God in the Desert
Today was noteworthy. I returned my regular wheelchair back to the Disability Resource Center. I appreciate our friends Craig and Cyndy Luzinski getting this chair and some items in preparation for my return home about one year ago. I am feeling more comfortable and stronger using my walker, so I have taken this step of faith that routine wheelchair days are behind me.
My fitness center workout with my trainer wasn’t as taxing as it was on Tuesday, so today has been a good day. I am still considering and pursuing some work possibilities for the future and look forward to what is in store for me in the coming year.
BIBLE VERSE FOR TODAY… “Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.” And he was afraid and said, “How awesome is this place!…” Genesis 28:15-17
This morning during our devotional reading referenced this passage in a manner that struck me in a new way. So often our familiarity with a Bible story can rob us of the appreciation of the beginning of the journey.
Jacob is being sent to Haran away from his family and the brother who he has enraged by his deception. He is traveling alone and in the dessert and facing along journey that has an uncertain outcome. He finds himself at night near a city but still out in the wilderness. He uses a stone as a pillow and endeavors to get some rest. It is here at night, alone and in the desert that the Lord appears to Jacob. Jacob’s response? “….the Lord is in this place.”
In a place and at a time when it would be easy to feel “God-forsaken” Jacob receives a revelation of the Lord that would change His life. Bible commentator of old, Matthew Henry said, “God’s time to visit his people with his comforts, is, when they are most destitute of other comforts, and other comforters.”
That is why when the trials of life come, from whatever source and for whatever reason or no reason, we need to move beyond the question of “why” to ask ourselves, “what now?” “how will I be different?” “what can I learn?” In each situation I am confident that we will find, as did Jacob, that “God is in this place.”
I like that words of Corrie ten Boom when she said, “there is no pit so deep, that God’s love is not deeper still..” When you find yourself between a “rock and a desert place” don’t surprised that God is there to provide His presence and His promise.