30 Days

October 13, 2008

Yesterday on our drive to the golf course, Dr. Feelgood said, “Today is one month.” I sat there for a few minutes, thinking about how we tend to measure life and the things we do by time, knowing after just 30 days without Megan that there might never be a magical number of days to our complete healing.

I thought about the movie I had just seen – Fireproof. A man whose marriage is in trouble is given a 40-day plan for healing his marriage. He realized at about day 25 that he has only gone through the motions without giving over his heart completely to God’s plan for marriage. And somewhere toward the end of the movie, he is on Day 43, discovering that some things take longer than planned.

Moses is a good example of that. Oswald Chambers says that when Moses saw the affliction of his people, he knew that he would be the one to deliver them and quickly took things into his own hands. But God had different plans and needed for Moses to experience 40 years learning “true fellowship and oneness with God.” Chambers calls it “getting into God’s stride”. And what I find so amazing is when Moses was finally ready by God’s standards, then Moses humbly responds “Who am I that I should go?” Chambers says, “It is difficult to get into stride with God, because as soon as we start walking with Him we find that His pace has surpassed us before we have even taken three steps. He has a different way of doing things and we have to be trained in His ways.” He goes on to say that Jesus always worked from the standpoint of his Father and that we must do likewise. It is not intellectual reasoning. It is an act of the heart allowing the Holy Spirit to “change the atmosphere of our way of looking at things”.

The verse that appeared for me this morning – after 30 days - was Psalm 39:7 “And now Lord, what wait I for? My hope is in thee.” Like the man in the movie, my heart still has little, dark, human thoughts of what I need and what I think God can do (or could have done). But God’s heart is bigger, always out there ahead of me, stretching and pulling in His direction. Being weary and hardly knowing what to expect is where God wants us because then we wait on Him. I say that mostly out of obedience while I writhe in pain over what is gone. I want to be used by God, but does it have to be so costly?

As I study the Psalms with a group at church, my teacher simply says “STICK WITH IT!” He says that when we don’t understand or cannot comprehend life’s journey, prayer is what forms us, makes us different, and teaches us that God is present even in our distress. There is no 30-day recovery from death, my friends. It will not be business as usual for a long time. But the Gaddis family is strong. Maybe we will move forward some days, doing what we do, tenderly caring for each other in new ways.

We will stick with it, watching for a change in the atmosphere, and wondering if it will take 40 years…..