God Archives - Kristen Anne Glover

Rain Like Horses

The clouds mount up, dark and ominous, like great muscled stallions, ready for war. I stand in my yard on my dead grass and watch them, waiting.

A lightning bold jabs swiftly into the wounded sky, but I am too far away to hear it groan. All around me, those horses circle, thundering to the back of me and charging like a single, solid sheet to the front of me.

But my yard opens its yellowed mouth and not a drop falls in.

“That’s the thing about the desert,” I say to the kids. “It can be flooding in one part of town while the other part is bone dry.”

A single fat rain drop plummets to the ground and vaporizes on the burning cement. At least it could have fallen on the grass, I mumble to myself. I gaze up at the burning yellow orb hovering just above my house and I think about how much I really don’t want to water my lawn that night, and how much everything would be so much better if it would just rain, even a little.

I have lived in the desert just long enough to know that here, the earth holds its breath for rain. Days and weeks go by without a drop, then all of a sudden God throws open the gates of heaven and lets his steeds run free. They thunder down to the earth with the sound of a thousand hoof beats, and are gone.

The grass is watered and the cacti flower and the people in the puddles are reminded that there is a God in heaven who causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust alike. But on the other side of town, where the horses didn’t run, the people stand on parched ground and wonder why God held back the reigns for them.

I looked at the spot where the raindrop fizzled. “I should be grateful for that drop,” I chastise myself. Even one drop is better than nothing.

Another drop falls. It is not exactly a war horse, but I get out a wash bin and put it under the eaves as an act of faith. Maybe it will rain enough to drip off the shingles so I can water the flowers tucked under the roof, close to the house.

Then the horses come, slowly at first, as if to find their way, then charging in at full force. The waters fill my pathetic little wash bin and trample the thirsty grass. I put another bucket out, and another, but those are overflowing before I can grab any more.

God has let his cavalry run right through my backyard.

I run too, trying to collect all the water I can because tomorrow, it will be dry again. Tomorrow, the rain will stop and I’d better be smart enough to get it while I can.

But I can’t contain it. I do not have enough empty containers to fill with the water that is pouring down on my house. I dump hand-me-down shoes out of plastic storage bins and fill those too, but the rain keeps coming and I am soaked.

It rains all day. Then the next. And the next. Great pools of water form in the hollows of the desert. The horses rush together in a foaming frenzy and course through dry riverbeds in a blur of motion. Everything that was empty has been filled up; everything that was dry has been saturated.

And I am out in my yard with buckets and bins, looking every bit like a widow who has cared for a growing boy through famine years, who thinks her son might die even while filling every last vessel in her home with oil while a prophet pours.

I am ashamed, just a little, at my attempts to hoard God’s provision as if I would run out. The water drips down my hair and off my chin, it gathers in herds in my yard, and there I stand in the rain, trying to save a bit of it in a blue plastic bin.

Here I am, with all my jars filled, and I realize something about God that I should have known before: I should fear overflowing more than I fear running out. God does not run out.

I do.

I have limited his hand because my mind tells me what God can do and my faith doesn’t have the guts to disagree.

I stand in the rain, drenched to the core, and I am reminded that God is not limited by my limitations. He is able to do exceedingly, abundantly, more than I could ever ask or imagine. He can command the horses of heaven to charge swiftly through the desert. He can make oil flow from clay jars.

He can even refine a rain-soaked child with just one lick of fire.

The rain is still coming, and I nothing to put out except the jar that is cracked and brittle, the one that I hold back because I don’t believe it can ever really be full. But it’s under the eaves today, and the rain is coming faster than the cracks can let it out.

It is raining horses, and I am overflowing.

In Morning

I am usually the first one up in the morning. Sometimes my husband sneaks out for work while I’m still dreaming, but on the days when there’s a choice, I’m the first one up. In all my years of marriage and mothering, I find that I like it that way, that I am better that way.

There is something about a new day that makes it hard to speak at first, and harder to talk. It’s better if I slip out of bed and into the quiet of the house where I can wrap my fingers around a warm mug and collect the thoughts that have settled in the night without having to respond to the thoughts of others.

I am not sad, or sullen—it’s just that I like to awaken to the miracle that is each new day in silence and solitude. It is my way of being in morning, of greeting the newness of each new day with the quiet acceptance that God has called me to it.

I have been in morning lately, ever since we packed up our house and headed to this new and unfamiliar place. I have been bleary-eyed and silent, not because I am sad, but because this sunrise has stolen the breath right out of me.

