Shipwrecked.

I’ll begin with a point of perhaps little general interest, but which I find amusing. This post was originally composed on a series of small, yellow stick-it notes spread across my lap. I’m out of proper paper, you see, and resorting to the scraps I have. In fact, if you get an email from me today, you can be assured it was born in a similar manner. (I told you it’d be of little general interest.)

So, good morning. It’s a chilly 9 a.m. here in LH, and I’ve been sitting up since 5 a.m. waiting for the rain to stop pounding on the ironsheet roof so KP and I can hit the trail for our morning workout. Instead, the Lord’s blessed me with a much-needed spiritual airing, and it’s the joy from that on which I now write…

I’ve been struggling a lot lately with sitting down and getting quality, quiet time with the Lord and in his Word. These dry times are always a huge red flag to me, as I normally have a God-given insatiable hunger for Scripture. But, lately, I’ve been  in a whirlwind, spending my days scribbling out and checking off to-do lists—wheeling off last-minute projects for my teammates, doing that and that to close up here, and this and this to prepare for life at home and Campus Crusade. My mind has been spinning full of the winds and waves of now, now, now demands and distractions.

But this morning God met me where I was at—in this storm—with a study on Paul in his own storm, in Acts 27:1-26. Paul’s heading to Rom as a prisoner, on board a ship with some reckless sailors. Coming up on the wrong side of a gamble with the winter weather at sea, these blokes do a few perhaps boneheaded things in their attempts to stay afloat amidst the tossing of the storm. I’m no sailor, so I can’t really judge what they did, but nonetheless I was able to take away some “seafaring” perspective of my own.

I need to be careful, I realized, in the midst of all this change, not to pull up anchor—that is, my faith in a sovereign God. I should mind not to give into the storm—all of this stuff before me—and maybe throw some cargo overboard—there are things I simply can’t take care of now, from here. I can follow suit with those sailors and throw the tackle overboard, too—all my own attempts to right the ship on my own power. In Paul’s case, God eventually sent an angel to tell him things were going to be OK. I’m not expecting any angels to rock up in Lopit in the next few days, but I can surely be a more ready listener to God’s voice. In fact, the study pointed to Job 40:6, which hit me. “Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the whirlwind…”

So, the storm pounding my mud wall doesn’t seem to be abating, and neither is this whirlwind transition in my life spinning away out of view. But I feel much more ready to deal with both, having had such a blessed morning with the Creator of the wind and rain and (sometimes stormy) seas.