Storm Recovery Status

Seems like a long time since Hurricane Sandy devastated the East Coast ... the storm was in October 2012, but I was reading recently that FEMA still has the relief effort listed on their website as victims are still needing help.  

But that isn’t as shocking as hearing that Joplin, MO just last week received money from HUD to help their residents rebuild from the 2011 tornado ... or worse yet, there are still neighborhoods in New Orleans that have not yet been rebuilt from Hurricane Katrina which was in 2005!!

That’s what big storms do ... they come in fast and hard, often without warning, only to be gone just as quickly ... but always sure to leave evidence of its nondiscriminating malevolence on every corner ... taking what was once strong and beautiful and just strewing it carelessly across what seems like too far to travel ... destruction and injury as far as we’re willing to look ... and it just takes time to uncover and recover.

Time.

Last fall, my pastor taught a series on ‘Doubting God’, focusing on common doubts that plague both the churched and unchurched: Doubting God’s Existence, His Goodness, Doubting God’s Plan, Doubting God’s Power. I believe the type of unfathomable events we just discussed can directly result in these sort of doubts and have also led to a great deal of hopelessness both in and out of the church ... and in the same way storms steal and destroy power to our homes, hopelessness has the same effect on the power in the church ... it stresses and strains the lines that connect us (faith) to our power source (God), until eventually our faith just snaps ... and power is no more ... and we sit in the dark until Light can be restored.

For the last teaching on ‘Doubting God’s Power’ my pastor felt it would be effective for folks within the congregation to share personal testimonies and he asked me if I would be willing to share a testimony of God’s power in my own life. I was a little taken a back by this invitation because he knows my story and personally, I was really looking forward to the teaching, hoping to get hold of some real truths to combat my own chronic doubts!! Unless you consider HAVING lots of doubt as 'being worthy of testimony', I just wasn’t sure where he was going with this.

For those just joining my walk, I grew up in a Christian home and accepted Jesus at a very young age. I married my high-school sweetheart and after graduating college together, we were on our way to ‘happily ever after’.  

My faith was first tested with the loss of my sister, Denise. She had struggled with cystic fibrosis all her life and she went Home to the Lord at a very young age. While that was a really hard time, I saw God in all of it and it just seemed right to let her go and I was able to stay close and continue in a strong walk with the Lord.

While that was all going on, my husband and I got involved in a small business with great friends and we did life really well for about 6-7 years ... but I was definitely living out of my own abilities and plans.

When the economy took a downturn, our little business started to have trouble and for some reason, I wasn’t able to fix it ... I was a very smart, capable gal who liked to do things above and beyond expectations but the harder I tried, the worse it seemed to get. This would be the start of what would become a shattering of my identity.

As I started to defend that identity, it put a strain on my business partnership, and the friendship ... at home, our family was growing ... having had three little ones under the age of 4, I was spinning too many plates, spread too thin and not doing anything well ... the strain of not being able to be who I wanted to be eventually started to strain our marriage and our home life and darkness just started moving in.

The whole time I was actively walking with God, involved in various ministries at church, tithing, fasting ... all of it ... to most people who knew me, I don’t think they would have ever known I was struggling at all ... but each day it was harder and harder to hear the kids laughing or to see the sun shining ... for those who have been through depression, you know the walls of the pit I’m describing.

I just couldn’t understand why God would take His hand off of our business ... why being a wife and a mom were so hard ... it was all from Him, dedicated to Him ... where was His favor, His blessing? I had served Him well, hadn’t I?!!

And this is when the storm of doubt started to brew ...

About 3-4 years into the darkness, my husband, David, was diagnosed with brain cancer. Surprisingly, we found ourselves in the book of Job, chapter 13 where Job says ‘though you slay me, yet I will hope in Him’ ... we thought ‘This is it! This is what all these trials have been about! This is where God is going to show His power and what a testimony we’ll have to share of His goodness and grace!’  We could just see ourselves walking into our destiny.