There is so much to say—too much, really, and I have found that I could not say any of it, not yet, because it is almost too glorious, this dawn. It is almost too much to take in and too much to speak of and too much to condense down into words.

I feel a bit like a slave-born Israelite, waking up on the first morning on the other side of the sea, surrounded by the plunder of Pharaoh’s and the keen awareness of how a child’s spilled blood set me free. In the night, angels swooped terrible-close and waters bowed before me as if I was a child of a King and the clouds caught fire and led me far from the shrieks of my captors and right into the center of His will, so close to Him, I could almost watch His footprints melt into the sand.

What can you say on a morning like that? What words are sufficient?

It is all too much, all too glorious, all too heavy with the holy because I know He is here. I know He was in the leading because sure as anything this is not what I would have chosen. This is not what I wanted, if I thought about what I wanted without really thinking about how all I really want is to be where He is.

He is here, and there is a bright star hanging over my house each night because this is my stable. This is my Bethlehem. This is where I was meant to find Him.

So I am sitting in the quiet, letting my senses awaken to something that is so rich and full and deep, I can only taste a little of it at a time. It is beautiful, all of it, and different, and it has struck me dumb because it is like seeing another side of my Father, familiar, but completely new, like seeing God in a babe or God in a bush—I have never before seen this kind of beauty, and yet, I know it.

And I know enough to know that this is the kind of thing you take off your shoes for. In this kind of place, it is best if your knees taste dirt and your tongue turns slack. Here is where you wait—silent—while the Spirit does the rushing.

In this quiet place, in my morning, I see that He is here. He is to be found in the great depths of blue sky that swim across the crumbled mountains and in the precious pools of water that gather in the hollows of the desert.

He is here, on this glorious new day, and I am in morning. I am not sad, or sullen. I’m just waking up to His presence in this place. And it is altogether too much for words.

A Secret

I like to hold secrets, good secrets, the kind that make eyes kind and lips turn up into smiles, the kind that can’t stay hidden because they’re too good not to share. Sometimes, you get a secret like that, and it is salty from tears and sweet from hope and you can’t help but savor it a bit before you pass it on.

Yesterday, I got to taste a secret like that.

“They called, Baby!” he said when I got home, “and I’m in!”

“You are? Really?” I grabbed my husband around the neck and held him close because I almost couldn’t believe it. It was over. The months of waiting, the year without a job, the praying and hearing and second-guessing–it was all over.

The Army had approved Jeff’s application to Active Duty. He would be a full-time chaplain after all.

Chaplain Glover

Relief and sadness and joy swirled around all at once as we stood in the living room, just the two of us, holding that secret between us. I looked in his eyes and he looked every bit like a man who had seen God come through when there was no plan B, no back door, no detour. Not really. There were leads and there guesses but there was no surety. There was just this, this thing we half-felt called to do and the shadow-fear that we might have heard it wrong.

We might have heard it wrong.

That’s the kind of thing that keeps me up at night, that keeps me trembling at the walls of Jericho, facing a wall thicker than my resolve. What if we heard it wrong?

It is a nagging doubt that wakes me from a restless sleep and makes me lay out fleeces in the damp of the night because my confidence doesn’t stretch our far enough to cover up the dust. And I tremble when I should be sleeping while the dew falls thick all around, and I know it should quench my doubt.

But it doesn’t.

Because I realize, with holy dread, that the voice of God is not enough. I want to see His hand. I want to wrestle around a bit, flesh to flesh, so that when the night finally slips into morning at least I know I had something more than just a voice in my head. I want to know I saw His hand.

Yesterday, we saw His hand, and we knew, finally, that this calling was more than just a voice inside our heads. All the doors were opened that once had been closed and suddenly, the questions dissolved and the answers stood out bright like day.

But I stood in the hallway for just a bit, holding that secret and that little glimpse of His hand. I know, now, where to walk, and it feels altogether lovely to know I am not running ahead or lagging behind. I am where I should be.

I kick my feet against the fleece on the ground, and stare at it, shame-faced for having put it out there to begin with. Because it is dripping with glory and drenched in grace, and I should have known better. I should have listened to His voice.

But it is just like God to say things twice, or three times because He knows children have troubling hearing. It is just like God to put signs in the desert and mess with fleeces when His words should be enough. It is just like God to show me His hand by grasping mine.

It is the kind of thing I want to hold to myself for just a bit, like a secret, and remember when the sun shines hot over the promised land and I begin to wish I was back where I started. I want to remember this unmistakable glimpse of God’s hand. This is where He is leading us, and this is where we gladly go.

The Glover boys