Bless This House, Oswald and the Owner

Today's entry in the Oswald Chambers devotional Daily Thoughts for Disciples seemed so fitting to what has been "proving" itself in our lives lately that I felt the unction to include it:

We sometimes wrongly illustrate faith by the faith of a businessperson in a bind. Faith commercialy is based on calculation, but religious faith cannot be illustrated by the kind of faith we exhibit in life. Faith in God is a terrific venture in the dark; I have to believe God is good in spite of all that contradicts it in my experience. It is not easy to say that God is love when everything that happens actually gives lie to it. Everyone's soul represents some kind of battle field. The point for each one is whether he or she will hand in, as Job did, and say, "Though things look black, I will trust in God."...
The basis of faith in God is that God is the Source and Support of all existence, not that He is all existence. Job recognized this, and maintains that in the end everything will be explained and made clear. Have I this kind of faith--not faith in a principle, but faith in GOD, that He is just and tue and right? Many of us have no faith in God at all, but only faith in what He has done for us, and when these things are not apparent we lose faith and say, "Why should this happen to me? Why should there be war? Why should I be wounded and sick? Why should my friend be killed? I am going to give up my faith in God.'


"Faith in God is terrific venture in the dark..." We lived this idea out in the course of anchoring our claim on this house in yet another way. We came up against a financial obstacle that we'd missed seeing, one that to many people might seem just a drop in the bucket--in fact, to us one year ago it would have been but a drop in the bucket; but now, it was a large enough obstacle to cause us to reconsider our "call" to this house entirely. Riding along with my sons and discussing our potential problem, I answered my 11-year-old's query about what we were going to do with, "Get used to living in this van."

But the day of discovery of this particular obstacle was also a day when God's messengers bustled with activity about it. In the end, my husband put this obstacle in front of the wife of the owner, and she released us from the financial obligation. An amazing, astounding act of grace extremely rare in our society, unless it is blatantly given to such as the shoeless in the Appalachians and the likes. Rarely is it given to someone who "looks" like they shouldn't need it. And that is a story in itself, but rather than run that tangent, I'll simply share the email I sent her Thanksgiving Night:


I felt the unction to send you this note about the day you gave us grace on this house for this need. We were at a difficult point then...so many things that were "supposed" to work favorably for us ended up working against us...from the help of our moving crew to the assurances of a renter at our old place so that our investment there would be freed up. By that day, Scott had almost hit a wall with regards to his faith that God really was involved in our decision to try to receive this house...in fact, he almost hit a wall over whether God was involved in much of anything with us. I hadn't lost faith in God so much, where I was faltering was in my sense of my own perception of His communication toward me. (I have his permission to share his faltering faith along with mine.)

The funny thing was, that morning, I woke up from a dream where these words were playing in my head. "Trust the woman..." Then my morning Bible reading had me reading about Lydia, the woman who offered hospitality to Paul during his missionary journeys in the book of Acts...offering grace specifically in a place of abode. Then during the devotions time at my school, the woman in charge of choosing a devotion read us the story to Babette's Feast in which a woman who secretly has great skill in cooking spends all her lottery winnings to offer a feast for the people who took her in during the French Revolution. The message was feminine grace in a place where a woman had the power to give it. All morning, women extending grace were parading before me. Later, when we discovered we'd missed the part of the lease that told about that payment, you took Scott's call and made a reality out of the day's foretelling of grace extended by a woman of influence.

Thank you so much. Today was really a day of joy and peace because of the grace you extended. We pray God will remember your generosity and bless you in kind.

Faith in God vs. faith in circumstances, and all to the affirmation of divine and human interactive relationship--a hallmark feature of life lately.