The Underside of His Wings

In the Lord I take refuge; how can you say to my soul, ‘Flee like a bird to your mountain…?’…For the Lord is righteous; he loves righteous deeds; the upright shall behold his face.—Psalm 11

It’s in your worst moments that you begin to see who you really are. But it is also in these moments that God reveals who He is. And this week, praise the Lord, I have seen the underside of His wings.

Here is my life over the past month in bulleted form.

• ·         Leaving home before light every day
• ·         Working weekends
• ·         Nine, ten, eleven-hour days
• ·         Meeting tons of new people (exhausting for a natural introvert)
• ·         Trying to run a reading center and learning as I go, on my feet
• ·         Being far away from everything and everyone I know and love
• ·        Getting habitually lost in the hardest city to navigate in the USA
• ·         Getting lost at night when it is late and I want to be at home asleep
• ·         Being honked at by people while I am lost; or being made to feel like an idiot for getting lost
• ·        A kid shutting down on me this week (two days in a row), and the junior high kids next door messing with my stuff
• ·         Not getting enough time with the Lord (due to many of above reasons)
• ·         Not getting enough time for exercise and relaxation

All of that stuff hit me this week. It’s like it balled itself up into a fist and punched me in the face. And, while I was down, it kicked me hard in the stomach.

That’s why I cried after I almost hit a raccoon. Last Tuesday, I was on my way home from staying late for training at work, and it was getting to be 9 o’clock (this little early-riser’s bedtime). It was very VERY dark on the Fairfax County Parkway (why don’t they have street lights in Virginia??), and I almost hit this raccoon, and I pretty much stopped in the middle of the road. (I think I did actually run over its tail or something, because I felt a bump.) This guy behind me beeped at me. I kept going but thought I was lost, and I began to just sob and repeat over and over to the Lord, “I just wanna go home…I just wanna go home...” while I waited for the light to change. Pathetic? Yes. I admit it.

It gets even better. The very next night, I got distressed over working 10 hour days and still not getting everything done (problems that have since been worked on by my understanding program manager, praise God), and I broke down crying again in bed. Then I was angry that I couldn’t fall asleep because I was crying, so I cried some more. I called my mom and didn’t even say hello. I just sobbed into the phone while she tried to make me feel better.

Again, pathetic, right?

And it gets even better: today, I had to volunteer at the National Book Festival (it’s not really “volunteering” if you are forced to do it), and I got lost on the way and broke down and cried again. (Third time’s the charm, right?) I was so mad. Here I was in my lease car, which has a limited number of miles, driving around this infernal city, so close to where I was supposed to be, and I couldn’t find it.

Earlier in the week, when I’d had to work on Saturday, a pedestrian thought I was not doing a suitable enough job driving and banged her knuckles angrily on my window. (Really, lady? You’re walking. You can’t have road rage.) Where is the forgiveness in the world? Oh yeah…the world hates me (1 John 3:13). To the world, I am just an inexperienced, unknown girl who is trying to make it somewhere, and I am in its way. In the world’s opinion, I ought to be forgotten and thrown into the potter’s field that Judas’s blood money bought, the “burial place for strangers”—the place where it throws all its worshipers when it is through with them (Matthew 27:7).

Thank the Lord that, because of His son, I do not have to be what the world thinks I am.

A couple days ago, the Lord led me to read Jonah. At the time, I didn’t understand why, but today it hit me (the burst-of-light kind of hitting, not the bus-at-eighty-miles-an-hour kind). It was because when I was lost today, I was seething with hatred toward the DC metro area. I called my mom and told her, “I HATE this city. It’s awful. I hate it! I wish it would just burn up—and Virginia too!” Later in the day, when I wasn’t quite so hateful (and I was more sure of my location on a map), I remembered that I am not the only one who has hated a city to which I have been called.

When the Lord told him to go to Ninevah, Jonah got up and ran the opposite direction. At the beginning of the story, the Bible isn’t clear on his reasons for running. He believed in the power of God: he admitted to the other boat passengers that it was God’s wrath against the storm, and even suggested that they throw him overboard. And when he was in the belly of the fish, he cried out to God for salvation and praised Him, even in all that smelly stomach acid and digested food. So he knew what God was up to—he just didn’t want to do it.

It becomes clearer later in scripture that Jonah just simply hated Ninevah. He thought it deserved what it had coming. In short, he wished it would burn up and be destroyed.

He did what the Lord asked, proclaiming judgment on the city. When they all repented, “it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry” (Jonah 4:1). Why would you be angry when people repent?

Honestly, I think Jonah was angry at God, at least partially, for interrupting his life to give him this assignment he didn’t want. That explains why, when the Lord first approached him with it, he fled “away from the presence of the Lord” (Jonah 1:3). When the Ninevites repented, Jonah said (quite melodramatically), “O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live” (4:3). This because people repented. But all the Lord said back in reply was, “Do you do well to be angry?” (4:4)

What a jerk Jonah must have been. But now, as I look upon the city to which I’ve been called, I understand the fears, stress, and pure exhaustion that Jonah must have felt. He felt things were unfair. He felt he was called to do more than he could do. Then, when the Ninevites repented, he was probably embarrassed because he had been walking around telling them they were going to be destroyed, and then they weren't. He felt angry, so angry that he probably cried and screamed, “I wanna go home!”

