Kirkepiscatoid

It started this morning, out in the yard with my morning coffee. One of my "collared" Facebook friends wrote on her status update...

(Facebook friend) is preaching on Psalm 84:1, How lovely/amiable/dear is your tabernacle/dwelling-place. Where do you experience God abiding?

I realized something for the first time. I am just now learning to see God abiding in "the hard places." It is almost a month after my Very Big Decisions regarding my work environment. I am starting to see that although there were many things that were not perfect about that decision, and whether it is good or bad is yet to be revealed, there IS a peace with it now that transcends everything I ever worried about with it. It does not mean "I got what I wanted." It is not exactly playing out the way I envisioned it. But there is a peace with it, anyway.

What it has taught me is to, rather than focus on the tumult, to focus on seeing God IN the tumult, much like the disciples in the boat in the storm learning to "focus on Jesus."

It is so easy to get trapped in the drama of "tumult". Like a grand Missouri thunderstorm, there is a "dangerous excitement" to it. Conflicting desires to "run from the storm and take cover," "watch it from a distance and feel its power," or "feel the victory of having weathered it," all emerge from it. But that is not what should be the center of it. The center should be on "our Godly dwelling place." Sometimes it is in the physical confines of the church. Sometimes it is in our back yard, with a cup of coffee. Sometimes it resides in the pits of our deepest personal fears, our loneliness, our sense of abandonment. Sometimes it resides in the smiles of others. Sometimes it resides in those gifts of serendipity, where you neither felt you deserved nor expected anything good to happen to you. Sometimes it resides in feeding the belly of a homeless person, or tearing wet, dirty, moldy insulation out of a house that was flooded.

How lovely IS your dwelling place, O Lord...wherever it may be.