God Is Good To Me

I don’t know.

I came on here to write something incisive or pensive, or maybe even edifying or inspiring, but then I looked at my reader and the news and an onslaught of stories telling me what I should be considering at any given moment about my faith, and the church, and God:

Christians must consider…

The modern church’s greatest struggle is…

Believers should…

This book explains why…

And then I just got tired.  I love to think and I love to read, but for the moment the treatises, and critiques, and analyses, and explanations, and arguments, and deconstructions, and interpretations, and all the rest of it feel like an endless churn.  There is value in all of this, of course.  I have written a great deal of material along these lines.  To everything there is a season.

But right now my season feels pretty simple.

I woke up today, beloved of God despite having done nothing to earn it.  I petted my kittens, who are new little blessings, and kissed my husband goodbye and prayed for him on my drive to work.  I worked eight hours at my job, producing the best I could, for the glory of God, and then I came home and got to see my husband and my best friend that God has given me.

We had walleye.  It stays sunny late, now, and the beams slant in on the floorboards and the kittens chase bugs on the other side of the glass sliding door.  My husband and I talk about our day and our weekend plans and tease each other.   It’s almost too hot but not quite there, not yet.  The days feel luxuriously long now.

In the midst of all this, I realize with surprise my heart is quiet.  I am almost always thinking about something, worrying about whatever waits around the road, thinking about tomorrow or the next day, planning, musing.  But tonight I crocheted.  I half-listened to a TV show and texted my mother, who God gave me, too.  I didn’t think of much of anything, except this:

God is good to me.

I don’t want complicated theology or ruminations or critiques right now.  Maybe later, but not now.  Sometimes the best and simplest truths are the lived ones that mirror what we know in Scripture, a series of perfectly ordinary moments that add up to what you realize is bone-deep contentment: the day to day knowledge that God is everywhere, working, that there is no part of the day He doesn’t touch, and He is Lord of the Little Moments, of walleye and sunbeams and hugs and kitten paws tapping glass.

It’s an almost-summer night, a calm night, and I wonder if this is something close to what Abraham felt, walking among his flocks and his growing family on a starless night, or what Paul felt as he worked on the day to day of growing new believers: God is good to me.

Simple.  Small.  Food for the time ahead when life is far less of both.  For now, I accept it, and I’m glad.