This morning’s word is Something Big.
The anchor verses are Psalm 121 and Acts 2:39.
In Clearwater, Kansas last September, an eleven-year-old boy on a 4-H field trip walked through a quarry where commercial crews routinely shave layers of chalk off the rock. The club had mostly turned up shark teeth on prior visits. Then on one of those trips, Corbin Bullard, a member of the Sedgwick County 4-H Geology Club, spotted six or seven large vertebrae protruding from a fresh layer of rock. His words: “I didn’t know what it was, but I knew that it was something big.”
Over three additional excavation trips, Corbin and his fellow club members uncovered a fifteen-foot tylosaurus. A marine reptile and apex predator that lived in an ancient sea over what is now Kansas roughly eighty-five million years ago. The fossil had been waiting in that chalk for the better part of geologic memory. Corbin showed up for a 4-H trip and saw what was there.
This is the rhythm at Grace and Peace Studio. Each morning, readings are gathered and walked together until their single thread emerges. Today’s come from three streams: Day Two of “One Day at a Time,” Day Four of “Does God Heal Today?,” and Day Three of Discipology, the disciple-making plan walked through this season with a Bible reading group.
The thread is one move. Lift your eyes.
Cade Thompson, a contemporary Christian songwriter who writes on walking with GOD one day at a time, opens Day Two with Psalm 121. “I lift up my eyes to the mountains. Where does my help come from? My help comes from the LORD.” He tells of a season when he walked through deep heartache and felt like he was losing his faith. He kept lifting his head to heaven. “Faith, for me, often looks like choosing to look up again, even when everything inside me feels tired.”
He then quotes a line from his own song “One Day at a Time.” Trusting is never easy, because it is not right there. The help does not arrive in your hand. It does not announce itself in your circumstances. The help is there, but it is up. You lift your eyes to find it.
Pastor Daniel Vander Klok of ResLife Church, who writes on the healing ministry of Jesus and the believer’s part in carrying it forward, opens Day Four of “Does God Heal Today?” with a title that names what becomes visible when we lift our eyes. “More, not less.” His teaching is simple. The promises of GOD have not faded. They were delivered once for all to the saints. Every spiritual blessing from heaven has already been given in Christ. The price has already been paid.
He reaches to Acts 2:39 to name how far the promise reaches. “The promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the LORD our GOD calls to HIMSELF.” All who are far off. That is us, this Thursday morning. The promise has been here all along. The chalk has been waiting.
And he names the cost. “By HIS wounds you have been healed.” The healing is not a future hope. It is a finished work. What we lift our eyes to is not a wish but an inheritance.
Discipology Day Three names this from another angle. Jesus formed disciples in HIS first year of ministry by spending time with them. They watched. They learned what HE was like by being near HIM. They were given a person to see. We are disoriented, not disobedient. The way back is the way of watching.
Corbin Bullard did not invent the tylosaurus. He showed up. He looked at chalk. He saw what was there. The fossil had been waiting for eyes that knew enough to recognize something big when it appeared.
You probably have your own chalk this morning. A promise you have stopped expecting. A grace that has been patient. A passage of Scripture you have walked past a hundred times. A person GOD has placed in your life whose voice you have not yet learned to hear.
The LORD does not need to make new promises today. The promises have been delivered once for all. The help is already there. What is asked of you today is the simplest move you will make. Lift your eyes. Look at what is in front of you. Trust that the One who has been faithful for eighty-five million years and longer is still faithful this Thursday.
The promises of GOD are real whether we see them or not. But the seeing is the participation we are invited into.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.