OR WOULD YOU RATHER BE A MULE?



My brother, Jeff, decided to have a second memorial for his wife, Ann. Just an intimate gathering of about 12 people (including the 3 or 4 workers who had to be there).

He had spent the weekend absorbed in old letters of Ann’s that he had found, including letters written to the God she treasured.

“She kept all of them,” Jeff said.

In the reading of the decades old letters, he discovered, (or remembered) the love that Ann carried for him, even to the point of writing to God to help her express, even better, that love.

“Randy,” he told me a couple of days later, “while I was reading these letters, crying, feeling her deep love and affection for me, her phone rang, and the caller ID was her number. I had the sudden sense that God’s affection for me was tied into everything, that there was something about light and darkness that I was supposed to understand. I walked by the front door, and, through the transom above the door, I could see the full moon, with wisps of clouds passing in front of the brightness of the moon. It came over me, an instant, overwhelming sense of the Father’s love that had been there the whole time.”

The evidence is in the difference between light and darkness.

Light overcomes the darkness.

I have this ongoing conversation with some friends that keep insisting that there is no “evidence “ that God even exists.

I keep repeating different versions of the same theme: you must be born again, he who has the Son has life, he who does not have the Son of God does not have life, the new creation….

Everything I say falls on deaf ears.

I look at Jeff. I see the evidence that they cannot see.

The world of the natural, where we live, has ways of swinging a club at us, knocking us backward, bringing our focus to a point. Just survive this one thing!

If that life is in us, we have access to that voice that whispers truth, that the world cannot hear.

“I have loved you with an everlasting love…and underneath are the everlasting arms.”

This scripture from Psalms jumped out at me last week.

“I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you with my loving eye on you.

Do not be like the horse or the mule, which have no understanding but must be controlled by bit and bridle or they will not come to you. Many are the woes of the wicked,

but the Lord’s unfailing love surrounds the one who trusts in him.”

Psalms 32:8-10 NIV

I put the spaces between the sections for emphasis.

The evidence for God is there. When our world overwhelms us, when our loss seems to be the overwhelming focus of our lives, if we have the son of God, we find the loving eye upon us, the teaching and counsel and instruction on what to do next, and, a sense of the evidence of God’s unfailing love surrounding us.

“Do not be like the horse or mule…”

I thought about the Disney film, “Pinocchio.”

Good old Jiminy Cricket, the conscience of the puppet who wants to become a boy. He counseled him, one time with a song, to encourage him “to swing on a star.”

Would you like to swing on a star?

Carry moonbeams home in a jar

And be better off than you are

Or would you rather be a mule?

A mule is an animal with long funny ears

Kicks up at anything he hears

His back is brawny but his brain is weak

He’s just plain stupid with a stubborn streak

And by the way, if you hate to go to school

You may grow up to be a mule.

I realized, that that life inside, the one that carries us when we can’t carry ourselves, that counsels us and teaches us, and pours the love of the Father out on us, is the evidence.

When you seek it with all your heart, you find it.

Or, would you rather be a mule?