Houston to the Rest of My Life

It doesn't take much to render me in a sentimental mood. I think I have always existed in a partial sentimental mood. On Saturday morning, all it took was a playlist of good songs and an open highway snaking its way west through Texas. Worship at 70 miles an hour; is there a better kind?

I was driving home to Buda from Houston, an absolute mess of emotions, which I often find are the ideal personal ingredients for entering into a time of praise - those scattered times in which you realize no one on earth knows exactly where you are, and so in this way you are known only to God, and there is a noticeable presence wrapped around your aloneness. I was feeling stretched and somewhat confused. Stretched because someone I was immediately concerned with was also traveling at that time, moving in almost the complete opposite direction from me, and there was that well-known feeling of separation that is impossible to shake. Confused because, like the countryside that lay far around the bend ahead of me, my future (what I am going to do ... what am I going to be?) was unseen, unknowable. And Saturday morning I was particularly concerned with my future.

It is a hard thing to balance the desire to plan out our lives to the smallest degree, and the call to live in the freeing reality of casting all our cares upon our overly capable God. Entrusting a future we cannot envision to a God we cannot see often challenges our equilibrium, mocks even our common sense. And for anyone that is even remotely compulsive when it comes to the big question, "What comes next?” it is hard to lay aside our own blueprints/schemes for our future without proof that God will give it his undivided attention. In Scripture, Jesus says that the Spirit "will guide you into all truth,"” but the stink of it is that we are not consulted as to whether or not this truth suits what we desire for ourselves.

And then, in that moment of mind-racing worship, down HWY 80 between Luling and San Marcos, wondering of God, thinking of home, and missing a girl, there came these words gently trickling from my car speakers: "I've never seen that Spirit wind, but I have seen the tall grass bend. Still I'll follow it, wherever it may bring us." I'd heard these words before, but never pondered them. They were much welcomed.

I doubt I will ever hear God speak to me audibly. I don't know if I'll ever get a handle on this leading of the Spirit. But I can look out my window right now and see grass and tree limbs bending with the wind, and I am reminded that behind all the physics of atmosphere and pressure systems, there is a God directing it all, and he is good. For the rest of my life, this truth will stand.

And even the grass bends with purpose ... So much more shall I.