Our Refuge, Our Peace

One of the people whom I've had the pleasure of getting to know during the past few months in Texas is my boss's housekeeper.  She is a precious Guatemalan woman who has been in the states ten years.  Hers is a long, winding, painful story, and especially now, it is so hard for her to see the hand of God in her life. 


For the sake of privacy, I'll keep details to a minimum; it'll suffice, I hope, in conveying her frustration and heartbreak, to say that three of her kids are still in Guatemala, and they are suffering.  Her eleven-year-old twins have talked about the possibility of committing suicide, and they have no place to lay their heads, no shoes, no clothes, and little to eat.  Our movement toward being able to legally bring the kids to the states has come to an abrupt halt on behalf of the government, and either their mother will stay here with her American husband and daughter, or she will return with her daughter to Guatemala to stay. 


If she stays, she will have to live with the abandonment of her kids, their continued pain and her separation from them; if she goes, she will return to a world of poverty, a world her American daughter has never known, a world in which she has been a stranger to her kids for ten years.


The world is broken.  


How do you comfort someone who will have deep suffering and grief whether she turns to the right or to the left?  


All we know, by God's sweet mercy and grace, is that this is not all, that even though in this world we'll have suffering, he has overcome it.  He's coming back, and more than that--while we're here, he promises never to leave us or forsake us, that he's always with us.  He is a shield about us, the lifter of our heads, our strong tower, our solid rock.  I love God for many reasons, but today I love him especially because he lets us be weak, and because he weeps when we weep.  He is a good Father who allows us to simply curl up in his lap, knowing that we do not know.  


I talked to my coworker, Eddie, about suffering this morning, and God's closeness to his children in the midst of it.  He mentioned a painting he'd heard about, in which all is storm and chaos, wind and waves and lightning...but when one looks closely, in the cleft of the rock, one can see a mother bird huddled over her nest, sitting firmly, peacefully.  This is a picture of who our God is for us!  He is our Refuge and our Peace.

              But he said to them, “It is I; do not be afraid.”


"I believe that I shall look upon the goodness of the LORD
       in the land of the living!
Wait for the LORD;
    be strong, and let your heart take courage;
    wait for the LORD!"  
          -Psalm 27:13-14