I will sing of your love forever.
I will sing of your blessings ...
I will sing of your joys ...
I will sing of your methods, your grace, your mercy, your love forever.
I was reading a story this morning about the wildfires in the West.
According to the Associated Press, cars were burned to nothing but charred metal and only concrete remained of many homes in the neighborhoods most damaged by the worst wildfire in Colorado history.
But for residents allowed Sunday to temporarily return to the area for the first time since they fled encroaching flames last week, the fact that other things were left untouched was equally jarring.
"Good Lord! I've never seen anything like this," said C.J. Moore upon her return to her two-story home, now reduced to ashes and one of nearly 350 houses that were damaged or destroyed in the Waldo Canyon fire that left two people dead. While searching for her great-grandmother's cast-iron skillets, Moore marveled at the juxtaposition of what burned and what hadn't. "To find my mail in my mailbox, unscathed. It's just unreal," she told The Associated Press by phone. "Bird baths are fine. Some of the foliage is fine."
Think of what this means to our ideas about God's will. If we're are too sure of our theology, that God's will for us includes this and precludes that, then what do we do with stories like this? How does one believer deal with his or her house burning to the ground and another's being spared? Was it God's will that your house burn, than your life be turned upside down, that you be devastated, and the other guy across the street receive nothing?
What if the other guy wasn't a believer? What do we do with the fact that believers are hit just as hard or harder than the ones who aren't?
To me, and this is just a guy's opinion, the safer thing is to simply sing of God's love through it all.
At one churh yesterday on my first Sunday as pastor of three churches in, uh, west Louisiana, I had two persons not named Turner; at the third church, it was packed. Does the church with two receive less than a blessing than does the larger one? Does it receive less of an effort? Does it not mean to do the sames things?
The safer thing is to simply sing of God's love, of his blessings that include the very life we breathe, of his joys, of his methods, grace, mercy, love forever.
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