Answered Prayer Packaged in Inconvenience

By Brenda Black

When you pray for drought relief, there's no excuse to complain about mud. The catch 22 of moisture soaking the soil is the accumulation of mush on top. Far and wide across the nation, massive snowfall brought life-giving water in an inconvenient, all be it, beautiful form, turning every day routines into harrowing feats. But, if you think driving to work in a foot of slippery fluff is difficult with solid pavement under the tread, try plowing to work on the farm, through drifts and ruts, over slick, tender grass blades. All I can say is Yee Haw! Hold on tight and give it the gas!

I 'm glad my husband is the one at the wheel while I ride shotgun through such a challenging course. I would rather be the gate girl than the wife who slid the pickup into the fence. I don't know how he navigates through slimy, narrow passages or keeps it in the center of oozing slush, flanked by walls of white drifts just waiting to suck our rig into stuck. I do understand the absolute necessity of keeping my window rolled up! Some things you learn the hard way and a freezing cold mud bath slung in the face is one class I never intend to take.

Ask anyone who knows me well and they will tell you I am a “do it myself” kind of gal. I take on everything with an “I can” attitude. Sometimes, not to my credit, but to my shame, I think I can do it in my own strength. That's about as smart as me taking the wheel through a dangerous snow drift or riding shotgun to feed hay in winter with the window rolled down! I need to know my limits. I need to accept my powerlessness at times. I need to employ some God-given common sense and I need to turn to God.

If I ask Him to help me, then deny the answer He gives me or the help He brings, I'm going to curse the showers of blessings instead of accept them in their various forms. In rain and snow and sleet and mud, the Lord is good. His perfect wisdom is our solid foundation when the bottom of the road seems to disappear into oblivion. His perfect love protects us from the cold, nasty challenges that life slings into our face. His perfect grace does not demand that we do more than we were ever designed or called to accomplish. The Lord is faithful and knows what is best. Though we wonder at His tactics, we must never begrudge His mysterious answers to prayer.

We pray for the Lord to refresh our land with moisture and He sends a blizzard. That inconvenient snow that some may curse, delivers unseen benefits for which we didn't ask, but we get. Much needed moisture will penetrate deep into the ground as it slowly melts. We receive nitrogen for the soil and a hard freeze to annihilate an overabundance of disease bearing pests. There's run-off filling creeks and ponds and streams that have groaned for a drink. God sees the big picture.

So often, we think we do not get the answers we seek when we pray. In those moments, I must remember that I'm not the Creator in charge of the weather or of life. I need to trust the One who bids the snow to get me through the tough things that want to suck the life out of me or slam me headfirst into a frigid embankment.

Before we can get to the pasture, we first have to get out of the drive!

As the Lord spoke to Job long ago, He speaks with the same authority today: “Have you entered the storehouses of the snow or seen the storehouses of the hail...What is the way to the place where the lightning is dispersed, or the place where the east winds are scattered over the earth? Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain, and a path for the thunderstorm, to water a land where no man lives, a desert with no one in it, to satisfy a desolate wasteland and make it sprout with grass?” (Job 38:22-27)

I think we know the answer to all of these questions. If God is great enough to command all of earth, isn't He the One that should be 4-wheeling His way through my life. The One at the wheel has far more experience and has every intention of protecting me. I need to employ the common sense the Lord gave me: Just buckle up, keep the window up, and look up for His safety.

Answers to prayer comes packaged in strange and inconvenient containers. But, with eyes wide open , a receptive heart and a good grip on the dash, we might just be able to see the big picture when we trust the Lord to transport us through life's scary drifts.

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.” (Proverbs 3:5-6)

Thinkin' 'Bout Home

By Brenda Black

There is a wandering soul in many of us that perpetuates discontent. The monotony of familiar surroundings causes longing for fantasy in far-away places, yet foreign locations and strange faces make us pine for the comfort of home. Thousands of travelers are stranded this week, trapped in airports or along closed inner state highways. I wonder if they are curled up on hard airport benches or hunkered down in semi truck cabs and dreaming like Dorothy of the Wizard of Oz: “There's no place like home, there's no place like home.”

For me --I arrived at my destination safely, but I am nonetheless dreaming about home. As heavy as the cold, damp air was the heavy feeling in my heart when I left home a day ahead of the storm and embarked on my cross-country flight. I sat alone and waited for my delayed plane to arrive and hoped none of the other passengers sitting at a distance would notice the big crocodile tears pooling in my eyes.

I wasn't afraid of flying in the weather. Wasn't worried about losing my luggage. I didn't fret over the journey much at all. Well maybe a little later, when we chopped our way through clouds that looked like cotton candy but punched the plane like choppy waves on a rolling sea. I prayed through that stratus-slicing portion of the ascent then relaxed when we cruised through blue, sunny skies above the tumult of white below. But before take-off, my foreboding was more attributed to leaving my husband alone at home to fend for himself in the forthcoming blizzard.

Sure he's a big boy, but what if...and a dozen scenarios littered my mind. We didn't spend much time together that morning and our good-bye was rushed. I worked all morning to rebook the last available flight leaving town ahead of the front. We didn't get to linger, talk or pray as we had my last trip away. As I headed west, he would get in a car and drive north on potentially icy streets and face the arctic blast beating it's away across his path. And that bothered me.

You see, I would have rather crawled into that car and braved the trip with him than to go it alone to fairer skies without him. I would rather be home in sub-zero weather with a storm so fierce that it blows the curtains on the inside of the house than to be far away, alone and safe. Because that's home and my family and neighborhood friends and those are my cows and horses and dog and cat that I care about more than my own comfort or safety.

So while I am sitting in warmth and quiet in the Mile High City of Denver, all be it bitter cold beyond this 20th floor hotel window, I am sheltered and I am comfortable, but I am thinking about home. Home is family and memories. It is where I'm known and mostly loved, sometimes tolerated and always forgiven. Home is my heart and my haven even if it lies in the eye of a blizzard.

As much as this distance during dire circumstances makes me long for home and hearth, there's another home that I yearn for even more -- heaven -- where I won't be alone.

After seeing how God could lift me from storm to sunshine, carry me out of harm's way and land me safely where He's called me to be this week, I have no doubt that the home I'll one day see will be perfect! And there I'll be with family and friends safe and sound and no distance between us or blizzards to harm us! I'll have no worries, sense no fear, cry no tears. That sounds like home to me. Like where I want to be.

“For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling, because when we are clothed, we will not be found naked. For while we are in this tent, we groan and are burdened, because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. Now the one who has fashioned us for this very purpose is God, who has given us the Spirit as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come.

“Therefore we are always confident and know that as long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord. For we live by faith, not by sight. We are confident, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord. So we make it our goal to please him, whether we are at home in the body or away from it.” (2 Corinthians 5:1-9)

Home. I hope just thinking about it warms your heart this cold, blustery week.