Years ago around the age of 25 I used to live in Charleston, South Carolina. Having just finished graduate school I started my first job at the hospital and had this really beautiful 20 minute commute up the I-26 from Mt. Pleasant to North Charleston. It was typically warm, often sunny and always beautiful. The "South" often is. Shortly after May 15, 1999, when I met Clark, I began to get signs. Literal ones. On license plates. It became a game of sorts. And then I began to really look for them.
Let me back up...
The week after that May wedding weekend when young, blonde, Georgian, Beamer-driving, recently mad-church-goer met younger, blonde, Texas pick-up driving, Navy dress-white wearing fighter pilot, God began to speak to me via car license tags. Or so I believe He did & still do. Now to my fellow Brits, you will be like, What on earth is she talking about? So let me clarify. In the United States, depending on what State and County you live in, your license tag has a series of letters and numbers, such as (ie: XVT 875 for say New York, or TXEA 27 for Mississippi) Basically when you drive regularly through your city you can tell who is a local and who isn't based on these varied tag configurations. I can't remember what the Charleston ones were at the time but I know that the week after I met Clark, I was driving to work one morning and right in front of me was a LARGE beat-up, white pick up truck and I couldn't help but notice it. I thought to myself, "wait, I think this is the truck Clark said he drives". So I talked to myself in my head like I often do and thought, "this is cute God". It must be a 'sign'. But the truck wasn't the real sign. After five or ten minutes trailing behind this truck, I glanced at the tag. It was no Texas plate but a regular South Carolina one. But it didn't have the normal series of letters and numbers and spaces for our area. In fact it didn't have any 'normal' series of letters and numbers for any town I'd seen nearby. It read "1COR 2 9"; Spaces and all. If we had cell phones back then I'm certain I would risked life and limb and have snapped a shot of it for what would have been posterity sake. After a few moments, this new-to-me-Bible-reading-gal began to think that it looked like maybe a passage from the Bible....1 Corinthians something or another. Giddy with delight I thought, "God is trying to tell me something!!!" So I raced into work and of course only owning a pager at the time, I did what all people before the 21st Century did, I paged my friend Ann to ask her what 1 Corinthians 2:9 was. My dear friend who knew her Bible better than me looked it up and shared: "No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what good things God has prepared for those that love Him." Oh my. Be still my heart. Could this be you Lord telling me something about that Texas-pick-up-driving-Navy-Whites-Wearing fellow? And so I guess it was meant to be. As 3 years later I married him. And Yes, God was right all along. My eyes hadn't seen, my ears hadn't heard, my mind had never conceived all the good ways God would lavish me with His love since those early days of my beginning walk with Him. And I'm still believing God knows so much more & has so much in store for me that my human, simple little brain can fully understand. And to this day, this has only fueled a fire in me to continue to search for Him. His Word does say after all that if we seek Him, we will find Him. And for about fifteen years (& around two dozen perfectly timed license tag verses later), He's now begun to find other ways to send me His love letters and I am so grateful. It's been a new way to search His heart. And some of that became crystal clear to me this week.
Often we have heavy seasons where it feels like Joy and Sorrow are mixed wildly like in an oil and vinegar cruet, like a dance between Broken and Beauty. And I have to confess that lately it's been easier to feel the mostly broken bit. I guess the acidity of the vinegar has seemed to out-proportion the soothing ointment of the oil. Why? I don't really know. Maybe because that's the gravity of this spinning planet Earth we live on. Like objects, it's easier for our souls to fall down than to rise up. (And I am a glass half full gal!) The gravity of pain sometimes feels like it outweighs the feather-like weight of Joy. These few week's birthday parties and long chats with friends in the English April sunshine have mixed feverishly with the stormy news of tragedy and seriously ill-health of friends & family. My prayers were all over the place. I have felt really sad. I've paused a million times & asked God what to make of it all. How can I find any beauty in this broken? How can I enjoy the Joy but also bear the weight of the suffering for my friends or even myself? Both of these I realize have to be done in communion with one another & with God.
And then something so simple happened last Sunday at church. A new sort of love letter from God. A different kind of license tag. One of the human heart variety. A letter found during worship at church. Something unexpected happened. Something that made me think that this earthly Cruet vessel of mine, can withhold both. Let me tell you about Jan. He is our adorable, young German music "exchange" student who's here for the year who leads worship with our lead pastor, Paul. Jan (pronounced: "Yawn") is his name and he always makes me smile when I see his tall, curly, sandy-brown hair self step up on stage. England is not his homeland, nor English his first language. Yet when he worships, it is beautiful not only because of his gorgeous tenor voice, but also because you see the humbler side of him. He searches for words from an unfamiliar land for an unfamiliar people all for the sake of leading them to worship His God, all our God. It's not easy for him. Yet when he speaks to us from the mic he shares his heart, broken English & all and you can see how God's made an imprint on his heart. And right there on the stage I get to read Jan's love letter from God. And it reminds me again and again that God is everywhere and in every thing. And uses human beings to be the greatest vehicle for His Love.
Caught up in this simple moment last Sunday, I realized that this is the only way. The only cure for enduring this mix of beauty with broken when forced to bend to the heaviness of these earthly gravitational pulls. The cure is to give when it's uncomfortable. To serve when we're grieving. To bend and break for the sake of others. Like Jan, to offer ourselves with risk right there outside our comfort zone. This is not the message the world gives us, which is to look out for #1. But it is the message Christ gives us, to look after others. To be His hands and feet even when it hurts. To help others when we feel like we're not being helped ourselves. Yet it is the only medicine that will soothe our weary souls. And from this comes the Joy, and the Oil, and the Beauty. And for a moment my Soul defies the odds of gravity seemingly pulled up from another type of home, a more permanent, heavenly one and I am lifted so that I might be able to lift another. This is the cycle. This is the secret. This is where my Joy comes from.
"This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel after that time," declares the LORD. "I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. Jeremiah 31:33
You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. Jeremiah 29:13
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