And yet, God still shows up

It was quite the East­er weekend.

Although it took me a while to real­ize the fact, it seemed that the cel­e­bra­tion of the death and res­ur­rec­tion of Christ that was being planned for this past East­er Sun­day in the vil­lage was going to be some­thing real­ly spe­cial. Why? Because of the oppo­si­tion, of course.

Sat­ur­day was a vil­lage work­day, where the men and young men work togeth­er on var­i­ous projects around our land such as build­ing a green­house, gar­den­ing, fix­ing leaks, build­ing decks, etc.

I was work­ing on a web­site design for the new vil­lage site (yes, there’s a new site com­ing soon), and most­ly spent the time run­ning into prob­lems. Then I ran off to a meet­ing with some of the musi­cians about the next day’s gath­er­ing cel­e­bra­tion music, and end­ed up spend­ing the entire plan­ning meet­ing work­ing through an argu­ment, as I had inad­ver­tant­ly made some of them mad.

Right as we were fin­ish­ing that up, my wife called me up and told me I was need­ed at home to help out with a broth­er and sis­ter there who were get­ting pret­ty heat­ed at each oth­er, so I ran home. The broth­er was work­ing on replac­ing a bro­ken and leak­ing out­door faucet at our place, and the water to the house was shut off, and he’d got­ten real­ly frus­trat­ed with how bad­ly the project was going, which had led to the con­fronta­tion. They worked through that great, though.

But our house was still with­out water.

Oh, and about that time I got told I had a meet­ing with our house­hold group to dis­cuss some plans for the next day …in fif­teen minutes.

At this point, I was get­ting overwhelmed.

I called Ari to tell her about the meet­ing, and told her how I was feeling.

“We must be going to have an amaz­ing day tomor­row,” she said.

That helped a lot. She had remind­ed me that we’re in a war all the time, and the ene­my’s always try­ing to get in through the sub­tle, hid­den ways to take us out before we even get to the fight.

We fin­ished out the Sat­ur­day rush­ing off to a 50th anniver­sary par­ty for Roy and Lau­ra Pavao, Shammah’s par­ents, who are real­ly amaz­ing peo­ple. It was real­ly a delight­ful time of skits and sto­ries in their honor.

Then home, get the gang into bed, prep for the next morn­ing (snacks, water bot­tles, etc.), and fall into bed ourselves.

Sun­day we woke up at 5:45, got all the boys up by 6:00, and some­how got every­one ready and out the door to go up to the top of the hill and gath­er with oth­er early­birds for the sun­rise on East­er morn­ing. We sang the day in, and it was won­der­ful. Then we all went down to the “town hall,” which is the large build­ing we meet in, ate muffins, drank cof­fee, and hung out together.

Then home to fin­ish break­fast and get every­body ready to meet back down at the town hall at 10:30 for the gath­er­ing. Frank had let me know that the musi­cians were going to meet togeth­er at 8:30 to plan for gath­er­ing and do a sound check. But only a cou­ple of us showed up at the town hall at 8:30. I was start­ing to get stressed out again, as I felt like we were total­ly unpre­pared, and the dead­line was looming.

I could­n’t get in touch with Frank, and was pret­ty irri­tat­ed until about 9ish, when I re-checked my mes­sage from Frank, and saw that I had missed the fact he said the musi­cians were meet­ing at 8:30 at his house, not the town hall. So it was my fault!

And now, I was feel­ing pret­ty des­per­ate. I could­n’t shake my funk, and I could only cry out to God, “Some­how, you’ve got to show up, or we’re all sunk.”

Any­way, the rest of the musi­cians showed up, and we had about half an hour to run through a sound check and touch base. But Frank said, “let’s pray,” and we all gath­ered around, hand in hand, and asked God for grace.

I was still in a funk while we prayed, but start­ed to feel like I should sing something.

Ah, no, I did­n’t feel like that! But the feel­ing was pret­ty insis­tent. So I did, and every­body joined in, and we sang the chorus:

I will praise you, Lord

And I will sing of Love come down

And as you show your face

We’ll see your glo­ry here.

All of a sud­den, God was there, right in our midst! And, just like that, we were all togeth­er.

It was so incred­i­ble, and I felt so stu­pid, small, and grate­ful. There was­n’t any­thing in me that had caused this to hap­pen, he had just decid­ed to answer our cry, and come and be with us. I was get­ting tak­en out by pet­ty prob­lems, think­ing about myself, and yet, God still shows up. I real­ly should learn not to wor­ry, because he tru­ly is a good Father to us.

We went on to have an amaz­ing gath­er­ing cel­e­brat­ing the risen Christ, break­ing bread togeth­er, and bask­ing in the Love of our Father.