I play piano and sing for the worship team at church and we had our weekly practice the other night- the songs were great, but I found myself going through the motions and praying that our ending prayer would finish quicker than it was. Sue, my dear friend and fellow worship leader, was praying for the other leader and for my week. Sue's gift is compassion, unfortunately mine is not. But I really do want to work on that....really....I do.
Anyway, I come home and decided to try and nail down a few tricky parts on one of the songs with more accidentals than normal notes and I come up with a beautiful melody line that I think would make a great new song. Normally when I get distracted like this, it's at least worth it as I can write very quickly and the lyrics come to me as the melody does. The lyrics started coming, but the hypocrisy tasted like blueberries dipped in horseradish coming out of my mouth. "All that I am, All that I want to be, is to know you more Jesus, to live so the world will see." I couldn't put my finger on the problem, so I wrote it off as bad creativity and called it a night.
Anyway, I come home and decided to try and nail down a few tricky parts on one of the songs with more accidentals than normal notes and I come up with a beautiful melody line that I think would make a great new song. Normally when I get distracted like this, it's at least worth it as I can write very quickly and the lyrics come to me as the melody does. The lyrics started coming, but the hypocrisy tasted like blueberries dipped in horseradish coming out of my mouth. "All that I am, All that I want to be, is to know you more Jesus, to live so the world will see." I couldn't put my finger on the problem, so I wrote it off as bad creativity and called it a night.
That night I'm comfortably sound asleep, the kind of asleep where the house burns around you and you go peacefully and warmly into heaven, when all the sudden the loudest noise I've ever heard shot me out of my bed and landed me beside it on my knees completely terrified. My first thought was that the cement factory across the frontage road had somehow exploded and the mushroom cloud (from cement??? I was apparently very tired) would come barreling through the windows at any moment. Once my thoughts collected, I realized it was thunder. I did not know thunder could be this loud, and the stranger thing was that there was no lightning flashes or rain I could hear after the crash. My second thought, following the impending mushroom cloud, was that someone needed my attention. Here I was on my knees, in sheer terror of simply a sound, a sound in the sky made by my God. How BIG this God was! He could wake an entire county with one collision of clouds like it was nothing! We Stearns County folks can barely get our tornado sirens to go off when there's a twister...I know this because with the last round of storms I ran from wide open window to wide open window begging my husband to turn down his comedy so I could hear the siren I thought I was hearing over the wind. The radio broadcaster had said we needed to be "weather alert," which was a phrase I VERY quickly adopted into my panicked vocabulary for the evening (one of the great lakes deterred any twisters where I grew up, so naturally every time there's a warning, Charlie and I go on lockdown).. "Um, Andy, I'd love to stir the taters, buuuut I can't dear; I'm trying to be 'weather alert!'" "Charlie get away from the porch, that's not very 'weather alert!'" "Andy, you be 'weather alert' at the front door and I'll go upstairs and be 'weather alert' by our bedroom window." Charlie couldn't resist his new window knocking habit so he found himself in 'weather alert' timeout in the safe room. Needless to say by the storm's passing, my collected husband made me swear on the burnt taters that I would never use those two words again. Back to the other night, I started thinking about how although God sometimes talks to us when we're willing to hear with a still small voice, or with subtle convictions through His Spirit, that does not make Him any smaller than He is. He is still our creator, He is still the Just Judge sitting on His throne loving us little screw-ups simply because that's who He is. I turned in my Bible, still hovering on my floor, to Job 37. "At this also my heart trembles and leaps out of its place. Keep listening to the thunder of his voice and the rumbling that comes from his mouth. Under the whole heaven He lets it go, and His lightning to the corners of the earth. After it His voice roars; He thunders with His majestic voice, and He does not restrain the lightnings when His voice is heard. God thunders wondrously with His voice; He does great things that we cannot comprehend. He loads the thick cloud with moisture; the clouds scatter His lightning. They turn around and around by His guidance, to accomplish all that He commands them on the face of the habitable world. Whether for correction or for His land or for love, He causes it to happen. Hear this, O Job; stop and consider the wondrous works of God. God is clothed with awesome majesty. The Almighty- we cannot find Him; He is great in power; justice and abundant righteousness He will not violate. Therefore men fear Him; He does not regard any who are wise in their own heart." Wow. For God to be God, He is as Just and Righteous as He is Loving and Merciful. "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge."
I have been profoundly convicted by this, and yet I'm comforted at the same time. My Savior is the kind of Savior that will answer my 'help- me- find- my- keys- prayer' twice a week, and He is also a God that hates my sin as much as he hated the sin of the man who dared try and catch the ark of the covenant when he knew he wasn't to touch it. I'm now praying that I never forget how Big He is, and that I remember to keep reverence and fear a priority lest I be woken again with thunder or worse.
