He's Not Safe

When we embarked up on the adoption journey, we expected challenges with paperwork and long waits and such. We prayed and saw God answer many times over. Throughout the journey to S., we, or at least I, had great faith that God was guiding and directing us to our child.

Also, during that journey, our home church bid farewell to a beloved pastor. Since that time, our little independent church has stuggled to understand its identity as a body of believers. We haven't really seriously looked at a pastor because we are not quite sure where we, as a body, stand on some key issues. Mind you, not jugular issues and the disagreeing is very polite and, well, agreeable. Almost too agreeable.

Anyway, I have really struggled with our families' adjustment to having little S. home. It breaks my heart when my olders share how much they miss me. S. requires a LOT of my time and energy most days. So, I end up really missing my olders too. We miss some of the old bedtime routines, time reading together or time just playing. We will find a way to bring those back, but for now, it's challenging.

Then, there are those really hard days where I think I just can't handle it all. I get stuck in my circumstances and wallow in the pain of the changes in our lives. One day, while in such a funk, I began one of my complain-a-prayer sessions. You know, "why did you have us do this...it's so hard...I stink at this...what were you thinking, Lord?!!?"

Ever so quietly I heard, "Did you think that if I brought you to this place I would abandon you? Where is your faith?"

Ouch.

You see, I never wanted to serve a mediocre God. I never wanted to have a mediocre Christian walk. So, here I am, trying to have mediocre faith for a mountainous task that my awesome God, creator of the vast universe, knows the numbers of (gray) hairs on my head, Kings of Kings has called me into.

Then, in what I thought to be an unrelated event, my olders and I began a new Bible study on the book of James. We tackle the first day and come to our first memory verse which goes straight to my heart and sends hot tears streaming down my face.

Consider it all joy, my brethren,

when you encounter various trials,

knowing that the testing of your faith

produces endurance.

And let endurance have it's perfect work,

so that you may be perfect and complete,

lacking in nothing.

James 1:2-4

It's never fun to get a whoopin' from the Lord. But, there it was. I had been corrected. Which is where my struggles and the struggles that our church faces have come together, for me at least.

I want my life in Christ to be rich. I want to be part of a church body that will not box Him in. In the end, a conversation from C.S. Lewis' The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, sums up my thoughts well:

"Is - is he a man?" asked Lucy. "Aslan a man!" said Mr. Beaver sternly. "Certainly not. I tell you he is the King of the wood and the son of the great Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea. Don't you know who is the King of Beasts? Aslan is a lion, the Lion, the great Lion."
"Ooh," said Susan, "I thought he was a man. Is he - quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion."
"That you will, dearie, abd make no mistake," said Mrs. Beaver; "if there's anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they're either braver than most or else just silly."
"Then he isn't safe?" said Lucy.
"Safe?" said Mr. Beaver; "don't you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe?

'Course he isn't

SAFE.

But he's

GOOD.

He's the king I tell you."