God's will Archives - Kristen Anne Glover

Green Light

I’m going to tell you something your mamma probably never did: Sometimes, God doesn’t rent a billboard to tell you what to do. He doesn’t always do the light-show-and-thundering-trumpets routine to confirm you’re on the right track.

Sometimes, He just expects you to have read His Words and to do them.

The end.

No chubby cherubs dancing in the stars.

No warm fuzzy feelings or great excitement.

No road maps.

No visions.

Just, “Hey, I already told you what to do if you love me. So…just do that.”

Sometimes, God isn’t very complicated. And it irritates me every time because I kinda prefer the thunder over the still, small voice. I have a distrust of easy when it comes to God. If it’s hard and God is loud, I think I’m doing something right.

But what if the decision is painfully easy, like whether or not to drive through a green light, and God just sits there, riding shotgun, like he expects you to, well, drive?

That’s when I start getting a little obsessive about things. What if he wants me to turn instead of go straight? What if I’m driving too fast or miss a stop or I don’t know where I’m going? What if I don’t like this road? What then?!

And he sits there, half asleep, and says, “Kristen, the light is green.” As if that’s all there is to it.

I much prefer it when God says, “Turn left. Turn LEFT! TURN LEFT!!!”

I think if God is shouting, I won’t get lost. I won’t mess it up. But what if some roads always lead to the right place, and it’s only my selfish will that makes me wander around in the first place?

Which brings me to this past March. Life was under control and my personal comfort level was at an all-time high. I was parked, doing what I thought God wanted and feeling quite good about it.

Then God whispered, “The light is green.”

It shocked me because I didn’t know I was sitting at a light, and I certainly wasn’t planning on driving in that particular direction.

I was asked to consider applying to be the president of the Protestant Women of the Chapel. PWOC, as we call it in the Army, is a weekly gathering of like-minded women of faith who come together to worship, pray, learn, and grow. It’s kind of like a weekly church meeting, complete with music and small group Bible studies.

Groups just like ours meet on military installations all over the world, and we are impacting our posts for Christ wherever we are by being an extension of the chapel communities and assisting the chaplains however we can. We are military women serving military women.

It’s a stinkin’ big deal.

So of course I said, “No way.” I did not have time for one more thing (which, in French means, “This scares me to death, and also, I can think of at least twenty-three people who are more qualified”).

But people kept asking, and they all said the same thing, “Just pray about it. And while you’re praying about it, fill out this ten-page application.”

So I did. I hauled myself home and had my own personal Burning Bush experience, minus the burning bush and double the complaining about why God should pick someone else.

I already have a ministry!
I am not organized enough to lead a board of sixteen women!
I am barely organized enough to homeschool (See: 3/5 of my children don’t know how to spell their last name).
I don’t have an extra 20 hours a week to do anything, and if I did, I’d clean my kitchen. Or teach spelling.
I haven’t been a military spouse long enough. The only rank I can identify is my husband’s, so I just walk around calling everyone “Sir” just in case. People are going to figure out I don’t know anything.
I am an introvert. Introverts should have blogs, not be president of a large group of women who might want to have sleepovers and scrapbooking parties.
People will be disappointed in me. Truly. I’m just not going to look good if I do this. Which will make you look bad too, God. You should think about that.

When I finally gave God a chance to say, “You’re right. You can’t do this,” he didn’t. He didn’t say much of anything. No writing on the wall, no dreams, just that same still, small voice that seemed to say, “Kristen, the light is green.”

Which, in my mind, meant I needed a second opinion.

My husband, who was not much more help than the burning bush, asked, “What are you going to give up?”

“I can’t give anything up!” I said. “I’m not doing this. I can’t do this. I can barely function with everything I have on my plate right now.” I cried a little for good measure because sometimes he offers to do the dishes if I cry about how busy I am.

We had made up our minds. I only prayed about it anyway because I said I would. The more I prayed about it, the more God kept messing with my comfortable, Christian life. I went to PWOC as usual and was overwhelmed with opportunities to be the hands and feet of Christ to women who desperately needed it.

I began to see that I was parked at a green light.

That green light kept blinking in time to gospel words that said, This is my body, broken for you. This is my blood, shed for you. Do this in remembrance of me…”

And it slowly dawned on me that perhaps remembering Christ’s sacrifice was more than just eating a hunk of crusty bread and slamming Welch’s shots once a month. Maybe Christ expected me to remember his sacrifice by doing likewise. Actually, physically, with my own hands-and-feet-doing the very things he told me to do. Loving. Feeding. Finding. Shepherding. Giving. Sharing. Binding. Healing. Going. Sending. Praying. Rejoicing. Communing.

