On Assignment

One of the coolest things I’ve learned recently came from a group of friends who take seriously the call to follow Jesus in this world and into the heart of the arenas they work in, live in, and move about in. Whatever their profession, wherever they are living right now, whatever their family looks like, they see it all as an “assignment” from the Lord. This is where they are for now. Because they walk with Jesus, they know that this, whatever this is to them, is where they are called to be. Not always. Not forever. But for right now. Which gives them an immense amount of freedom to move about in their worlds with courage and hope. They know the time in their assignment will not last, and so difficult circumstances become easier and beautiful moments are treasured more deeply. And when their time is up with one assignment, they walk with Jesus into the next, keeping before them the constant undercurrent of reality, which is the Kingdom of God and our Father’s desire to see people come into it, walk in it, and live.

I’m on assignment right now doing something I thought I would never do, and something I’m not quite sure I was really prepared to enter into, and that is working with high school students. My job duties on any given day vary, but largely I consider myself a mentor to these teens, though sometimes my role is a disciplinarian, sometimes a teacher, sometimes a counselor… but really all of that I roll up into the title of “mentor.”

As a mentor, and especially through the summer months when I work daily with the students, I encounter situations that are brand new to me. I find myself needing to deal with one issue or another — whether it is a serious disturbance at home, relational struggles, or the typical difficulties that come as a by-product of their stage in life — that I am completely unprepared to handle. And when I say “unprepared” I do not mean that things are not handled well. In fact, that is one of the joys of working where I do and in the capacity I do, which is that my coworkers are incredibly competent and adept and dealing with these kinds of situations. What I mean in saying “unprepared” is just that I have never had explicit training or experience in handling this particular kind of issue, whatever this may be.

And this is where it gets really cool. This is where the Kingdom (”the reign of the King”) comes into play. I once worked (on a different kind of assignment) with a missionary in Colombia, South America. He had been kidnapped some years ago by a rebel faction at gunpoint. His current assignment, to continue to borrow that term, is to bring the gospel to the paramilitary groups in Colombia. It’s an incredibly dangerous mission, one in which is “unprepared” to do, in the traditional meaning of that word. (How could you possibly prepare for that?) I sat one evening at a hotel in Bogotá while he regaled us with stories of his near-death experiences of bringing books and Bibles into remote jungle, rebel-controlled regions of the country and of the way Christ would lead him in very specific ways to do very specific things and the countless times when he would have a half-dozen AK-47’s pointed at his head with weary and suspicious fingers shaking on the triggers. “At times like those,” he told us, “You do not have time to consult your Bible or call your church elders to pray for you or call a time-out so that you can go to your prayer closet for a few days, come back, and decide what to do or say in the situation. Whatever you have in your heart, that’s what you got to go on in those next split-second decisions.” Meaning, it was the Spirit of Christ that would lead him in words and sometimes action, sometimes inaction, to bring peace to a very tense situation. Always, every time, guns would drop, fingers would relax from the triggers, and God would soften hearts to hear the gospel.

And he has been on this assignment for something close to 25 years now.

Something about what he said that night stuck with me. I realized that often we are in similar circumstances, times and places when what flows out of our hearts right then at that moment determines an entire series of outcomes. It may be a word properly –or improperly– spoken. A gesture. A seemingly small decision. Or an enormous one, like in the missionary’s case. Certainly in my job now, I have to earn the trust of my students (earn is the only word here, and it is not done easily for a generation suspicious and wounded) while simultaneously treating the issue at hand with wisdom, discernment, and timeliness. It all can be a difficult balance, with a lot hanging in the balance, including issues of faith, hope, and love centered in relationships that need the healing ministry of Christ. Including the relationship with Christ.

Which is the similarity in the two assignments. My mission here is not so different from my friend’s mission in Colombia. Each of us, in our own way, are bringing the gospel, bringing in the Kingdom, by the fierce intention of first and foremost remaining intimately connected with Jesus. That’s the source. All else — every on-the-spot decision — is fruit of that relationship.

My friends that I spoke of earlier, my wife, the beloved of God all over the world — all of us are “on assignment,” “in the world but not of it.” It is an astounding and freeing thing to remember that the relative successes of those missions depend not on our own wisdom or charm, mood or even awareness, but rather by our connection to Jesus. Our intention to love Him, to follow Him, to be obedient. And to listen, which is a tough thing to do in our culture. But it pays off. It is intimacy for intimacy’s sake, but it also results in a transformation of character that enables to live from the new nature that the world needs to see and needs to have.

