Love Story

As I listened to the sounds around me in my home, I was suddenly struck by how many of them were water noises. I noticed the turbulent whirring of the dishwasher, the trickle drip from the coffeemaker, and the gushing from the pipe as the washing machine filled. It was very peaceful, and it made me think of other water-noises, including this great app that I started using called Calm. They have several background options, and one of them is rain falling – very calming, lol. So, as I contemplated these things, it occurred to me that although the initial sound (stick with me, no, I’m not trying to make you feel like you have to pee!) of falling water in my home was similar, it does not compare to the fullness of the experience of hiking to a waterfall and looking out over the nature that surrounds you.
I tend to generalize things that I read in the bible – Moses went up “a mountain”, Jesus prayed in “a garden”, David was king of “somewhere”, and so on. In doing this, sometimes I am missing out on the fullness of the beautiful over-arching picture that God has presented as a love story to us. Just as a pizza shop in Uptown is nice (or at least usefully convenient if you are hungry), it means something much more as you look into the window with your husband and reminisce of his proposal to you on the dance floor when it used to go by a different name. Sometimes living in the same place for a while is like that, you have all these amazing memories of incredible meaning that are important to your story. I have heard from people who have journeyed to the “Holy Land” that it is a huge experience for their faith to visit and walk on the same spots that our Lord and Savior walked with his feet. Now for some of us, probably most of us, we will never physically make that journey. But there is another way.

Remember the Yellow Pages? If you are of a certain age, then yes. But for the others, let me try to elaborate. The Yellow Pages was a phone book – I know this is hard to imagine, but try – for the purpose of, well, letting everyone know your information. Funny enough, there was a time in which if somehow you were overlooked in the Yellow Pages, it was kind of embarrassing. It was a huge ordeal to get an “unlisted number” so if you weren’t in there on purpose it was an accomplishment. There were white pages for the residential-giving your name, number, and address, and yellow pages for the business providing the same info. Now on the front of this book was their logo – two “walking” fingers which sufficiently represented their tag line of “let your fingers do the walking”. Instead of walking around town, your fingers could walk down the page and find what you were looking for. Take this concept straight to God’s Word. Now don’t just meander, but go with purpose. There is such a reward in getting the fullness of the picture of history that the Living Word paints when you see that the same mountain on which God gave the ten commandments to Moses (Ex. 20:1-17) was also the mountain on which Jesus gave his first sermon (Mt. 5:1- 7:29) – “sermon on the mount” – yes that mount! The one where Jesus says that he did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it (Mt. 5:17-19)! Or, that the same river God had the Israelites stack stones of remembrance after parting the waters to take them to the “land of promise”(Jos. 4:1-9), was also the same river that John used to baptizepeople (including Jesus!) (Mt. 3:13-17), the symbolic act representing the repentance and rebirth with a new “land of promise” in mind.

These moments of recognition are transforming, faith-forming. The kind of thing you can read about in a love story… oh wait, that’s the point.