A PIVOTAL MOMENT

Hello, there,

It has been a bit since I’ve shared anything and a lot of that has to do with life. There has been a lot hitting me since the first of this year and from pretty much all angles. I’ve been struggling with what to say and when. My default position when in such a circumstance is to just go radio silent and disappear into the crowd. But that only works for so long before you have to face your problems, and recently I had what I call my Jehoshaphat moment. In 2 Chronicles chapter 20, King Jehoshaphat of Judah and the people of Jerusalem were faced with a pretty intense problem. An army of multiple enemies from the region joined together to come and destroy the Kingdom of Judah. It was more than the Judean army could handle alone and even retreating into Jerusalem’s walls only bought time, not a new outcome. That pressure, the intense hopelessness the people within the walls must have felt…I kind of understood that recently. Not because a marauding horde of Moabites, Ammonites, and Meunites were coming up to my yard. But metaphorically, I felt encircled, trapped, and like everything was going to crash down on top of me. And that’s when the Lord reminded me of this story. After recalling what God had already done for Israel, King Jehoshaphat prayed:

“Now here are the Ammonites, Moabites, and the inhabitants of Mount Seir…  Our God, will You not judge them? For we are powerless before this vast number that comes to fight against us. We do not know what to do, but we look to You.”

That last bit, that became my prayer. I didn’t and in some ways still don’t know what to do, but I’m looking to Him. I will say some things have begun already to resolve and other things, I have peace about that was sorely lacking (to the point of facing anxiety attacks as I had years ago). That peace was and is precious. And I struggled with whether to share this when I wrote it on Good Friday or not. I absolutely never want to distract from what Good Friday represents—the Lord Jesus Christ’s sacrifice on the cross to atone for our sins—or the even more wondrous the Sunday after where we celebrate His resurrection and the promise of eternal life we have in Him. That deserves to be forefront.

It also struck me as I was thinking about my struggles, that in some ways what I seek and what those days between Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday represent is similar if in immeasurably smaller form comparatively. Dark, awful circumstances that are hard for those going through it to understand, being turned into something marvelous, something good we would never see coming. And while I’m still living through waiting for my Saturday between the hard and painful things to end with Sunday’s sunrise, I cannot and should not stop hoping. The parallel in emotion is even stronger, because I had just come from the enormous victories and blessings of having Quest of Fire: The Unending Light release after twenty years of working on that series and found out in March that the novella I was blessed to write, Asunder, for The Wonders Within the Starlit Inn is a Selah Award finalist. It’s kind of like the joy of Palm Sunday coming crashing into the realities of Passion Week and Good Friday. Again, not even close in comparison except for the pattern and I think that there is a pretty consistent pattern of God working in His people’s lives and times of blessing being interrupted by hardships. With the key thing being that what God’s people need most is to turn to Him and watch and see the marvelous things He will do.

So, if anyone else is like me and overwhelmed, then I hope this has helped to hear and turn your eyes off the hard things and onto the Lord, especially today of all days, when the greatest story of triumph turning to tragedy was ultimately to lead to the greatest victory our world has ever known, Christ’s victory over sin and death, paving the way for those who belong to Him being reunited with God eternally.