THOUGHTS

April 23, 2020

A reprint from 2014

Growing up camping in the Colorado mountains, there wasn't a campground, just us, the break your ice in the bucket in the morning in the middle of summer kind of camping, the swim in the snow-fed frosty frothing river for your Saturday bath kind of camping, the eat the left over cornmeal fried trout for breakfast kind of camping, the hike up above timberline kind of camping.  Then one day someone else had camped below us and left a survival training area for their Outward Bound program where city kids were taught 
skills and then sent out to climb a mountain by themselves with naught but a knife and very little else.  When they deserted the place, we tried to shimmy up the obstacle course poles in order to walk across the log suspended about twelve feet above the ground.  It was a great achievement to make it across, enough to make us do a little victory dance  once we hit the ground again.

A Promise for the Survivor

"'At that time,' declares the Lord, 'I will be the God of all the families of Israel, 

and they shall be My people.  'Thus says the Lord, 'The people who survived the sword found grace in the wilderness--Israel, when it went to find its rest.  The Lord appeared to him from afar, saying, 'I have loved you with an everlasting love therefore I have drawn you with lovingkindness.  Again I will build you, and you shall be rebuilt, O virgin of Israel!  Again you shall take up your tambourines, And go forth to the dances of the merry makers.'"

Jeremiah 31:1-4

The word lovingkindness is "hesed" in the Old Testament.  It means the very intimacy of love of the deepest kind.  It is not the "I love chocolate" kind of love, not even the "I love my dog" kind of love.  We all yearn for this lovingkindness, but few know it.  It is the wooing, prevenient grace that draws us to God Himself.  It is the kind of love that Christ thought was worth dying for.  Do you know this kind of crazy love? Marriage is the divine example, but in human form it is imperfect at times.  For God though, it was love at first sight.

It is the divine romance beckoning that makes us seek love.  When it is God who pursues us and when we respond, we receive grace, rest, and an everlasting love that restores our soul.

Our world is a wilderness, especially now.  We are aliens, wayfaring strangers just passing through this world of woe, just passing through looking for the narrow way apart from the crowd.  From afar He has appeared and is beckoning saying, "I have loved you with an everlasting love," an undying, eternal, unconditional, unreasonable, irrational, one that defies logic kind of love.  He has invited us survivors to dance with the merrymakers to celebrate!

Find grace in this wilderness, you survivors.  

It's a war out there, but there is a rest promised for the soul.