birthdays are good. my wife is great. Lensey and my mom managed to co-plan a surprise 30th birthday party for me while nine months pregnant. she even lied to my face and led me to believe that we were going to the captains table on watauga lake to eat dinner. we walked in my parents house to "drop the kids off"...literally (not poop) and there were most of my favorite people in the whole world. and we laughed and ate chicken wings and told stories and laughed some more. somehow when stories are told of me, almost 94% percent of them involve nudity on my part. i like to think it's someone else's idea to get naked, but when the story is told out loud, it sure sounds like someone else came up with a great idea to do some spontaneous random thing, but it's always me who has to add, "you know what would be even better....if we did it NAKED!"
anyway, it was good times. but the interesting thing is that for the past month or so, i've felt very lonely, alone, by myself. no friends, no family, no God, nobody. but then Jack came, and my phone didn't stop ringing for a week because people called to check on us, and people from church signed up for three weeks to bring us dinner, and my friend Josh wrote me from Orphan Helpers with an encouraging note, and I had a birthday, and people showed up at a party and had stoies to tell on me, and my friend Ryan said he hopes that we are friends for a long time, and one of my former students thanked me for investing in his life, and liz and curtis post-it noted my car (see picture), and chris gave me a card that played the Bewitched theme song and read, "your magic makes me tingle".
And so God showed up in all these ways and finally I had no choice but to realize that it is not God that goes somewhere, but me who walks away. and the passage that says, "as for me, the nearness of God is my good" started to make sense. because life sucks when we walk away from God like we have it all together and we don't need anybody. but I ask myself "why?" why do i walk away? i walk away without even knowing it. i start feeling like crap and still don't recognize the fact that i have turned a cold shoulder to the nearness of God. i sure wish i could trust only in that passage, I guess i'll just have to keep saying it over and over in my head.
1 comment:
It's amazing how we can be surrounded by people and still feel incredibly lonely, isn't it?
A quote from Titanic, of all movies, has always stayed with me. "I felt like I was standing at a great precipice, with no one to pull me back, no one who cared... or even noticed." I'd never heard it put like that before, and strangely, at the time I saw the movie in college, felt just that. And many times afterward.
It IS hard to remember that God doesn't leave... that in spite of our lonliness, He is waiting for OUR pursuit. Glad you realized
Post a Comment