22 Apr WHO DO YOU SAY THAT I AM?
Rising early to say my last good-bye, my eyes hungrily surveyed every detail that I would have normally passed without noticing. My car was packed. We had worked until late the night before getting ready to leave. In a few short hours we would begin our drive across the country, with me following Bill’s truck holding everything we could lash down and stuff in. It was my last dark before dawn that would give way to the gold sun splashing the walls of my study, where I had spent innumerable hours with God. No more the prayers and writing at my desk, the curled up times with Him in my big gold chair. Bill and I were saying good-bye to everything familiar and well loved. Never again the kitchen door slam announcing someone home from school. Never again the turning off of lights and locking the doors at night. Never again we six gathered at our family table. Never again softly opening their bedroom doors to check my children as they slept. No longer the toddler grandbabies clambering the same steps well worn by their parents. With our children grown and gone, Bill and I were beginning the adventure of a new life together in Montana.
Such a mixture of emotions. Somehow in the excitement of preparation, I had failed to anticipate this rending pain of leaving. A few silent tears slipped down my cheeks, as I gazed into my garden, my heart wrenched by the pain of letting go. Resolutely reaching for my books, I began to stuff them into my leather backpack one by one. The last of them, a new acquisition unopened for more than a month felt like it was resisting being stuffed in the backpack, as if I was meant to open it and find some jewel before I left. Dubious but willing, I opened it, throwing myself into my chair, telling myself that I would read just the first chapter. It was a book having nothing to do with moving, or setting up a new home—it was about recognizing and resisting what steals our destiny. (1)
God has put us in the time and place He wants us to live. He has determined not only when we live, but where, down to the country, state, neighborhood and street. God knew our exact address before we did… The place we call “home”, with its geography, longitude and latitude, is a place where God wants to walk, accomplish His purposes, talk to the people of the earth, and fulfill His destiny. God wants our habitations to become His habitation. Each of us has a specific geographic place . . . that we can impact for the kingdom of God. Where you live will not only impact you, but you will impact and shape it.
As if they were hi-lighted, these words lifted from the page, speaking deeply and appropriately to my heart. The author was expanding upon a fragment from Paul’s sermon before the Areopagus in Athens,
He Himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. From one man He made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and He determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their lands. God intended that they would seek Him and perhaps reach out for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us. ‘For in Him we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:25-27)
God’s spectacular orchestration of our circumstances, speaking words that come to find us is not serendipity or coincidence, it is His unflagging determination to bring us the personal evidence of Himself so that we might seek Him and perhaps reach out for Him and find Him. There is nothing more critical to us than to learn how to walk with God.
That unopened book held a word from God that was orchestrated to rise at the rim of the world at the exact moment when its dawning would mean the most to me. It was my Lord assuring me that I was going to the place He had already determined for me. With overflowing fresh confidence I closed my eyes and let go of our beloved home with a smile. I was safe in His will and in His plan for me. And once more, my heart erupted with “YOU ARE MY LORD AND MY GOD.!” in response to His never ending question, “Who do you say that I am?“
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(1) Destiny Thieves: Defeat Seducing Spirits and Achieve Your Purpose in God, by Sandie Freed
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