Steps of obedience

This is long…you’ve been warned.

 

Over and over and over again lately God has been gently reminding me that he desires my obedience more than anything.  And truthfully, being obedient is sometimes really, really hard.  I’m an answer kind of girl.  I like them and I like to have them now.  I like to have a plan and know that it’s going to come off without a hitch.  I like to know what to expect on any given day and change it based on my whims not someone else’s.

Ahem.

The last week of June I arrived home to find a letter from the hospital.  I dreaded opening it, positive that it was a notice that we would be sent to collection or that they had refigured our bill and decided that we owed a whole bunch more money that we thought we did.  Between having babies and some unexpected health troubles in the last few years we owed them a lot of money…and there has just been no getting around that fact.  So, imagine my confusion when I open the letter and read that they were asking for a smallish copay in exchange for the hospital financial aid covering almost all of our bills. 

Seriously – it took me all night to digest that letter and then THREE phone calls the following day to make sure that I was understanding correctly what was happening.  Along with a phone call to TDM who was at Camp Barakel that week, where I repeatedly had to tell him that I was crying happy tears even though I'm sure he thought that I was either laying in a ditch on the brink of death or had finally flipped my lid.

Happy makes me cry sometimes, okay? 

In short, they took our nearly $4,700 bill and reduced it to less than $400 dollars.

This is big people!

Several nights later I was awakened during the night with a Bible verse, but while I had the concept of what the verse was saying I couldn’t think of it’s location and I couldn’t get the words quite right in my head.  I just knew that it involved water and stones and creating an altar as a reminder that the Lord is good.

I spent some time reading the following morning and searching ‘water’ and ‘stones’ in the same verse via the internet but couldn’t find MY verse.  I tried to recall it in a conversation with my mom but just wasn’t coming up with anything.  I was actually starting to think that I was remembering a sermon instead of an actual passage in the Bible when God told me to read Joshua.

It’s crazy here in the summer time and I was doing every thing that I could to keep up with kids and life and sanity but in the middle of the night that night I grabbed my Kindle, found Joshua and started reading.  And then I read again in the morning until Ka-bam!  I found it! 

Joshua 4:20-24

²⁰ And Joshua set up at Gilgal the twelve stones they had taken out of the Jordan. ²¹ He said to the Israelites, “In the future when your descendants ask their parents, ‘What do these stones mean?’ ²² tell them, ‘Israel crossed the Jordan on dry ground.’ ²³ For the Lord your God dried up the Jordan before you until you had crossed over. The Lord your God did to the Jordan what he had done to the Red Sea^[b] when he dried it up before us until we had crossed over. ²⁴ He did this so that all the peoples of the earth might know that the hand of the Lord is powerful and so that you might always fear the Lord your God.”

The hand of the Lord is powerful!  And it was the hand of the Lord that made those medical bills go away.  That’s worth building a few mental stones, huh?

Anyway, as I read on in Joshua I realized that the common theme throughout the book was obedience to God.  There is a whole chapter on circumcision – but it became clear to me that God really wasn’t talking about whether or not a boy should have a foreskin but whether or not his kids were willing to OBEY!

Sharing these thoughts with a friend one evening she compared God’s desire for us to obey with one of us getting excited over our own child’s obedience.  It’s a really cool thing when our kids obey.  God rejoices every bit over our obedience!

But then I realized that there were several things that God has really been talking to me about and that I needed to put some of that obedience into action.

One of those things was my involvement in MOPS.  (That’s Mothers of Preschoolers for you non diaper changing / potty training people.)  I have been a part of MOPS as long as I have been a mom.  But I have also never been fully present with my kids because there has always been something related to MOPS that needed my attention.  God had begun to show me that it was time for me to step away from MOPS but as much as my words were that of obedience my actions were not. 

I felt like God and I were having this same struggle over and over again.  I would think up some way that I could be involved in MOPS without leading MOPS and He would smack me on the head and say ‘What did I tell you?’.  So I would try to think up another scenario that would work and then I would get smacked on the head again by that still, small voice saying ‘What did I tell you?’ 

So, earlier this week, I met with the ladies on the Leadership team and officially handed over my job to some great ladies who will do it well.  And it was hard, even though I knew with everything in me that it was the right thing to do.

That was on Tuesday…

On Wednesday the Big Red Truck was sold to a local guy who had called about it the day before.

Coincidence?

I think not!

Obedience…it’s what God desires.  It’s what God blesses!

In the course of just a few months I have gone back to work, believing that God had a plan for our family, because He does.  A major debt was forgiven.  And the sale of the truck allowed us to pay off all but one loan in full.  I don’t know where God is leading us and that drives me nutty a lot of the time.  I know that we both feel that God is calling us to full time service at Camp Barakel but maybe that isn't what he has in mind for us at all.  Who knows?  I do know that God is calling me to come closer to Him, to be obedient to Him.  And I know that I need to act in obedience.  And I know that God is good! 

 

ALL of the time!