Fog with a chance of Fog

So, I have been conducting a personal Bible study on Jeremiah. One of my all time favorite verses is in Jeremiah. I think you may find Jeremiah 29:11 familiar. It reads: For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.

Well, to put it simply, what I did not know, due to my lack of reading the full context of the scripture, is that Jeremiah is prophesying on behalf of the Lord to the exiles that God Himself exiled. Now, they probably did something to earn it, and that in all honesty, I have not gotten as far as to know what they did to earn it. I do know that this is significant. God declares to those who are down and out one simple truth. “I know what I am doing.”

How many times do I feel, “exiled.” Sometimes I feel so far away from God that it is hard to get back. Sometimes I mess up and fall so far back that I do not even know if I can catch up. What about the days I feel like I’m in a fog? I recently had my relationship fall apart right before my eyes. I am not married or anything, so it was not life shattering, but if you felt for someone the way I feel for this woman, you would understand. We ended up working through a lot of things that needed to be worked out. Understand this too, when I say work through things, I am talking about making sure we are prepared for marriage to each other. I recall a mutual understanding for God to be our primary goal and primary relationship that we are chasing. So you understand now what we were working on, but what about the end of the story? Not yet. One of the verses that got me through this tough time was simply Jeremiah 29:11. I texted it to her on the night we broke up. I said I do not know what is going to happen, but God never lets us go. She responded with, “you have no idea how much I needed that”. Now here we are, 2 months later and more in love than I can recount us being in the first place. The reason is simply this fact; God knows the plans he has for us.

Our relationships with God have gotten stronger and vicariously, our relationship with each other has grown immensely. What a great promise to those of us who are in the fog. What an amazing promise to those of us who have no idea what the next step is, or how college is going to be, or how we are going to cope with this loss. What an amazing promise for those of us in the fog.

If you are in a situation where it is foggy. Take some time to read this whole chapter. I have linked it in the word Jeremiah at the beginning of this post. We are only men. Just men looking for a hand through the fog.

Every time I try to find
a helping hand to get me through
I seem to always rewind
and find myself, running back to you

Let the fog roll, and let it swarm
let the fog keep on coming in
You never let me down before
and you won’t let me down now, again.