Out of Broken Eggshells...

Today I found out why God gave us math. From now on, so help me, I will never complain about Algebra! God in His kindness gave us math so that, somewhere in this maelstrom of a world we live in, we could find refuge in a concrete answer. There’s a problem. There’s a formula. You solve it.
The End.

Most of life isn’t like that, and I’m okay with that for now. In fact, I am more okay with it than I’ve ever been. This week I went around in such a silly stupor of joy in what God has done in my life that questions and regrets are still just falling off me like old leaves off an oak tree.

It didn’t start out that way. In fact, two weeks ago, at the beginning of the special prayer week at church, I went into the “Redemption Room” to cry out to God because I was feeling so messed up. As in, months and months of built up messed-up-ness

I empathize with Humpty Dumpty. Before last week, I felt like him. You know the story…sat on a wall, had a great fall, no one could put him back together again. A kind of Jeremiah character. I was getting really tired of being a shattered egg. The whole world is a carton of broken eggs. But if I’m the one with hope in Jesus, why was I still laying there in pieces?

In the Redemption there were piles of rocks, and you could write in Sharpie the thing or person you were asking God to redeem. I could think of a hundred things, a hundred people, but I simply put, “My Joy.”

Throughout the week a series of shakings and quakings happened through various circumstances. I prayed, I made new friends, I called old ones, I went running, trying to remember how people breath when they haven’t been socked in the chest. Then, the sweetness of God’s healing and redemption began washing over me in wave after wave. An old shell was coming off. I felt, well, if you’ll excuse a silly pun, like a newly hatched chic!

The freedom is still unbelievable to me. I didn’t know that the things I thought were so good in my life could be such chains, and I didn’t know how chained I was until the chains were torn off. I didn’t know I would rejoice over something that would have grieved me weeks ago. My time of sorrow is over; He has freed me from my chains. And now, before me, I have a future full of “the One Important Thing,”
Jesus. And when you get Him, you get everything.

Now I walk around with a different view. God gave me compassion where I only wished I had it before. I want to take this outside! This morning I walked out of algebra class with tears in my eyes. It wasn’t because of Algebra, by the grace of God. It was because God gave me the chance to help the student in front of me, a girl from another country, in the simplest way. And I was looking around at the current of students passing by, looking out on them like Jesus looked on Jerusalem, seeing that so many are “sheep without a shepherd, harassed and thrown down…” and suddenly I knew that the joy of my salvation has been restored. My cup, even my cup over flows!

“The Lord is my shepherd
I shall not want
He makes me lie down in green pastures
He leads me beside still waters
He restores my soul
He leads me in the paths of righteousness
For His name’s sake
Even though I walk
Through the valley of the shadow of death
I will fear no evil
For though art with me
Thy rod and thy staff,
They comfort me
Thou hast prepared a table before me
In the presence of my enemies
Thou hast anointed my head with oil
My cup overflows
Surely goodness and lovingkindness
Shall follow me all the days of my life
And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord
Forever.”

Amen.
Psalm 23