I’ve been getting off-track lately.  I’ve found myself distracted by worldly things that have taken my attention away from God.  I found myself fighting with God, resisting Him and wandering out of His will.  I began to choose my will over His too often.  Its hard once you get in this place to get back out again.  I was so frustrated with myself for doing this but I could not seem give up doing what I wanted to do and making bad choices.

Then a couple of readers lately have made comments on the same post I wrote from almost three years ago!  I was wondering why, and then finally God got through to me.  The post is entitled, “Making God’s Will My Heart’s Desire“.   I need to listen to my own message!  lol  I need to again pray for God’s will to be my heart’s desire.  We don’t naturally want to give ourselves to God and to choose His will.  We have to pray for Him to give us these desires.  So I began to pray that prayer again.  Why did I stop?  It seems so obvious now.  But yet it eluded me until God reminded me.

Then I opened up to this verse: “May the favor of the Lord our God rest upon us…”  That spoke to me, and suddenly I felt a great urge for it to be true of me.  I wanted God to find favor in me and be pleased with me.  I was not acting in a way that was pleasing to Him, but yet I wanted to be pleasing to Him.  And somehow by praying that prayer seems to make it true or make it able to be true.  Maybe just the desire to please Him is pleasing to Him!   And of course the other side of this is praying for it makes it possible for Him to begin to change us so that we actually do pleasing things as well.

So I have prayed for Him to find favor in me, just like the man who wanted Jesus to heal his son who had an evil spirit but had trouble believing that Jesus could do it.  Jesus in effect asked if he believed He could heal him.  Knowing the truth about Himself, but wanting to do what was right, he said,  “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!”  (Mk. 9:24)  I love this man’s honesty.  He didn’t currently possess what would please Jesus, but asking Jesus to help him overcome that which he lacked was in itself pleasing to God. 

So I pray Jesus, make me pleasing to You.  May I find favor with You.  Let me see with Your eyes and hear with Your ears.  Make Your will my heart’s desire again so that my only pursuit in life is to please You and to obey You.  Living outside of Your will is scary and miserable.  I enjoy being here with You, safe within Your will.  Help me to not be resistant to You, but to stay in Your will and seek to please You each day.   In Your Name, amen.

He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty…He will cover you with His feathers and under His wings you will find refuge…  Psa. 91:1-2,4

Its funny.  We grow up on this planet assuming that we belong to ourselves.  We assume that we can do whatever we want.  We are individuals.  We have rights.  We are free.  We can’t see God, so its hard to know sometimes that He exists and who He is.  But then one day we meet Him.   We fall in love with Him.  But, as in my case, it can become hard to understand why we are told to praise and worship Him?   One reason our country is great because we believe that everyone is created equal.  We aren’t used to societies that have ruling classes where it is accepted that one must respect and submit to persons above them. 

I struggled with this a year or two after being saved.  If God loved me, why would He ask me to praise Him??  I couldn’t understand why God, who loved me so much and was my Friend, would ask me to lift Him up and praise Him.  It just didn’t make sense in my logical mind.  I prayed about it and asked God, but still didn’t come to a logical answer.  So one day I finally just decided to do it.  And in doing it I felt such joy and a sense that it was right.

Even now sometimes I struggle with allowing God to be in control.  Sometimes I do better than others.  The days I give Him control are often wonderful days as I watch as He works out my day.  But other days I find myself resistant.  I just want to do what I want to do!  I know it’s not right and ultimately it leads to discontent on my part.  But yet I still choose it sometimes.  Why do I have so much trouble giving Him control and admitting that He is my Master, albeit the most loving, gentle, kind Master there is, who is always working for my good .

But as I look at who God is, it becomes easier to understand why we should worship and obey Him.  He created all of us!  Before that there was nothing but God.  He has always existed, He has no beginning and no end.  He always Is.  And then He decided to create the earth and us.   We only live because God sustains us.  Our heart beats, we breathe in oxygen, our soul lives because He sustains us.  