And so, what better preparation can there be? I could not possibly know everything I need to know about every situation that arises. They are all different, every time, as different from one to another as people are one to another. But I have at my access a resource to draw from — God Himself! — who knows everything there is to know about the deepest heart, the most complex problem. We need the intimate acquaintance of Jesus in each circumstance (2 Peter 1:3). And then we have all (1 Corinthians 3:21).

I can’t say for sure what my next mission will look like, but I can say that it will involve a deepening intimacy with the Lord God and a growth more into His likeness. That is the one commonality among us all, no matter what assignment we’re on.

How Near is the Kingdom?

How much is God on our side?  How much can we trust Him, I mean, to be our comforter and provider?  I often think of it as our being on His side, not He on ours (He is, after all, God!), but when it comes to mercy, we need Him to come to us.  But how can He?  Are we not too ungodly for Him to come near?  And then we cannot receive Him when He does come, as the Savior and the Lover He’s promised to be for us.  But does He come near?  Is He really that accessible?

When Jesus showed up in the flesh, John the Baptist warned those who came to see him to “repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.”  It was not, notice, “Repent so that the kingdom can come near,” for it — He — was already close by!  It was, rather, a warning to change their mind about things so that they could receive the kingdom.

I think this is where many Christians find themselves now.  The longer we wallow in the “Woe is me.  I cannot enjoy the life of God because I am unclean,” the longer we cannot, indeed, enjoy the life of God — not because we are unclean but rather because we are unbelieving.  For not only is the Lord God the Life we need (the justice and mercy, the love, the connection), He is also the Water to wash us clean, ther tears of mercy weeping to wash over us.  Woe is me, for sure, if I had only my means to reach the Lord God!

But He is more for us than we must think.  This is the secret depth of His great love shown for us at the cross, in the death of Jesus.  He stood in for us!  We repent when we simply embrace that so that we can embrace Him.  Then we begin living in this kingdom, in the reign of the King Jesus, with full and complete access into His presence.  That’s why we can come boldly into His throneroom, because our failure and shortcomings are no longer an issue between us and God — at all.  He has come, bringing the Kingdom of God along with Him in the train of His robe.

There is so much deep, bewildering, astounding truth here that to grasp it in its fullness could kill a man by the sheer ecstasy that would follow, by the  unspeakably beautiful grace.  It’s like Moses seeing the back side of God.  Any more revelation and he would die.

Perhaps that is why I am slow to grasp even the most elementary of God’s provisions for me.  Maybe I must go it slowly, with He controlling the locks of the dam of His greatness and glory.  I have asked many times — begging on my knees — that He would release His full revelation to me.  Perhaps it is mercy that stays the flood.  And, perhaps it is persistence that will find me in the deepest end of it, conquered and overtaken.

I think that would be a cool way to die.  Someone finds my bloated, drowned body.  They notice a curious and out-of-place smile frozen on my face, and my eyes are stuck wide-open.  “Poor fool” is repeated again and again by those attending the funeral service, by the same who did not understand when I was alive what it was I was running after.  More true than they realize would be their comment, “He fell of the deep end.”  The simple phrase on my tombstone would tell all: “He cried out for rain all his life.  In the end, he got what he wanted, for ‘what the righteous desire will be granted’ (Proverbs 10:24).”

Righteous, not by my own merit, but because I embraced what Jesus has done for me, and entered into the kingdom at hand.

A Surprising Encounter

I’m big on journaling. It’s a discipline I discovered some years back that helps me process through what God is showing me, that helps me express desires or fears that may be buried beneath the busyness of the day, that helps me engage in prayer with the Lord when the noise outside is too loud.

Lately He is leading me into a more profound and disciplined experience of the Kingdom through a more intense and intentional style of journaling. I’m reading through Leanne Payne’s Listening Prayer, in which the author describes a system of keeping hold of the things God reveals and ways of exploring the depths of His word.

It’s not tips or techniques that I am after; it is a broader experience of the life of God through the spiritual disciplines. I’ve become rutted a bit as of late, and I sense Christ leading me into more.

