Meg

A couple weeks ago, I visited Laura Jones at her home in Bellevue. Laura is a fairly new addition to a Thursday morning Bible study group at Creekside.  We walked Laura's pair of English Cream Retrievers, Hank and Hazel, around Lake Boren and then sat down for a cup of tea at her kitchen table.  My intention was to record Laura’s story of God restoring her eyesight for the Creekside blog.  Instead, I got to meet Laura’s son Luke and his wife, Meg.  Luke made me a very delicious cup of pour-over coffee. And Meg and I had a wonderful conversation.

Luke and Meg have joined their skills in videography and photography, and formed an organization called No Shortage, as in – there’s no shortage of stories of God’s work in the world!  Together, Luke and Meg run around the country capturing stories of God’s work through individuals and organizations.   (Check out this one about TheoTech, a company developing tech products with God as the primary customer.)

Their NoShortage mission statement is:

We tell the stories of how Jesus followers are advancing the kingdom of heaven by pushing against the darkness and spreading the light.

Telling kingdom stories is what our Creekside blog does too!

I told Meg that I’m a writer-wannabe, but don’t spend enough time on writing.  She suggested I ask God directly, “How much do You want me to write?”  Good idea.

Meg and I talked about writing process.  “Writing is 80% noticing,” she said.  Meg recommended that I look at John Steinbeck’s six key writing rules.  Here’s rule #3 – Forget about a generalized audience.  Write for one specific reader, whether real or imagined.

This same idea is in Hidden Art by Edith Schaeffer. “Write to communicate with someone, even if it is literally only one person.  It is not a waste to write beautiful prose or poetry for one person’s eyes only!”

Meg loves the way God speaks spiritual truths through the natural world.  As an example, Meg told me about watching the wind blowing field grasses one day.  There were short and tall grasses intermixed with clumps of dead grass strewn on the ground.

I feel like God was really speaking to me through the grass, which is a lesson in itself that God is so powerful He can speak to us even through grass!  The wind would blow.  The dead grass didn't move at all. The medium grass would only move with a big gust of wind. But the tall grass was always moving, no matter how strong the wind was, even when it felt imperceptible.

That’s a picture of God, His Spirit, being the wind. And we are the grass.  How receptive are we to God’s Spirit?  How do we grow spiritually?  I felt like God was saying to me, “You want to be the tall grass that is always receptive to my voice and always moving in response to my voice.

Thank you, Meg!  I love the spiritual analogies embedded in every created thing!

Now here’s something mind-blowing.  Look how the apostle Paul makes a spiritual analogy out of letter-writing!

You are our letter, written in our hearts, known and read by all men; being manifested that you are a letter of Christ, cared for by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.  2 Cor 3:2-3

So there you have it.  I sit down with Laura over a cup of tea and end up bonding with Meg about kingdom stories, writing process and spiritual analogies!  What fun!  The wind blows where it will and God lead us into divine encounters.