He created the perfect planet to sustain us.  It is just the right distance from the sun to sustain our life.  A bit too close and we burn up.  A bit too far and we freeze to death.  We have just the right amount of oxygen so that we can breathe and not some other gas which would poison us.  Without Him creating the perfect, safe environment for us to live in, we would not continue to exist.

No only did He create us and our planet, but He created a plan for us as well.  We are living in the story that He created.  He knew Adam and Eve would sin.  He knew He would send Jesus to die for our sins.  He knows when He will come back again to bring us to  be with Him.  It is His story, planned by Him from beginning to end.  And we are a part of it, walking through our little piece of it.

So for me to think that I am my own, that I am independent, free to do whatever I want is kind of silly in light of all that!  It is all God’s.  His people.  His story.  He has a right to tell me what is right and wrong.  He has a right to be worshiped and adored.  He is, after all, all-powerful, holy beyond our understanding, and Love.  He loves us more than we can imagine.  He is a great, unimaginable, good Being, the likes of which we cannot conceive.  We’ve never met on this earth anyone who compares.  We never will.  Even the angels in all their glory, do not hold a candle to God.  He is the One and Only great and awesome God.

In light of all this, our response is only to bow down and worship.  We are created from a thought in His mind.  We are sustained by His will.  We are cared for and protected by His Love.  We are created for Him and by Him, living on His earth, walking through His plan, His story until He brings His children safely Home to be with Him.  We are not our own.  We are His.  In the end there really is no other response than worship and submission. 

And the amazing thing is that with all His power and glory and greatness and holiness, He comes down to find us, each of His individual children.  He comes to seek each one of us and gives us dignity, life in Him, a sense of purpose in His plan, the love we have always desired.   In fact, He gives us the love that He created us to receive and without which we are incomplete.   The Great King treats us as friends, as sons and daughters.  He treats us gently and kindly as we kneel in awe and reverence of our Master and Love.

The Lord Himself goes before you and will be with you; He will never leave you nor forsake you.  Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged.  Deut. 31:8

One thing I am learning after everything we’ve been through the past couple of years is that God never leaves me.  Through all of my ups and downs, highs and lows, success and failure, good and bad behavior, He still is with me.  Of course He was here when I chose to give my life to Him 23 years ago and grew with Him as a baby Christian throughout college.  But He stayed with me when after that I got married and subconsciously decided that since I now had my husband, I didn’t need Him any more.  He remained with me even when I was trying to ignore Him.  He continued to pursue me and woo me and call me back, and thankfully He is persistent, because He succeeded.

He was with me the many years after that of married life during my long, gradual restoration to Him and slow growth in Him in which not a lot seemed to happen and you could have called me lukewarm.  But no one else could see what He was doing on the inside.  He had His master plan all along, continuing to lead me where He wanted me.

He was with me five years ago during a spiritual high.  After convincing me that, though I had everything I could basically want physically, I was lifeless and depressed because I had not given Him everything.  Then He amazed me with His love for me.  I just could not believe that He could possibly love me that much.  I still can’t believe it, and it continues to constantly amazes me to the point where it is that which I now am driven to try to convince other people of.  And so I almost couldn’t resist agreeing to give Him everything, with His help, which launched me on the most amazing adventure of my life!  I became amazed and captivated by Him and He was all I could think about.

Looking back, I believe one of the reasons for the previous experience was to enable me to survive the next chapter in our lives.  A couple of years later, my husband lost his home-based business of 14 years.  I’ve written about it many times over the past couple of years!  Our life of comfort that I took for granted was changed forever.  After having my husband home 24 hours a day, what had become the norm for the kids and me, he lost the business.  He trained in the only thing that he knew would be hiring a middle-aged person starting over in his career.  He became a truck driver and drove over the road for the first year.  We saw him very little, and when we did, he was exhausted.  He not only drove 12-14 hours a day but manually unloaded the entire truck, box by box, to the stores.  He worked so hard he could not maintain his weight and became unhealthy. 

