Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. {James 1:17}I remember being perched on the church pews I had sat upon a thousand times before for Sunday service, but this time it was for my mother's funeral. I was twelve years old and wore the Easter dress my mama had bought me a few months before, light and gauzy in late June.
God was thick among us reminding us that He never, never let's us go. I felt it. It overwhelmed me.
Fast forward nearly ten years. I walked the aisle toward my husband to be, said vows that I was yet to understand and was bound heart and soul to a man I was only beginning to know. God was thick in the room that day too. His Spirit singing over our new marriage.
Earlier this week I was reminded that God's presence is with us in the pit. David said that we could descend to the deepest ocean trench and God would be there. When God spoke the Law to Moses on the mountain top He was also down among the people who worshiped a golden calf in His very presence.
It's easy to see Him in the good. It's easy to feel His presence when we are not in the muck and mire of sin. We don't have to fight for it. God shines bright with no clouds to obscure. But let the clouds pass over us, let death or disease graze our lives, and we begin to think that He has changed His mind, His course, His heart for us.
He has not.
Whatever we dare to think of God when His Light has to fight through the clouds and the cracks let it not be that God has changed. He is the same God, the same Spirit, the same Jesus mighty to save. When the shadows shift He shines faithful.
He will remind us that He is God. That He calms waves and moreover walks to us on the stormy waters. And when we say, "I can't." He says "Lift your eyes." Lift your eyes to the clouds because if even just one ray makes it through the fog and to our hearts we will know that He is brightly shining in the darkness.
I write this and as I do across my little town is a family celebrating and grieving their teenage sons life cut short. The rain is pouring and I know that their eyes are dim. Many of our eyes are dim. Dim to the light that pours along with the rain.
The clouds reflect the Light and we are not swallowed up in darkness. Never. Because when God said, "Let there be light" there was and His is Light unstoppable, never changing, never ceasing.
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