Tributaries

...apart from me you can do nothing. John 15:5

Oh...“the after the holiday blues”... usually not a real issue with me, but this year it has smacked me around a little. We lost our beloved Pepper-kitty on Christmas Eve to an unfortunate accident. It hit Annie especially hard. A few days after Christmas, Annie and I, my sweet mother in law, and my animal loving sister spent a day visiting the local shelters and found a wonderful adult cat we named Pru, who came in our house and stole all our hearts in the matter of a few days. It has helped, but losing a pet is always a tough thing.

I love my job, but I returned to some issues that I knew I had put off until after the holidays...and now I am dealing with them. Bottom line, I really haven’t felt like writing or praying or reading. With that, I declare myself....normal. We have all been there, and I have been around long enough to know that times like this don’t last forever. It changes nothing spiritually, Christ is still Lord, He loves me with an everlasting love and I know I am repeating a line from the last entry, but I found it an astoundingly simple, yet incredibly deep statement by Phillip Yancey:

There is nothing we can do to make God love us more. There is nothing we can do to make God love us less.

Recently, I was in a training session at a work retreat at the beautiful 4H Camp in Columbiana, AL. We were sitting in a cozy hexagon shaped building, constructed with natural wood siding and tall windows in each of the six sides. I was paying attention to the speaker, but as usual, the sights of nature were distracting me. I was drawn to an eyeful outside the window I had camped out by. It had rained hard that morning, one of those severe weather days that we are apt to have in the deep south with the clash of warm and cold air during the winter months. Water was gushing in a small stream, and a number of small, run-off tributaries were feeding into the stream, much like fingers leading to the palm of your hand.

Initially, the tributaries were strong, moving swiftly toward the source, where the real vitality of the water was evident. With each glance, I noticed the weakest tributary losing its strength and finally being morphed into the source, then the next one, by the time the session was over, there was one lone stream, weak and slow, leading into the main creek.

My epiphany came quickly. John the Baptist spoke a brief seven word sentence that sums up the tiny tributaries leading to the stream. “He must increase, but I must decrease.” (Jn 3:30) I am so thrilled to know that as that little trickle called my own human efforts and emotions start to run dry, they run into “the stream of God” (Ps 65:9). It is what John refers to in the book of Revelation as the “river of the water of life”.

I don’t look at John the Baptist’s astonishing sentence as something we decide to do, but I see this as God’s urging. He is gently pulling us from those singular tributaries into what Isaiah called the “rushing stream” (Is 59:19) that is teeming with the “spring of salvation” (Is 12:3). It is wonderful that He cares for us during what we refer to as dry times; it is His desire to provide us with His holy refreshment.

Lord, thank you for drawing me to the strength of Your mighty river! Yet in it we find the quiet brooks and the winding streams on our journey. And sometimes even the receding tributaries serve to remind us that we are being pulled into Your river of life.

Mark

Prov. 17:22

Pru, who I call Prudy,

watching me write my

blog. A thankful animal

rescued from a local shelter.

I highly recommend it.