bewildered by grace

So I've officially gotten a temporary second job. I'm not getting as many hours at the bank as I would like, and so I have taken to delivering pizza. It's hockey season, so that means a good amount of money, and when that's over then the tourists start pouring in. I worked my first shift on Friday night and in three hours made more money than four hours at the bank. Crazy. Reagan says it's because I have breasts and so that's why, but honestly most of the people I delivered to were women, and I don't think they care. But I compliment their homes and their babies and so that works just as well.
I thought I would feel lame delivering pizza at nearly 25 but I just couldn't bring myself to waitress. It just seemed like such hard work to learn table numbers, and where the cream was kept and on and on. By two hours into my first shift, I was answering phones, punching in orders, and making good money doing it. There's not a lot to learn that a handy new map book won't help me with, so I'm good. It's only three nights a week, in Parksville and Qualicum, and I still get all my weekends to myself. I work Monday, Wednesday, and Friday if you're sitting around in the area and want a friendly face delivering pizza... I was very surprised to enjoy my first shift, and tomorrow I'm back at it. Peter's happy because on my work nights, I get 50% off pizza. His next order is a goat cheese and oyster pizza. Um, eww.
Other than that, there's not a lot that's new for me. Peter and I are leading a home group for young married couples and are loving the people we've met through that. We hung out with them all weekend, and just had a really great time. Now I'm off to have a long hot bath, after watching some Iron Chef...

For some reason, I find myself wanting to celebrate this Easter more than I normally do. I want to celebrate what has been resurrected in my life, what God is currently raising from the dead. It amazes me that we don't think that miracles happen anymore. I have seen miracles in my life. Our friend Janie was given just a few months to live years ago, her situation really was hopeless. Quite honestly, I thought she was going to die. I really did. I'm sorry for that now. Luckily we serve a God that doesn't care if we're hopeful or not. He wanted Janie healed. He wanted her to live, and I think he wanted to prove that he alone has power over life and death. Cancer does not. Janie can tell you.
At some point in the last few years, I really struggled with whether or not my brother or my sister would ever be at the place where they were actively serving God again. I mourned for the loss of both of them at one point, and they are restored. It makes me think of the verse in Luke (I had to look it up):
" ' My son,' the father said, ' you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.' " (15:31-32) I look at Robyn with her little boy now, and I SEE the faithfulness of my God.
God has raised me from the dead. Not only when he died for sins that not only did I care nothing about, but that I actually valued; but when he daily saves me from a car accident five miles down the road by having me hit a red light, or when he loves me enough to discipline me in an area that would eventually kill me, or ruin the plans he has for my life, even if I don't know it at the time. He is sovereign, and he will constantly do things that I don't understand, but he is God, and I'm not. That's all that I really, really know.
I believe that God wants to heal my uncle John, who was very recently diagnosed with multiple myeloma. Everything in me recoils at saying that, because "oh my goodness, what if I'm wrong, what if..." but I do believe it.
I remember this one time in YWAM, we were praying really hard for finances for these three or four really great people to go do missions abroad. We'd hit a deadline, and we needed the money and we didn't know how we were going to get it. Now, I have seen financial miracles like you would not believe. I've seen celebrities ( I promised them not to name names, but you'd know them if I did) walk onto the YWAM base and write $10,000 cheques at the last possible second, so that poor people can go to other countries. I've collected money from people who were told by God to come to an obscure location that they didn't know we were at to give us whatever was in their wallet. This time was different. We were praying and we were getting nothing. Literally nothing. And then a man that I know and respect got up, with tears in his eyes and said that he really felt like he'd heard from God. We waited for the money to fall from the sky. Literally. It did not. He got up and said that all he'd heard God say was this: "AM I STILL FAITHFUL?" We knew in that moment, that they were all going home. They did. They didn't get to be missionaries and others did. It was terribly sad. To this day, I do not understand it. In YWAM, miracles are more common. This time it didn't work that way. But he is still faithful.
All this to say, I have heard God give a disappointing message, and I've seen him do miracles that blew my mind. In my head, I don't know what will happen with my uncle John. In my heart, I know what God has said to us thus far:
"Keep my commands in your heart for they will prolong your life many years." (prov 3:2)
"Then he will bring health to your body and nourishment to your bones." (prov 3:8)
"Your healing will spring up speedily." (isaiah 58:8)
In my own life, I remember very clearly a time when I did not serve God. I don't know how to describe this time in my life, even to my own family, to my own husband. I know that God was allowing hardship in my life that I didn't feel that I could overcome. I felt like the deck was stacked against me and I wasn't going to win, no matter how hard I tried or prayed. I felt like Job. The devil took everything he had away, but God allowed it to happen. I knew God was allowing something terrible to happen to me not because he is cruel, but because he is merciful. And I know that at the very last possible moment, it stopped. I can tell you that I overcame nothing. I ran. I fled with everything in me, and I made choices that didn't even allow me the option to become who I was then because that girl, that lie that is me on this sinful earth, terrifies me. Part of me is haunted to this day, that maybe I'm not different now than that girl back then. Maybe I'm the same girl but with no opportunity to screw it all up. I know how close I came to wrecking everything. I know, without really intellectually knowing, what would have happened had I not literally run for my life. But he saved me. Not only from a destiny that I would have hated myself for, but for the pride that would have eventually killed me had I not gone through what I did.
I believe God is still raising people from the dead.
Just like Jesus, just like Lazarus. The funny thing, the thing that always gets me is that Jesus himself raised Lazarus from the dead, but when he arrived at his grave, he still mourned. Why? It says in the Bible that Jesus was going there for the specific purpose to raise him from the dead. (John 11:11-12). It's not like he arrived there heartbroken that his friend was dead and then God told him to raise Lazarus from the dead. But when he meets Mary and sees her weeping he was "deeply moved in spirit and troubled." And he went to the tomb and wept. Why was he troubled? Why did he cry? If it was me I'd have arrived with this smug little smile and a knowing look in my eye..."Guess what?!" It would have been like giving someone the best present ever. I'd have been ecstatic. Jesus mourned. I think this is because he truly does share in our sorrows. I'm allowed to cry and mourn for my uncle John's diagnosis and believe for his healing. Jesus did it for his friend Lazarus.
I believe in hoping against all hope. The diagnosis says that my uncle will be taken before his time by cancer. My God says that he died for our healing. I want to believe God for more than I do now. I want to ask him for things that I know he wants to give me without being afraid the way that I am so often. I want to be like Abraham. He wasn't stupid. He didn't sit around thinking, "oh good, even though I'm nearly dead, I know that God promised me a child and that's that! Yippee!". The bible says that Abraham faced the facts that he could see, that his body simply couldn't produce the sperm necessary to make a child. He dealt with what he knew of this world, and he believed in what he knew of the next, not because he was such a spiritual guy, but because God actually had to make an incredible promise to him, and then persuade him that it was true.
"Yet he did not waver in unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God has the power to do what he had promised. "
God is working on persuading me that he wants to heal my uncle. He's made some promises, but my head knows that not everything works out the way I want it to. Good godly people die all the time. I'm facing the fact that cancer is lethal. And I'm trying to believe the truth that God is bigger than my reality.
I'm going to try with all my heart to give glory to God this Easter, for not only raising his Son from the dead, but for showing me that same miracle again and again in my own life, in people that I care dearly about. For doing it in me. Happy Easter guys. I love you.