He Who leads you in the way you should go

Oh that you had paid attention to my commandments!

Then your peace would have been like a river,

and your righteousness like the waves of the sea. Isaiah 48:18

Indeed my neck is an iron sinew and my forehead brass; my thoughts are obstinate.  How many times do I have to wrest my thoughts away from the fretting or frustrations or spinning plots which occupy them?  

His commandments and paths are for my own good.  Over and over my actions and thoughts show that I believe otherwise.  It is out of love and my best interests that He longs to lead me beside still waters and make me lie down in green pastures.  

Ali’s father, (BTW his parents are so very gracious and full of kind smiles and, I think the best word for them is genteel - which is striking when one considers all that they have been through together... remembering that Ali was born in Saddam Hussein’s prison) asked me yesterday, as we sat at a round picnic table at the http://www.saltlickbbq.com/ and ate barbecue pork and beef ribs, and beef brisket, and sausage, and chicken, and turkey and cole slaw and baked beans and potato salad and bread and huge styrofoam cups of iced tea, seriously all that, while listening to a trio sing about why they would never leave Texas on an upright bass, a snare set, and a finger-flying gueetar.  Anyways, the conversation had drifted to the heaps of college applications that Ali and Max and I had filled out for Ali oh-so-long-ago, and Ali’s father asked me, “Did I think that Ali had ended up at the best college?

I paused.  And the answer rushed over me, much like this river of peace.  Oh yes.  Oh yes.  The LORD God Almighty, who from the beginning of time has carried Ali Rawaf, now Ali Abdul Karim because of a goof-up at passport office, in His heart and hand is in control to work His good purpose.  And Ali’s father agreed with me, once Ali had translated my response to Arabic.  This is true.  And we can simply stand back and be amazed.

It does not mean that Ali did not have to work long hours at two or three jobs and take classes in the summer and at two schools and receive weird phone calls from vaguely crazy refugees at all hours of the night, and that he should have sat by twiddling his thumbs while God moved mountains, but it is clear that the Almighty did the heavy lifting. 

They did not thirst when he led them through the deserts; He made water flow for them from the rock; He split the rock and the water gushed out.

And He is our peace.  And our righteousness which shines like noon day.