Everything in my being would love to tell you that that’s exactly what happened. But after 15 months of fighting, David went Home to the Lord. And I was devastated. Not even a month after David was gone, we had to close 2 of our businesses, one of which developed into a lawsuit that would then linger on for months.

Left with three young kids and a whole lot of broken dreams and promises everything I had known my entire adult life was gone ... I felt like I was caught up in a riptide, tumbling head over foot ... as I twisted and turned in the current of grief and confusion ... I couldn’t breathe or find my footing. You want to talk about doubting God’s existence, His goodness, His plan and His power ... I had it all!

Stay with me ...

Now you know when my pastor asked if I would be willing to share a testimony of God’s power in my life, why I didn’t get it ... Where is the power of God in this story?! How could you possibly ask ME to testify to His POWER? When I think of ‘power’, I think of miracles and healing and I just don’t have a testimony of that. But as I took my story before the Lord ONCE AGAIN and cried out to him ‘God, I just don’t get it!!’, He started to speak to me about His power ...

We often think of His power as the ‘moving of mountains’ or the ‘shaking of strongholds’ ... but sometimes His power is revealed in what is STILL STANDING after the shaking stops ... Proverbs 10:25 says ‘When the storm has swept by, the wicked are gone, but the righteous stand firm forever. ‘

There are many stories in the Bible where Jesus silenced the storm or where God rescued His people from certain perilous times, but Paul also tells us in Romans that ‘suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.’ ... so it is the RESULT of some suffering that is far more powerful than being delivered FROM the suffering. The Kingdom of God is an ‘opposite world’ ... God tells us His ways are not our ways and because of that, we must learn His ways or risk missing Him altogether!

That’s what happened to many in Jesus’ time ... many missed Him altogether because they were looking for a ‘king that would conquer’ ... not for a King on a Cross. Even those closest to Him ... when He was captured it confused and terrified His followers ... to the point that all but one fled the city! Just think about what grief and torment would have been avoided if those closest to Him and had been listening to what Jesus told them ... if when He died they knew that they knew He was coming back! I picture preparation for a feast, rather than hiding in the Upper Room!!

His power revealed in surprising ways is common throughout the Word ... In 1Kings we read about Elijah running for his life ... He was hiding in a cave and God’s power showed up, but not in the way we would think ... first there was a great and powerful wind, then an earthquake, then fire ... It’s funny to me that satan knows us well and knows that any one of us seeking a ‘Lord Almighty’ would have walked out on that mountain ledge at ANY ONE of those powerful signs, only to be destroyed ... but Elijah knew His Shepherds voice and knew those signs were counterfeits ... and only when the gentle whisper came did he go out.

How many times do we miss Him because we’re looking for the bigger thing?

It reminds me of a story that Luci Swindoll once shared ... she’s a popular Bible teacher and she once shared a story of an Alaskan Cruise she went on with some friends and she was so excited to see whales ... when it came time for the tour, she disembarked the ship wrapped in a blanket of cameras and video equipment. So determined to not miss the whale that was sure to come, she sat perched with her camera to her eye ... for TWO HOURS ... but not a single whale. Finally frustrated, she puts the camera down and noticed on the glaciers they had been passing, a sea of penguins jumping in and out of the water just ‘showing off’ for her ... in her determination to see what she THOUGHT would be the ‘way God would bless the trip’, she almost missed the littlest of blessings of the penguins on the way!!

Again, how many times do we miss Him because we’re looking for the bigger thing when His Word shows us over and over His affinity for the lesser of all things.

In the Gospels, Jesus teaches us the power of turning the other cheek, NOT engaging in the fight ... in extending forgiveness and mercy, NOT in casting the first stone ... in dining with tax collectors and prostitutes, NOT in handing out condemnation ... He above all others certainly was in the position to do all of these things, but because He chose differently He reveals the POWER OF RESTRAINT.

It’s the same restraint He showed on the Cross ... It would have been an awesome scene for Jesus to call on legions of Angels waiting for Him to say the word ... but think about it ... if that would have happened, today He would just be a great man that we celebrate in our traditions ... instead, He RESTRAINED Himself for the bigger and better plan ... for His greater power to be revealed through His resurrection ... because He did that, our hope now is not just in a great king that once lived and led ... our hope is in a RESURRECTED SAVIOR who has defeated death once and for all!!