Apparently he actually enjoyed being angry, because he just sat himself down on the edge of the city and stared at it with an evil eye, “to see what would become of it.” God made a plant grow up over his head to shade him. Then He caused the plant to wither. Jonah complained (of course), and the Lord said, “So, you’re going to mourn over this plant that you didn’t even tend and care for, and you don’t expect me to have compassion on this great city where there are 120,000 very confused and lost people?” (4:11)

Scripture does not record Jonah’s reply, but the question is rhetorical. It's so rhetorical that that's where the book ends, with a question mark. Go look if you don't believe me.

Do I expect God—the God that I know, the God who is so full of mercy and patience—not to have compassion on this city? That is why He sent me, and other believers, here in the first place.

I don’t think I have “fled the presence of the Lord,” at least. That’s a step in the right direction. I actually came here the first time and didn’t have to be swallowed by a fish. However, the devil has been trying very hard to show me that I am not welcome here. He has been trying to get me to hate this city. And, on several occasions, he has succeeded. I must admit, although I do love my students, I have never loved living here; at best, my attitude toward the DC metro area has been neutral.

If you hate a place, you don’t have much compassion for it, and you certainly don’t care if its people get saved.

But even though I was crying with hatred today, I don’t want to just go sit on a hill and watch DC burn: not because I love the city, but because I love Jesus. And if He wants me here, I will stay here.

That’s the sweet part of this. God knows that my life is hard. He knows because He lives it with me.

Keep me as the apple of your eye;

Hide me in the shadow of your wings.

Psalm 17:8

The more adversities tear me down, the more He climbs into my soul right with me and builds me up. His mighty wings surround me, and I grow more faithful, not less.

Every day this week has had to be an act of complete surrender. I know I can’t do what I am called to do without Him. No one can. I know I will become tired. I will cry in my car. I will be nothing, fit for a field of strangers. So I have asked Him every day—sometimes even with a heart full of despair, or eyes filled with tears of anger—to just hijack my life and make it miraculous, in spite of me.

And I have seen Him working. I have seen Him calm my little spirit inside of me like a mother comforts a child. I have seen Him send people my way to encourage me—strong people in the Lord, building me up at opportunities and in ways I did not expect. Just today, after I arrived at my volunteer post and was suffering from a bad attitude (see last post), I prayed for encouragement. Who should come up to me but a fellow Mississippian who just happened to be a minister as well? She gave me a good word of encouragement. How He cares for me! If He didn’t, come to think of it, the devil wouldn’t waste his time attacking me. Thanks for the compliments, devil.

I belong to Jesus. Although I may not be having the time of my life, and although my life is hard to wake up to sometimes, nothing can touch me. I am free to sing praise to my God. How awesome is that?

We will never find peace or wisdom from our own minds. As Kenneth Copeland says, that’s like “trying to fish in your bathtub.” There’s just no peace there. I know, because I have fallen into the black hole of my own mind this week. All it has to offer me is a worn-out cycle of stress and anxiety. And there is certainly no wisdom there. When we need peace and wisdom desperately, we can find it only in Christ.

I’m not trying to be cliché here. I’m not saying, “Just say a little prayer, and peace will come fall on your head like pixie dust and sparkle around your ears.” What I am saying is that when that seven-year-old student is sitting there with his face in his elbow, unresponsive, we have to say to the Lord, “What is it that I need to do now, Lord?” When middle-schoolers disrupt me and I am angry, I have to ask the Lord to love them for me. When I am lost and distressed and don’t see how things will get better, I have to cry out, “Jesus, I still believe that You are sovereign in this, and I resolve to follow you.” If we turn to Him, He will tell us what to do; He will comfort us. I am proof of that. Praise God!

Life is hard. It is especially hard for people who follow after Jesus. He said it would be (Matthew 7:14). “…they will lay their hands on you and persecute you, delivering you up to the synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kinds and governors for my name’s sake,” said Jesus (Luke 21:12). But in the very next sentence, He stated simply: “This will be your opportunity to witness.”

Praise God, that I have the opportunity to witness! I am not just a third party. I have seen His mercy and His triumph. I am not afraid of the devil’s persecutions, because I am following the man who got out of the boat and walked on water in the middle of the storm; I am following the God who came down to earth to touch dead and dying people and awaken them to life. If I did not follow this God, my only choice would be to follow my fears and listen to the world, and, instead of walking on water in a storm, I would be thrown overboard and swallowed by a fish. Ew...bad alternative.

Life isn’t what I expected. If it were, it would be a life of my own creation, and not God’s.

So here is another rhetorical question for you: Who is it that overcomes the world except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?—1 John 5:5. I pray that you find victory in that.

**Speaking of prayer, I’d like to ask for prayer for my sister, who is having a difficult time adjusting at work and feeling confident. And, of course, you can always pray for me, that I do not submit to anger, but instead go about the work He has assigned me with zeal. I admit, this week looks scary to me. But I know whom I have believed (2 Timothy 1:12). He is good.