A Lesson on a Winding Road

Yesterday I wrote about the unknown of this soon-coming adventure, this mystery season that’s creeping up on our family of four (six, counting the puppies).

We drove the back-road, the little, windy highway to the school where Trav will teach this semester. The boys dozed in the back, their heads bobbing with the road’s twist here and turn there. We talked about dreams, and feelings we have and how God might be speaking.

“I don’t really know why, I just really want to live there,” I admitted quietly.

“If I’m going to be accepted, really wanted, we’ll find out soon. So soon,” he said.

We understood the risks, the probably-nots, the let’s-not-get-our-hopes-up sentiments. We’d been there and it hurt to walk away with nothing.

Or was that nothing?

A friend asks what God’s good is.

How do we know God is good then? What is good? I wonder instead, whether we ought to be asking a more imaginative, more creative question. I wonder whether we ought to be asking whether God is, in fact, God, and if so, whether he is in us, and for us, and through us. If we come away with the eternal yes to these questions, maybe we should just leave it at that and live in gratefulness.

How did the Good Spirit know? How did He know that the question I’m asking inside is the question my friend Seth asks, too?

On the drive home, back through less winding, more flat and stationary, more bustle and traffic, he received a phone call.

That place I admitted my want for, that one town my heart seems to be marking for its home–its area code appeared on the tiny cell screen.

We barely fought tears and smiles crept up and bellies twisted at the thought. Is this real? A campus visit, a possibility, a chance for what might be our good.

And I felt that Spirit smile, but I knew that it wasn’t a smile for the child who gets everything she wants. It was a smile for the Psalm 16 child, who cries out,

The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup; you hold my lot. The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;  indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance.

He is good whether this door is our door or not. In this, I proclaim with my friend,

This year, I’m moving on, wrestling less with the questions of God’s goodness and more with the mystery of God’s Godness. I’m trying less to define all of His undefinable contours and accepting, instead, the reality of his indwelling.

He is good and I accept it.

And we wait. And I listen to the Lord of The Rings Pandora station while Isaiah cries his hungry, tired cry, and Eli arranges his markers in his very meticulous way. I drink cold coffee and regret that my house is a little messier than I would like.

But my portion is right here. I am secure. And my inheritance is beyond this. 

We wait. Moments wind like that road and our souls bob this way and that, and we are covered in grace at each turn. Thank God He is good.