Wednesday, May 11, 2016

Walking In A Fog

As we walk around and drive around we are bombarded with communication. There are signs everywhere. Every shop has signs covered in words. The streets have words written on them. The traffic signs have words. There are banners and placards everywhere.

But for me, it looks like squiggly lines. I am sure for the average Okinawan it all makes perfect sense, but for me, I am lost. And yet I know that the squiggly lines have meaning, but the meaning is hidden to me. They are in plain sight, but I don't know how to understand them.

The Scriptures tell us that the things of God are hidden and unable to be understood by someone who isn't a Jesus-follower. We read in 1 Corinthians 2:14
"The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit."
It is as though the Spirit acts as a translator for the believer. The Spirit opens the heart and mind of the believer enabling them to accept the things the Spirit wants to send. They are able to see the wisdom in what seems to others foolishness.

To the non-Jesus-follower, many things that happen in life are a mystery. Even when the LORD shows up in tangible ways, there is confusion and an inability to accept a different reality. Their thinking is locked into seeing the world one way, and one way only.

For those of us who have the Spirit, life is full of new and exciting possibilities. We can see His presence in so many places. We see Him working. He has opened our eyes and hearts. It has nothing to do with us other than yielding to His influence.

As I try to decipher the characters of the three Japanese alphabets (you read that correctly, three alphabets) I need a translator desperately. By the way, there are over 2,100 differently characters taken from Chinese used by the Japanese language. They learn all 2,100 as part of their primary school education. And to top that off, they assign different meanings and different pronunciation than the Chinese equivalent. So even if I was fluent in Chinese, it wouldn't help me much in Japan.

So even though I don't know what the thousands of signs are saying, I can be confident of the LORD's direction in our being here. We sense His fingerprints all over our interactions. We are right where the LORD wants us to be.

Please pray that we would be like the many banners along the streets, willing to move at the slightest movement of the wind of the Spirit.

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