A headboard tale.

The day after tomorrow I am moving.

I hate running those kinds of figures through my head.
I hate moving.
It’s not even so much as the packing and the carrying and the carrying and the unpacking. It’s the leaving.
I hate leaving.
Well, leaving when what I have been in has been good.
And this last season of my life falls under that category.  

It’s not as if all of my circumstances here have been wonderful. It’s not as if there has been no stress, or crying, or tiredness, or weariness. I have experienced all of those in more abundance than I maybe had any other time before. It’s just that I still found Jesus in all of that. Or that he showed up in all of it.

I had to say goodbye-to-living-in-close-proximity to my “second family” yesterday. It was very appropriate that we all went traipsing about through fields filled with somewhat too friendly cows after Easter dinner. Nature walks have a tendency of bringing things full circle.

I have adopted them as sisters. I don't know if I have told them that yet.

To fend off any rogue cattle. Or to pull girls who don't want to get their shoes wet across streams.

Good thing I don't go anywhere without boots. I'm not kidding.

Naturally we all started singing "Climb Every Mountain" from The Sound of Music.

I love these people.

If you have people in your life whom you love and who love you and who you don’t have to explain yourself to, take my advice and don’t ever let them go.
God will minister himself to you through them in more ways than you will ever know.

 Anyway.

 I could regale you with all kinds of tales of how God has been faithful to me in this time of my life, but I won’t bore you with so many of those. Not tonight, anyway. There is really just one that I want to tell you about, because this is the one that made me cry the hardest.

 One day in my last season of life I was doing devotions, praying over my next move (which would bring me to where I have been for the past few years) and I just felt the Lord say, “If there were little things you would like to have at the new place, what would they be?”

His question caught me a little off guard because A. I don’t really believe in praying for frivolous things and B. This was such a very odd question. What should I answer?
After thinking for a while this picture came to my mind. I had been doing a lot of design type things and had fallen in love with cool headboards on beds. And so, in the spirit of frivolity, I thought what better thing would there be to pray for than a cool headboard?
So I did.
“Lord, I would really like a cool headboard.”

 I had long forgotten about this prayer until one day this last summer. I was praying in my room (which was furnished when I moved in----another good God story), thanking the Lord for bringing me to this house, blessing me with all of this unmerited favor, just looking around at all the pretty things I got to see every day when I looked at my bed, and God said to me, “Do you remember when you prayed for that headboard?”

 Hot tears welled up in my eyes and then started spilling down my cheeks.

I hadn’t thought about that prayer for years.

Do you ever feel like you do that? Pray for something, ask for something, only to have already moved on to praying for your next “need” to not even see when he answers that first prayer??! And worse yet, to have forgotten so long ago that you don’t even thank him for doing what he did when he does it?!

Those hot tears were a reminder of my forgetfulness and his faithfulness.

See, this is the headboard that came with the furnished room:

Let me just explain the gravity of this situation:

I HAD BEEN SLEEPING UNDER A 6-FOOT TALL, SOLID WOOD HEADBOARD FOR A YEAR AND A HALF.

And had no idea.

 In my forgetfulness I had never thanked him for it because I DIDN’T REMEMBER that I had prayed for it.
Terrible, huh?
This week especially I have a hard time looking at it and not crying.
Isn’t that the way God works? Using some inanimate object to teach you something totally revolutionary about Himself?

 Like how, he doesn’t forget.

 I love that about him.

He who implants the ear DOES hear. He hears the prayers of the righteous. And then he never forgets.