Times and Places

I remember when I was a senior at Harding University, I was in a class with Dr. Fortner that fascinated me. Fortner was an acquired taste for me as a teacher. He was kind of like coffee ice cream, the first few bites, you’re thinking, ‘Why would anyone ever decide to make this?’ But the taste haunts you, and eventually you are addicted. My favorite part having a Fortner class was that he would ask the most brash questions about everything. Nothing was off limits. And while that led to my leaving class on many occasions feeling pretty uncomfortable, he gave me more than answers, he gave me the ability to ask better questions.

Like this one time, someone had asked Dr. Fortner about where he landed on the whole Predestined/Free Will thing.  He responded by letting us know that this was not a very good question. That in reality, this was a question that had been tarnished by hundreds of years of Greco-Roman ways of thinking about God.

We tend to talk about God in terms like Omnipotent or Omnipresent. But those are words that were borrowed from the Greek pantheon, and while I think God is those things, he’s somehow much more.

Have you ever noticed how the Old Testament talks about God? He’s the God who speaks and creates the universes into existence, but He also gets stuck in a headlock when wrestling with a guy named Jacob. He stores up the snow in warehouses. But he lets Abraham argue with Him, and even change His mind. It’s like God refuses to allow us to put Him in this narrow kinds of categories.

A few weeks ago, right before our little baby boy was born, we had a couple of different options for names that we were bouncing around. We hadn’t really settled on one by April 17th, and that was becoming a problem because that was when the little guy was born. In fact, when I had driven home to pick up Eden to meet her new baby brother, I asked her to decide between the two names we had narrowed it down to. And she chose Samuel.

But my wife, who hears from the LORD much clearer than I do, had felt like months earlier that the Lord had told her that his name was Samuel. She didn’t tell me this (because how do you disagree with God’s choice for a name?) But through different circumstances involving my narrowing the name down from a dozen choices, and Eden making the final decision, that’s exactly what his name came to be.

Now that story probably isn’t as cool to you as it is to Leslie and I. But it’s been really comforting through the last few weeks for me. My good friend Josh Ross, made a point recently that has really resonated with me. He told me that the more uncertain the time in our lives, the more we tend to lean into God’s sovereignty. And that’s exactly what our little Storment family is experiencing.

There’s something about having your world turned upside down (even in a good way) that makes you re-evaluate what you really believe in, and who really has your trust.

So yesterday, Leslie and I looked at houses all day long. And around 9 p.m last night., we found a house that we are pretty sure we are going to spend the next few years of our lives in. And all I could think of was one thing. God already knew this. And if that house doesn’t work out, if we wind up going a different direction…God knew that too.

In the book of Acts, Paul tells the Greeks on Mars Hill that God had ordained the times and places in which they would live. Before that had been just a good idea, now it’s encouraging. The Psalmist tells us that the Lord goes before us and behind us, and maybe this is part of what that passage means. God is not surprised, He transcends our situations but is deeply involved in them.

Which brings me back to Dr. Fortner. One of the things he taught me about the God of the Bible is that He is really, really big. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that he is like Zeus. Unlike the stoic and deistic options of those worlds, this God is deeply relational. I don’t think that means that God micro-manages our decisions, but that he does actually care about them, and is involved in the outcome of them.

That is, after all, the reason Paul gives for God’s investment in our lives. He ordains the times and places that we will live, so that we might know Him.

And that applies to Abilene too.