Take this morning’s prayer time, for example…

I usually make the most of my 40-minute commute to work in the morning by praying. My sort of “first prayer” or “waking prayer” of my day is fairly liturgical; I have a list of what I know I need to bring to God, including myself and my family and then friends, coworkers, and my students, in consecration, petition, intercession, resistance against the Evil One, and the like. It’s critical for me to come to Christ this way as early in my morning as possible and receive His counsel for what He will lead me into through the day. As important as it is, it has lately become a bit… stagnant. It’s routine, which doesn’t necessarily in itself mean dry, except that it is beginning to feel pretty stuffy. It’s not very enlivening or surprising or even conversational anymore, at least not this first prayer of the day.

I’ve been trying to figure out lately what to do about this. There are things on my heart I know I need to pray through. Not knowing what needed to change, I’ve continued in the routine but hoping for something fresh, like working through a hot day waiting for a cloud or a cool breeze.

This morning the Lord God brought me something different, something more beautiful than I could have expected, and something I could not have planned for. It was all His initiative. It came by way of a song.

“Be Thou My Vision” is my favorite hymn, and in fact may well be my favorite piece of literature and liturgy ever written. I used to hold it close and pray it often, but somehow the words got lost in the shuffle of my life. A contemporary artist a few years back released an album containing this song, complete with contemplative music accompanying the lyrics. I can’t say what brought me to listen to it, but I found it on my iPod and started listening.

By the time I left for work, I knew that I needed to begin praying through my day, but something kept drawing me back to the song. It felt like the tug of a little child on your shirt asking for your attention. I couldn’t step away from it. I replayed it. Again. Then again. When I started feeling the pressure to turn it off, I heard the voice of the Spirit in my heart say, “No, listen to it. Play it again. This will serve as your prayer to me this morning. Sing along with the full expression of passion within you.”

On the same album, I found a rendition of the Keith Green song, “Lord You’re Beautiful,” and echoed with the words praise to God. For forty minutes I let these two songs carry me into a worship and prayer with this Lover and Life-giver that blew the dust off of my morning liturgies and opened me up again to beauty and the joy of surprise and delight I find in expressing myself to the Lord, and of hearing Him respond.

I pulled up to work, parked the truck, and sang aloud, “Lord You’re beautiful, Your face is all I seek, for when Your eyes are on this child, Your grace abounds to me…” Shutting the truck off, I looked up and noticed the car parked across from had written on the windshield in white shoepolish the words, “You’re beautiful.” Yeah! I was singing this to God and here even inanimate objects were joining with me! And immediately then I recognized that this was God speaking back to me. I heard, “You are beautiful, my son. Nothing is more compelling than your delight in me. You conquer me with your love.”

I could not have made all of this happen. I can’t even say for sure why now. I mean, why was it this morning that I was able to have such an intimate time with the Lord when weeks have gone where our interactions have felt stifled? Perhaps I was desperate enough to hear Him. Maybe I was just quiet enough to hear Him, “my house now being still” and all of that. Or, maybe He was just ready to speak, to bring something new and fresh to me.

Whatever the reason, it was beautiful, and I am taken all over again by this brush with the Living One. He disciplines us, and we take our place in the relationship by offering Him our hearts and minds and lives as timber, but it is the Presence we must encounter if we are to have the Fire. This is His part, His promise, to “be with us” (John 14:16, Romans 16:20, 2 Corinthians 3:11, 2 Thessalonians 3:18, Hebrews 13:25). I am getting the feeling that when Jesus says He will be with us, He really means to be with us, in ways that newlyweds on their wedding night are “with” one another, only moreso. He means to have us.

After the Fray

In How the Irish Saved Civilization, Thomas Cahill paints a picture of ancient Irish culture by discussing Tain Bo Cuailnge, an Irish prose epic. In the story, the hero-warriors Cuchulainn (pronounced koo-hool-n) and Ferdia are foster brothers who love and fight for one another. They trained together under the same master and fight beside one another through epic battles in the dense forests “in foreign lands after the fray.” Cuchulainn refers to their friendship as “fast friends, forest-companions… pupils, two together we’d set forth to comb the forest” of their enemies.

Concerning the hero’s virtue, Cahill writes, “What we can rely on are the comeliness and iron virtue of the short-lived hero: his loyalty to cause and comrades, his bravery in the face of overwhelming odds, the gargantuan generosity with which he scatters his possessions and his person and with which he spills his blood.”

