Not a quick post

I have now vowed to stop writing at the top of my posts, "This is just a quick post..." because they never wind up being a "quick post". I just have to face facts, I may just be long-winded blogger.

First the update stuff. I have to admit that I was feeling pretty desperate yesterday. It is a strange thing to arrive at the place where you know you need something to happen, but you don't have any way of making it happen. I spent some time updating my résumé yesterday morning and stopped by Staples to print it out. The feeling of urgency was so overwhelming that I just stopped in the parking lot and prayed out loud, "God, I really need a miracle today." There was much more to the prayer to that, but that was the main point. But it was different than you might think. You see the prayer was more of a realization than a request. When I say that the main point of the prayer was that I need a miracle, it was not that I was communicating this to God. It was that God was (and has been for some time) communicating this to me. I am now at the point in time where I am utterly and helplessly and literally dependent on Him. I don't even know where to start without Him. I have some ideas, but all of those ideas even have a sort of dark cloud of hopelessness without Him. But I think that among other things, the Lord has prepared this season for us to realize that this is not different now than at any other time. More than just a miracle, I need the Lord. Right now, sure. But not just right now. I need Him this way all the time. The line that keeps repeating in my head comes from John MacArthur's Thanksgiving sermon last week is, "I have nothing [besides Him] and I need nothing [besides Him]". Now I must say, that I have proclaimed a thousand times in the past my trust in the Lord, but this is entirely different. I don't even know that I did (or do) trust Him without this testing time. How faithful the Lord is to bring these times of testing and strengthening to us.

At any rate, I continued to pray out loud for most of the rest of the morning until I stopped to drop a résumé off at a Christian internet company. Before I went in I received a phone call from my mom which kept me in the car for just a few extra minutes. This is unremarkable by itself (after all, my mom calls me all the time), except that while I was talking on the phone with her a guy from the church walked by my car. This is also not that remarkable, except that I only know five or six guys from the church, and this particular guy was the one guy that I was supposed to be connecting with for potential job opportunities. I had left messages for him the previous two days, but we had missed each other. I blurted out, "Mom, I gotta go!" and hung up the phone while I darted out the car door. Almost before I knew what I was doing, I was calling out the guy's name and chasing him down. I quickly explained to him what I was doing there and handed him an extra copy of my résumé. He very graciously apologized that we had been missing each other and mentioned that he works on the same floor as the Christian internet company! (I know, this is starting to become remarkable!) Oh, and did I mention that he is a HUGE Steelers fan? As in the only person West of the Mississippi that is a bigger Steelers fan than me.

Through a long set of circumstances no less remarkable than these already mentioned and clearly ordered by God, I wound up at his house that night for a care group meeting. All of those that were gathered were wonderfully encouraging to me in exactly the ways that I needed to simultaneously remove the impending desperation and encourage my utter dependence on God. It was really remarkable. Now, I don't know if anything will develop at this company or not, but it doesn't matter to me. The miracle has already happened. God has reassured my weak heart that He is in control and He is at work. The rest is just details.

I can't say that I won't waiver any more. Heck, I can't even say that I haven't waivered since then. But I can say for certain that when I do, a very faithful and very real God has aggressively addressed my faithless heart. I John 3:20 says it well, "whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and he knows everything."

Thank you for your prayers and your support. It means more than you will know. We are grateful to God for His faithfulness, and for His peoples' faithfulness as well. Maybe I'll do more than the update stuff later.

Soli Deo Gloria