WHAT DO YOU SEE IN YOUR CLOUDS?
Behold, He cometh with clouds.
Revelation 1:7
In the Bible clouds are always connected with God.
Clouds are those sorrows or sufferings or providences, within or without our personal lives, which seem to dispute the rule of God.
It is by those very clouds that the Spirit of God is teaching us how to walk byfaith.
If there were no clouds, we should have no faith. "The clouds are but
the dust of our Father's feet." The clouds are a sign that He is there.
What a revelation it is to know that sorrow and bereavement and suffering are the clouds that come along with God!
God cannot come near without clouds, He does not come in clear shining.
It is not true to say that God wants to teach us something in our trials: through every cloud He brings, He wants us to unlearn something.
His purpose in the cloud is to simplify our belief until our relationship to Him is exactly that of a child - God and my own soul, other people are shadows. Until other people become shadows, clouds and darkness will be mine every now and again.
Is the relationship between myself and God getting simpler than ever it has
been?
There is a connection between the strange providences of God and what we know of Him, and we have to learn to interpret the mysteries of life in the light of our knowledge of God.
Unless we can look the darkest, blackest fact full in the face without damaging God's
character, we do not yet know Him.
"They feared as they entered the cloud . . ."
- Is there anyone "save Jesus only" in your cloud?
If so, it will get darker; you must get to the place where there is "no one any more save Jesus only."
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Reading Chambers today I can only remember the odd things in "my" salvation story that made me who I am today.
Often the clouds were above me and I would look up and wish Jesus would come again as we once so adamantly told everyone.
I recall in Fountain Valley coming home from Calvary Chapel on the Bus when looking East I saw the Sun break the clouds and I stared in love and adoration just walking away with the Lord like an Enoch.
"Cloud tripping" as I used to tell it, seemingly walking and talking feeling compelled to come up(in) farther and it was the most beautiful out of body "seemingly" experience I enjoyed with Jesus.
It still feels like the "first heaven" to me.
Sometimes the clouds were in my soul when I recall the time post op when a particular procedure should have been done with medication but "cold turkey" I was held down as "packing" was pulled from a wound and four grown men were lifted up as the scream that tore through the VA Hospital was a body meant for praise, shocked into abject suffering.
In a Journal the record I kept said the Smile in my eyes died that day and it literally took years before I could look in a mirror and say, my eyes are smiling-my code words to myself that Jesus was there.
Looking back, I have the Utmost thankfulness that all my suffering clouds of Joy were with the unique experiences I encountered with God to be able to be with those who when no one would come, there is still one who will.
Alone before the Church's were organized to "be there" I struggled when no one was there as a Keith Green song might have sung, but I found if Jesus was not real enough at that point of crisis for me, he always sent some stranger, who "happened" to be there at "just the right time".
No one prepared me for clouds, trials, tribulation, Trust, but Romaine once said something about the Book of James and having my middle name "james" I became enthralled in Romaine's way of presenting it.
I learned if I really wanted to be like Jesus, in some smaller way, I would be able to look at his life, and Identify my Life, to his, in experiences.
That "gift of understanding" helped me enormously because as passionate as I was to follow Him, he was as passionate to allow me to experience much of his life as I did.
I am glad for that, for in the fellowship of His Suffering, we find the real quality of love that cannot be spoken, but can only be shared.
Are you in a cloud?
Stay there.
Be still, the storm will pass.
Michael James Stone
