The Ultimate Move

I have been reading the story of Noah lately, really trying to get some deeper bits and pieces. Last night I began to look at Noah's wife a little more closely. The past couple weeks it has been taking me more time than I imagined to sort through the last of our things and figure out what I am doing with them. Every item I am looking at with the question, "Store, take, or throw/give away?" As it is more difficult than I ever imagined it would be, I have begun to get a bit whiny about it all.

And that is where Noah and his wife come in. I am not sure where Noah, his ark and all his animals became a cute, cuddly picture for the nursery wall, but I believe there is something there that I can learn from...maybe you can too!

Just to give a little background in case you aren't aware, the story of Noah took place approximately 750 years after Adam died. For interest sake, Adam actually lived to see the birth of Noah's father, Lamech, but died when he was about 30. The inhabitants of the earth had gotten increasingly wicked to the point that God wanted to just kill them all. Sounds harsh right? You can read that part for yourself...Genesis 6. Anyways, a guy named Noah caught the attention of the Almighty and He came up with an alternative to killing them all: it was killing most of them. He would spare Noah and his family by having him build a massive boat, gather a bunch of animals and button down the hatches for 40 days while it rained and poured, and while "water sprang from the deep", which would have been quite a sight! Now, sometimes I think we tell the story with a little yawn and fail to grasp the enormity of the situation. Just to give you a scale here is a photo of a replica ark that a man in Holland built.

You can read the how and why behind the picture here, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-451746/Noahs-Ark-ready-floods-Holland.html. It is pretty interesting.

So, back to Noah and his family. Maybe you already knew this, but I always thought that it started raining and once it started to get a bit extreme they all decided to get on the boat for safety. However, God had them board a full seven days before a drop of rain even fell. Imagine the faith to build the thing in the first place, but then to have to actually sit there surrounded by monkeys and lizards for seven days while your neighbours are still outside gardening, would require immense faith. Or maybe that was the easy part, I don't know. But God had them do it for a reason I am sure.

This is the part that gets me. For the sake of typing I am going to name Noah's wife Norah. In the midst of all my whining, I thought of Norah. Wow, talk about the ultimate move! Imagine her last walk through her house. What did she pack? What did she leave behind? What was going through her mind? Having no idea what a flood even looked like, and having no understanding of the size of the earth, would she have known that she would never see it all ever again? Did she sweep the dirt floor before she left? Were her neighbours so wicked that they looted her home while Norah sat on the ark and listened? Did she cry? Or did she hold her daughters -in-law while they cried?

I obviously don't have answers to these questions. I won't have answers to them until I sit beside Norah in Glory and have the opportunity to ask her. Maybe it won't matter then though. But right now, the questions themselves help me to have faith.

The end of the story is interesting also. After the 40 days of rain, it didn't end there. They didn't just walk off the boat and set up their new home. All in all, they were on the ark for over a year, waiting for the waters to recede.

I am inspired by the lives of Noah and his family. Inspired to have more faith and to stop whining. Obviously, the journey we are embarking on does not in any way have the enormous implecations that Noah's does. But I believe in all things, we are to have faith. Faith in God is to have an anchor, a sure anchor.

So in the difficult moments of life, I know my anchor holds.