In July 1989, my dad took a call at 36th Street CRC in Wyoming, MI. It meant a family move to Grand Rapids from South Dakota. It also meant I would start 7th grade in a new town, at a new school, with no one that I had ever met before. My sister was in high school, so she had to go to school to register on a Monday. I wouldn't start until Tuesday, so my dad took me to Meijer on Clyde Park to pick up a few things for school.
Riding in the car with my dad has always meant listening to music, and it's usually meant listening to it loudly. That's what we were doing that day. It must have been 99.3 (WJQK), because WCSG (91.3) usually played sleepy music in the late '80s and early '90s, and WAYFM didn't exist yet. We had just pulled into the parking lot, when a song by DeGarmo & Key came on. My dad had me sit and listen to it, and then he said, "This will get you through tomorrow and every other day, kiddo. If God is for you, then no one else matters."
It's a hard lesson to learn and an even harder lesson to remember. When the pressures of the world stack up, and I feel like I don't measure up, the last thing I'm thinking about is that it doesn't matter what others think, because God is for me. It's easier to think that if I was just something more, something different, then the world would be nicer to me. But, the truth remains: if God is for us, who could be against us? No power on earth can take His love away.
When you rest in that, you can truly rest. Thanks, Daddy. It really does get me through every day.
3 comments:
Oh, 1989, you are SO AWESOME.
I wonder if we ever attended any of the same D&K/Petra/Carman/whoever concerts.
It was Charlie Peacock (singing Scripture) who about saved my life in, oh, 1991? "Dear friend, He is not slow in keeping his promises--as some understand slowness to be..."
Cheesy though they may now seem, how such songs have blessed us by driving these truths into our brains.
Beka:
You write so well and I am going to share today's with Madison. Good for me to remember too and as for your dad - he is a man with such great wisdom and advice - there are many things that I still rememeber that he shared with me and he had such an enormous impact on my life...as did your whole family. Oh how I miss you guys!! Love ya!
That's one of the things that is so great about music. It really allows us to immerse ourselves in the word of God in a way that simply reading it sometimes can't. "And they nod to themselves/And say/Iforgot I knew that," as a dear friend shared in my Book of Common Prayer. (Yay, Over the Rhine!)
Thanks, Norma. I hope that it's a truth Madison can climb into and rest as well. It's hard to be a teenager. I miss you, too, and love you like a sister forever.
Post a Comment