He Is the Hurricane.....

WBC currently has a team in Swaziland. I am not there and I do not know most of this team. But what I do know is this: it’s a team hand-picked by God. Each and every person is present for His mighty purpose, that which we many times cannot comprehend.

While this team has been over there, several things have happened which are beyond their comprehension. They are over there, allowing their hearts to be scratched, while we are over here, scratching our heads -- amazement and bewilderment on both sides of the sea.

The amazing thing for them came in the form of a cyclone Check out the blog of “Showing up and Showing Off”   at   www.warrenbaptistswaziland.wordpress.com 

 Briefly, as I understand it, this cyclone threatened Swaziland. Closer and closer it came, encroaching upon the team’s potential for visiting the carepoints.  The ominous clouds were on the horizon, menacing in their darkness. 

So God’s hand-picked team did what they needed to do. They dropped to their knees. There, they prayed to the God-of-the-Angel-Armies. And that cyclone did what it had to do. It dropped to its knees. There it obeyed the God-of-the-Angel-Armies and it went no further. It stopped, simply there on the horizon, and it went away.

God cleared away a cyclone, a hurricane, so the team’s ministering at the carepoints would not be obstructed. That’s God, your mighty God.

Now, your mighty God has a tree in Swaziland. It is at the Timbutini Carepoint. It sits in front of the church, just inside the fence. This tree is a nice tree. It provides shade. But mostly, it just stands there. The children rest under it, eat under it, play under it. But anyone that has been to this carepoint knows the tree I am writing about. I spent ten days there last summer and I came to know that tree.  It’s just there and it’s doing life with these kids. And for ten days, I did life with that tree and those kids.

And then I came home. And I was not the same. Dang, I left something back with that tree.

But life went on here and I got busy doing life with my own kids: grad school, nursing school, and college applications for our three daughters.

That’s what we were doing in November, Darcy and I. Doing life. She was tackling college applications one evening. She had some questions for me, so I sat down at the computer with her. As she zipped around on various websites, she needed some information from the website of Furman University. So she clicked her way to its main page. She paused there for two seconds (one locomotive, two locomotive), got her information and clicked to the next place.

But I erupted with, “Go back! Go back! Go back! Go back!” She thought I had lost it. Frankly, I did too. Clueless, she hesitantly clicked backward, a tad bewildered.

But if she was bewildered, then I was blown away. For there on the screen, there, where Darcy had clicked on Furman’s website for all of two seconds, was the picture of a tree…..not really the whole tree….about 6 feet of the bottom of a tree trunk. And behind it was a bit of a fence. And I knew that fence and I KNEW that tree. Yep. I read the caption and sure enough it was THAT tree. Someone at Furman had visited there. And took a picture. And Furman posted it. And it was posted on one of those scrolling picture thingies. And somehow in the vastness of the nebulous world of the internet, and with only the impeccable timing of God, we were staring at it, with our mouths open. I might have even drooled in incredulity.

That tree. It was doing life over there, with those children, while I’m doing life over here. That tree will not leave my mind. Nor my heart. I cannot explain it. That tree.

Doing life. And death. Yep. Death. The team that is over there now is wrestling with the shooting death of a child.  www.warrenbaptistswaziland.wordpress.com   “Some Things We Just Don’t Understand”.    That’s bewildering.

Me? I’m over here. Doing life. Doing church. Doing Wednesday night. And on Wednesday evening, with the youth, we sang David Crowder’s song “Oh, He Loves Us.” The lyrics are:  

“ He is jealous for me,
loves like a hurricane, I am a tree
bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy…”

And that’s when it hit. That’s when God tied it all together. He is the hurricane and I am the tree. He is the hurricane and you are the tree. He blows by us. If not for Him, we could not stand in His presence. But because of Him, we CAN stand in His presence. And do life with those children. And death. We can stand in the figurative wind and rain and thunder and lightning and do life and death with those that need us.

 He is the hurricane. He is vast. We do not understand Him and we certainly can’t control Him. I am a tree. His tree. So is that team. So are you.

Isaiah 61:3 – “…..and provide for those who grieve in Zion – to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair. They will be called oaks of righteousness, a planting of the LORD for the display of his splendor.”