Act One - The Piano Bench
My husband and I were sitting at our outside breakfast table at an adorable Beach side cafe during his Spring Break getaway. I looked around and saw many couples about our age doing the same thing and I internally giggled, enjoying the irony of our unconventional life path leading us here. Our bank accounts likely didn’t match the folks sitting beside us, but my omelet tasted just as good. What a genuinely sweet surprise.
35 years earlier, Shannon and I were sitting together listening to Tommy Okes preach about ETERNITY. He challenged us to live lives invested in what really matters for eternity instead of piling up a bunch of temporary satisfactions and things and stuff that he called ‘dots’. Shannon and I were cut to the heart. We were 18 and 19 years old and looking at our lives together, Tommy’s words were timely, powerful, and demanded an answer from us. So we slipped out of the church gathering and quietly found a vacant room behind the auditorium, it happened to be the choir room. We were both in tears and we knelt down at the piano bench and cried out our promises to God that we would never live for temporary pursuits and satisfactions. We meant it. We promised God that our lives would be given wholly to His Kingdom and like Matthew 6:33, we would ‘Seek first His Kingdom’” and trust God to provide what we needed.
And it began. 7 years of traveling the country off and on with missions and never knowing what or if or when we would be paid, but we were always fed, sheltered, loved and protected. Then a local ministry assignment for the season of all the babies arriving, in the midst of birthing our 4 children a film was released documenting my testimony and I was asked to travel again- with all of my babies. I have littered the country with pacies and sippy cups. Then a tour of all 50 states living in an RV for a year- our most difficult journey of faith at the time. Then a move to NY, a diagnosis of disease, a lost job, a found job, and finding Jesus in loneliness. Then a Church plant in North Carolina and a ride of faith for 9 years as we met in a downtown bar and started an Art School. Then a call for my family to tell the Story of God and tour, we went 27 months without known income- and yet we fed the team of 8-10 people every meal and bought and sold 3 houses in three years. Then the birth of another North Carolina Church and a wild ride through a global pandemic- where that little Church didn’t just survive- but continues to thrive. I cannot recount the multitude of steps that were absolutely rooted inside that Matthew 6:33 promise. It would take volumes of books to retell all the provision that God poured out on us as we chased His Kingdom.
Mid Pandemic, Shannon and I sat at our kitchen table to discuss the Chicken Little warnings that the ‘sky was indeed falling.’ Do we store stuff up? If so, how much? Where do we put it inside our tiny house? The conversation felt like wisdom at the time, many people we loved were doing the same thing. We had very little extra money to store stuff up and very little space to put it in, and.....the whole time we were having this conversation I could see a Robin out my front window repeatedly placing her beak into the ground and pulling up a worm. The conversation of storing stuff up was forever glued to the image of that Robin's effort to get that worm. The voice of Jesus was nearly audible inside my heart, overlaying all of Shannon and I’s
concerns, “Look at the birds. They do not sow or reap or store away in barns but your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than them?” “Store up treasure in heaven...”
We didn’t end up buying anything extra.
I am praying for each of you today (and me too) as we face our “too hard” and “too much”- and as we each feel “not enough”. Jesus sweetly woke me up this morning remembering that He NEVER scares me with tomorrows ‘too much’. That is not His voice. He says, one day at a time.
My recent reoccurring repentance is from trying to ‘know’ how this will all work. I can’t ‘know’ that, and trying to know is certainly gorging at the Tree of Knowledge in a Herculean effort to save myself and all that I love.
My repentance is to switch tree’s- and take the fruit from the Tree of Life. To say...it’s not mine to know the way through but instead to worship the One who does and celebrate His faithfulness in every step.
That piano bench promise has rescued us more times than I can count.
