There is nothing more amazing than turning your life over to God and seeing where HE will take you. I know not everyone will believe me when I say this, but when I look back at my life I know he was always there watching over me. He was just there waiting for me to remember HIM. To follow him. To trust him. To let him rock my world in a way I never knew was possible. In a way that would replace all of the ways I was trying to make that happen. I know he had to be.... because I can look back and see all of the ways my life should have gone wrong.
It is funny how we can forget him if we let ourselves. How suddenly when the time is right, that you remember him. You remember dropping to your knees in your Sunday school classroom and telling him you believed. He still watched over me even as I spent years of my life not remembering him. He came rushing back to my mind and the heart he never left one day so many years later. At least it felt like he came rushing back, but really he started as a whisper. He came first in the whisper of a much older than me lady who was going to school with me. Who dared to tell this very young, tired, single, soon-to-be mom why she wouldn't let her kids celebrate Halloween. I actually listened, and while I didn't agree, I listened. She was a good friend to me, good enough to tell me the truth and to hand me a Bible. The same one I still carry in that red and zebra striped cover, full of notes, and markings, and memories. The same one I've carried to Kenya and back so many times now. She wouldn't even know me anymore by the time I started reading it, or by the time I was baptized, or by the time I started carrying that Bible to Kenya.
It's amazing the places he takes us......
I never thought just a handful of years ago, or so it seems like a handful, that I would be on any mountain praying.....much less in Kenya. We climbed to the top of this mountain, we sang out to God, we read the word together, and then we separated to spend a few hours in prayer.
It's amazing the places he takes us..........
I found a spot in the tall grass to pray. At first my mind was racing, it was hot, and something bit me, and I thought about all of those shows with lions stalking in tall grass....and then I remembered HIM. He made me laugh at myself, worrying about a lion on a mountaintop. Then he reminded me of being in a pit with a lion on a snowy day. About being a lion chaser. I settled in my heart and mind and I listened to the birds, the bugs, and the waterfall that was so far away but sounded so close. The sound of it would come like waves from the ocean. I thought about his voice, the one I wanted so much to ignore. The voice I dared to argue with....choose someone else. I wept to him that day, about the big dreams he had been so bold as to place on my shoulders. Thanking him for the help he had brought to me, begging him for the help that still needed to come, lifting up those little people who just wanted to come to him, to come to anyone to be loved. Help me point them to you and not just anyone. Make them visible. Help me be that first whisper in their lives so that some day you can swoop in and rock their world like you have mine. So that someday when they are finishing high school, tech school, or university they can say it's amazing the places HE takes us. So that when they start a family and become upstanding members of their community and church they can say it's amazing the places HE takes us. So that someday when they get to be the whisper to someone else they can say......It's amazing the places HE takes us.
