“For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
    so are my ways higher than your ways
    and my thoughts than your thoughts.” – Isaiah 55:9

Dad always made boiled eggs in the mornings before he’d go to work, and maybe he didn’t do it everyday, but he did it enough for me to hear the boiling of water whenever I think about it, or half-expect it on a dark morning when the day is just beginning to open its eyes. 

There are memories scattered everywhere, especially living in the same place I grew up in. Lately, I’ve stopped at things like his picture in my room, and just stare at it maybe hoping to get them to come back. And sometimes I’ll long for the past when we were all here, running around in the Florida sunshine and wading in endless, inexhaustible heat which made everything more intense, yes, but that much harder to forget.

Sometimes I’ll mourn for the life I think I should have had by now, and I wonder if it’s the same for you. Because it’s God’s voice that continually reminds me, His ways are higher than my ways, and His thoughts higher than my thoughts. “For as the heavens are higher than the earth,” He says, “so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8-9).

My favorite poem used to be “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost as soon as I pretty much read it in high school. It has this verse that I still sometimes think about:

“I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.” 

I picture a path with fallen leaves that crunches underneath your feet as you pass by it. And the brightness illuminates on the empty path as it winds ahead, leading to only God knows where, coupled with overhanging trees that cast a shadow on the ground to provide shade. Can you see it? You know, now that I think about it, this might have been a picture from my textbook back when I memorized this poem in ninth grade (we’ll never know). But oh, how lonely this path can be, and a solitary walk it can become.

Then I think of the straight-up love poetry in the Bible spoken from the mouth of Adonai Himself in passages like Jeremiah 31:3 where He says, “I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you.” And I swoon. 

And I realize, every little doubt I’ve had is really me doubting His love for me. Yea, it’s really me saying to Him, “If you loved me, you’d xx, or you really wouldn’t have let yy happen, or you would have showed up by now.”

It makes me think of the disciples when they were in a ship being rocked by the wind and waves in the book of Mark, while Jesus was sleeping. Their words to Adonai were completely relatable I think. 

“Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?” they ask in Mark 4:38.

The next part is my favorite: “He got up, rebuked the wind and said to the waves, ‘Quiet! Be still!’” (verse 39). 

Then, after nature itself stills at the command of its Creator’s voice, Jesus turns to His disciples and He asks them in verse 40, “Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?”

I can’t help but wonder if He was questioning them for their audacity to believe that He’d ever let them drown in a boat He was with them in. But then, laughing on the inside, I wonder—if Adonai says, “I am with you always” (Matthew 28:20), and He means it, how silly it must look sometimes for me to doubt Him standing right in front of me. 

Because I know as high as the heavens are above the earth, and much higher still, in ways my mind can never fathom—as mysterious and boundless as the universe itself, no, even vaster still—is His love for a you and a me. 

So then, every winding path or wind or wave can become an opportunity for His glory, just as every storm or strike of thunder knows His Name. May my heart speak it always. 

“For You know better than I

You know the way

I've let go the need to know why

I'll take what answers You supply

You know better than I."

- "Better Than I" (song from Joseph: King of Dreams)