God Is the Glue

(This is not my words, but the words of an anonymous physician quoted to me in an email.  But the message is both beautiful and incredible so I wanted to share.)

A couple of days ago I was running (I use that term very  loosely) on my treadmill, watching a DVD sermon by Louie Giglio. And  I was BLOWN AWAY!  I want to share what I learned. But I fear  not being able to convey it as well as I want. I will share anyway.

He (Louie) was talking about how inconceivably BIG our God is, how He spoke the universe into being, how He breathes stars out of His mouth  that are huge raging balls of fire  Etc. Etc.

Then He went on to  speak of how this star-breathing, universe creating God ALSO knitted  our human bodies together with amazing detail and wonder.

At this point  I am LOVING it (fascinating from a medical standpoint, you know.)

And  I was remembering how I was constantly amazed during medical school as  I learned more and more about God’s handiwork.  I remember so many times  thinking. “How can ANYONE deny that a Creator did all of this???”

Louie went on to talk about how we can trust that the God who created  all this, also has the power to hold it all together when things seem  to be falling apart. How our loving Creator is also our sustainer.

And then I lost my breath. And it wasn’t because I was running my treadmill, either!!!  It was because he started talking about laminin. I knew  about laminin.

Here is how Wikipedia describes  them: ‘Laminins are a family of proteins that are an integral part of  the structural scaffolding of basement membranes in almost every animal  tissue.’

You see, Laminins are what hold us together, LITERALLY.  They are cell adhesion molecules.  They are the glue.

They are what holds one cell of our  bodies to the next cell. Without them, we would literally fall apart.  And I knew all this already. But what I didn’t know is what they LOOKED LIKE.

But now I do.  And I have thought about it a thousand times since (already). Here is what the structure of laminin looks like, AND  THIS IS NOT a ‘Christian portrayal’ of it. If you look up laminin in  any scientific/medical piece of literature, this is what you will see.

Now tell me that our God is not the coolest!!!  Amazing.  

The glue that holds us together…. ALL  of us…. Is in the shape of the cross.  Immediately,  Colossians 1:15-17 comes to mind.

            ‘He is the  image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.   For by him all things were created; things in heaven and  on earth, visible And invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or Authorities;     All things were created by him and for him.   He is before all things, and in him All things HOLD  TOGETHER.’

 
                                               Colossians 1:15-17

Call me crazy. I just think that is very, very, very  cool. 

Thousands of years before the world knew anything about laminin, Paul  penned those words. And now we see that from a very LITERAL standpoint, we are held together one cell to another by the cross. 

You would never in a quad- rillion years convince me that is anything other  than the mark of a Creator who knew EXACTLY what laminin ‘glue’ would  look like long before Adam breathed his first breath.

And you will find the video of Louie Giglio on laminin here, courtesy of youtube.

The Gift of the Broken Phone

“What time is it?” my friend, Andrina, asked as we headed back toward the parking structure, reluctant to end the day. 

 I'd not seen my dear high school and college friend, Andrina, in ages.  We spent the afternoon enjoying the sunshine in Huntington Beach, dining on Main street, strolling on the pier.

Well, that and the ocean breeze watching the U.S. Opens of surfing down in Huntington Beach.  

A beautiful afternoon with perfect weather, and the best of company. 

It doesn’t get much better than that.

I reached into my back pocket for my cell phone – I stopped wearing a watch years ago – to check the time.  


But the screen was a sickly bluish-white.

I turned it off and back on.  Same thing.  Grrr…  Then I noticed a small, pale, blue-grey strip running up the left side.  

Hmm…  Never seen that before….  I pressed on the screen and it did funny things to the sickly bluish-white screen.

Finally it dawned on me that the screen was cracked.  I couldn' t see a crack, but it must be there.  So small you couldn’t actually see the crack, but cracked nonetheless. BIG grrrrr…!

I wasn’t due for an upgrade yet.  

 
I gave mine to my son a few months back when he broke his phone.  Maybe he was due for an upgrade and I could use his!

We drove to the phone store and when I explained the upgrade issue to him, the salesman said no problem.  

Just give him my son’s phone number and he’d look it up.  

I greeted him with a blank stare as I tried to remember my son’s phone number.  Umm...it ends with 4917...or is it 4719?

“Umm….  Memory dial 2?”

We all laughed.  But the salesman said without his number we couldn’t look it up.  

Then it dawned on me.  I couldn’t look up his number on my phone, but I could still call him!  The phone still worked, provided one didn't need to see anything on it.  And Nick was in my memory dial!

I proudly pushed that number 2 and waited while Andrina and the salesman watched expectantly.  Nick answers and I am so jazzed to have been so smart.  

“Um, Coke, what’s your phone number?”

“What do you mean what’s my number, Mom?  You just called me!”

I briefly explained my plight and he gave me his number.  But alas, he wasn’t due for an upgrade for a good eight months.  I would have to pay full price.  Sigh…

We hemmed and hawed as we compared phones and the benefits and drawbacks of each.  We waited what seemed an eternity for another salesman's attention, and finally had what we needed.

Finally, after the salesman printed out a mile and a half of receipt, I walked out the door $197 poorer, but with a means to keep in contact with my kids and friends, listen to music, check the time, be reminded to take my pills, take pictures, keep my appointments all in line, and any number of other vital functions.

I didn’t plan on spending a month’s food budget on a phone, but stepped out in faith.  

Somehow God would have to take care of the end of the month.

I pinched pennies all month and what do you know.  

In the last week of the month I dog sat for some dear friends and they gave me $50 of spending money.  I said, “Thank you, John and Besty!  And thank you, Lord!”

