This is how grown up the kid is.

1. Riding bike with two wheels.
2. Starting to learn cursive in school.
3. On a soccer team.
4. Takes showers.
5. Took his first steps towards reading Green Eggs and Ham last night.
6. Played his first ukulele chord, also last night.
7. Lost his first tooth today.
8. Spent more than 15 minutes playing outside alone with the older neighbor boys who taught him how to ride a skateboard. (They commented that he was doing very well and learning very quickly and that Americans are very strong in skateboarding.)
9. Watched the news with me tonight.
10. At the dinner table, asked very seriously if he could start calling us "Mom" and "Dad" instead of Mama and Papa, because that's what grown up boys call their parents. We gave no definitive answer, stalled by saying we'd take his request into consideration.

happy

good way to end a long day.

i just watched it with the girl and she immediately began crying again when it was done. oh well, guess we'll have to watch it again.

The other kid, however, must be living on the wrong continent. He just pointed to poor Big Bird and said, "Look! There's an Angry Bird!!" No...no, not quite.

music in versailles

i really love all twenty minutes of this.

if you get bored quick, at least skip ahead to 6:20 for a really surprising look at Versailles.

Asaph's Psalm 77: Trusting Unseen Footprints

I thought I had wrung all I could out of this Psalm, but it keeps coming to mind. Especially those unseen footprints (v19).

A friend told me the story of another friend who needed a serious life-saving operation. If I've got the story right, it came in the order of an extensive blood transfusion, where they replaced his blood with new blood. Imagine: an operation where they quite literally suck the life out of you. This man described it to my friend, his state of consciousness while on the operating table. There were no bright lights or reassuring angels, no soothing harps, no sunset beach scenes, no calling voices. Nothing but darkness in the fullest sense of the word. It was a deep experience of fully trusting God, the man said, trusting Him when there was no external, visible, clearly valid reason for doing so. God took him on a path through great waters and His footprints were unseen. If that is not faith, what is? (And obviously, he lived to tell the story.)

Another friend recently shared the story of Daniel coming out of the lions' den. As I mentioned in my last post, I'm still struck by the fact that God didn't rescue Daniel before going into the lions' den, and even that he let him go for the entire night, but that's exactly the path described in Psalm 77. This friend highlighted just verse 23 of Daniel 6: "No kind of harm was found on him, because he had trusted in his God." Even as Daniel is threatened with his life, he trusts God. And the story has a happy ending.

And so here goes my train of thought: Quite a few Christians, being so eager to paint sunny pictures and sugar coat as if we're responsible for giving God good press, tend to see Daniel as the guy who dove into the den with a smile on his face, ready to give big hugs to those smiling teddy bears. After all, trust means confidence and confidence means a puffed up chest and head held high. Fearless, doubtless, strong and bold, convinced that he'd come back out unscathed because God always gives the victory to the ones who have enough trust. 

If you know me, you know full well I have a really hard time putting up with that train of thought and that picture of trust. But I'm also getting really tired of feeling like the Debbie Downer Pessimistic Realist all the time, so I began to doubt myself. Maybe that is what trusting God looks like, I said to myself. Maybe I've got it all wrong. Maybe I need more faith. Maybe I'm making too many provisions for my melancholic flesh. 

(Yes, I'm thinking all of this as my friend is still talking about Daniel.) In that moment it was as if God himself turned the pages for me, just a few stories ahead of the lions' den, and pointed to the verse. Daniels three friends are about to go into the furnace -- a strikingly similar scenario -- and they too trust God. 

"Our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of your hand, O king. But if not, be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the golden image that you have set up."

But if not. Meaning, Even if he doesn't. We've got a feeling he will, but maybe he won't, and actually it really doesn't matter.

I've got to believe that all four of these men facing death, even as they trusted entirely in God, were unsettled, nervous, scared, and even wrestled with doubt. These were probably moments where God's footprints were unseen. They didn't know how it was going to end, whether or not they'd exit unsinged and uneaten. But not knowing doesn't mean not trusting, because that wasn't what mattered; the earthly outcome wasn't why they were trusting in God. Their trust simply meant that they would obey him no matter what the cost, knowing they could trust in his infinite goodness no matter the result.

When we minimize our trust in God to our own happy endings, we minimize our God.

And as Jesus descends into his own den of lions, he expresses his anguish to the friends around him: "My soul is very sorrowful even to death." He begs for God's path to take a detour around the deep waters, to be rescued before entering the fiery furnace: "My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me." Yet his trust in God surrenders to obedience: "Nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will." 

And then: "My God! Why have you forsaken me?!"

The tragedy that followed is the one and only time God forsakes, abandons, rejects, turns his back on one of his own. If ever there were a time where God's footprints are not seen, it is most definitely here. And yet Jesus keeps on trusting in obedience. He continues, seeking, calling out, "My God."

It was not the happy ending anyone wanted or expected, but it was indeed a happy ending that surpasses understanding, proving yet again that his goodness does not end and he is worth trusting, in the deepest sense of the word.