Love Happens

Dear Eugene,

Heavy snow last Friday.

Now less than a week later, after a couple nights of heavy rain, all is washed away, first beauty, then filth.

All that remains is but a "shiny artifact of the past."

Like last Friday didn't happen.


Two years ago, I believe, I heard the story of a family that used to come to my then church's cafeteria where I served.  The father passed away while shoveling snow.

The lady who related the story tried her best to describe to me this father, his face, his features, for I could recall not even a glint of him.

Which is strange.

I usually would soak up my surrounding.  For a face that I've seen more than once to vanish, be blotted out from my memory, there must be a deliberate act of sabotage.

Then I realized I was looking out from a window.  I asked a rag doll in my arms, my best friend, Why is daddy sleeping in the snow?  He was facing down.  I knew the back of his green John Deere jacket.  I knew that's his shovel beside him.

But I could not recall his face.

(Now mommy is crying.)

Did last Friday actually happen?  Could heavy rain wash away bad dreams and set things back to how they used to be?  "Would daddy melt away with the snow and be no more, like he didn't happen?"

To "believe" in Jesus is to trust God will never stop loving us.  (God does not need my intellectual assent to exist, my weekly vote of confidence to keep his job, my best apologetic attempt to prove he could be real.)

To believe in Jesus is to trust God, in everything I do, in every thought I think.

I trust, I have faith, I have confidence, I take refuge in a God who has our best interest in mind, as shown in his ever-creative purpose in the life and through the death and resurrection of Jesus.

I trust God does not terminate his loving relationship with us, that bad things do and did happen but the good bits would never thaw away like snow.

Nothing could thwart his Way
Not even our many, frequent
  death-seeking ways

Peace and love in Jesus, Alex

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