Walking With Christ

Deuteronomy 4:9 “Only take care, and keep your soul diligently, lest you forget the things that your eyes have seen, and lest they depart from your heart all the days of your life. Make them known to your children and your children’s children—(ESV)

This was Moses telling the children of Israel to always remember that day they stood at the foot of Mount Horeb and heard directly from God. This is a command to teach our children the things we learn in life and the reason for them. This is a command for us to use our experiences to support the lessons learned.

I drink coffee. I know that not everyone likes coffee. It’s an acquired taste. I drink coffee because it takes me back to a time when I felt safe growing up. Living with my grandparents had the unfortunate side-effect of leaving my struggling to find stability. The chaos that I lived in before had normalized so many bad things. There was no consistency. That might have been the only consistent thing. The expectation of chaos made it difficult to cope with a calmer environment.

Every morning, my grandpa would wake me up for school and I would eat breakfast while he drank his coffee and worked the latest crossword puzzle. Sometimes we would just sit and enjoy the morning. At other times, we would chat about the day before or expected events of the day. In the years that I lived with them, there was only one time that grandpa failed to get me up. He overslept. Even he had no idea why, but I think that was the moment I realized how much I relied on him to be consistent. I woke up on my own that morning and he wasn’t up. There was no coffee brewing. That smell wasn’t in the air.

I have to admit that I panicked just a bit that morning. I panicked until I heard him snoring on the couch. When I looked at the clock and confirmed that I was running late I calmed down a bit. That’s also when I figured out that I missed the smell of coffee that morning. Part of me knew that everything was ok. He had just overslept. Part of me was disoriented because the habit of waking up to that smell had been disrupted. It had been almost a decade since I moved in at this point and I had come to associate that smell with the security I found in the consistency that grandpa represented.

People crave patterns. People crave what they consider to be normal. Sure, an adventure that changes the routine is amazing, but we can’t really enjoy such adventures unless we have a defined normal that we can rely on. For some, chaos is the norm and they don’t feel right when things are calm. For others, quietly sitting alone while reading a book is the norm. Sometimes, normal isn’t healthy. Yet, it’s normal. When that normal is disrupted, we often don’t know how to react and many of us feel an increased stress level until normal is returned. There is good news, however.

Hebrews 13:8 Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.(ESV)

My grandpa was the first consistent thing in my life. I didn’t know at the time that he was just living out the example set before him of Jesus. Grandpa was a believer. He wanted to be an example for me. It took years for me to see and understand the example he was trying to set. It took many years to see that his example pointed to Jesus who, in turn, pointed to God the Father. My grandpa is one of the first people I want to see when I get to heaven. Shortly after Jesus to thank Him for putting certain people in my life like my grandpa.