Reach Up!

Many Christmases ago, I posted a piece called Low Branches about how our great God bridges the gap between our feeble efforts and His perfection. As I was praying recently, that concept reemerged into my mind, but in greater detail.

I thought of Moses climbing Mount Sinai to obtain the ten commandments, those two stone tablets which provide God's instructions for holy living. I recollected how this paragon of faith, in a fit of righteous indignation, smashed the words written by God Himself.

But our God is a God of second chances. He gave Moses and the people (not least Moses’s brother, Aaron, whose actions provoked Moses’s rashness in the first place, and who blamed his foolishness on the very people he led into idolatry) a second set of commandments after Moses destroyed the first.

What a patient, forgiving deity. 

This same divine being sent His Son to earth to wash away the sins of believers and grant His children unlimited access to His presence, even though our sin warrants the very opposite.

I'm going through a time of frailty (aren't we always, when we get right down to it? but some seasons of living just feel more fragile than others). As is so often the case, this period of fragility is finding me wakeful, watchful, and wistful. I'm reaching up with extra gusto to seek God’s hands, using the vehicle of prayer that never fails to get me to the right destination. I’m counting extra hard on the Lord’s cleansing nature and open door policy for believers, subjects about which I wrote quite confidently years ago. 

Did I mean it then? Do I believe it now?

Reaching up is the only way I know to find out. Vulnerability can be a companion to desperation or determination. By God's grace, I'm leaning towards the latter.

To quote Tiny Tim, whose words still ring true nearly two centuries after Dickens penned them, “God bless us, every one.”