here in the dirt

Today we read from Joshua 15:1-63 in the One Year Bible. We read a very human moment.

The account gives us a long and tedious list of all of the territories given to the different tribes of Israel, and the locations of all of the boundaries. And then Caleb offers his daughter's hand in marriage to whoever defeats this one king in battle. So this warrior kills the king and marries the girl.

And then we come to the very mundane and human moment. The Bible tells us, after all of this kind of lofty and historical narrative, that, "As she got down off her donkey, Caleb asked her, "What's the matter?""

It's a moment in time, captured for us to experience right along with them. It's a very real and palpable moment. We feel like we're there.

And that reminds us that God is not quite what we think of Him as. It's important for us to realize that. He's not exactly how we picture Him. He's so much more. In this case, we see that He is not some disembodied, ethereal presence far off in the clouds. When we die, we don't go float in the clouds with him as some kind of ghosts. God made stuff. He made dirt, and flowers, and trees and grass. He likes stuff. He made us with bodies, and we'll have bodies for eternity.

That brings us to our lives today. He meets us in the here and now, in the bodies that we walk around in, even as we deal with this plague that threatens our bodies. He meets with us even when we can't come to His church to meet in the usual way. He interacts with us in the stuff and the beauty that He created all around us.

Keep that in mind: the stuff around you, the THINGS that sometimes seem to get in the way of your spiritual life... God made that stuff, and it's often THROUGH that stuff, rather than in spite of it, that He chooses to meet with you. So meet Him in the wind, and the flowers, and the dirt. He likes that stuff.

God, thanks for teaching us that we meet you even in getting down off our donkeys.