Calling out Your Name...When God Shakes our World

Before we begin, give this a watch...

Rich Mullins...Calling out your Name

From the place where morning gathers
You can look sometimes forever till you see
What time may never know
What time may never know

How the Lord takes by its corners this old world
And shakes us forward and shakes us free
To run wild with the hope
To run wild with the hope

The hope that this thirst will not last long
That it will soon drown in the song not sung in vain
And I feel thunder in the sky, I see the sky about to rain
And I hear the prairies calling out Your name

And I know this thirst will not last long
That it will soon drown in the song not sung in vain
And I feel thunder in the sky, I see the sky about to rain
And with the prairies I am calling out Your name

I was sitting here thinking about the path my life has taken these last 7 years. Thinking about how none of it made any sense at all, until I got here to Lynchburg, found myself in the application process for a job with my alma mater, (something I would never have even dreamed about) and felt the amazing, loving touch of people who have done whatever they could to make our move here work.

I remembered this verse from one of my favorite Rich Mullins songs. I remember hearing this for the first time and being so moved emotionally at the beauty of that intro on the hammered dulcimer. It was so beautiful, in fact, that a few years later, my (ex) wife and I used it as her wedding processional. It was an evening, candlelight wedding and that dulcimer intro –looped so it was of sufficient duration- was stunning.

I remember hearing this song, years before,  in 1993 and hearing that one stanza...

From the place where morning gathers
You can look sometimes forever till you see
What time may never know
What time may never know

How the Lord takes by its corners this old world
And shakes us forward and shakes us free
To run wild with the hope
To run wild with the hope

Those haunting words... “How the Lord takes by it’s corners, this old world, and shakes us forward and shakes us free...” I knew what Rich meant. He wasn’t talking about "the world"...not the globe we sit on. He was talking about our world. Yours and mine. The plans we plan, and the dreams we dream, and the nice tidy way we fit it all into a box of our own making, never realizing that, at times, that box becomes a prison. Our dreams get chained to the wall of life by the urgency of responsibility, the consequence of choices –good and bad- and the daily grind of trying to make it in this world.

We can become very comfortable in the midst of this discomfort, and we find ourselves sacrificing those dreams and visions for the staid, bland existence of merely surviving.

We find ourselves alive...but not really alive.

I look back on the seven years since I lost my beloved home, and the six years of alternately living in my car and I see how God was shaking me forward in order to shake me free. At no point in time did God not know that I was heading to Lynchburg, VA with my daughter. But at no time...until about a month ago...did I  know this.

Another of Mullins’ great songs says “And step by step He leads me. And I will follow Him all of my days.”  Step by step. Most of the time, for most of His children, each step is hard, scary, terrifying in fact, and often painful. But in the Christian life, the destination is always...it’s always something you must be prepared for.  You don’t just wake up one morning and find yourself in the perfect place with the perfect assigned task, having never been forged in the furnace of doubt, fear, failure, resilience, and finally remade into the perfect man or woman for the job. David was being prepared for the throne as he tended sheep. Moses had his desert wandering. Even Jesus spent time in preparation for the most important 42 months of any life ever lived.

I still don’t know the fine points of what God has planned for me but I do know that he has shaken me and my daughter forward. And free.

I see tiny signs that we are beginning to “run wild with the hope...”

In my heart I hear the thunder in the sky, I see the sky is about to rain,

and this dry, desolate prairie in my soul is beginning to Call out His Name.

Don’t fear the shaking forward. We are always being shaken forward toward who and what we were meant to be.

That gives me hope.