Then out of the blue, I got a royalty check I wasn’t expecting from my publisher to the tune of $147. 
  
The total of these two surprise bonuses inexplicably totaled up to one $197 phone.

I told God I would need him to make up the difference when I walked out of that store with that $197 phone on what had once been a beautiful, joyous day.  

And boy did he!  Almost to the very penny!

You will never in a million years convince me that God can’t do math.
  
He who knows the number of hairs on your heads and grains of sand on the beach...

Nor that he knows exactly what we need, when we need it – to the very dollar!  And he knows when we might need a little reassurance with a very precisely exact answer to prayer.

Liz Carson Rosas

31 Aug 2001

…And my God will meet all your needs according to his glorious riches in Christ Jesus.  – Philippians 4:19

…Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.  Matthew 6:8

…If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.  -- Matthew 21:22

Not Your Average Joe

Maria Braun shuffled around in her great-aunt’s small, dusty attic sorting through boxes and trunks. 

Boxes full with the treasured and forgotten things that are left behind to mark the passing of a life.

Most of it she tossed.

Some she boxed up, and a few heirlooms and mementos she divided among family. 

But what to do with the Bible she found? You can’t throw away a Bible. But it was in English, and had been dog-eared and written in.

No one would want it. Someone had written notes in all of the margins and inside the front and back covers. 

Conflicted about what to do with this old, well-used, once loved Bible, she set it aside and forgot about it.

But one day she came across it again and began to wonder about its owner and how it ended up in a box in her great-aunt’s attic. She looked at the inscription, written in a woman’s hand, and could only make out a few of the English words she recognized. Then she noticed it: a faded, smudged phone number in the corner of the back, inside cover.

It took a while to get up the nerve, but finally, she dialed the phone number. The woman on the other end spoke only English, and Maria’s English was extremely limited. Over the bad connection, she read the name inside the Bible aloud, “Joe Smith,” and then said, “Bible.”(Okay, her name was not Maria Braun and Joe’s last name was not Smith, but we’re going with that for now…)

After some halting and confusing back and forth, Maria managed to get an address from the woman on the other end for Joe. An address in California in the United States.

“Dankeschön (Thank you),” she said, then hung up.

She began to search for packaging material sufficient for the long trip from Germany to Southern California.

A year later, in San Gabriel, California, I looked up as my friend, Angel, walked into my classroom at the end of a long day.

“Do you know someone named Joe Smith?” she asked with a perplexed look on her face.

I flipped through the Rolodex in my head, searching through decades of friends and acquaintances, but came up empty.

She said a friend of hers from church had approached her with a bizarre story. An acquaintance of his had asked him if he knew anyone named Liz Rosas who was a teacher at one of the church schools in Southern California.

He didn’t, but said he had a friend from church who taught at the school in San Gabriel.

Maybe she knew someone who knew someone who knew this Liz Rosas. And so he called my best friend, Angel.

Angel said this Joe Smith was asking for my phone number, saying that he really needed to talk to me.

I had no idea who he was, so I declined

to give my number to my friends friend whose acquaintance knew someone named Joe who lived in Germany and was asking for me.

But then, feeling guilty, I reconsidered and told Angel to pass along my email address.  A week or so later I got the most amazing email from Joe Smith in Germany who said I was one of the most influential people in his life.

I felt terrible that I had no idea still who this man was, but continued to read.

Two decades earlier (when I was a newlywed living up in the mountains at Camp Cedar Falls), I had been influential in his giving his life to Jesus.

I still had no idea who Joe Smith was.

He said that I’d made such an impact on his life that he got baptized in that freezing creek up at camp the summer he was sixteen. And I gave him a Bible with his name engraved on the front in gold letters and an inscription inside.

I began to have a fuzzy recollection of Joe. But it was nothing more than a fleeting glimpse of a boy I barely recalled, but for whom I wanted to do something special to commemorate his baptism.

He said that not long after I gave him that Bible, he joined the military and bounced around from place to place, his Bible the only real anchor in his life.

But somehow, one day in Germany, he lost his Bible. And slowly, eventually, he not only forgot the Bible, but his walk with the Lord. He lost himself in the life of military buddies and drinking and partying.

Years later, now out of the military, he was married with a young child of his own, and living once again back in Germany. One day, he got a package in the mail from his mother back home in California.

He tore open the packaging only to find another package inside. A package also addressed to him, but in a stranger’s hand, and with a return address in Germany, less than 100 miles from where he now lived.

Odd, he thought. Then he opened the inner package and found a familiar, old Bible, dog-eared and worn. He flipped through the pages, and the notes in the margins tugged at his heart.

Then he saw the inscription inside from the young woman who gave the Bible to him some twenty years earlier. And thus began his convoluted quest to track down a Liz Rosas somewhere in Southern California.

Eventually he found someone who knew someone, who had known her and her husband long ago. He heard that they had divorced and she was maybe a teacher at one of the church schools in Southern California still, but they didn’t know which one.

And through his persistence, Joe finally tracked me down at the church school there in San Gabriel at a time when my life was difficult. I had lost someone I loved to pancreatic cancer, followed by a fellow teacher’s death to breast cancer, a friend’s murder and her husband’s death a week later.

So much of life was questionable at this point. It was easy to question life and God and everything.

And in all the chaos, God sent me Joe and his rededication to the Lord.

Joe and his worn, dog-eared, note-riddled Bible that had crossed the ocean twice before it found him again. And then only after a German housewife found it in a dusty box in her great-aunt’s attic.

And that gift, which touched a young man’s heart so deeply when I gave it to him twenty years earlier now came back to give me a gift.

The gift of faith and renewed belief in the miracles of God’s love.

.