We’re closing Advance Church tomorrow, so every time someone told me to have a good weekend yesterday, I was forced to stare that precarious word in the face and decide how I was going to feel about it.
This post? It’s how I’ve decided feel about it. Not just this weekend, but this whole time.
There was a day back at the end of May when a text from Ryan confirmed what we’d been suspecting for weeks: God was moving us on. To where and to what? We weren’t sure. But the realization that God was releasing us from Advance—and possibly from Las Vegas—all but paralyzed me in the Trader Joe’s parking lot.
I cried and heaved and clenched the steering wheel. I begged God to not make us walk over this glass. I was not up for the upheaval.
Not again. Not now. Please. We can’t.
And then I heard it.
“You cannot allow these things to loom larger in your heart than what I have promised.”
As quickly as the storm rolled in, it passed right by. I stopped tantruming, got out of the car, and shopped for groceries with my sunglasses on.
Do the next thing.
By the time I got home I had resolved to trust Him. Not because I understood Him. But because I knew Him. And he has only ever been…
Good to us.
Good for us.
Good in spite of us.
And I will make an everlasting covenant with them: I will never stop doing good for them. I will put a desire in their hearts to worship me, and they will never leave me. I will find joy doing good for them and will faithfully and wholeheartedly replant them in this land.
Jeremiah 32: 40-41
For the past three months, as God has uprooted our family and the Advancers in our midst, he has carefully and creatively forged beauty where we expected to find broken glass. He has intertwined the hard and the good, filling in the blanks and filling up our hearts with this most blessed assurance:
I will find joy doing good for them and will faithfully and wholeheartedly replant them in this land.
This promise is so beautiful to me. It’s powerful. It’s steady. It refuses to budge. It holds when our circumstances don’t. It wins when we think we’ve failed. And tomorrow? Tomorrow it will have the last word.
Because just as life will upturn us, so will His grace.
And that?
Oh, friends, that is indeed so very good.