Recently, my husband Tim and I went to Chattanooga to pick up a boat and pilot it back to Nashville. That's an easy trip by car, a couple of hours or so; by boat, however, it's a four-day run, 6-7 hours a day, and it involves going through four states to get from Chattanooga to Lebanon, our home dock. This trip also involves locking through eight dams, which can be a little unnerving. Our adventure took us down to Alabama through Guntersville and over to Muscle Shoals. We were in Mississippi for awhile, then up to Kentucky. Finally, we crossed into Tennessee and traveled through a good part of the state waterways before arriving home.
For part of the week, the weather was absolutely horrible. Springtime in this part of the country can be seventy degrees one day and thirty the next. Unfortunately, we didn't see a single seventy-degree day. We had sunshine the first leg of our trip on Wednesday; we didn't see the sun again until five o'clock Saturday afternoon for the final thirty minutes of our journey, as we passed by Cedar Creek boat dock. (Tim said God was smiling us home).
Anyway, it started pouring rain on Wednesday night while we were docked at Ditto Marina in Alabama, and it continued to rain substantially the entire next day. It was so cold I had on my winter coat with a hood, and my nose was freezing. If I had been a dog, I would have been judged very healthy!
On Thursday night, after piloting the boat in a hard rain all day, we were exhausted when we finally stopped for the night. Without windshield wipers for the boat, we had both watched the river through the downpour all day, straining to see logs and debris that would have to be avoided so we wouldn't damage our props. We had eaten supper at the Pickwick State Lodge, where we were docked until morning, and afterwards we returned to the boat to read the paper and watch a little TV before going to bed. We could only get one nearby hometown station since we had no outside antenna; they were airing an auction to benefit one of the city schools, and the reception was so bad the people kept turning blue, then green, then yellow. Still, it was TV, and Tim is a man...somehow I think that means we were honor bound to watch whatever was on. (Marybeth Ringleburg was high bidder on the solid oak rocker with the cane seat, a bargain at $49, in case you're interested). We were just spending some "quality" time together when Tim suddenly got a puzzled look on his face and said, "I didn't know our window did that!" He pointed out through the sliding glass door to the back deck of the boat. Because of the weather, we had left this deck enclosed in zippered canvas that had plastic windows all around it; we were desperately trying to keep some of the cold outside. The back window of the boat was facing a light from out across the docks, and on the clear, plastic window we could now see a very beautiful, very detailed picture.
First of all, there were lots of gnarled old trees in the picture, the kind that grow right out to the water and arrange their roots so that they spill out over the edge of the bank, reaching out for life below. The leaves of these trees were so precisely depicted, you could see the veins in them, and make out the shapes and individual patterns. The water in this scene was glistening, sparkling, like it was full of millions of twinkling diamonds. Off to the right in the picture, there was a small, old-fashioned, wooden boat in the corner, partially hidden beneath some protective tree branches. It looked like a beautiful, serene masterpiece, and Tim and I were both struck by the charm of this picture in our window.
"That's really neat!" Tim said. "I wonder how they did that?"
You see, Tim was accepting the whole vision on face value. He thought perhaps it was like those holograms sometimes found on antique lamps; the picture is invisible until a light shines behind it and then the scene appears from the underside of the lampshade. The problem is, those lamps have opaque shades to hide the artwork beneath them, and that's why the picture isn't noticeable when the light is turned off. Our window, on the other hand, was clear. The picture we were seeing didn't make sense to me. Doubting Thomas that I am, I got up from my seat and walked to the back of the boat, opening the sliding glass door so that I could examine the window from the outside. When I got right in front of it, I realized there was no picture actually there! The window was full of lots of smudges and fingerprints, but there was no beautifully detailed scene, no hologram. I quickly scanned the dock for a replication of the things in our picture that might exist anywhere around us, believing something must have been reflected in our window from another source. Let me assure you, there were no gnarled trees at the water's edge, and no wooden boats like the one we had both observed only moments before. I looked again at the fingerprints on the outside of the window, and then it hit me. The fingerprints of God. They were all over this!
I had to see if the "picture" returned when I got back inside the boat, now that I knew it didn't reallly exist. Sure enough, it was still there in amazing detail right down to the quaint little boat in the right corner. This was an awesome gift! The amazing thing was, Tim and I both saw exactly the same thing. I think God was was taking this moment to remind us, "I am here. I have brought you through the storm today, and I will bring you safely home." I could have cried!
I am reminded of David's words in Psalm 8:3 when he says, "When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, The moon and the stars, which You have ordained, What is man that You are mindful of him, and the son of man, that You visit him?" I felt truly humbled and grateful.
Life is a journey. Along the way, we occasionally weather some bad storms, and at times, we are privileged to experience a very detailed picture that God uses to make us see something very clearly. He reminds us He has been with us every step along the way, and He will be with us when this journey is over, ready to steer us towards a new adventure. There are times when we get so close to God, we have a real mountaintop experience. We long for another, and another. We must be aware, however, that we cannot live our lives simply waiting for the next mountaintop experience. The problem with that lifestyle is, we can only get from one mountaintop to another by going down and walking through the valley between them. That's not always an extremely pleasant place to be! We must learn that the God of the mountaintop is also the God of the little things that happen in our lives every day. He is the God of a baby's first step. He is the God of the brave crocus that pops up in February while there's still snow on the ground. He is the God of the tears we cry when our own children leave our watchcare and go off to college. Our awesome God can take the grimy smudges of our pitiful lives and weave them into a masterful tapestry, both amazing and humbling us. The real reason Tim and I saw that "picture" on the boat that night was because the window, with all its imperfections, was facing the light.
Do you want your life to be a beautiful, detailed picture of serenity? You know what to do.
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