

Isaiah 5: 18

A dusty trail on a sweltering day,

a wooden cart thudding over ruts and stones,

Ropes digging deeply

 into sunburned shoulders

sweat stinging squinted eyes

he strains at the heavy load.

What treasure is worth this effort? 

What beauty that consumes a soul?

Wickedness,

sin,

the deceit of ourselves,

Release;

the only freedom,

from all that was never worth having.

They do not perceive the Lord's actions,

and they do not see the work of his hands.

Isaiah 5:12

I haven't seen a whole lot of anything in the past three days.  Broken glasses on a weekend morning on the other side of the state means no insurance information, no help from company call trees, and no chance of fixing anything until Monday afternoon. 

I've wandered through a blurry fog of formless colors and bloated lights.  I've stumbled through a day of work, my nose almost touching the board to decipher my own notes, while giggling teenagers wave their hands and ask me how many fingers they're holding up.  I chose to ignore the implications of that one.

I wonder how often I stumble around with glasses securely on, believing I'm seeing it all.  Where is the touch of God all around me, where is the work of his hands?  Do I miss it, ignore it, or assign it another source?  Where are the glasses that will let me see everything that really matters.  

In the last days

the mountain of the Lord's house will be established

at the top of the mountains

and will be raised above the hills.

All nations will stream to it,

and many people will come and say,

Come,

let us go up

 to the mountain of the Lord,

to the house of the God of Jacob.

He will teach us about His ways

so that we may walk in his paths.

Isaiah 2: 2 - 3a

We climbed a mountain at church camp once.  Really it was hardly more than a pile of boulders, but enough to impress me at the time.  The teacher asked us to walk silently behind him, and in great testimony to his influence over thirty giddy and sleep deprived teenagers, we actually pretty well did it. 

He sat us down among the rocks and in the character of Jesus gave us word for word, completely from memory, the sermon on the mount.  It was an awe inspiring experience that lives with me thirty years later whenever I hear any of the words of those verses.

I've camped in the Colorado Rockies since then, coasted through the winding hills of the Smokey mountains of Tennessee and lived within sight on a clear day of the incredible majesty of Mt McKinley, Alaska.  Yet these verses still take me back to that rough hill where the words of Jesus were as fresh and real to me as the day they were first spoken. 

He will teach us his ways, all nations, all people, climbing that hill in breathless awe waiting for the gift of his words. 

"Who will you compare me to,

or who is my equal?"

Asks the Holy One.

Look up and see:

Who created these:

He brings out the starry host by number;

He calls all of them by name.

Isaiah 40: 25-26

I've been a space geek since I was five.  A solar eclipse and and a man on the moon sealed my heart in the heavens.  Lying on the ground on a summer night on plains of Oklahoma, the stars stretched beyond the scope of my craning neck.  A stunning song to the heavens, to the God who created it all, that transports me half-way there in the glory of it all. 

They barely peek through now in night of  my city life.  A sliver of sprinkles amidst buildings and trees and the glow of the airport lights.  I stare at them still, not quite the glory of my early days, but even that little sliver beyond anything I could begin to count or name. 

Yet He knows them, he counts them, he calls them by name, and somehow cares to know mine too.   

...Do not grieve for the joy of the Lord is your strength.

Nehemiah 8:10

Summer breezes, children's giggles, and a never quite in tune guitar.  We stumbled through endless verses of the bouncing song in half a dozen keys at once.  A Bible school staple, a guaranteed net to capture their fleeting attention.

I guess I always knew it was in the Bible, but I never wondered from where.  If anything, I would have guessed a time of great celebration, a victory in battle, the song of a conquering hero.  In one sense it was of course.  The children of Israel have returned to their land.  The walls have been rebuilt.   The Law of God has been proclaimed before them as they've gathered to acknowledge his gifts. 

But there's no celebrating now.  The grief of all they've lost overwhelms them.  The missing years, the forgotten commands, the guilt over all they could have been, over all they were meant to be. 

In the crushing weakness of failure, "Go," Nehemiah told them. Eat, drink, celebrate together.  Their strength, their hope, their new beginning were powered by the joy of the Lord at their return. 

Give your servant success today, and have compassion on him in the presence of this man.

Nehemiah 1:11

Eleven verses  into the prayer.  Three rather magnified pages on my reader.  The very last line of a lengthy petition, before Nehemiah gets to what we would consider the point;  an impassioned cry for personal help.

He opens with worship, with a recitation of the glory of God, of the promises of the covenant with his people.  He acknowledges the sin of himself and his people and the fairness of their exile in exchange.  He reminds himself, he reminds his God of the promise to restore them if they just turn back to his way.  He glories in the power and strength of God, in his faith in his goodness to act. 

When he finally reaches his petition, he's so full of the glory of God, that the King of Persia becomes almost an afterthought, "this man" just a man, though he holds Nehemiah's life in his hands.

I love spring. 

I love clearing out of school right behind the kids and pumping up my tires. 

I love watching my bike sway gently over bumps secure in it's rack 

I love blue skies, bright sun and a breeze across the lake. 

 I love windsurfers on the water, babies on the trail, and a dog tugging joyfully at his leash. 

 I love the promise of renewal, the kiss of warmth, the taste of new life to come.  

A touch of joy, 

a hope for the future,

a nugget of bonus blessings

 on January the 30th.

John wore a camel hair garmet with a leather belt around his waist and ate locusts and wild honey  Matthew 1:6

Wow, why such a vivid discription?  I see so much more than even is stated.  I see a wild man with long tangled hair and a dusty cloak blowing in the wind at the shore of the river.  A man tantalizing and terrifying all at the same time.  Who wouldn't be fascinated by his rugged independence, yet wonder what a man who asks so much of himself might possibly ask of me.   

I wonder what they thought, those people who flocked out to see him.  They left the city, their homes, modern civilization as they knew it, to hearken back to the days of the prophets.  It's easy to think of them as so long ago to us that we lump them together with all Old Testament stories as if they all happened at once.  But it had been four hundred since the prophets last spoke.  A history of twice the span of a our own country, time as far removed from them as the 1600s are from us. 

Did this sense of an ancient throwback shock the author into such a detailed memory of the man?  Did it capture the imagination of a people beaten down by oppression and craving the words of God? For all his fire, for all his drama, what was it he really asked? 

Repent,

prepare,

listen;

for God is coming.