My friend Bob used to remind me that God comes as love, carrying a saw. 

When he was 19, Bob and his brother crashed into a telephone pole, and walked away unscathed.  But Bob stumbled going up the embankment and his arm touched a down power line.  He said during his six month’s hospital stay that the doctor would enter his room with a clipboard needing his signature.  That happened three times as he surrendered one arm and two legs.  He hated that doctor, but then he said, unless they took what he couldn’t imagine living without, he would never live.  In so many ways, God our father comes to us, and asks us to surrender what we cannot imagine giving to him. This is pure gospel, because our fallenness has demanded from God His only Son.  He is no stranger to losing what He most loves.   

How do you respond when God enters the room with a clipboard? 

When the unexpected sucker punch hits us, it’s natural to reel, fighting for breath, and think there’s no escape. Yet, we don’t see what heaven has dispatched, nor do we believe that deliverance may be inches from our heart, a rescue plan hatched from eternity and being lived out and seen in real time, just in time. Can we believe that from his goodness we receive what he has dropped as seed from heaven into our troubled heart? Perhaps the following will give you light to your path.

A young man kneels in a drift of snow, and like so many David’s before him, utters, “Unto you O Lord do I cry, hear my pleas for help!” Little does he know, inches from his anxious heart, there rests an angel, dispatched moments before, summoned by God to watch over this single solitary soul.  He sinks into the soft crystals and delivers his eulogy of injustice to God.  The angel has been sent to fortify his faith for the stiffest test of his life.  He did it for Jesus in the desert, and he has never stopped. 

God plays no favorite. All of us at one point or another, if we walk with God, will find ourselves at wits end. In those moments do we believe God wants to put heaven in our veins, something dropped as seed in order to receive grace in our time of need? The angel had performed his role in pulpit and pitch of battle, in flop house and in face of flimsy faith.  The pressure of the moment had squeezed tears from the man, and they hit the snow with a warm wisp of vapor, too quiet to matter, but the angel counted, and heaven recorded each in the book.  It all happened so fast, and yet he felt different as a faint voice inside his head said, get up and take your place, for the pride of man dissolves before this force of love. Hearts surrendered are given the gift of eternal worship. The seed dropped by sovereign design into the reeling heart will germinate in the darkness and bust out into living beauty as the warm grace of God’s promises are believed and clung to.

My friend Bob learned the lesson of true love, the hardest most confounding in the book—real love carries a saw.  This year may the seed of God’s transformation be activated by the heart of a pleading David, and a hunger given by God, in order to trust Him whenever he wants us to drop in the snow and melt the ice with our tears.