Thank You God For Some Of The Many Ways You Meet Us Where We Are
Welcome to the next daily installment of this true story, which you can find posted here each afternoon until it comes to an end.
Chapter 108: Toward the End
If you let God have His way with you, He may fill your day with so many mind-blowing things that you cannot even keep track of them. This book is one such nine-day period in my life. It was so full of God that I am not able to fully recount what took place. I believe that for this one week of my life, I was totally absorbed with God, at least until that moment when the Bible fell on the wintertime wet street, and that distraction became immediately and painfully apparent to me.
This is what my day looked like when I let God have His way with me: ministry opportunities, one on top of another, from almost the time I woke up until almost the time I went to sleep. When the day came to an end, I was left in a state of total relaxation. Often, at the end of my day, or during parts of the day, I would insert something that I believed I needed to do — something on my phone or something on my computer. That insertion of my own agenda was often the least relaxing part of my day, and inserted cares where there had been none.
I believe for this week of time I got a small glimpse of two moments in the Bible:
1.) The Son of man has nowhere to lay his head. (Matthew 8:20, Luke 9:58) This comparison, shows how free of care Jesus, his disciples, and I suspect each of us are able to live if we keep our focus on God. God provides.
2.) If everything Jesus did were put into books, the entire world could not contain all of those books. (John 21:25). When one is ministering to others, and living in the will of God, it can be hard to even remember what took place that day, since there can be so many exciting examples, with little room to pause.
While I realize a train is a pretty controlled environment, I think that would be distracting to point to that as the entire point. I believe God really does give us rest, as the Bible says. I believe God really does allow us to rest in Him. He gives us the right type of work and the right amount of work, and when we do that work, there is often a restfulness to it. That is a very different work than things that I devise on my own. Prayerful reflection on how the day should look, and a return to prayer throughout the day to check in, yields very different results in my day than when I do not allow God to be at the center of my day and the chief planner of my day.
In contrast to that, many of us live our days in a constant state of frenzy. That is nearly the norm. It can be hard to see the constant frenzy, though, as you are in the midst of it. And it can be hard to see others in a state of frenzy when frenzy is the norm for you. You can’t usually spot frenzy when you are frenzied. All you would see is normalcy, where there is no normalcy. You can’t spot frenzied friends when all you know is frenzied friends. And, the opposite of frenzy is not the weekend, nor is the opposite of frenzy vacation time.
Those can be barely sustainable ways of escaping from a life that exhausts you and there is a decent chance that after the weekend or even after a vacation, you are left tired as well. The opposite of frenzy is the ability to rest in the Lord. God promises the peace that passes all understanding. (Philippians 4:7) If what I am describing here sounds unrealistic to you in some way, it may just be possible that such relaxation in the midst of doing God’s work in your life, may leave you so at peace, that it is beyond your understanding or mine. To cite the passage above again, the Bible refers to us being able to find in God “the peace that passes all understanding.”
-Allan Stevo
This is a selection from my forthcoming book, “The Amtrak Vignettes.” A neat story began with the writing of “The Amtrak Vignettes” in October 2023. Every day until that story comes to an end, I intend to share a part of it here. It is a part of my faith journey as a Christian, a faith journey that has been deepened since the Ides of March 2020. Some of it gets pretty wild and nothing that a “reasonable” person would find himself in the midst of. Few will be scared off by it. Instead, many will grow deeper in their faith. I know that, because I know my readers well, and I know that few come here expecting me to give a milquetoast version of anything. Come here to be challenged. Stay here to have your life changed. That, I believe, is what will come of this work. You can support that work by signing up below.