The Broken Road

I love the song by Rascal Flatts, 'God bless the broken road that led me straight to you...' I think it was talking about a person, but I sing it to Jesus. Recently, though, I reminisced with a friend about our first meeting. We met on the broken road. And there is a closeness and a sweetness about the friendship, one that spans years, moves, chasms, and new growth. There is comfort in knowing others are on the same path, have experienced the same pain or challenges, and have come through it, or are, at least, working toward that end.

The dictionary defines broken as:

: violently separated into parts : shattered

: damaged or altered by breaking: as having undergone or been subjected to fracture <a broken leg>

 of land surfaces : being irregular, interrupted, or full of obstacles

 : violated by transgression <a broken promise>

 : discontinuous, interrupted disrupted by change

 : of a tulip flower : having an irregular, streaked, or blotched pattern especially from virus infection

  : made weak or infirm

 : subdued completely : crushed, sorrowful <a broken heart> <a broken spirit>

 : bankrupt

 : reduced in rank : cut off : disconnected

: imperfectly spoken or written <broken English>

: not complete or full <a broken bale of hay>

: disunited by divorce, separation, or desertion of one parent <children from broken homes> <a broken family>

Okay, brokenness is a part of life. How I respond makes it either a blessing or a curse. I can walk into the pain and seek the beauty and life lessons He will bring out of it, comfort others with the comfort I've received from it. Or, I can hide, cower, stew, worry etc.  I've done both. And really, sometimes the things that we go through in life throw us for a loop and it takes a while to process it, grieve over it, accept it, learn from it, forgive, heal, whatever. All of that is normal. But I think the message that is loud and clear is that He is right there in it with us!!!! I came across a verse 3 times this morning, from 3 different sources and I figured the Lord wanted me to think about it. 

God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in times of trouble. Psalm 46:1

Refuge (machseh) means: shelter, protection, fortress, a hope, a place of trust, a shelter from the storm. As I mentioned, I haven't always run to Him in times of brokenness. Oh I've wanted to, and in my head I did. But I didn't engage my heart. It's one thing to quote a scripture and it's an altogether different thing to believe it. He is a very present help in trouble. In trouble. Not after it, in it. And although I didn't always believe it, it doesn't make it any less true. The I Am, Is  Present, on my broken road, even when my broken road is of my own doing. (See Hebrews 10:19-22 at end of post) He promises NEVER to leave me nor forsake me.  

I promised I would talk about how present He was when I found my husband in a life-threatening coma. It was about 2 am, 6 hours before I would find him. I woke up, couldn't sleep, went down stairs, curled up on the couch, fell asleep, but not before I prayed. I felt an urgency to pray over my husband's life. I know. It sounds weird, but it's true. Mind you, he has some auto immune issues and had been struggling for many months in some of those areas, so my prayer didn't come out of the blue. I had a tough time falling back asleep, so I continued to pray for him and us...and then the Lord literally dropped  a very calming statement into my spirit, I could read the words as if reading a sentence on a page, 'everything is going to be alright'. Immediately I fell into a peaceful sleep. When I awoke and went upstairs at 8:00, I found him. Needless to say, everything didn't look alright. I was terrified and traumatized. But throughout the day, as we sat in the hospital, those words of comfort and peace came back to me, over and over again. And he was and is alright.

The other thing that happened that day, which to this day brings tears to my eyes, is that my, (then) 3 year old grand-daughter asked her mommy to call me on the phone. She didn't know grandpa was sick. She then proceeded to "read" from a book she called the God book. The story consisted of her repeating the phrase..."and God will be there", at least 20 times.  With tears streaming down my face I thanked her for the great "story". Later, when I visited their house, I found the "God book" and suspected I would find that very phrase, convinced that her mommy must have read it to her a million times, because she proclaimed it to me with such passion in her voice. But what I found was a book with the basic subject of God being present in our lives. No where in the book was the phrase she kept repeating to me. For those of you who know me, you know how precious my grandchildren are, so much so, that I packed up and drove a U-Haul 2000 miles to live close to them. So for the Lord to use that precious child to tell me that He was with me, a very present help, is one of the most tender displays of His love for me, that I've ever experienced. I cannot wait to tell her, when she is older, and when she can truly understand, how God used her to comfort her Grammie on a very difficult day.

This is the God we serve. The God we struggle to set aside time for...oh for all of the wasted time I have used up in my own pursuits...when He's been right here all along. Oh and by the way, another verse popped up a couple times this am too. So I think I need to leave it as a verse to ponder:

¹⁹ And so, dear brothers and sisters, we can boldly enter heaven’s Most Holy Place because of the blood of Jesus. ²⁰ By his death, Jesus opened a new and life-giving way through the curtain into the Most Holy Place. ²¹ And since we have a great High Priest who rules over God’s house, ²² let us go right into the presence of God with sincere hearts fully trusting him. For our guilty consciences have been sprinkled with Christ’s blood to make us clean, and our bodies have been washed with pure water. Hebrews 10:19-22