Christian Living

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As many of you know, the Lord has finally provided me with a home in my son’s school district and, to my great delight, Daniel, my son, has chosen to share that home with me. I have spent the last few weeks moving in, but not without running into several stumbling blocks turned stepping stones.

The same theme has kept coming up over and over: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So is ugliness. How you see things is a choice and that choice is yours. Greater yet, choosing to see through the eyes of faith, rather than fixing your eyes on the ugliness that comes your way, will find you in the midst of a most beautiful, most scenic world. And the Truth said it best when He said “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things NOT seen.”

I was going to park my barely drivable car in my new driveway one Saturday before officially moving in and use my truck for moving. (I couldn’t very well just leave it parked at the old residence.) But when I went to get the car inspected before moving it, I found out the hard way that the gauges weren’t working. Fortunately, all it took to fix the problem was a fuse. Unfortunately, one of the gauges that wasn’t working was the gas gauge and I wound up walking several miles after I ran out of gas.

It was First Monday weekend (a 70-acre flea market) in Canton, the town I was going to, and the highway was very busy that day. But nobody bothered to ask me if I needed help. I had but two things to say to the Lord as I walked in that ditch: “I don’t know why this is happening to me, but I do know You and there must be a good reason.” (And there was.) And “Surely I don’t look capable of hurting any of these people who are not stopping to help me.”

At least I had my harmonica in my pocket to give me something to do as I walked. Who knows... maybe the passersby thought it was a crack pipe or something. Nevertheless, a few miles later, I found an elderly woman having a porch sale and she blessed my heart so, so much and let me use her phone. I finally got to Canton and the inspection office was closed that day. It would have been so easy to say “WHAT A ROTTEN DAY!”

Monday morning, I finally got to the inspection office. I went inside to ask the man to inspect my car and then went back out to wait. Then, I noticed that water was pouring out from under it. The water pump! I made a phone call and, after waiting a few hours at the inspection office, my nephew gave me a ride home. Needless to say, my car didn’t make it to my new driveway that day either. In fact, it sat in the shop almost a week before the mechanic could get around to fixing it.

I got in my truck and headed for my new landlord’s office to ask him for a key to the house. He wasn’t in his office. I decided to drive on over to the house to see if he or one of his crew happened to be finishing up some of the repairs on it and then I found out why my car wasn’t parked in that driveway on Saturday morning: Sometime late Sunday night, a huge oak tree had fallen across the driveway and front yard. My car would have been crushed by that tree had I parked it there!

I didn’t get the key that day either. In fact, every time I tried to get it, something else happened. In fact, I never did get that key. As it turned out, I didn’t even get that little house. The Lord had something else in mind altogether. There was another house in a neighborhood I’m much more comfortable with, a better house, a nicer house. Daniel told me, after I’d moved in here, that he had been trying to figure out how to tell me that he didn’t want to live with me when I was considering moving into the other house. Yes, it was that bad.

This house is tiny and has no storage space. I will have to hang a lot of shelves in the small closets and get rid of a lot of things. I had a ton of stuff in storage for the last couple of years, much more than I realized I had until I started moving it all. But I find it hard to let go of any of it. And all this time, I never thought I was one to cling to material things. Apparently, I am. First thing to go, however, will be the over abundance of clothes that I can’t/don’t wear. I will give them all away to W.I.N. (Women in Need) and, hopefully, have enough room in my tiny closet for what’s left.

When I was in my early twenties, I was visiting Tia Lucy when I noticed a picture she had hanging in her hallway and commented on its beauty. She gave that picture to me and I’ve cherished it ever since. It was one of the things I never put in storage. I hung it, rather, beside my bed. It never did hang in my hallway. It was always either in my bedroom or bathroom.

Tia Lucy passed away last week. I’ve been searching for a place to hang that painting. It just wouldn’t fit in the bathroom or my bedroom. I can’t seem to find enough space here for anything. I finally wound up hanging it in the hallway and it’s perfect there... as though that wall was designed specifically for that picture. I don’t see myself letting go of that picture... not until I’m retired from this life anyway.

