Distinction

“But the Lord will make a distinction between the livestock of Israel and that of Egypt, so that no animal belonging to the Israelites will die.” Exodus 9: 4 This verse jumped out at me as I listened to my audio Bible first thing this morning. The truth is that we are living in the middle of something amazing. When the plagues start to fly in this world, you know that on the other side of the veil God is doing something too.

Last night I dreamed that I was going to be elected ‘president of church’. Not exactly sure what that’s going to look like but I saw in the dream how I was going to be surprisingly well prepared for what is happening. The same is true for many who have spent the last several years walking closely with God. We have been doing weird things and acting very differently than most people. That weird stuff is what has made us ready for a weird time.

When the plagues start flying, the Moses are called in. When the flood is coming the Noahs are put in the game. These are distinctly different kinds of people and God makes a distinction on purpose. For His purpose! He made many of us weird for such a time as this. We may spend a little more time talking to God in the living room or when we wake up in the middle of the night or while we drive than most people. We may buy our clothes without labels for $3 or less on the sale rack. We may have learned 45 different gardening strategies and them combined several to create our own.

No one looks at my garden and thinks much, but I spent hundreds of hours learning about gardening. I didn’t have a plant in the ground or an animal in the yard and I was living in the suburbs when God told me farm and garden and try to raise my own food. Enough to feed a neighborhood. I’m not even close yet but I promise you that if the system collapses today we will eat. I do weird stuff like cover my garden in wood chips, burry big chunks of wood under the dirt in my raised beds, plant constantly in staggered sections and I going to just keep building more.

I raise chickens and we have way too many eggs. The Lord used those eggs to bless some people who couldn’t get eggs during the plague because of the supply chain problems. We’ve had to learn how to make several new egg dishes and that’s been a lot of fun but it’s not what everyone else is doing. I feed my chickens grass with their feed and I intend to start growing their food. Cucumbers, melons, squash, cabbage and many different veggies are very productive and we can afford to share them with the chickens to save on feed. But eventually I plan to grow all of what they eat.

Not everyone makes a complete change in lifestyle when unemployment is dropping and the stock market is going up. But the Holy Spirit teaches us of things to come, that’s one of the descriptions the Bible gives. That means looking weird until the day everyone is locked in their houses and then you suddenly look brilliant or lucky. But really it’s neither, it’s the living God telling you what to do and how to position your life.

God has already made a distinction between people who were listening to Him and people who weren’t. He has always done this, He did this during the plagues and the flood and all through history and He can do the same for you. If you want to make it through the crazy mine field of the future you will need to be close to God and do what He says. It’s not an exact science and sometimes we misunderstand. That’s a call to get closer, not an excuse to walk away. Sometimes it’s hard. I went through an injury and it positioned me and made things better in my life. But it also hurt! I have literal scars and figurative scars; scars are a sign that you’ve been healed from something.

In time I will see what God has been doing. By the time it comes I will have been expecting it for a long time because He’s always telling me in dreams what He is doing with me. He may talk to you in a different way, but He’s talking. It may be hard to understand like dreams are, but if you chase that understanding, you will eventually figure out how it works. It isn’t logical, it isn’t comfortable, and you don’t get to plan it out. It’s so much better than all of that ‘normal’ stuff. We aren’t made for normal. We aren’t made to try and climb the hierarchy that is presented to us and see how much of ourselves we can give to it. We are made to fly right to the place God wants us. We are made to be different and weird. We are distinct and God has made a distinction on our behalf.