I’m in the foothills when I snap this picture of the fog shrouding the Sacramento Valley. Above the fog, the Sutter Buttes look like a crown. This is my fog. My valley. My Sutter Buttes. The place I live and move and have my being. Born here, raised here, raising my kids here. And this picture is so much like my spiritual life right now. Days of fog. Days of valleys. And then there are the mountaintop days of grace.

Days above the fog.

I wish I had a better camera with me to capture these moments. To capture the clarity. To capture the grace. So much undeserving grace in my life. But as always here I am stumbling along with my iPhone camera because I forgot to bring my good camera. Stumbling along behind my sons climbing a mountain because I’m carrying a forty-pound three-year-old who refuses to climb himself.

“Slow down! Stay away from that ravine! Do you want a mountain lion to get you?!” I call to G2 and Joey running ahead up the mountain my dad calls Sugarloaf. I’m sliding around in cowboy boots with no grip on the soles of my shoes. The way I often feel I have no grip on the souls I love. Totally unprepared to climb a mountain today, totally unprepared for the fog we’ve escaped, totally unprepared for my life at all. And then I’m rescued by grace.

Grace that’s all around me. Grace so often I don’t see. Like the girl I met last week who said to me, “God doesn’t answer my prayers. I don’t see God at all in my life.” Her freckled face reminding me so much of my own. “Tell me the last prayer God didn’t answer for you,” I say, putting my hand on her knee, waiting for her response with a smile on my face.

“I prayed I wouldn’t kill myself,” she softly confesses.

This knocks the smile out of me. Knocks the wind out of me. Like life sometimes knocks the wind out of me.

Help me, Lord, I toss heavenward like a rope to a lifeguard before the answer comes to me. Out of the clear blue ceiling it comes. I am struck by this epiphany as I gently squeeze her fifteen-year-old knee: “You’re still here, honey. God answered your prayer. You didn’t commit suicide. You’re still here.”

I talk with the girl for awhile, and then go find another adult who knows more than me. I’m not a counselor here. Not a pastor here. I’m in over my head here. The way my life feels these days.

As I chase my sons up Sugarloaf Mountain in the sparkling sunshine high above the valley fog, high above the valley of doubt and fear, I think of this freckled face girl unaware of God answering her prayers.

Like my shadow that follows me and loses bulk as I shed my coat and shed my hat and shed my unbelief, the shadow of the freckle-faced girl with me on the mountain. God doesn’t answer my prayers. God doesn’t speak to me at all, and all around God speaks. Just not in ways we recognize.

God speaks in heart-shaped rocks. In acorns tucked in trees. In the birds flying around. “Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?” Matthew 6:26.

Before hiking Sugarloaf with my little guys, before we leave Scott showing Luke how to chainsaw at the base of the mountain, I pray angels around us. Angels protecting seventeen-year-old Luke as he learns to handle a chainsaw. Angels around my little boys because this is the place coyotes attacked John and Joey a few years back as they turkey hunted with Opa on Sugarloaf ridge. A coyote jumping into the blind and biting John’s leg. Another coyote about to leap on little Joey. But Dad was there to kill the coyote, to chase the pack away, and the boys were okay. I’m not imagining dangers here for no good reason. Mountain lions and bears live in these hills, too. And sometimes fifteen-year-old girls commit suicide. Bad things happen in the hills. In the valleys. In the fog. But God is watching over us.

Do I really believe God is watching over us? A good and faithful and true God? A God who really loves us?

 

Like a dad watching over his son chainsawing for the first time. “Mom, look at the bluebirds,” Joey says up on Sugarloaf Mountain. My sons know what bluebirds mean to me. Bluebirds are God’s sign that his angels are with us. It’s kind of a long story– bluebirds and angels– I don’t have time to share it in this blog, but one day when I was really upset, I asked God to show me his angels.

Whenever you see a bluebird, know my angel is there with you, God seemed to say. That same day, I read in my Bible, “The angel of the LORD encamps around those who fear him, and he delivers them” Psalm 34:7. And deliverance came. During that long story I can’t share today, deliverance came.

So I look around on Sugarloaf Mountain and a dozen bluebirds surround us. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many bluebirds at one time in one place. I am the God of angel armies, I sense the Lord assuring me on the mountaintop. I am with you and for you and will fight for your children. Trust me when your eyes can’t see.

Nine-year-old Joey tries to take a picture of the bluebirds. He runs from tree to tree, never fast enough to get a snapshot of these bright, little birds. Yet, the bluebirds don’t leave us. They follow us down the mountain, flying from tree to tree in our wake. Disappointed, Joey hands my iPhone camera back to me. His little freckled face reminds me of the fifteen-year-old girl’s freckled face. My own freckled face. We are living proof God answers our prayers. We are here. Breathing God’s oxygen. Breathing God’s grace.

Many days in the valley, in the fog, we don’t see God. Don’t see his angels. Don’t see the answers to our prayers. But this doesn’t change God. Or change his answers. Or change his plans for us.

This is my new journal for 2015. I’ve always been a dreamer, but as I’ve grown older, my dreams have grown smaller. Has this happened to you? Have your dreams grown smaller? Safer? Saner?

This year I feel God saying, Dream big. I’m a big God. Dream big. Leave the safety of the shore and row out to me. Your God who walks on water. Your God who calms the storms and raging seas.

“The LORD your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves. He will take great delight in you; in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing” Zephaniah 3:17.