You see, I know God could have healed my David ... one word ... that’s all it would have taken ... much in the same way that I know He could have rescued Jesus from the cross ... and satan worked really hard to get me to live in offense and call Him ‘unfaithful’ when my whale watching didn’t turn out the way I had believed it would. But in the same way of the Cross, I now believe God actually SHOWED RESTRAINT in not healing David for a greater plan that I can’t see or comprehend ... through this experience, He is revealing to me a greater power than the power of healing ... don’t get me wrong, healing is VERY powerful and would have been an AWESOME thing to be able to testify ... but His GREATER power ... I believe His GREATEST POWER ... which was won at the cross is the RESURRECTION POWER of Christ ... it is the power of the resurrection that brings life out of death, beauty out of ashes, hope out of darkness ... whatever you want to call it, however you want to package it, it’s 100% Him ... resurrection is what happens when He breathes life into the very scene where death once was ... and that is the power to which I can now testify!

Romans 6:4 says ‘We were buried with Him by the baptism into death, so that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glorious [power] of the Father, so we too might live and behave in newness of life.’

Good news is that you don’t have to go through great loss in your own lives to experience and gain a testimony of this resurrection power ... when we accept Jesus and are baptized, this verse tells us just as Christ was raised from the dead ... with that very same resurrection power ... we can live and behave as a new person ... that’s resurrection power!!

I pray you can get a hold of that ... I know the darkness of death, so resurrection is very exciting to me!!

And what happens when we really get a hold of this? When we can actually witness and testify to this resurrection power in our lives? Let me close by jumping to Acts 4 and see what happened to the Apostles AFTER they witnessed the resurrection of Jesus ...

Acts 4:13-20
The members of the council were amazed when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, for they could see that they were ordinary men with no special training in the Scriptures. They also recognized them as men who had been with Jesus. But since they could see the man who had been healed standing right there among them, there was nothing the council could say. So they ordered Peter and John out of the council chamber and conferred among themselves. “What should we do with these men?” they asked each other. “We can’t deny that they have performed a miraculous sign, and everybody in Jerusalem knows about it. But to keep them from spreading their propaganda any further, we must warn them not to speak to anyone in Jesus’ name again.” So they called the apostles back in and commanded them never again to speak or teach in the name of Jesus. But Peter and John replied, “Do you think God wants us to obey you rather than him? We cannot stop telling about everything we have seen and heard.”

When we experience the resurrection power of Jesus, we become courageous and we start to see miracles and ‘we cannot help but speak about what we have seen and heard.’ ==> SOUNDS LIKE POWER TO ME!

When we see the power of God in our lives, that encounter moves what we know from our head to our heart and we cannot help but to speak about it ... it changes us ... it’s like fixing the downed wires in our life caused by a storm and power is restored!!

So let me leave you with the same challenging question my pastor asked me ... can you share a testimony of God’s power in your life? Maybe it’s the power of forgiveness?  The power of love for His people ... maybe you are privileged to signs and wonders everywhere you go ... that is my hope one day! I do know that the more I get to know Him, the more I recognize Him!

Maybe you are like I once was and maybe your struggling with doubt and feeling powerless ... maybe your storms have not involved the death of a loved one ... maybe the death you know is a different kind ... emotional, spiritual ... loss of a dream, loss of hope ...

If that is you, I encourage you to let me pray for you and to then get away with God and ask Him to speak to you about His power in your life ... don’t get so distracted with the shaking that is going on that you’re tempted to call Him unfaithful ... HE IS FAITHFUL ... He is good and He loves you ... please consider that God may be restraining Himself in your circumstances, so that you can know something greater about Him ... maybe He’s setting you up to experience His greatest power ... the power that Jesus won on the cross ... HIS RESURRECTION POWER!! While you’re in this ‘Friday’ of your walk, know that Sunday is coming!!

And it’s certainly going to be better than any stinkin whale!!





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