Green lights, every one of them.

It was so completely obvious, I missed it.

I was looking for the billboard, the blazing lights, the trumpet-tooting cherubs with Mapquest directions to God’s will. “God! Please show me if you want me to serve these women!” I pleaded, and then wondered why he wasn’t talking.

It’s because the light on that road is always green. I didn’t need a billboard. I just needed to drive through.

Life Interruptions

The washing machine is choking on bedclothes and pajamas. A sour-sick smell languishes in the air, half-heartedly mingling with the fresh herbal scents of the lavender and peppermint I am using to disinfect everything.

My son sits on the couch and watches me through hollow eyes. Just yesterday, he was bright and laughing. Today, he has aged a hundred years. His body holds him captive; he’s a pawn in the fight that rages inside.

He is limp.

Fire burns across his cheeks.

I can’t see him in his eyes; he looks at me, but he is not there.

We have been up all night, we two, one of us huddled around the toilet, the other standing guard with a roll of paper towels and a spray bottle. He has been dunked in a tub or run through a shower three times already. My hands are chapped from the washing.

The sun has not yet warmed the sleep out of the earth, but already the plans for the day have evaporated. The intentions of six are trumped by the sickness of one.

Jonathan’s birthday—his tenth birthday—is just days away, and for the first time in my mothering career, I actually planned a party. Not just a party for relatives, but a real party with handmade invitations and too-much sugar and ten high-energy testosterone-dripping boy-guests who are all planning to explode things in the backyard by way of celebration.

But everything halts because this child is ill. I cannot go to the store to get the last few supplies for the cake. I can’t get the PVC pipe to make marshmallow shooters. I can’t even get out of the laundry room long enough to sweep the kitchen floor or pick up the school room. I can’t…I can’t…I can’t…

The sudden change in plans, the newly-formed void in my day, opens up a space in me that my heart rushes in to fill. Gurgling, bubbling, spilling out into me from its excess of good—or bad—my heart shows up in that interruption.

It happens so rapidly, I cannot stop it. It is just there, like a sudden string of traffic on an already busy morning, and I can do nothing but look and see what has just bubbled up inside of me simply because plans changed. In an instant, I see the state of things in that hidden room.

Nature abhors a vacuum. So does the heart. When the day brings something unexpected, or plans change, or life gets interrupted by God’s intentions, your heart will fill the void.

It may rush in with hot words and short-tempers, if that is what it has in greatest supply. Or, if it has enough in stock, it may spill over into your soul with grace and patience. Either way, the greatest indication of where your heart is at is not in how it behaves when life is under control. It is in what happens when life is interrupted. What flows out of your heart then is the surplus, the thing it has the most to spare.

Is it good?

Or is it shameful?

I finally get a moment to stand in the shower while my boy sleeps on the couch with a bowl by his side. I think back to my grade school days. Twice a week, we lined up and trotted down the hall to the art room. We donned oversized shirts to cover up the school clothes we’d already dirtied on the playground and set to work with brushes and pencils and glue that smelled like it should be eaten.

Sometimes, we were given great lumps of clay to work into bowls and saucers and little figurines that our mothers would feel obligated to keep on their dressers until we married.

Those lumps of clay were always gooey and cold in my hands, at first. If I was impatient and tried to bend it into a bowl, it snapped and crumbled. But if I held the clay in my hands and worked it until the warmth of my body infused that bit of earth, then I could twist and turn and bend it in any direction, and it would not break.

My heart is clay.

Sometimes, it is cold and brittle. Any sudden, unexpected molding causes me to break instead of bend. It does not matter if I intend to break or not. It simply happens that way because I was not ready. My heart was not prepared the way it should have been.

But when I dwell in the hands of the Potter, and His life radiates through every molecule of my little lump of dirt, I cannot help but be pliable. He has warmed and readied me for His own purposes.

My life was interrupted today. Was yours?

Did you like what you saw when your heart bubbled up to fill the void in your sense of control?

If not, then take your mind captive to this: Those interruptions are the very things He is using to transform you from a ball of dirt into a holy vessel , sanctified and set apart for Kingdom work. Those things that seem like interruptions and unexpected annoyances do not take Him by surprise. In fact, they are His intention for you.

He uses these things to show you what is in your heart. Then He says, “Now, come into my hands and let us see what we can do with that.”

The interruptions in your day are God’s invitation to dwell in Him. Let Him hold your heart-clay and make it soft. Let Him fill you with His radiating goodness so that when life screeches to a halt, His is the One who fills the void.

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.