Are you Waiting for Wonder?

Hi Friends,

Are you in a waiting place in life? Perhaps a dry place, a barren place? If so, I wanted to share with you a little snippet from the book I'm working on now, which I'm calling Waiting for Wonder. The book is about Sarah, Abraham's wife.

Will you also pray for this book? I've only written the proposal (which includes the intro and chapter one) and publishers are considering it now.

Meanwhile, here is a little snippet that I hope will encourage you on your journey with God:

Who Is This God?

        This is a God who promises descendants as numerous as the grains of sand, to a barren woman.

This is a God who blesses all the families on earth through a woman with no family at all.

He is a God who reveals his glory through a man born blind, who could not enter the temple, the outcast.

And he reaches an entire town through a woman so ashamed she went to a well in the middle of the day.

This is what God does. God chooses us precisely for the places where nothing seems to change and hope is sparse. He is the God who uncovers the deepest place of our shame and pain, and promises to bless the whole world right from that very place. 

We sit in our barrenness, in our blindness, in our shame ... we may sit for a long time. But we do not sit without hope. Like Sarai, we hold the strange, impossible promises of God.

So, I look at Sarai.  And I know we are all barren. There are empty places in us all. 

       And I ask myself, will I set forth on this journey with her to discover a God who promises to take the places of my deepest shame and pain and transform them to bless the whole world? 

Will I dare step forward, knowing that the darkest places of my soul will be revealed, my pain will have no secrets, and promises may take decades to be fulfilled.

Do I dare embrace the empty places? Do I dare acknowledge my shame? And in doing so, might I embrace the very promises of God?