deuteronomy... by way of australia

My nieces love to sneak up on me -- to surprise me when I round a corner or tickle me unexpectedly or practice their scariest faces and growls at me. Most of the time, I know they're there or can hear them coming, and so I just play along. Sometimes, though, they genuinely catch me off guard. Either way, we always end up laughing and giggling afterward.

I think God likes to sneak up on us, too. Sometimes we can sense His coming -- say, during a sacred week of remembrance like Easter or Christmas, or perhaps during a spiritual retreat weekend -- but other times He catches us completely off guard with an omnipotent "Boo!" Either way, the surprise always yields the contentment that can only come from true joy -- it's God and I laughing at our inside joke.

God surprised me last week. I turned a corner in one area of my life and "Boo!" God was there, just waiting to get me. I arrived for my first day at my new job, still hesitant that I had made the right decision even as I walked through the doors and took my seat in orientation. But then our devotions begam, and "Boo!" God and I started laughing, for only He could connect the dots between my current doubts, the testimony of a brother in Christ from Australia, and Moses' descent from Mount Horeb as recorded in the first chapter of Deuteronomy.

Now I don't know about you, but when I look to Scripture for inspiration, Deuteronomy is not the first book that comes to mind. But it just goes to show that all of Scripture is indeed God-breathed and profitable!!! Here is what our devotional reading was that morning:

The Lord our God said to us at Horeb, "You have stayed long enough at this mountain. Break camp and advance into the hill country of the Amorites; go to all the neighboring peoples in the Arabah, in the mountains, in the western foothills, in the Negev and along the coast, to the land of the Canaanites and to Lebanon, as far as the great river, the Euphrates. See, I have given you this land. Go in and take possession of the land that the Lord swore He would give to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and to their descendants after them." (Deut. 1:6-8)

God's word was as surprisingly clear to me that day as it had been to my Christian brother when he felt called away from his home in Australia, and as it was to Moses -- I had stayed long enough on the mountain. It was time to come down, time for me to break camp and move on to the new place God had already prepared for me. And it became so obvious at that moment that, doubtful as the decision had seemed, it had been God telling me to leave my comfortable, familiar mountaintop, to break camp and move on to the new place He was showing me.

God doesn't call us to a place of comfort -- He simply calls us to a place of obedience. and it's only when we're obedient to what He's clearly and very obviously called us to do that we can have confidence in the less obvious, that we can trust His leading as we break camp and head into the unknown, and that we can thoroughly enjoy His many surprises... even those that come to us from Deuteronomy, by way of Australia.

When is the last time God snuck up on you said "Boo!"?