It\u2019s three in the morning and I\u2019m awake. No surprise there. Dwelling on the goodness of God. Thinking about how man has drifted so, so far away from the garden. How we now struggle to grow food to feed ourselves because the ground won\u2019t yield its bounty without one. How we have figured out how to poison the earth by certain combinations of the elements it\u2019s made up with. How we inadvertently polluted the air, the land, the water in our rush to be bigger, better, more.<\/p>\n
How far we\u2019ve come.<\/p>\n
We poison our air, the very breath of God, we poison the land he spoke into existence to where it is worthless. We carelessly, or on purpose use our water as a garbage dump destroying the life it holds and the life it could offer to us- the water your spirit hovered over.<\/p>\n
But then, oh hey! We messed up! Oh, lets figure out how to clean up the air, the water, the land. So we do. And then we go on making bigger, better, more.<\/p>\n
Because we have forgotten. We have forgotten that God walked with us in the garden. Before. We have forgotten the earth would wield up its bounty without effort. We have forgotten that the air was so pure there was a sweet, fresh smell to it. We have forgotten that weather was not an issue because the dew would water everything while we slept. That the whole of earth was fresh, clean, pure like God made them. That the creatures were all at peace with each other. That God would walk in the garden with them and man in the cool of the day.<\/p>\n
Lord, do you miss it? Do you miss having a chat face to face? You already knew before your Spirit moved across the waters that here is where we would end up.\u00a0 When you planted those trees in the garden as hallmarks of your handiwork; reminders to us of all you created out of nothing. That you chose to let us choose by pointing them out to us.<\/p>\n
When what inevitably happened, did you weep? The sorrow of that moment must have cut like a knife. Even then, you knew that I would be sitting here typing all of this. Plain jane, little old me sitting here in the near dark listening to your creation rumble as it brings the rain we need to survive on this earth.<\/p>\n
Oh, the world of things I don\u2019t understand; that remain a mystery to me and all of this world! Even as we lose focus, again, and determine we will take what we see as rightfully ours instead of being rightfully grateful. Instead of being filled with gratitude for life we decide another man\u2019s life isn\u2019t as valuable as our own. Doesn\u2019t deserve to live in \u201cour space\u201d.<\/p>\n
I long for the simplicity of the complex world you created to provide all that we would need. I long for a world without evil. But I\u2019m grateful I can see the good. That I can see your hand at work even now.<\/p>\n
I read your love letter to us. Over and over. We didn\u2019t learn. Or we learned and forgot. Or we learned and decided to walk away. And we keep on learning and forgetting and walking away.<\/p>\n
Lord, this is what fills me with sadness. With regret, with guilt for the missing the mark, again; with the me mentality that wrecks everything, again. I look back and see those places where you allowed me to fall again and again until I learned how to stand in this little portion of your world. I\u2019m grateful, Lord, for your steadying hand; for Your word that shows me that it\u2019s already been tried and failed or tried and done and the havoc we\u2019ve wrought upon this world in the name of \u201cme\u201d.<\/p>\n
And all of this only<\/em> fills me with sadness because I know it wrenches your heart. Were I a mindless, heartless or stony-hearted wanderer it wouldn\u2019t matter to me. But you, filled me with that awareness of you, the boundless love you have for your creation, the knowledge that you, yourself, made the narrow, straight path that gets me back to the garden- eventually. Because you knew we\u2019d never find the way on our own and that we\u2019d never even look.<\/p>\n In your great mercy, Lord, you took all of this \u201cstuff\u201d on yourself as you saw us continually stumble and fall, watching our houses that we built on the sand disintegrate before us and then turning around and building again on the same spots.<\/p>\n You, Lord, gave us what we didn\u2019t know we needed. You gave us yourself and it was so very costly. And some of us, we saw and wanted others to see. To know that this is way beyond any theological logic of the brain of man that reasons you away. This simply is the gift you\u2019ve been holding out to us since we left the garden. You have been the way, the truth and the life that is forever; all this time patiently waiting for us to see.<\/p>\n I love you, Lord. I\u2019m terrible at this, yet I know this much at least. I admit I\u2019d be hopeless without you and I don\u2019t know much at all, but I do know this: that you have rescued me from a life of destruction and disintegration of the me you designed me to be. You have set my feet on you -you are my way, you are my truth and you alone are Life. And I\u2019m so very grateful. And sad. And hope-full knowing that one day I will know the mysteries you hold in your hand. The one with the scar that gave me life<\/p>\n ” The Lord<\/span> your God is with you, <\/span>the Mighty Warrior who saves. <\/span><\/span>He will take great delight in you; <\/span>in his love he will no longer rebuke you, <\/span><\/span>but will rejoice over you with singing.\u2019” <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/strong>Zephaniah 3:17<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n “But as for me, I watch in hope for the Lord<\/span>, <\/span>I wait for God my Savior; <\/span><\/span>my God will hear me.” <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/strong>Micah 7:7<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It\u2019s three in the morning and I\u2019m awake. No surprise there. Dwelling on the goodness of God. Thinking about how man has drifted so, so far away from the garden. How we now struggle to grow food to feed ourselves because the ground won\u2019t yield its bounty without one. How we have figured out how … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[395,394,25,11,33,93,347,295],"class_list":["post-1114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-evil","tag-garden","tag-god-with-us","tag-jesus","tag-life","tag-redemption","tag-rock","tag-sin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordsfromthehomefront.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordsfromthehomefront.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordsfromthehomefront.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordsfromthehomefront.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordsfromthehomefront.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1114"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/wordsfromthehomefront.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1114\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1116,"href":"https:\/\/wordsfromthehomefront.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1114\/revisions\/1116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordsfromthehomefront.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordsfromthehomefront.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordsfromthehomefront.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}