The Power of Wet Ankles....

"When the LORD your God brings you into the land which you go to possess, and has cast out many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than you…. (Deuteronomy 7:1) 

    Sometimes I balk at the border of the better land to which the Lord has directed me. My hesitance always results from fear. Sometimes because I feel like a spiritual grasshopper and across the border I see scary grasshopper eating giants. Sometimes I feel like an interloper, unworthy of drinking from wells I didn’t dig. I often balk because I allow my timid self awareness to tint and diminish awareness of the Lord's omnipotence.

   Ever had a Moses moment where the "still small voice of God" reminds you – Remember, we were here forty years ago and you balked. You’ve had forty years to think it over. Have you decided to trust Me this time? In the old movie, The Ten Commandments, Moses perches on a rise overlooking the Red Sea and parts the waters. The bible isn’t clear on the minutia of the moment, but I think Moses actually had wet ankles. I see him timidly, maybe even with some fear (soon to be replaced with wonder) walking into water that the Lord said wouldn’t be there. Maybe he even got knee deep before the wind began to blow from the east and the water began to recede.

   Often, God goes before us and when we arrive the enemy we thought would be waiting is simply gone, banished by the Lord. More often the Lord waits for the first few timid splashes to reach His holy ear before He parts the water, or heals the sickness, or provides the money, or saves the seemingly unredeemable. 

   In today’s verse God describes the land we know now as Israel as the land  -- you go to possess. It was a gift waiting for the Israelites unwrapping with steps of even tepid faith.

   I prayed today, and asked the Lord to reveal to me the border of the next thing He is leading me to, at which I am stalled. Even as I formed the question in my mind, I was refreshed with the answer (which I’ve been wandering nearby for a while pondering the uncertainty before me).  When I fear my own ability to succeed, I am justified by experience. When I fear God’s ability to succeed, experience has proven me wrong many times.

   But, Lord, there are city kings and armed enemies in my way…. the LORD your God…… has cast out many nations before you…. Emerson wrote something which has been a helpful reminder to me many times-- Some of your hurts you’ve cured, the fiercest you’ve even survived; But oh, what torments and grief you’ve endured, from evils that never arrived. Is it possible that the Lord my God has already cast out the things before me that I fear? That would leave me in a pretty awkward situation, fearing only the welcoming holy Presence the Lord has provided to greet me.

   Maybe today my mustard seed faith will stop wandering and risk wet ankles.
 

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