God Will Make Good

This past Saturday, I drove to Moose Lake for a visitation to St. Andrew's. Over the course of Thursday and Friday, I was obsessively monitoring the forecast as there was a chance of a pretty epic ice storm hitting several points between my house, St. Andrew's, and Duluth, where I was headed that evening. I started out early Saturday morning with a little light rain here in the cities and didn't completely know what conditions I would hit along the way. I was in touch with the Senior Warden, and kept playing out different scenarios that might unfold as I made my way north. In the end, the roads were completely fine, I encountered no delays or dangers, and I made both destinations on time and as expected. 

Our days, our weeks, and our lives can feel a little like driving north into potentially hazardous conditions. When we set out on a journey, we never know exactly what we will encounter, and usually the path unfolds very differently than we had imagined. In the Old Testament lesson appointed for the Second Sunday in Lent from Genesis 15, Abraham is encountering his own equivalent of an ice storm on I-35 around Hinckley. Three chapters earlier, he had set out on a journey with nothing to rely on but the outrageous promise that God would give him and Sarah an heir well into their old age, and that their descendants would play a key role in God's project to heal the world with love. None of that had happened yet, and the road trip wasn't panning out as expected. God shows up to reassure Abraham that things will still work out. Abraham gets whiny, pointing out the increasing improbability of it all. God patiently but clearly redirects, reassures, and insists God will make good on the original promise. 

The whole big heart of the Bible is contained in that exchange. The road we travel is hard. Life is frighteningly uncertain in its best moments, and we never know when the road beneath our wheels will turn to ice. The journey never unfolds the way we imagine. And yet, through all the twists, through all the storms, though it all looks very different than the movie in our heads, God is astonishingly, unreasonably, impossibly faithful. Despite all the ways we screw it up and get it wrong, despite all that gets thrown at us, God pursues us with a love that won't let up and won't let go. Whatever possible storms you might be facing this week, take heart, dear ones. If all the evil and ridiculous things we as God's people have done in the past didn't make God give up on us, nothing will. God is faithful. Even in the darkness of our lenten wilderness, hold fast to Jesus' indisputable triumph over death. And if you need to get a little whiny with God about it all, God's heard it before, and God can take that, too.