Long Live King Hezekiah!

When I confessed my envy of your long-standing active friendships, my love, you countered my blog with your own confession of your own great envy of me: my long-standing active relationship with God. You used words like genuine, dynamic, interactive, meaningful both directions...and you made me cry. I cried because these words--when I received them from a witness--made these truths truer. I'd be too afraid I was becoming proud if I allowed myself to perceive things this special from God Himself about my relationship with Him, but because He used you to convey the message, it became another thing entirely for me to accept the words. You were the voice of God giving me hope and comfort. I didn't conjure up what God said to me through you, so thank you for being willing to give me this gift, especially since you felt like you were giving it from a position of lack on your own part.

Now here is God's answer, I think, to this ache you admitted for a more interactive, dynamic, genuine, meaningful both directions relationship for yourself and Him, as well as the answer to another ache you've felt, about your own mortality. He just this morning gave me understanding of that strange night when time went backwards for you. Again it is one of those how-did-I-not-see-this-meaning-before things. If you remember you woke to go to the bathroom and get a drink in the night, looked at the clock, came back to bed and slept. Later when you woke again and glanced at the clock, it was an earlier time than it had been the first time you got up! You swore you'd been awake; it wasn't a dream, etc. We packed it into the box of mysterious night activity we've both been having for the last year or two and left it there. Since then, many things have happened...you've had dreams of impending change, gone through a massive spiritual testing time, now been driven into a state of involuntary unsureness, and through it all you've have a nagging suspicion that death might wait for you the minute you finish everything assigned to this particular venture God has laid at our feet.

The time moving backward event answers your question of just how "impending" is death for you. In Scripture, King Hezekiah was given the word by the Prophet Isaiah that he would die. He sought the Lord to change that. God agreed to add to Hezekiah's days, and the sign that He gave of His agreement to this was that the sundial would move backward 10 degrees.

Now we could do the math and see how many "minutes" that backward movement translates to be, and I could dig back in my journal to find the exact times you said the clock showed, for you exactly remembered these...another pertinent thing, and I expect we'd find the times match up. But I hardly think it necessary to look for such proof, not at this point in our faith-walk with God, it would only be wasting time, for the message is still the same: years have been added to your life. God said so, in a way so intimately associated with Him as to leave no doubt about it. God bless all those years, my love! Starting today!