This month brought me so much joy, and was such a time for learning. God has been showing me how big, beautiful, and creative He is. I’m currently sitting on a mountainside and looking out onto a gorgeous valley. Clouds roll through pretty constantly and hide parts or all of the valley. This happened the other morning during one of my quite times, I was reading My Utmost for His Highest and Oswald was talking about how our imagination of God is so small and how we don’t realize how incredibly creative our God has to be. So as the clouds blocked my view of the valley as I was sitting on our rock, I thought about what I could possibly imagine behind those clouds and I realized that nothing could come close to comparing to what was already there. We serve such a beautiful God who creates such beautiful things, and not just in nature but in each of us. Yes, some of us are really gorgeous on the outside but I’m not talking about that exactly.
On the World Race you see some of the more beautiful things and some of the most grotesque. You see incredible mountains, huge desserts, breath-taking shorelines, and yet we see hungry people, homeless people, children who don’t know what love looks like. I have seen people criticize everything about what we are doing in their country, and I have seen people weep with gratitude just because we decided to show up in their village that day. If these things don’t humble you then I’m not sure that anything could. Sometimes on the Race we become numb to some of these things, but I want to always be in awe of the beauty and be heartbroken for the pain. So as I sat on the mountainside that day I began to realize that as I am (hopefully) becoming a more beautiful and broken creation of the Lord I am only becoming that way because of the gorgeous God I serve and as I give up more of myself to Him, He is pouring more of Himself into me. I guess what I’m trying to say here is that I want to be ridiculously, remarkably, irrevocably changed for the Lord. I want people to be able to look at my life and see only a reflection of my God. I want to be the valley behind the clouds, a beautiful picture of the God I exist for.
"Sing to the Lord with thanksgiving; make melody to our God on the lyre! He covers the heavens with clouds; the prepares rain for the earth; he makes grass grow on the hills." -Psalm 147:8