Patricius, who later became known as Saint Patrick (the same Patrick whose life is commemorated each year on the celebrated day named in his honor), was able to evangelize an entire country by addressing these qualities found in their ancient literature. It is Jesus, he explained, who was the one who most epitomizes these virtues, and it was, in fact, the eternity set within their hearts that spurred on such literature, an eternity these men and women knew must by characterized, if by anything at all, by men as alive as Cuchulainn. In their literary heroes their hunger for Christ was given a voice. When Patrick came to bring them the “Godspell,” or Gospel, they listened only because Patrick himself, dead to himself and baptized in the fire of the Spirit of God, was the most loyal, courageous, and generous man they had ever met.

What Cahill writes of Ireland’s ancient fictional heroes is an apt pronouncement on the life of any Christian, that is, the life of Christ lived fully within us. When we allow Him to live through us, imagine what faith (loyalty), hope (courage), and love (generosity) is set loose on the world. We would have a second wave of revival not unlike in style to that of those wild and willing Celts.

The way to save our own civilization, as Cahill says, is not to think about saving our civilization at all. It is to become saints. Then shall we each be saved, not by government, nor technology, nor new (and age-old) ideologies, but by the Kingdom coming through us as we pursue and battle with fierce intention, a Kingdom not of this world, unshakable, peopled by “citizens of heaven” who run fast after the Living God “in foreign lands after the fray.”

(see Matthew 11:12; Philippians 3:20; Matthew 5:14-16; Hebrews 12:28-29; Luke 17:20-21; Mark 1:15; Acts 14; Romans 14:17-18; Hebrews 12:10; Ephesians 4:22-24; 2 Corinthians 7:1)

The Voice

One of my favorite places to go when I want to study is a coffee shop in a local town. It’s all about the atmosphere for me. First off, there are a host of large benches, where I can spread out my books and still have room for my laptop. And there are corner benches, so that I am isolated enough with my back to a wall that I can get work done, but still some part of the calm activity going on around me. I like it because I turn on my iPod and focus intently on what I want to learn or pray or write, yet distractions abound when I want them. There are interesting people to watch and conversations to overhear and pastries to sample. There is life going on around me, yet often faded and overshadowed by the life I find through the conversation with God that companionship with Him offers and that I usually enter into when I’m in this cafe.

I am here now, by the way, but today things are a bit different. I found a bench. My Bible and journal and computer are spread around on the table before me. I’ve entered into some good dialogue already with the Lord God. But, for some reason, this place is hopping today. People are flooding into it; the line at the registers have, at times, nearly gone out the door. And the group of ladies behind me are pretty excitable and definitely chatty in their enthusiasm. It’s as if there is a family reunion going on in the two sets of seats behind me. I’ve had to turn up the volume on my music so as to not feel like I’m eavesdropping, and so that I can concentrate on the book I’m reading. In short, there are too many distractions around me.

In all of this, I find the perfectly fitting analogy of our life with God. In fact, this is exactly what I am reading about, listening to the “still small voice” of God, and I wonder if He is not illustrating it the conflict between the inner hunger of my heart for communion with Him and the hustle and bustle around me. There is a still and quiet motion in the midst of the activity. A center point around which everything seems to be revolving and next to all else seems to be out of focus. Jeffrey Satinover describes this well, in speaking of the still small voice of God:

“I have often wondered why the voice of God is so quiet and so still. Perhaps He is trying to train us to listen. Just as by his very quiet the gentleman in a room of shouting oafs eventually compels attention, perhaps God draws us to His voice not by out-shouting our inner babble, but by the whispered truths that reveal His character.”

I found this quote in the book I came here to read, and it is dead-on in illustrating the struggle. I picture being in a bar (why a bar, I’m not sure, but that’s what came to mind), and there’s a lot of activity going on around me: conversations and a game of darts and spilled beer and the juke box playing a loud rendition of Garth Brook’s “Friends in Low Places” while a half dozen sing karaoke-style off key. In walks this Gentleman, this Character, this Person, and few recognize Him. Maybe no one does — no one pays attention. But my eyes catch Him. Somehow, He demands attention by His easy movements, by the way in which He seems to move in a different speed than the rest, as if He doesn’t quite belong in the same timeframe as the rest, or maybe the rest doesn’t belong with Him. His motions are intentional, and His eyes lock on mine the moment He enters the door. He whispers something, and I know it is meant for my ears. I am compelled to draw nearer Him so as to hear better. This Voice is that of my God’s, and I recognize it immediately, because I have heard it before. All the other distractions of my heart quiet down, fade, even disappear, and I am left with only this One before me. Now I can hear and even participate in this conversation, where I am instructed in truth and life.