 Thankfully he has found other jobs since then that have kept him closer to home.  But the jobs have been difficult and low paying.  Finances, which were always fairly comfortable for us in the past, have now continued to be a challenge.  We have had many months where we had no idea how we would pay the bills.  But amazingly, during the past two and a half years of this uncertainty, every bill has been paid.  God has provided for every need, as promised.

In addition to having my husband gone more often and struggling financially, we lost our church family of nine years, I had to go go back to work after being home for 14 years, and last year we also struggled with an illness with my older daughter that  took a long time to diagnose and created a lot of fear, uncertainty, and eventually led to her being out of school for the second half of the year.  It pushed me to where I had trouble trusting God because it seemed that it was up to me to figure it all out.  Of course it wasn’t.  He had it all figured out.   And God was still with me through our lowest times.

I struggled to trust Him.  I struggled with anger at him.  I doubted Him, His goodness.  I sent myself into despair and hopelessness.  Because once we decide God may no longer be good or trustworthy, our whole foundation for hope and security is shattered.  It is a scary place to be.  But God did not give up on me then either.  He patiently walked with me through my valley of the shadow of death.  He even walked with me when my anger was turned towards Him, holding my hand.  He did not leave, patiently leading me through.

There were times during all this that I just didn’t feel I could maintain a relationship with Him like I should.  I didn’t have anything left to give Him.  There was nothing.  And that is when I found out that He was still with me.  Even when I have nothing left.  He is still there.  And that is the lesson, right?  When all else fails, when my strength fails, my ability to cope, my ability to respond in relationship to Him, my ability to give Him anything at all, He Is.  He is enough.  He is enough to maintain our relationship with Him.  He is our strength.  He carries us.  He is here, always, to the very end of life on earth and then beyond.

It is an amazing lesson that I am learning, His constancy, which is not dependent on me.  What a relief!  Because I’m quite unreliable and inconsistent and emotional.  It gives us such a sense of security.  When I cannot do anything else, He will still be here to carry me through.  Whether I have everything or nothing left, I can rest in the fact that He will never leave me and will carry me through to the end. 

Praise You God for Your amazing constancy, patience, and committment, Your Love, that sees us all the way through this life and when we have nothing left, even picks us up and carries us ever so tenderly.  We love You.  Amen.

For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, no anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.  Rom. 8:38-39

I was filming the snow with our early Christmas present, a video camera.  We have had great fun with our camera, filming our girls and the snow and our Christmas tree.  But I was getting frustrated with the fact that the scenery just didn’t quite look as beautiful on the screen as I could see with my naked eye.  It just didn’t quite capture the same picture.  The same happens with my still camera.  I can get beautiful outdoor pictures with it, but still the quality is just doesn’t compare to what my eye can see.  Cameras cannot pick up the slight nuances of light and shade, depth of focus, contrast, the ability of the eye to quickly capture high quality detail in whatever direction the eye looks, at multiple depths, including what is outside of the focus area in the peripheral vision and the ability to see the depth in three dimensions.  As beautiful as the snow was, the camera was just not quite getting what I was seeing.

Then I thought, after all these thousands of years of human beings developing greater and greater levels of invention and technology, we still can’t recreate the human eye in all its complexity.  Now if we, the most intelligent life on this earth, cannot even create a decent eyeball after thousands of years, how likely is it that unintelligent chance or evolution could have created us intelligent humans beings, who as a whole are infinitely more sophisticated than just the one part of our body?  Could chance create our graceful and coordinated hands and legs which no man-made robot can imitate?  How about our heart and our lungs?  Or our brain which is more sophisticated than our fastest, most up-to-date computer?  How much less likely could chance have created our souls, our spirits, our heart, our conscience?  How about our desire for God, for heaven, to know we are loved and wanted and significant in the universe?  Our desire to know there is Something greater than ourselves, Someone more powerful, Someone loving, who is in control for our good in the middle of all the chaos that we experience.  What is our need to explain where we came from, how we were created and why, do we have significance, are we loved, do we matter?…

Yes.  We are loved.  We do matter.  We are created by the One who loves us more than we can imagine, the One who wants to be our Father, who sent His Son, Jesus, to die for us, to take the punishment that we deserve for our sin instead of us.  Once we accept this, then we are His, and He ours.  We are forgiven.  We are safe in Him.  We are loved.  We know where we came from.  We know why we were created.  We know where we are going.    And we know Who created the most amazingly sophisticated creations on this earth…snowflakes, our spirits, our bodies, and especially our eyeballs.

