He is Bigger than you think

I had to call my six siblings that day, and my parents who were in Germany on a missions trip. 

I started with my big brother. 

Cancer. 

How do you tell the people you love the worst news? 

How do you break the hearts that you love with your own story? 

His response

"Jo, God is SO big, and you are so small."

Offended? 

No. It was what I knew but was just beginning to live. 

God's vastness in EVERYTHING was about to blow up this small little life. 

I am parked on the side of the road right now. 

In the middle of this Holy Week. My kids at home on spring break and Kev on his way to work. 

We just left a meeting. 

And tears of joy started falling too hard to drive.

Then this song came right on as I pulled out of the coffee shop. 

"Come to me

In the valley of unknowns

You understand me"

A divine appointment. 

It was a year ago...

We sat around a table of men and women devoting their lives to missions. 

Oh so little do we know when we sit at that table.

"What I am doing you do not understand now, but afterward you will understand" John 13

A year later I’m leaving a coffee shop in tears because God is bigger. 

A business mentor brought up her name a few months ago. And my brief, barely there, memory knew I had heard that name. I sat at that table with her. So we reached out. Radiant Hope, the ministry I run, was in great need of some infrastructure accounting and business help. 

God picks out who we need. God knows when we will need them.

He's working in all things, even when we can't see them. 

You might have sat at a table with her, or crossed paths with her in the grocery store, but it wasn't meaningless. 

Today Courtney and her ministry, Accounting Beyond Boarders, will partner with Radiant Hope. They will fill every need we had and needs we didn't know we had. When God was starting her ministry he was starting mine. He was connecting cords, and filling hearts. 

You can’t make up these stories. 

Everyday God is doing something. 

He’s making a way.

When the days are long and the season seems to never end there is life underneath the surface that is preparing to bloom. Those meetings, dinners, path-crossing moments, they aren't meaningless, not if they are God's. 

This week as Jesus prepared to DIE for you... He was doing something and no one could see. 

Today see it. 

We can read the unfolding plan and we can choose to walk in a life "worthy to the calling which we are called". (Eph. 4) 

We can mourn and weep at the hard impossible days "In this world you will have trouble, but take heart I have overcome." (John 16:33), and we can wake up because every promise has been fulfilled and our sorrow will be turned to joy. (John 16) 

God,

If this life is yours, this ministry, my family, you will do with it what you please. I will foster and care for it, and pray I can steward it with excellence. Thank you for it. For the days that are hard and each day I am ill-equipped for what you have called me to. For it is exactly this realization that makes me lay it down everyday. And I will find freedom then, when I release it all to you, a bigger God than I every thought you were. 

So I throw all my cares before You
My doubts and fears don’t scare You
You’re bigger than I thought You were
You’re bigger than I thought
So I stop all negotiations
With the God of all creation
You’re bigger than I thought You were