I’ve got a long way to go as far as moving in. It’s a slow process. But it’s starting to look and feel like home now. I was so anxious to get settled in that I didn’t realize I was already doing so. We’ve already developed routines. I woke yesterday morning and picked up the bedside clock to check the time only to have the alarm go off with it in my hands. Home sweet home.

Though I’m still working hard inside the house, I’ve also stepped outside occasionally to dig a little alongside the sidewalk. When I get it all dug away from the sidewalk, I’ll be planting daisy seeds. I’ve been expectant of the Lord to teach me something as I garden. Today, I finally heard clearly: “As the inside of the cup must be as clean as the outside, so must you be as concerned for the inside of your home as you are for the outside.” I don’t think the Lord was talking about my moving in.

Our heart condition may be something we have to depend upon the Lord to keep in order, but we should always be most concerned about the cleanliness of our hearts... working out our salvation in fear and trembling. I wondered why I needed that reminder. But we all do, over and over and over.

Finally, I stole the first moment I’ve found alone since the day I got here and did what the Lord has been prompting me all day to do. I read Hosea chapter 2. I had no idea why the Lord would be leading me there, but I knew that it would bless me if I would just sit down alone and in the quiet with it. And it did.

The chapter discusses the punishment and restoration of Israel. Under the influence of the Holy Spirit, Hosea calls Israel an adulteress and discusses all of her sins toward the Lord. It sure didn’t start out sounding too good, but I’m not too proud to say that I have not always served the Lord. Anything that takes the Lord’s place in our hearts becomes our God. That makes us adulterers.

Hosea refers to a time for Israel in the desert and in the Valley of Achor, meaning the Valley of Trouble. Sounds like "the Valley of Aching" to me! Whew! Do I ever know that valley! But the Lord said He would lure Israel there, speak tenderly to her in the desert, and cause the Valley of Achor to be a door of hope. There, Israel would sing as in the days of her youth.

I was suddenly taken back to a time when I found myself in a deep valley, there when my son first decided not to live with me and I was left to live alone in an apartment for the first time in my life. There, the Lord spoke very tenderly to me. There, I found a door of hope.

Hosea goes on to discuss the covenant that the Lord provides to Israel and the fact that the Lord will Himself plant Israel in the land. I, even after all these weeks, still find myself wiping tears of joy over what the Lord has done for me. But greater than planting me here, in my new home, and restoring my son to me, the Lord has spoken to me tenderly via Hosea 2:19-20 “I will betroth you to me forever; I will betroth you in righteousness and justice, in love and compassion. I will betroth you in faithfulness, and you will acknowledge the Lord.”

I can choose to see this tiny house as a blessing that will encourage me to get rid of things I don’t need, helping others in the process. Or I can complain about the lack of space. I can choose to give up on finding space for the things I do need or things I really want to keep, like Tia Lucy’s painting, and continue to live out of boxes, whining all the while. Or I can pray and believe, in faith, for space I’m not seeing and the Lord’s helping hand to get everything more organized. I can choose to keep my yard flowerless because that flatlands’ black dirt is hard as a rock and the work is so hard to do. Or I can muster up that determined spirit of mine and reap the benefits of beautiful daisies later.

It really is all in the eye of the beholder. No doubt, The Valley of Achor, the Valley of Trouble, is a hard place to go to, a hard place to survive, a hard place to come from. But the tender voice of the Lord, as He whispers promises of love and life, opens a door of hope and a vision of beauty that can never be found outside that valley. It would never have been my plan to go there. But in His perfect will, I have. And there, I beheld the beauty of grace.

May you also behold the beauty of grace. May you rest in knowing that the same God who sends us through the Valley of Achor also sets our feet upon the high hills. I have missed you, my faithful friends. Surely, I will come back to write less, but more often in the very near future. And surely, I will catch up on all your recently written articles soon. Be blessed today by the way you choose to see.
© Joyce Pool

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