*As a caveat, I will say that I tend toward disorganized writing, and my thoughts bounce back and forth so much that if I were to wait until I'd edited everything into coherence, I doubt I would ever post anything. I can only ask the Father to grant my words the coherence and grace necessary to strike the hearts of whatever readers might stumble onto this page.
With that said...
He visited me late one evening about a month ago (when I wrote this, it had been only the night before, so if I miss an edit that refers to "last night", don't be confused).
I didn't have a cozy, happy sense of the Lord's presence at first, as I sometimes experience. This was a display of His glory. I needed it, and I think I'd been asking for it. Just assume that I was, because I ask that of Him a lot lately. And He packaged it in a way that was 100% just for me (although I pray that the reason I feel compelled to share it is that there are others out there who will see the breathtaking glory of God in this as well). I feel so loved, and so awed, by the power and tender care of my Master. How powerful, how generous is my God, my best friend, my Teacher. How much He has given me. And to give me such an unexpected, unnecessary gift on top of it all. He lavished it on me.
A bit of background. I am currently living on the outskirts of Hanoi, Vietnam. My husband is an ESL teacher, and I came along with him from Portland, Oregon. We have a 1.5 year old boy that we call Netters. He is pretty weird, but I am finding more and more that he, too, is a tender vehicle of my Lord's grace, and so I tolerate his strangeness.
Back to the miraculous gift.
So, as a preamble, I rarely see stars here, not even one usually, nevermind a constellation. Much of the time, there is so much mist and clouds and light pollution and real pollution, so it's very rare. (My human father, who was in Vietnam during the American war, says that is a shock to him, because the thing he remembers most about nighttime is the fields of stars overhead. Pollution has done a real number on the sky here in 50 years.)
We live on the 16th floor of a 21 floor building that faces the city, so we have a pretty good idea about what is going on outside at all times, whether it is sideways falling rain, a cloud that engulfs the whole building, city, etc.
One night, toward the end of Christmas break (or it might have been the beginning of Tet, they run together for me some years), we had a lightning storm. This is unusual for early January. I don't go outside anymore for storms the way I did in the US, because I'm busy with Netters and it's usually so hot, but it is winter here in Hanoi, which means it is in the 60's, and Netters was in bed, so I went out on the balcony to watch for awhile.
The clouds were moving fast, in waves. They reminded me a little of companies of soldiers spread out across a field, with gaps in between, like from the Civil War. A front of clouds would settle over the city and every building would disappear, like someone had dropped a blanket over it. Hanoi is BIG, and every light winked out when that blanket dropped, as if there had never been any buildings there at all. The whole city vanished into white.
Then then wind would clear the clouds away, and the whole city reappeared, all its millions of lights and colors. The cloud cover was only as high as the very tops of the tallest buildings, so that they seemed huddled almost under the lowering clouds, the bright flares of their topmost lights reflecting off a ceiling of gray. And then the clouds moved in, dropped, and consumed them again, just as though the whole city had winked out of existence. The cloud dropped right over my building, to the point where I could barely see beyond the railing of our balcony.
And then my Lord's own light show began, announced by a rumble and a boom. I've always loved thunderstorms, ever since I was a little kid, but there have been few places where I have been able to see the full majesty of a big storm, stretching across the sky for miles and miles. It's one of the things I love most about living on such a high floor. For awhile, I could only see flashes of light from inside the cloud I was sitting in, and hear the thunder echoing all around me.
And I thought, how quickly the works of man are consumed, subsumed by the works of God! How high and intricate are His works, that even compared to a sprawling, high hectic city like Hanoi, He takes my breath away.
The sky cleared again as the lightning and thunder continued. Frogs started singing with the thunder.
(As much as I have a hard time with the heat and humidity, there is something to be said about living in a tropical place.)
I also saw some Tet fireworks, very low and localized in comparison to the expanse of the lightning.
And then... I saw a star and realized that the dark above me was actually sky and not just dark clouds. As I watched the clouds clear away, right over my head, I saw three stars. And realized that it was Orion's belt. In another minute, the whole constellation was in sight! Perfectly framed and directly over my head. Our building is L-shaped, and we are in the joint of the L, the corner between the two sides. Orion's positioning was such that, if it were centered a little bit in any other direction, it would be only partly visible. It was tucked up into this perfect space in the L just above the building roof.
It was then that I realized that the Lord was putting on a show for me. I hardly ever go out on the balcony. The cool air, the clouds, the lightning storm, and even the fireworks all enticed me outside. So that I would be standing in the perfect spot to see Orion when the clouds parted.
