Saturday, January 8, 2011

God Will Make a Way – Don Moen

Mission Impossible – remember this? A match lights, a fire sparks (see the picture), and the musical entertainment begins, building with energy to a climax. These cloak-n-dagger agents capture my imagination, probably because their story has more adventure than mine. They treat danger with a cocky air of confidence. ‘…your mission, should you decide to accept it…’ is really wasted on me, because I know ‘Jim’ always accepts the assignment. The impossible mission crew never found a challenge they couldn’t overcome with careful team coordination, technology, and guile. The make-believe never allows that heroes might be defeated, perhaps by the completely unexpected, perhaps a death of one of the team.
Real life is different, in which an impossible situation might make me feel more depressed than excited. Don Moen’s song “God Will Make a Way” sprang from this kind of episode, a tragedy in his family. See if this song’s story sounds familiar, and if its light-in-the-darkness message might help.
 
 
You can read Don Moen’s own words for this song story at: http://www.donmoen.com/Blog.aspx?iid=26017
If you don’t have the link, Moen’s story briefly goes like this. In 1990, his sister’s family lost their oldest son in a car accident, as they were travelling between Texas and Colorado. Moen was unable to be with them in the aftermath, due to a previously scheduled recording session, but in his grief for them, he found solace by writing the song’s words on an airplane trip the following day. Isaiah’s words (Isaiah 43:19) comforted him, so he rephrased them for the song’s lyrics. His sister’s family met the tragedy with those and other words in the same book (43:4), which helped them understand their son’s seemingly senseless death might have a higher purpose. Friends of the family’s son came to accept God, because of the promise of heaven, and of seeing him again. The family’s own lives were fed as they involved themselves in their local church in a deeper way. Fruit comes about in ways we don’t expect, Moen’s sister remembers. 
 
 
Have you lost someone close? How are you dealing with it – does life seem unfair, maybe even impossible to comprehend, in death’s wake? There’s but one way to manage life, when death intrudes. It’s not pie-in-the-sky to hope in God and to prepare for a home with Him. I believe. If you don’t, what have you got to lose if you change your mind today? That’s what Don Moen and the prophet Isaiah have to say. There’s a way He’s made, though I cannot sometimes fathom it. Impossible, you say? What was impossible in Isaiah’s day is commonplace today – ah, technology. So, what impossibles will become possible in 3000 A.D.? In 4000 A.D.? The Beyond? Let’s go find out!

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