The Call at 9:45 pm

            I wanted to scream. I sobbed instead.

            Phone calls at 9:45 at night aren’t good news, and this one wasn’t. It was the worst news about someone I knew. A life was gone. The request was for prayer.

            Yes, of course I would pray. Except when I found my rocker and sat in the dark, I didn’t have any words. So I rocked and let the tears running down my face carry my heart heavenward until words flowed from my lips.

            When you work in a field, you never know if or how a crop will grow. Neither do we know as we work in God’s fields how the seed will respond in the soil of someone’s life. That was why I sobbed. There was seed sown into this person’s life. I remember conversations and knew others had reached out, too.

Where is he now? God knows.

Questions—I have them. I want to ask why. I’ve heard that I should and that I shouldn’t ask God why. I’ve heard that one day I’ll understand why, and I’ve also heard that I won’t care why by then. Right now I would still like to ask it.

And I want to know how to think about Isaiah 55:11 and the parable of the sower. I want to know how that applies to giving someone a Bible when he asks for one. I want to know why the Enemy has such a stronghold in parts of my city. I want to know how I can do more, serve harder, live more powerfully as a servant of God so someone or many someones won’t leave loved ones behind who need prayer. I long to be the fragrance of Christ, the word of hope, truth and salvation in a mad, mad, world lost in the darkness of sin.

In the spring my family used to go mushroom hunting. On one hunt, as we made our last sweep through the woods, we came upon the most amazing find of morel mushrooms. They were everywhere! While my siblings and I couldn’t pick them fast enough, my mother couldn’t see them at all. We’d point one out; she’d pick it but couldn’t find another. People are like my mother with the mushrooms when it comes to God. He constantly makes himself known everywhere, using anything and everything to get mankind’s attention, yet he remains invisible to most.

There is a mystery about how God works within a person.  When his Truth penetrates a heart, convicts, extends the rescue of the cross, and is then genuinely embraced, a life is transformed. How that happens, when that happens, the stages in which it happens are mysterious, at least to me.

Faith.  We are saved when we exercise it. Then we walk by it, live by it, and watch it grow as we obey and learn to know God better. I have no idea where this person was on the road of faith or if he’d ever gotten on it at all. And it breaks my heart.

That night I finished crying and found words to pray for the grieving. Still, I’m furious with sin and the Enemy of Our Souls. And I have questions, questions. While I may not get those answers here or even ever, I do know that God hasn’t changed.

So tomorrow I’m going to get up and pray and work for the King so perhaps somewhere along the way God will allow me to be involved with the mystery of transformation in someone’s heart or the opportunity to offer hope and help to someone who doesn’t know that all the promises of God are “yes and Amen!” Because that’s what people of faith do.