That was a heartstopping moment for me.
(A bit of background: my dad and I were close growing up, and he's the reason we considered Vietnam as a place to move. We used to look up at the stars so often, that when I went to college, I took a couple Astronomy classes, and even became proficient enough using the CCD camera to take a full color photo of the Orion nebula, which I gave him for Christmas one year. We haven't spoken for years until only recently, and I do believe that one of the reasons the Lord gave me this gift was so that I could share this experience with him, which I did. Now we're going to visit my parents over the summer, something I did not think would ever happen. My God is good!)
Such glory! It seemed to me that my Lord was reassuring me, saying, "I am here, whether you can see through the clouds, pollution and dark, or not. Whether you can focus your eyes or not. I am here. I will make a clearing for you, and remind you."
And then ten minutes later, the whole city and our building was in such thick fog that I couldn't see a thing, not even the building.
It was a gift. A nerdy, brilliant, unplannable gift. I'd had NO IDEA Orion was in the position it was this time of year, in Vietnam, at that time of night. And without that storm, I never would have seen it.
My Lord captured me in all my favorite ways, with lightning and thunder and wind and stars, and a constellation with special significance to me, hovering over my head like an angel.
I feel like there is more, a deeper lesson He is teaching me. I have to keep looking into it, keep meditating, reading His Word (Job especially). If there is more to it, it will come. He will bring it to me. As the months go by, I am learning that how my Lord holds a conversation (with me, at least - as in human relationships, they differ from person to person) is on a timeline different than I'm used to with fellow humans. He or I might open a topic one day, but it will unfold over weeks or months.
NOTE - additional thinking on this, more recent
I'm writing this on February 14, so the initial Orion incident was a little while ago. We've been pretty cooped up in the house, because the Coronavirus has been making its way around Asia, and my husband's school has been closed since the Tet holiday. We are heading into the third week of closure, making this the longest Tet holiday ever, I imagine! It's been hard not to feel a little anxious about what might happen, how our community might be affected, etc.
Before all the holidays, scheduled and unplanned, I was substitute teaching at the school, bringing in a little more income and talking to people about Jesus. (I should write a post about all this, too. I will, if only to keep this somewhat on task). But now, not only has the income stopped, we've been very isolated. It feels like everything has stalled.
Lately, my prayers have been focused on the Lord's plan for me. As I become more aware of my vocation as my Lord's follower, servant, child, ambassador, what specifically does He want me to do here? It's hard to know. I feel a little unmoored and stir-crazy, like I'm not being productive or useful. I'm getting more and more eager to share what God has done in my life this past half-year, and the opportunities seem to be dwindling. I'm "weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot." It's the reason I thought about starting this blog today.
Anyway, the other day during this Virus-Vacation, my husband and I were in our neighborhood coffee shop, killing some time, and I had to use the bathroom. They only have a women's room, so my husband has never seen this bathroom - I only say this because I wish someone could tell me if this is a recent development or what. As I walked in, I was thinking about God's plan for me, and I'd been thinking about starting this blog, and about the Orion incident because it was so amazing, I really wanted to write about it...and what I saw made me laugh.
On the wall directly ahead of me was a sight I don't recall seeing before. A new decoration. A giant sticker (easier than having someone paint a scene) made to look like someone had knocked a big, ragged whole in the white wall. And through the "hole", I could see a scape of the universe: starry sky, with bright colorful planets and nebulae and galaxies. I don't have to tell you how it immediately reminded me of the clouds parting to show me Orion.
I might have passed it off as coincidence, because I am wary of describing a bathroom decoration as a love note from God...except that right next to it was a little hand towel, embroidered with a wreath of thorns and white flowers, and a little blue dove with a branch in its mouth.
I just laughed and shook my head. My Lord does, from time to time, remind me that He has a sense of humor. He picked up our conversation from the night of the storm (which happened before Coronavirus fell on us), to let me know that He is sovereign, and His hand is on my life. He can use a storm and a constellation, and even inspire the decoration of a cafe bathroom perfectly timed to remind me. He was saying more to me than ‘I am here.’ I think that He intended to show me that His plan is in place for me, intact and perfect as a constellation, whether I can see it or not, whether I see it in pieces (individual stars), or not at all (obscured by cloud and pollution and darkness, my blurry vision). I can rest knowing that He has it there, ready, waiting for His timing to reveal it. When He decides to unveil His plan for me and put me into action, I want to be ready.
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