Pow! Right between the Eyes

So you can see it's been a week or two and I haven't posted.  I haven't been doing very well at spottting God- in fact you might say I've been acting like a petulant child - 'Hey, God, since you're not playing the game the way I like I'm just going to quit playing' - How's that working for me?  Not so well.

I've spend an anxious week or two awaiting news on how our 30 acres of piney woods fared in the wildfires that ravaged Bastrop starting Labor Day weekend.  We finally got into the area to see our property Friday.  I drove aghast past acres of lunar landscape- rolling hills starkly covered by gray ash and match-stick charcoal tree trunks with no branches or leaves.  I saw brick fireplace and chimneys standing isolated where two weeks a bustling homestead lived, next to melted down chassis of automobiles whose owners couldn't get back to rescue them from the blaze.  This went on for miles, and then suddenly about a mile from our property line, it all stopped and everything looked as if nothing had ever happened.  Amazing how much difference one litttle mile can make. Never again will I say 'Missed me by a mile' as if that means a margin of safety - that mile wasn't nearly long enough.


I spoke  yesterday to a woman who's son lost his wife to a fire years ago that was started by a lightning strike to their trailer home. He and his sons were tent-camping in the back yard when it happened, and his young son watched his mother die unable to get out of the blazing trailer home.  This man picked up his surviving children and moved them to central Texas, where last weekend everything they owned went up in flames, albeit this time with no loss of life.  When I hear of people surviving losses like that, I am ashamed of my whining about the events of this summer whose outcomes I don't like - if these people can still love and trust God throughout all that, how can I complain?  Yet there is a skeptic part of me watches this and asks, though, if this is what God allows to happen to people who do follow Him, how does he treat the ones who don't?  - So should I follow God out of fear - I don't really like that idea much.


I'm having a real trust issue with God right now - I keep hearing 'You just have to let go, and let God handle things.'  and I think 'Yeah, right, like he handled the trial this summer, or like he's handling my son, or like he handled those people who lost everything they own' - and I know that is wrong of me to expect that everything will come right in the short term, but I still can't help feeling betrayed or let down.


Today's prayer of confession really hit me where I live right now, so I'll post it here - right now I'm still singing, but I'm not feeling the joy in my heart:

 O God, we sit beside waters of sorrow and despair.  We hear voices that hold us captive and realize that apart from you our hearts do not sing.  We turn to you for deliverance.  Guide us to the promised shore, the place of justice and mercy, that returning to you we may sing a new song.  Amen.