ONLY GOD – PART FOUR

PART 4/4

TAP TO LISTEN

As the days go by and we gather and plan for our move back south, God continues to place people in our path confirming this move is His plan for our lives. God has strengthened my faith over the years and though I do not need these signs to confirm that He is working all things for our good, the gift of His grace in allowing me to visually see Him working is something I will never forget. One night while we were at one of our boys baseball games, a random man walked up and sat beside us. It was a chilly, unusual night with a little rain fall in Arizona and he was in town visiting for some sunshine and golf in the Arizona heat. He was visiting from Nebraska and was a friend of a man that had a grandson playing on our team. We got to talking about baseball and life. He of course wanted to know where my accent was from. Ninety percent of people guess Texas and when I say Alabama ninety percent say the opposite teams battle cry… so I usually say Alabama and immediately follow that with, we graduated from Auburn. He laughed and said, “oh you’re a War Eagle girl.” He said he was once at a work conference and met a man that had played football at Alabama and lived in a town where he started a ranch for boys. It almost felt like I was being punked because the school associated with this ranch was the same exact school that we had prayed for the boys to be able to get into. I told him how I had grown up in that  small town where the Alabama player had this ranch and that we were set to move back to the town where our boys would be going to this school.  He was a bit shocked himself that two strangers from different parts of the country could sit at a baseball game in Arizona talking about a small town and a small school in Alabama and it be the exact place that God was moving us to. Only God could orchestrate that meeting.

A few days later while at my usual Wednesday Bible study I opened up to our small group, with a shaky voice, asking for prayers as we navigated the move details. I asked for specific prayers for our hearts to get ready and to be able to see and to hear God in every detail of His plan. Telling people you love that you are moving away from them and asking them to pray for the details while you yourself are still trying to process the decision to move is heavy and layered with many emotions. I cried and they cried. As we left Bible study that day and headed to lunch I would have never guessed what God would reveal to me next. We were sitting outside at lunch and a man, named Bruce, wearing a hat with Jesus written across it, walked up to our table with a basket full of bread. He was selling bread for a local church helping with addiction rescue homes. After we bought some bread from him we made small talk that led into Jesus and how He rescued him out of his own addiction. After our ten minute conversation we asked if we could pray with him. We prayed to God thanking him for rescuing our new friend out of destruction. As we finished praying for him, he started praying for us. We had not discussed any of our lives with him besides our common love for Jesus. As he prayed, he prayed for us as humans, he prayed for our husbands and for our kids and wrapped up the prayer asking God to bless our homes. It felt like God’s voice was coming out of this man’s voice through his prayer. Only God knows our hearts and hearing this man that we had just met carrying a basket full of bread pray for things that were so freshly asked to be covered in prayer, could Only be God. It was day after day, God was revealing the deeper details that I was still trying to process for myself. He was helping me hold on tight to every moment and cling to Him more and more through the unknowns as He provided us with our daily bread that was far more than just the bread that our friend was selling us.  The bread in that basket was God telling me one day at a time, as I depend on Him for all things that He would provide for us all the spiritual nourishment and guidance that we would need to follow Him and His ways while giving Him all the glory.  

Within a week after meeting him, I was standing in line at a restaurant between baseball games, and in walked another man, named Bernard, with the same Jesus hat on singing a hymn that I recognised very well. It was the hymn that carried me through the loss of my brother in 1997. The man had a cane and I’ll never forget slowly looking up to see him swaying smoothly with his cane while singing “It is well with my soul.” I knew I couldn’t let the moment go. I couldn’t ignore God in this. I made eye contact with him and immediately he smiled a big grin. I said, “I love Jesus too.”  He replied, “I could tell by the joy in your smile you love Jesus.”  The day before meeting this man, I had read through Galatians 5 about the fruits of the spirit and the importance of making it known to all, by our actions, that we walk with the Spirit. God was in this meeting.  His Spirit and Words were living and active within this conversation with someone I had just met.  As we both got our food and went our own ways, he reached in his pocket and pulled out a cross while saying, I want you to have this and remember God is always in control. The same exact words that my brother, Sean, left with me before he passed away from open heart surgery. Week after week as we prepped to close on our house, God was showing up in big ways confirming that the soil that He once moved us away from to refine us, to stretch us and to grow us, was the exact soil He was returning us to be planted and deeply rooted into. Only God could do that. 

May arrived and the date the buyers wanted to close on was changed to May 15th.  May 15 holds so many core memories for me and Matt. This is the day that we got married, in 2004. We both knew this change was no coincidence.  This was the day that God united us and this would be now a day that brought completion and closure to a huge part of our journey.  A move that shifted our hearts closer to God in the desert.  A move that prepared us to return to where our story all began.  Within this closure was a lot of new that was waiting for us in the south.  As we closed and signed the papers, all I could do was pray without ceasing trusting God’s plan and His desires for our lives.  In all circumstances we rejoice, in all circumstances we pray and in all circumstances we trust our Heavenly Father who has carried us and revealed Himself over and over to all of us as we have surrendered and obeyed His ways and not our own.  This world will try to hide all of this, but keep focused on the Kingdom and trust God in every detail.  His ways are always better than our own ways.  “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” Isaiah 55:8-9

The day that God moved us into our home in AZ was June 25th, 2021, Conrad’s third birthday and the day that God is walking us out of our AZ home for our seventh move as a family, is June 25th, 2025, Conrad’s seventh birthday.  The same day, four years later. Seven holds completion and wholeness, divine timing. God is never fully complete with us this side of heaven, but I trust the work He has done within us while living in the desert is complete.  I feel parts of my brokenness that I never imagined being whole again were pieced back together, into a wholeness that only God could do. I know God’s timing is never off and His plan is never a mistake.  It is all well with my soul, because it is all from Him.

We are heading south into a rental home that we are thankful to have while we build our home on the land that God has for us.  We trust fully that the home we are set to build isn’t our forever home, but a step within our earthly journey that God has prepared for us, aligning our hearts with His plan for our eternal home in Heaven with Him.  

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” John 3.16

All glory to God. 

“God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble.” Psalm 46.1

Photo by Christine Johnson

Bread photo by Kate Cox