A makeshift herd

I LOVE stories. It's a firm belief of mine that God does too. Just look at the first shapter of John. Jesus was the Word before anything came to be and in the Word we were created to make more words and stories and relationships to his glory.

I'm learning that a story doesn't have to mention God's name to be to his glory. It's because of him that we're able to write and read and be a part of other worlds. Every book we lose ourselves in, any TV show we can't stop watching and all the movies that take our breath away displays some of God's truth. Because that's what we were created for. To proclaim our God as the way, the truth and the life. We were born to recognize goodness and justice when we see it.

I'm learning that it's okay to find it easier to lose myself in a book rather then the Bible, because either way, I am going to see God in a new way.I just finished a sweet book called Small as an Elephant by Jennifer Richard Jacobsen. An eleven year old boy wakes up one morming to find his mother gone and sets out to find her. By himself. In a town he barely knows. By the end of the book, I just wanted this guy to stop running and accept help already. He rejects any and all efforts to reach out to him and keeps on pressing to a goal that I think he himself doesn't even know. My favorite part is a paragraph ast the end of Jack's long journey to do it by himself and he finally gets to see Lydia the Maine elephant and his grandmother waiting for him in a zoo.

"All along the way, Jack realized ,he had never really been alone. He had been part of a makeshift herd, one that had spread out over miles.They had communicated with heart sounds that were sometimes so soft, thay weren't always discernible to the ear. But they had found one another and they had helped one another. Just like a true herd."

Even though Jack was alone in a strange town he didn't know, he was always surrounded by people who cared. The family next to him on the camping ground who shared a picnic with him the day before he left, Nina, his friend from back home who alerted his grandmother that Jack needed help, Slyvie and Wyatt, cousins who gave Jack a safe place to hide out and drove him at least part of the way, and of course, Big Jack, who Jack first meets in a restraunt and who splints up his hurt finger. And of course, the grandmother who patiently waits by Lydia for the grandson who she knows mistrusts her and loves elephants. He was never alone.Something about that resonates with me, a sixteen year old girl,  years older in wisdom and puberty, who aches to belong, to be cared for, whose heart hurts as people she loves leave her. But even now, I have friends in Germany, in Pennsylvania, Missouri, Iowa, and random places in Michigan. I have family I've never met and friends I've only had for a year that I already consider family. That's the beauty of Christ, is that we're all connected. Wherever I go I can rest in knowing that I will be cared for. By him who will never leave nor forsake me, and those he chooses to bring into my life :)