I make known the end from the beginning,
Isaiah 46:10
from ancient times, what is still to come.
I say, ‘My purpose will stand,
and I will do all that I please.’
Reading back over some of my recent posts I am struck by a couple of things.
First, there are a lot of photographs; but that’s understandable, we’re on a brand new adventure in a cool new place and it’s Christmas. So of course I’m going to take pictures.
Then, number two, we have been talking about a lot of deep stuff! So what’s that all about? Actually, I think it’s the same thing. Being in Tarboro, being in this setting where Rebekah and I are necessarily very purposeful in terms of responding to why we have been invited here, is in itself a clarifying event.
Lots of reflection:
If you read me at all then you already know I am the kind of person who tends to think out loud. So I am in a sense processing things, turning them over in my head and letting some of it spill out in this space.
Plus there is the hard to miss fact that life has been hitting me upside the head a lot recently and I have been trying my best to pay attention. I may write more about this when it’s time for our Christmas letter, the annual “Year in Review”; but I’ll say right now it is going to be more like six or seven years in review. In many ways, life has started over for me over the past couple of months and – no surprise – there is stuff to say!
Anyway… Max and I took a walk down by the Tar River and it was easy to see that it absolutely has not yet crested. In the morning it was 27-degrees and breezy and we didn’t make it anywhere close. But early afternoon, in the beautiful sunshine and 42-degrees, we walked through downtown, taking a different route down to River Road.
Intellectually, I understand how the water can keep rising in the clear sunshine more than three days after it has stopped raining; but it still gives me pause.
The riverfront park has completely disappeared. The Tar is more than double its normal width and River Road is now well and truly part of the river!
This is a metaphor, I believe, for where we are here in Tarboro. There is rain. There is sunshine. The water rises. The water falls. Sometimes it’s going to wash over us and sometimes it will flow on by.
What matters most is the more solid and unchanging fact that we are here for an uncomplicated purpose; and that is to love and to listen and to encourage and hopefully to inspire God’s good people at HMPC in their life as a faithful congregation, and their calling to be salt and light in this community.
As I stood there in the cold sunshine, watching the river do whatever it wanted to, I felt a still deeper stirring of the power, and the immovability, and the granite solid firmness of the timeless and immutable fact of God, of God’s purposes, of God’s care for us, and of God’s unshakable love.
In confidence and in faith – DEREK
