The Wind Heads North

An epilogue to “Love Letter to the Wind”
Sevenink in Singapore
5:10am 05-28-2007

“In your graceful and unfathomed steps, you leave a trail for hope to follow. As the leaves kiss the ground when you head home to the north, so will my heart lie peaceful beneath the adornment of dust and shingles that covers my chest.”

85 miles north of the Equator, a few hours shy of sunrise, with a cup of coffee pretending to be my soul mate, I hurried to my laptop in dire hope to write in words the absence of words in my lips.

In the past few days, the Sovereign God introduced Himself to me as the God of details. Many times in my life He proved how majestic the works of His hand is, how he turns worship inside the church to a glimpse of heaven. How He turns mourning into dancing by quenching the thirst of the desperate souls.

But despite His glorious powers displayed in ways that makes every “believer” shun his own god (or even former gods), despite the grandiosity of the sick being healed and sinners being delivered, there are things that are mostly untouched following these words, “I thank the Lord for…”

As our name gets called to stand on the pulpit to testify on God’s goodness, a miniature time-machine gears up at the back of our mind speeding its way to the last time God proved himself to us.

Does it always need to be artistic? Do you need a lot of words to speak “Praise God?”

If God have numbered even the hairs of our head, and if He names all the stars in the sky, then He is in real serious business of touching our lives even in the animosity of our confused society. Even in the unnoticed details that exist with every second of history. In fact, He has crafted us in detail (“fearfully and wonderfully made”). Have you heard of placing an electrode in the human scalp just to record the electrical activity in the brain? Oh well, if there’s anyone else other than God who better understands how each of our brains should perform such activity, I’d give him my life. Do you know that the human heart has two separate parts? One collecting de-oxygenated blood, the other, collects oxygenated blood. A meshwork of cardiac muscle cells, who planned all this?

Truth of details versus the status-quo preference.

What if you are trapped in an island with only the earth’s crust to comfort you, can you dance your way into praising Him? With the immovable rocks before you and the heat of the sun exposing the absence of shade in a radius of 5Km, can we shake our own hands and tell ourselves “I’m glad you are here?”

Without the sound of the cymbals, the amplified rhythm section of a loud band, without a microphone in your hand, without the presence of a rejoicing peer, without the pastor, without your best friend, without your loved one, without everything else. Only God’s promise in your heart…brethren how would you praise God?

Is praise possible in the absence of everything else? Yes, you might say, but have you gone that road before? And are you willing to travel that unpopular direction if you are led to?

Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will be joyful in God my Savior.
Habakkuk 3:17-18