This is the experience of all who want to hear the voice of God. “This,” says Leanne Payne, “is what we understand as we reason together with God: ‘Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord’ (Isaiah 1:18, KJV).”

Looking up, the lines have dwindled. The ladies behind me finished their coffee and boisterous conversation. The song through my mp3 player has shifted to a soft and poignant symphony from the soundtrack to “August Rush.”  And my heart is resting a bit more.  I’m entering into that place of centered, practical fellowship with the Creator of the universe that is both my birthright and the source of my life (John 17:3).  This is the place in which I am to abide throughout the day, a continual dialogue of praise, petition, intercession, healing, listening, reasoning, rest, intimacy… of union (1 Thess. 5:17).

As Thomas A. Smail has said, “The central secret of the Christian life is that we are adopted into this relationship as children of this Father.”  We are made for this kind of communal life with God.

The Soul Dissed-Satisfied

Every day I am ready to be murdered, betrayed, enslaved — whatever may come my way.
-St. Patrick

I wonder about our willingness to endure “whatever may come our way” for the sake of something greater than ourselves. I wonder about how we in the “West” handle suffering and pain and what we do with it. (I speak of “West” here not as a geographical description but as an ideological designation.) The church in the West has adapted itself to the overriding culture of the day, one that pours every ounce of energy into avoiding pain — through diversion, entertainment, shallow relationships, easy investments, psychobabble, and the religion of popular talk show hosts.

Suffering is the pain caused by the division between desire and satisfaction, and we try our best to bring satisfaction up to the level of our desires.

It never works, or not permanently at least. At some point it fails. Always. Every time. What we do with that failure marks our movement toward either an authentic growth in godliness and transformation or a slinking away from it, a creeping toward (as the only alternative) death.

The Buddhists are familiar with the issue of suffering. The entire religion is built, in fact, upon the evasion of suffering through the eightfold path. The ultimate goal of Nirvana is really a state of complete detachment and desirelessness. It is the absolute absolution of desire. They try to bring desire down to the level of their satisfaction. This also does not work. Desire cannot be completely killed, nor can it be permanently locked away.

What Christ has done is to bridge the gap between our desire and satisfaction. He transforms even our understanding of suffering — remember, this comes from the gap between desire and satisfaction — by daring us not to desire less, but to desire more. And then he dares us to believe that we can actually have what we really want (that is faith). Of course, our desire has to be increased dramatically, maybe infinitely, and He usually does not give us satisfaction of our small desires. We are made for more than those. New cars, fancy clothes, even our version of peace and prosperity — these things would trick us into thinking they are what we are really after. No, He takes us into deeper places of hope, requiring greater levels of faith.

All of this I say this today because I have recently experienced a very personal and painful betrayal, one that has brought me poignantly face-to-face with suffering, and I wonder again its purpose. What is God up to in it? Why does He choose to use it more, sometimes, than any other thing, to bring His redemption and restoration? “To reconcile both of them [Jews and Gentiles] to God through the cross,” as Paul put it in Ephesians 2:16, the cross being the breaking and shattering point of all human suffering, the singularity at which the distance between desire and satisfaction was at the greatest and was born under by one man, Jesus. Whatever else is said of the suffering our Lover-God experienced there, surely by way of it he “put to death” hostility among men and between men and God. This is peace, and this is what we are to desire. Since Christ is the only fulfillment of that desire, we cannot allow it to be filled by any lesser thing if we want it to draw us to the Lord. As Kenneth Boa said, “We must grow in the realization that no earth-bound felicity can fully satisfy the deepest God-given longings of our hearts.”

At the point in Patrick’s life when he uttered these words quoted above, he had long been used to the pains and pangs of human life. He had been naked and hungry as a young man kidnapped by Irish and forced into slavery. He had known what it was to be alone and frightened, broken of body and of heart. But in the midst of those looming shadows, he encountered something greater than his own pain, a secret he held to and sought after, a secret that sustained him throughout his ordeal then and his calling when he later returned to Ireland as a bishop, a secret that kept the fire in his belly burning when all others were snuffed out on the damp and windy hills of that pagan isle. It was a secret that allowed him to embrace suffering, not as an end in itself as a Stoic would, but as a means to something else.