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—His eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.   Rom. 1:20

Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord his God, the Maker of heaven and earth, the sea, and everything in them – the Lord, who remains faithful forever.  Psa. 146:5-6

I can’t get over the fact that He actually lives in me.  It is such an intimate, personal, all-encompassing experience.  He is always with me, inside of me.  I am never left alone.  Never without help or comfort or company.  He goes about my day with me, experiencing everything I experience, feeling everything I feel.  He knows me, inside and out.  He is always ready to listen to my thoughts and fears.  He helps me with my struggles or is just available to chat.  He never leaves.  He shares my very body with me.  He co-resides in me.  It’s really an amazing, awesome thing that I cannot get over!

The second thing I can never get over is that fact that God loves me.  He, who created all things, who has all power, who is perfect and holy, loves me!?   He, the great King, chooses to reach down and lift up us poor children, so that we become sons and daughters of the King! 

It doesn’t even seem like it should be true.  It doesn’t seem right that He should be so loving and so gentle and kind and patient with me.  I keep trying to convince myself that my latest transgression was one too many.  Surely it would have lessened His love for me, or at least His desire to be with me.   But it does not.  It never does.  He always greets me warmly, with love and gentleness.  He delights in my presence.  He delights in me.  Thankfully His love for me is not based on what I do but on what Jesus has already done for me on the cross.  He just loves me for me, because I am His.  Because He made me. 

Sometimes I forget what His love is like, how deep it is, how crazy and passionate He really is about us.  I get distracted and doubtful.  But then once again He reminds me, and I am surprised to remember that He truly does love me that much, beyond what I can even comprehend.  After all these years of learning about His love for me, I don’t think I’ve even scratched the tip of the iceberg!  I only know a wee little bit of the depth of His love now and even that little bit  amazes me. 

God, I never get over being amazed at how You love me or how You are always within me.  I would be lost without You, and I am alive with You.  You, living within me, loving me beyond my imagining, gives me life.  It is the very sustenance by which I live.  I am grateful beyond words and humbled.  We love You, and we choose to be with You too, amen.

And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love,  may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ,  and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.  Eph. 3:17-19

The LORD himself goes before you and will be with you; He will never leave you nor forsake you. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged.   Josh. 31:8

As we learn to deal with job and financial struggles, I have found that I experience God’s grace day-to-day.  It’s almost like being carried spiritually through it all.  We are learning that we haven’t ever really been the ones to provide for ourselves, and especially now we know we aren’t able to provide everything we need for ourselves.  God provides for us.  He always has, but its easy to ignore when everything is going fine.  So in this learning to depend on Him, I find myself sometimes closer to Him.  It’s not anything I do.  In fact, now more than before I struggle with spending enough time alone with Him and with conquering bad habits that I thought I had already conquered.  But yet I find Him close sometimes throughout the day.  I find myself thinking about Him, smiling to inwardly in His direction at the little connection with Him.  I find little interactions throughout the day, a touch or a moment shared as we think of each other.  Sometimes I think I am learning to experience a little bit of what Brother Lawrence called “practicing the presence of God” in his book by the same name.  He says  he learned to experience God’s presence every day through faith, even as he was going about his work in the kitchen or whatever he was doing that day.

This morning as I pulled into the parking lot at work, I prayed my usual prayer, “God, please help me love people.  Help me to be accurate in my work.  Help me to be close to You and to connect with You throughout the day.  Help me to do Your will.”  And sometimes I forget to pray this last part, but this morning I did pray, “Put together my day.”  Sometimes when I pray that and really look to see what He has planned for me, I have the most interesting days and find myself endeared to Him as I realize that He has planned specific events tailored just for me.

