Have you had a mountaintop experience? Those times when God’s presence is so real you feel like you could reach out and touch the Divine? When everything – all worries and concerns and fears and sorrows – fall away and you are embodying a “peace that passes all understanding?”
I recently came back from a mountaintop experience – literally, as I returned from a week in the high plains of New Mexico. I was so like Peter at the Transfiguration: “Let me pitch a tent, Lord, and stay here with you forever!” Sounds like a plan to me! Except, there’s not much work for a transformed believer on the mountaintop; the work is to be done in the valleys.
Oswald Chambers in My Utmost for His Highest writes that when we are brought down from those times of exaltation “it is neither beautiful nor poetic nor thrilling … But it is in the valley that we have to live for the glory of God.” (October 2 devotional)
In scrubbing the soup pot after providing a meal for people who are hungry. In embracing the urine-soaked, dirt-caked older man who lives on the streets because the horrors of the war he fought in makes it impossible for him to sleep in a shelter. In separating two 2-year-old children hitting each other because in their world if you don’t grab it and fight for it, you won’t get it.
It is in the valleys of hunger, violence, scarcity and humiliation that the saints must serve. That is where God needs us. Yes, an Omnipotent God who “needs” us – not to bring about the Divine Potential, but to embody fully what it means to love one another.
The air smells much better on the mountaintop but it is our job to bring that sweet essence to the homeless, the hungry, the embittered, the forsaken and the forgotten.
We all want meaningful work to do. Here’s the good news: There are many vacancies! Applications are being accepted!
No urine test required. Compensation commensurate with your love.
Simply yours,
Victoria Grace
Simply Yours 