Blessings

In late April, when I was writing about some of the ways God works in our sufferings, my husband was in Michigan looking for a place for us to move into this summer. The rental market for homes was crazy in the location we were preparing to move to and home sales were super competitive too. As our friends asked us about how our move was going, they would often say something along the lines of "well, I'll be praying that God leads you to just the right place that exceeds all your expectations" or "I'll be praying everything goes smoothly and easily and you find the perfect place". My husband and I would roll our eyes. That's not how things work! No one just rolls the red carpet out for you when you are looking for a rental, especially when you have a dog, and most especially when your dog weighs more than 20 pounds. We knew God had a place for us, yes, but we also knew that the search is often arduous and God uses these times of pending homelessness to grow our trust in Him as we WAIT and WAIT and WAIT. And submit applications minutes behind someone else. And get told they already have seven applications for a property. Or find out the property that looks great in the on-line photos actually smells of cat pee and contains the previous tenant's garbage everywhere etc etc etc.

Some final pictures from our time near Lake
Superior this summer.

But then God really surprised us, and this time my husband was able to visit our new location beforehand, look at a few OK rentals, and then get a lead from a cousin who lives in the area where we were looking. And the lead quickly turned into a more wonderful house than we could have imagined ending up in! It is everything we needed and wanted and hoped for, plus more. A real cherry on the top situation! 

I wrote a few lines about how it is true that we should expect sorrows and troubles in this life, but it is also true that we should expect God to bless us, amaze us, and come through for us in mighty overwhelmingly good ways. In a world full of sorrow and a culture focused wrongly on the prosperity gospel, it can sometimes be easy to forget the truth that God is for us and longs to bless us. Sometimes that means He does things we don't like, but other times it means He goes above and beyond what we can imagine.

I waited to hit publish, mostly because I expected the rental opportunity to fall through. And actually for a while it looked like it was going to. And then it wasn’t. And then it was again. And then another separate opportunity became available for us to take a big step forward in a dream coming true. And it too has felt like a huge blessing and a cherry on top besides and has also come with its own setbacks, concerns, fears, and struggles. 

Family!

The whole summer has me thinking about suffering and blessing and how bad we can be about identifying one from the other. We want to lump each life event into one category or the other. Blessings: walks on the beach, picking strawberries with my mom, seeing lots of family members, a fence and a pool in our backyard, cousins down the street and just across town. Not blessings: a busted lip that required a trip to urgent care and made me look like I got lip filler gone wrong for two weeks, construction and right lanes that keep ending and roads designed with U-turns in place of left turns as I try to navigate driving in our new location, the endless frustrations of being in a new house where you can't find where you put the colander and you can't remember which light switches turn on which lights. From our view here on earth we don’t see the whole picture. We don't know everything God is up to and can't determine how everything is going to fit together.

Last day on the beach! 

Hanging in our new backyard! 

It reminds me of a fable Max Lucado tells in "The Woodcutter's Wisdom and Other Favorite Stories" (you can read it here - https://maxlucado.com/woodcutters-wisdom-and-other-favorite-stories/). An old man encounters a variety of circumstances, one leading to another, some seemingly bad and some seemingly good. The townspeople come to him and quickly judge each situation as a blessing or a curse. The old man reminds them: "Whether it be a curse or a blessing, I can’t say. All we can see is a fragment. Who can say what will come next?"

I've spent a lot of words talking about suffering on earth, my attempts to wait patiently for the full restoration in heaven, the grief and longing I feel for my son, and the joy and hope of watching God at work in my struggles. It seems, however, that every time I write specifically about God working in our suffering, something happens to remind me of how God also works to bless us mightily here on earth, right here, right now. We are wise to wait patiently on the Lord and see what He is going to do next. Whether it feels like a blessing or a curse, the truth is He is with us and He is working out a grand redemption story.