So after my prayer, I went in to work and did my usual stuff.  I can leave when I’ve finished my work, and today I found I did not have much to do.  This was convenient because my Mom had knee surgery yesterday and was still in the hospital.  I could go right to the hospital, which is much closer to work than to my home.  I called my Dad to see what was going on at the hospital and he was just leaving to go have lunch at a Thai restaurant.   I had not had lunch yet and I love Thai food, so this was perfect timing!  I drove to the hospital, picked up my Dad, and we enjoyed our Thai lunch!

Then we drove back to the hospital, and I spent some time with my Mom.  After I left, I still had to go grocery shopping.  I had lots of energy before but was now finally starting to droop.  Although tired, I enjoyed shopping because I was still aware of God’s presence with me.  As I drove home, I began to see the most amazing sunset!  The sky glowed with a soft pink and orange.  But then as I turned the corner to enter the highway, in all three of my rearview mirrors I saw the sun blazing, a gloriously large, low, fiery orangey-pink fireball.  It was really breathtaking!  And it was shining at me through all three rearview mirrors!  I couldn’t miss it!  It was awesome!  And I saw it as a blessing, a gift from God, for no other reason than to say that He loves me.

When I finally got home I was tired.  It was dinner time, and I still had to put the groceries away and make dinner.  As I’m in my bedroom changing, my 12-year-old comes in and says, “Mom, is it okay if I make dinner tonight?”  At first, I’m thinking I already had something planned and that I would probably do a better job.  But then I thought, my daughter is offering to cook!  This doesn’t happen too often!  I’d better take her up on it!  And when I asked her about it, she actually had a pretty good plan, so I told her to go for it.  Then completely seperately, my 15-year old was also planning to make desert that night!  Now this doesn’t happen too often either.  God had it all planned out after my long, tiring day, to even get my girls to make dinner and desert for me.  Who would have thought??

So I sat and rested for a minute while the girls cooked.  My husband came home just as it was finished.  We all sat down and ate a meal that was delicious, all the more so because I didn’t make it!! :)  I felt really blessed and cared for as I thought of how God had answered my prayer from that morning to plan my day.  He really did a great job and surprised me with how it all turned out, really much better than I could have planned myself.  Plus it is just so much more fun to see what He has in mind and to accept the things that happen as gifts from Him, tokens of love and His care, catalysts for worshipping Him and drawing closer to Him.

Thank You God for the amazing plans you have for our days!

These past 2 1/2 years have been hard with my husband losing his business and us struggling financially.  Even though there is not much evidence of it yet, we are learning to believe that God does indeed have good plans for us in that area, and we just haven’t seen the evidence of it yet.  Earlier I wrote how God has given us a little example of how God can bring a really good thing out of a really bad thing.  My 15-year-old was so sick last year that she was out of school for the second half of the year.  But out of that, not only did He do a lot of physical healing in her, but also spiritual and emotional healing as well.  I realize that it was all worth it for how God has changed and healed her.

Today I remembered another way that God has brought good out of bad.  When we lost our business, my husband had to take an over-the-road trucking job.  He went from being home 24/7 to being gone 24/6.  On top of that we lost our church family of eight years.  It was pretty devastating.  It felt like we had lost almost everything.   We tried a different church for a few months, but we never seemed to fit in there.  

Then one day we impulsively decided to try a different church.  Gradually over several months, this church began to grow on us.  Everyone was so friendly.  This was a larger church than our old one, so they had more programs for the kids, but yet they were more friendly.  They seemed to want to know new people, and they also seemed to want to serve.   They pray a lot and seek to do God’s will. 

I enjoy our Sunday morning women’s study.  The women there are like a family.  They share their lives and pray for each other.  I enjoy the teaching, and often God speaks to me through it.  They are friendly and are very willing to include new people, to notice when someone isn’t there, or to care for someone who’s sick. 

I also love our church service.  I love the music.  It is very easy to worship God.  I often run into the service a little harried, on the verge of being late after chatting too long in the women’s class!  But once I’m there and the music is playing and people are singing, it is so easy to slip into worshipping God and to praise Him.  I believe that the Holy Spirit is at this church leading people to worship, to pray, and to love eachother.   It makes me feel so privileged to be part of a church where God is working.

