Comforting Words

Here are some quotes that are encouraging me tonight. There is a lot going on (when hasn't that been the case in the last few months, anyway?) in my heart right now. Put simply, Phoenix has not turned out as I had expected, in a number of ways, but most tangibly, financially. I have to decide over the next week or so if I need to cut my losses (literally) and move back to Michigan at the end of this month--or, someone will call me and offer me one of the jobs I've applied for, and I'll be able to stay.

So I am in an unexpected place, one that upsets and frustrates me, and in which I find myself at a bit of a loss as to which direction to turn, but I am finding more peace as I can do nothing except wait on God. I've been looking over my journal at the months before I left Michigan, and at a few books that a friend brought up in an email that I'd read previously, and at the Bible, and I am finding comfort, and perhaps just a faint shimmer of hope.

Here they are.

"We rediscover Emmanuel in the times where He seems hidden."
-- From my notes from a sermon author Lauren F. Winner preached while I visited Mars Hill Bible Church this summer; the sermon was about the theme of God's hiddenness in Esther

"'What if that's how God deals with us?' We ask Him all the time for the unimportant things, for the surface things, for a water bottle, but all the while He's offering us Himself, and He has to withhold the things we desire so that we will see Him and want Him before the other things, that we'll continue in relationship with Him instead of just expecting things all the time."
-- from my journal, from a conversation with Mel Hayward where she was talking about how their team had processed a relationship had developed with a family that wasn't based on material things but on real relationship, something that can be hard in India, when they were asked frequently for items without any sort of desire for relational connection

"Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure." -- Rumi, quoted in Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott

"I will ask him to help me to place myself fully in his care, to abandon myself to him, knowing that he always wants what is best for me." -- from Sacred Space, an online daily prayer website

". . . When a lot of things start going wrong all at once, it is to protect something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born--and that this something needs for you to be distracted so that it can be born as perfectly as possible." -- Traveling Mercies

"Live carefree before God; he is most careful with you." -- 1 Peter 5:7, The Message