Living In the Presence of God

The rain, coming down in torrents, beat against the front of our house.  We went about our business, that Saturday morning, trying to ignore the weather maps that clearly showed the worst part of the hurricane approaching our eastern North Carolina home.  I sat at my computer trying to get some work done while the gales of wind forced whistles through the windows over my desk.  One rather large gust of wind caused the walls surrounding the room to shudder which drove me down stairs to check the weather maps once more.  I snuggled close to my husband on the couch as he watched the weather man on TV pointing out the swirling clouds moving closer to our happy little home.  As my eyes were glued to the screen, I heard a little girl of ten say, "Don't worry, it's ok, I put a bucket under the drip at the front door."  She walked into the kitchen before her words penetrated my mind.  I dismissed them briefly, distracted by the warnings of tornadoes and floods.  As the commercial played, I ventured over to the front door to see what our nonchalant little girl had discovered.  In the entryway, I noticed a bead of water forming in the frame above the window surrounding the door.  A small drip splashed down on the hardwood floors below, missing the bucket altogether.  As I looked more closely, I noticed another drip hitting the bucket dead on.  Following the drip upwards, I noticed a stream of water cascading down the wall starting below the window high above the doorway.  Immediately, I called to my husband (the solver of all the household problems) and asked him what we should do.  The rest of the day we took turns mopping up the floor, wiping up the wall, and going outside to place towels and tarps around the front door to block the rain, pelting our house at a ninety degree angle.  When the towels and tarps were in place the dripping almost stopped, but when the wind blew the towels out of their position, the dripping increased to a pretty steady stream. 

On one occasion when a gust of wind blew the towels out of place and the slow drip began to flow faster, our twelve year old daughter approached me with tears in her eyes.  Distracted by the wet floor, I asked, "What's wrong?"  She replied trying to suppress her anger, "Who put my hamster cage on the back porch?"  Irritated by one more problem to deal with I snapped, "What are you talking about?"  Then, in a flash back I remembered.  One night about a week and a half ago, my husband and I were sitting in the living room, catching up after a long day.  The hamster cage was sitting on the bookcase near the fireplace.  The little hamster was happily running on its wheel, making a loud rumbling noise.  My loving husband, distracted by the noise, carefully cradled the cage in his arms as he took it outside and placed it on the shelving located on the back porch.  Oh no! I thought, that poor thing has been outside in the hot temperatures for over a week.  "It's OK!" I reassured her, "Just bring him in the house now."  "I can't!  A gust of wind knocked the cage over!  It is broken in several places, the bedding is scattered all over the porch, and I can't find my hamster anywhere!"  I ran out to the back porch and asked everyone to follow.  We spent ten minutes in the 40 to 50 mile an hour wind looking for the hamster, to no avail.  I reassured her that peanut was a spunky little guy, and he was likely hiding under a bush somewhere waiting for us to find him.  No one believed me. 
 
When we finally came back in, we went back to our posts mopping up the floor and trying to keep the dripping to a minimum.  My husband pulled my daughter aside and apologized for forgetting about her hamster.  She reluctantly accepted his apology leaving both of them feeling pretty sad.  Eventually, the wind and the rain became less and less and we shoved a paper towel in the crack where the drip was coming from, to keep the floor dry.  We ate a dinner of tuna fish and crackers lit by flash lights, hoping for the electricity to return before we had to go to bed.  Instead, we went to sleep with the windows open in the pitch blackness of the night.  When we awoke the next morning, the pleasant breeze and the cool crisp morning air led us to explore the damage outside.  As we stepped out on the back porch, we noticed the bedding of the hamster cage scattered about.  The only other damage we noticed was our gas grill that had been turned over on its side.  Fortunately, we did not have much to clean up.  I went back into the house for a broom, when I heard my husband call, "Get a box or a bucket or something to put the hamster in."  "What!?!" I yelled.  "The hamster is out here in the fallen grill...get a box quickly before it gets away!"  I bolted up the stairs to get the box that we had brought the hamster home in, and ran outside to where my husband was crouched on the side of the half opened grill top.  I positioned myself on the other side and put the box, lid opened, at the edge of the grill.  The little guy ran across the top of the grill and jumped right in the box, shaking with excitement, or maybe with the horror of the weather he had just experienced the night before.

My husband, overjoyed at the miracle he had just witnessed, ran directly to my daughter's room, gently and excitedly woke her from her sleep, and presented her with the gift he had in his hands.  She took one look inside the box and burst into tears.   The terrible blunder made by a loving father had turned into a miracle that would create a bond between a father and a daughter for a lifetime.  

As I reflected on the events of that hurricane weekend, I saw a picture of the life that we all live as parents.  If we are honest we all have made terrible "blunders": We respond to our kids in anger, with irritated answers, with careless or caustic, biting words;  we make selfish decisions, poor choices, and take detrimental courses of action.  In short, we sin and we sin and we sin against the children we love.  Before we had kids we were sure that it was because of bad parenting that the kid was throwing a fit in the candy isle.  We said to ourselves, Our kids were going to turn out right because we were going to be better parents.  But the truth is, we have a war with sin waging in our hearts.  We want to respond with patience, but more than not, we get irritated.  We want to discipline in love, but many times it is anger that rules.  Romans 9:21ff talks of this war that Christians fight daily.

²¹So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. ²²For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, ²³but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. ²⁴Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? 

Our daily struggle against the desires of our flesh gives us a clear picture of the depth of our sin.  The Bible says, we are dead in our trespasses and sins (Ephesians 2:5).  Just as a dead man has no hope of getting up and walking, so we, who are spiritually dead, have no hope of bringing any righteousness of our own before a holy God.  Even our feeble attempts at righteous works are as filthy rags (Isaiah 64:6).  So how do we respond?  Do we say with despair, "Fine, I give up!  I will always struggle with sin, and therefore my kids and my life is destined to be messed up!"  The answer is emphatically, "No!"  Romans 8 gives us hope.  

¹There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. ²For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. ³For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do...

²⁶Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. ²⁷And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. ²⁸And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.

We, instead, respond with confession and then hope.  We confess each day that we are truly sinful and without hope accept for the Saving Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.  Then we live with hope; hope that God will use even our worst days as a parent to work good in our lives and the lives of our kids.  We can then live with confidence that God will take the actions of a sinful father or mother and bring about good (sometimes in the form of a hurricane miracle).