So I realized that I LOVE my church!  I am in love with God, and He has made me fall in love with His church too.  He has given us a new church home, a new church family.  And I also realize that it is another example of how He brings a wonderful good out of a really bad heartbreaking situation.  In fact, while we loved our old church, God has now given us something even better.  Out of the heartbreak and pain, He brought new life, even better life than before.  Isn’t that just like Him???  So now we remember these examples of His goodness and continue to learn to have faith that there is good in store for my husband’s job as well.   

Thank You God for bringing us through some of the heartbreaks over the past couple of years.  You sustained us during that time with Yourself, comforting us and caring for us, providing just what we needed.  And some things You have already healed and resolved and given us even greater good than before.  Help us to continue to trust You and to believe that You are working out a great plan for my husband’s job as well.  And thank You the greatest gift of all, You.  We love You dearly.  Amen.

Early last spring I bought four little tomato plants at Wal-Mart for a buck.  I planted my little plants in my newly dug garden.  At first they struggled to grow healthy leaves, so I fertilized and watered.  Finally they grew big and tall and bushy and green.  But…no tomatoes.  The plants were beautiful and looked very healthy.  They had bright yellow flowers all over but they never developed into tomatoes. 

I researched how to make tomatoes actually produce…tomatoes!   I read that some plants deficient in a certain mineral can benefit from epsom salts.  So I bought some and spread it on the soil.  Still no tomatoes.  I found some Miracle Grow specifically for tomatoes.  So I began to hand water these finicky plants every couple of weeks with this special fertilizer…no tomatoes.  

By this time, it was already July and I was starting to wonder if it was worth continuing to try to grow them.  The plants still looked very full and healthy.  Just no tomatoes.  I was planting other new vegetables at that time, and I could have used that space in the garden.  (I live in the South, so we have a long growing season.)  After all, I had given them four months already!  If they hadn’t produced fruit yet, would they ever?  Was it worth continuing to wait?

But the plants looked so full and healthy.  I thought if they ever did become ready to produce tomatoes, they would be way ahead of the game because the plants were so big and well-established.  It would be a shame to throw away all that time that they had grown.  So I decided to keep the plants and continue to baby them.  It was worth a try.

Our summer had been pretty hot this year but towards the end of it, we had some unseasonably cool weather.  All of my vegetables seemed to take a break from producing at that time.  And then would you believe shortly after that, I saw a tomato!  First just one, then two, on the largest, healthiest plant.  Then there were a few.  I cherished each little tomato and monitored their growth and thanked God for my miracle tomatoes every day!  I figured, well at least I had a couple tomatoes for all my work and patience! 

Another month passed and one day I looked.  All four plants were covered in small, green tomatoes!  They were everywhere!  Its like after months of growing, my tomatoes finally decided they were going to grow tomatoes!  I had so many, I couldn’t believe it!  Suddenly I felt rich in tomatoes!  From scarcity to abundance!  It was really quite a miracle to me, especially since there was a moment when I had considered whether I’d just rip them up.  I am glad I didn’t give up on them.

I realized God is the same way with us.  He plants a seed in us.  We grow.  We become green and lush, but no fruit.  Maybe even no fruit for a long time, as it was for me.  I was saved at 18, and it made a huge impact on my life and who I was.  But I did not produce much fruit for a long time.  Just the past few years as God has revealed more of His love to me, He has started to make it my desire to please Him more and serve Him.  I am just like that plant, a ”late bloomer”!  And even now, I’m probably slower to produce than I should be.

But, thank God, He never gives up on us!  He keeps watering with His Spirit and fertilizing with His Word, lavishing His love and the warm sunshine of His presence, even allowing some storms and wind to strengthen us.  And one day, we bloom!  We produce that first little, green tomato!  Then soon its two, then four.  And before we know it, we are covered with fruit, from head to toe, front to back!  I can see the joy on the Master Gardener’s face when all of his hard work and patience finally begins to pay off!  However, unlike me, He knew His efforts would pay off from the beginning.  He knew exactly what was needed to produce His desired result.  And because He loves us more dearly than we can imagine, He waits for the harvest that He knows will come due to His gentle persistence and lavish love.