His teacher Paul knew the same secret. Listen in closely to what he says in Philippians 3: “I want to know Christ and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings…” Good Lord. Really? Does he not know what it was that Christ suffered at that still point on the cross, the dividing historical event between the old and the new, between death and life? Why would he want to suffer with Christ? Because through it, he could “attain to the resurrection from the dead.” Because life was in the balance. And because of Christ, in the suffering there is life, because there is fellowship with Life Himself.

What hangs in the balance with the betrayal I am faced with is everything. What I do with it will determine whether or not my own desire — and possibly the desire of those who betrayed me and my friends — will deepen, and so approach more fully Christ’s own desire, or whether or not I will try to starve it. The first means that I will suffer, deeply, but it also means I will know Christ all the more. The latter is the easier, broader way, the more common route and the one that I could only enter into through some sort of denial or numbing. It is the way of death.

As the greatest contemporary theologian (in my opinion) Rich Mullins once said, “So go out and live real good and I promise you’ll get beat up real bad. But, in a little while after you’re dead, you’ll be rotted away anyway. It’s not gonna matter if you have a few scars. It will matter if you didn’t live. And when you wash up on that other shore, even though you’ve been disfigured beyond and recognition, the angels are gonna see you there and they’ll go, ‘What is *that*? We’re not even sure if it’s human.’ But Jesus will say, ‘No, that’s human. I know that one.’”

Jesus will touch me or speak my name and I will rise. He will look me in the face and ask if in these moments — when all around is at a breathless standstill awaiting my response, while in the midst of the bitter pain of betrayal not unlike in kind but less in degree to that of Jesus — whether or not we knew each other. Because today is the day of salvation. It is here, in the dirt and grime of suffering, that we can experience the staggeringly intimate love of our God. In the words of George Herbert, “Here, in the dust and dirt, O here the lilies of His love appear.”

Peace in the Storm

Yesterday my 10 year-old nephew and I took a walk during a storm. The rain had slacked and the sun was trying its hardest to peer through the dark and ominous clouds overhead. It has been a stormy season, with tornadoes and severe thunderstorms pounding the midwest relentlessly.

What made our walk really good was the fact that my nephew doesn’t like storms. They terrify him, actually. But, his dog hadn’t been out of the apartment in quite awhile and needed a break. So we took him, together. In our talk, I asked my nephew what it was that scared him about the storms. He couldn’t answer, except to say that they can produce tornadoes and tornadoes can cause damage and death. But I kept probing, asking why he was scared of tornadoes. Had they ever hurt him or even anyone he knew? The answer was no. Of course talking him through how low a chance statistically he had of being in a tornado didn’t help. Reason at this point had been abandoned.

But what did help was to talk about Perfect Love and the embrace of the Lord Jesus and the reality that we are in His hands. How this works out for those who do get hurt during storms — like those that ripped through the area a month ago and destroyed the homes of four people I work with — I cannot explain. I can say that I have friends who had held their mattresses over their heads in the hallways of their homes while all around them winds ripped their houses apart. And they came through unharmed.

What I could say to my nephew was that right at this very moment Jesus was holding us. We were covered under the protection of His mighty wing (Psalm 91). Even as I said that I realized that I wasn’t making it up. It was real. And I knew that it would not be believable for a 10 year-old (who still has eyes to see through lies because he hasn’t learned yet to lie to himself) if I didn’t believe it myself. He asked what that meant, and so I described what His wing might look like, might be like.

He started getting it. And then we stepped over a puddle in the parking lot. A car must have leaked some motor oil, because the film rested on the water. As soon as we stepped over, the sun won the wrestling match and appeared triumphant from behind a cloud. Our eyes on the puddle, suddenly a rainbow of colors washed across the surface of the water, more color than I’ve seen in any rainbow in the sky. I thought it was pretty, if not a little irresponsible environmentally, but it was my nephew who got it. It wasn’t lost on him. He said, “Look. God just promised me that he wouldn’t flood the earth again, that he wouldn’t give me more than I could handle.”

I was blown away. That’s only something the Spirit of Christ could bring to his deep heart.

Maybe the coolest part of the story is that my nephew’s name is Jonah. Hebrew for “dove,” a symbol of God’s peace and provision for His own.