Thank You God that You are the Master Gardener, so much better of a gardener that I!  You know just how to coax us along, to grow us and mature us until we produce the fruit that you created us to produce.  You take great joy in developing us and making us new and fruitful.  Thank You for Your love and persistence.  You never give up on us, and I can’t tell you how grateful I am for that!  We love You!  In Jesus name, amen.

“‘Then I passed by and saw you kicking about in your blood, and as you lay there in your blood I said to you, “Live!” I made you grow like a plant of the field. You grew up and developed and became the most beautiful of jewels.”  Eze. 16:6-7

Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.  Galatians 6:9

This man’s name was, Eric Liddell, a Scottish runner.  For some reason I thought this guy was a contemporary, but it turns out that he won gold in the 1924 Paris Olympics.    He also was the subject of the film, Chariots of Fire, and later went on to be a missionary in China.  The quote I referred to by him was,

“God made me fast. And when I run, I feel His pleasure.” 

What a great quote from a man who obviously devoted his life to God and enjoyed doing it as well.

Thank You, God, for answering my prayer in Your time and Your way.  You always amaze me at how You do answer, how You provide solutions for our problems, big and small, and how you work everything out for our good.  Thank You for the example of Eric Liddell.  May we learn to experience Your pleasure in living our lives for You and in doing what you made us to do as well.  We love You!  Amen.

In the past week or so we have had major systems go out all over the place!  Last week our microwave died, one month after the 10-year warranty for the magnetron expired!  Figures, right?  It was rough living without that microwave!  lol  We actually had to get the tea kettle out to boil water.  And we had to reheat food in the oven!  And make popcorn on the stove top!  (Yes, we have become quite spoiled with our microwave!) 

The next thing to blow up was our internet.  It had been having problems on and off for months now, though we could always reboot it and make it work again.  But on Saturday it finally went kaput.  We could not get it restarted for anything.   Having no internet is really tough.  And yes, we are spoiled with that too!  No tv guide, no ability to research the best microwave to replace the old one, no online devotional, no email, no blog!

The third problem was that the light for the airbag had come on in our minivan a while ago, but last week the horn and the cruise control also stopped working.  We could live with the airbag not working, but I found out not having my horn was quite scary when a car cut me off on the highway, and I had no way to let them know that I was there.

It certainly has been different living without all our conveniences and in the case of the car, without safety features.  And of course we worry, how can we afford to pay to fix everything with the job situation being so difficult?  But God has provided a solution for everything, just as He has promised.

Thankfully Comcast came out earlier this week and fixed our internet for free as part of our service.  We are grateful that the problem wasn’t with one of our own computer components but  with Comcast.  And it was easily fixable.  For the microwave, God provided money needed to replace it.  I had just finished house-sitting for a month for my parents, and it turned out to be just enough to cover the cost of the new microwave, which by the way was delivered today!!  Ahhh, hot water in just over a minute again!  Its wonderful! :)  And our airbag/horn/cruise control problem turned out to be a recall.  All we had to do was take it to the dealer, and they fixed it for free in one afternoon, good as new!

So even though these things are inconvenient, God has our back.  He led us through each frustrating event, step by step, and showed us how to fix it or provided the money to replace it.  Our first instinct with all this is to wonder, how will we ever fix this since we have no extra money?  And we assume that we are stuck and will have to live without.  But God already knew these things would happen, and He knew just how He would provide the solution.  He takes such good care of us and He will take good care of you as well, as we learn to trust Him.

Thank You Jesus for showing us once again that You are able and willing to provide for us.  Our money and our job does not provide for us, You do.  And You do a great job of it too!  Help us to continue to learn to trust You and to be confident in Your ability and willingness to care for us.  We love You!!  In Jesus Name, amen.