God Fought For Me

Two days... for two days my Bible came with me, sat by me, beckoned me. I hadn't studied in weeks and hadn't made any quiet time with God. He brought a song to me and struck my heart with it's words and sound. I was moved by it, more than usual, when all of a sudden a beautiful bald eagle swooped down in front of me and then back up into the tree, as if just to catch my attention. I wanted to cry... so I said, "Thanks." I knew God was there and trying to get at my heart. But I still filled my time with other things.
There were perfect times cleared away for study time, too. In these two days I had time alone, a quiet house, or just a space I'd carved out for myself. Each time I thought to sit and study I was dragged away or down.
Today, little things got in my way, pulled me away. A cloud of doubt whispered, "Why sit and study? You'll just forget whatever He says. You won't put it into action." Then legitimate things came up. Time with my daughter, bills to pay, house to clean, the beauty of the storm outside. Just details....
All of these things waged war on my heart and mind. The negatives seemed too heavy. I was finding it very difficult to not believe the lies that I was hearing from my own mind. And why????
God wanted to encourage me.
I sat to read and study, apologizing for being so weak. I prayed that He would still help me to hear what He wanted to say. I opened my Bible and read the first verse of the next section I was on.
Wow... did God engineer these words to speak directly to my heart today and for millions of others at other times? It seems so clear that He wanted me to hear this...
"Do not lose heart."
Do not lose heart... don't give up... don't believe the lies. He fought for me... for two days!! Just to tell me those four special words. He kept urging me, showing me the Bible where I had placed it and had intended to read it.
You know when you're down and you just can't seem to find the right things to get you back up and going? And then a friend walks in and says something that they didn't think much of but it makes all the difference to you? That was these four words to me. God may have said them through someone else, He may have meant them for many different things over the years. But today, He said them to me. He fought through my neglect and sad attempts to connect with Him. He pursued me for two days in particular, just to encourage me.
My heart is bolstered and I am rescued again. Oh that I could just remember this moment so that I won't ever let myself get so far away from Him.

God Is Everything

Job had it all. He had the family, the wealth, the life everyone dreamed of. He had everything that the people of his day considered a life blessed by God because of his righteous living.  He had lived perfectly for God. Job had everything. 

For many people, life is about success, achievement, having the prettiest car, having the nicest house, being the best mom, being the best wife, being the best housekeeper… blah blah blah! If you have all that then God must be blessing you for living rightly before Him. Right? For some it may be living a righteous life that brings them satisfaction, knowing they lived for God as they believed they should. None of it is bad in itself but I think we humans can take all of this "blessing" stuff a bit far and I know that we all have different opinions of what "being blessed" is.

For Job, it wasn’t about being blessed or about the things he had gained, the success he had achieved, the righteous life he lived but it was about the relationship he had with God. He knew that God would never leave him. He knew in his heart that he was a righteous man, someone who lived as God wanted him to.

Then came the evil one challenging God to let him have a shot at this so-called righteous man. We all got to hear the gist of the conversation between Satan and God. We got to hear the reason why Job was going to suffer. I think that somewhat disarmed us to what Job had to face.  He didn't get to hear the exchange in the spiritual realm. He lost everything and even gained some pain and heartache to go with the loss without a single groan of explanation. He did everything right and got the rug pulled out from under him for it. He didn’t understand why he had been stripped of all the blessings and been given so much suffering instead. 

It wasn't about his understanding all that was going on. He was determined to remain in God, praising and thanking him for just being with him.

“But as for me I know that my Redeemer liveth, 

And at last he will stand up upon the earth: 

And after my skin, even this body, is destroyed, 

Then without my flesh shall I see God; 

Whom I, even I, shall see, on my side, 

And mine eyes shall behold, and not as a stranger. 

My heart is consumed within me.” Job 19:25-27 ASV

For Job, it was about faith. He would not let his faith change with the circumstances of life. He believed that no matter what happened on the earth, his relationship with God would not be broken and he would be with God. It was about seeing Him with his heart, not just hearing Him with his ears.

Frederich Buechner writes, “God doesn’t reveal his grand design. He reveals himself. He doesn’t show why things are as they are. He shows his face. And Job says, “I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eyes see thee.” [Job 42:5] Even covered with sores and ashes, he looks oddly like a man who has asked for a crust and been given the whole loaf.”

Oh that I could know I would respond the same way. That today, if I lost everything and everyone, I would not lose my faith. I pray that I would be grateful for what I had been given already, not expecting more, but rather that I would give all that was left in me to praise Him who gave it to me in the first place. 

What’s it about for you? What do you want it to be about?

Friendships... something funny to think on

I am a big fan of Paul Reiser's books. Familyhood is out and it is good to laugh, even if it is at myself. The first thing in his book was a perspective on friendships during the season of raising a family. It caught me off guard because it was a more serious comment and it is how I often feel. His parents were a bit extreme (if, in fact, they actually did this) but life does seem to feel this way sometimes. I don't wanna wait twenty-five years to spend time with my friends either. If you have any ideas on how to fit it all in, please enlighten me!!!

"When they were well into their sixties, my parents renewed friendships with some of their old friends. These were close friends from their school days, friends from old neighborhoods - good friends that I had no recollection of ever having met growing up. Where had these people been? I wondered. If they were such good friends, how come I never heard of them?
My parents' simple explanation was that they had all drifted apart when they were busy raising their families, but now that the kids were older, they had picked up the friendships again.
This was fascinating to me. First of all, the drifting apart. It's not like any of them moved to the North Pole; they were all pretty close by, but they somehow managed to never see each other.
Secondly - I didn't know you could do that with friendship; put them on hold for fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years, and then just start right up again.
And I had no idea that having kids and doing simple day-to-day stuff was so all-encompassing that it could necessitate putting entire friendships - good friendships - on hold.
Well, that's kind of how I feel about this book. I wrote two books before this; the first one about meeting and marrying my beautiful wife, the second one about the journey before, during, and after having a baby.
That was fifteen years ago. In that time, our infant firstborn became fifteen, his brother - now ten - joined the team, and a gazillion day-to-day things had to be dealt with: there were the countless hectic meals where nobody sits down at the same time, frantic rushes to start school reports that should have been finished weeks earlier, knees that needed bandaging and glasses that needed finding - even though they were "right there" five minutes ago - and more arguments than you can imagine about why long pants were in order even though, yes, shorts are more comfortable. My point is - things got busy around here.
Along the way, there were certainly plenty of things that occurred to me, observations I might have written down for, say, a book about having kids, but I couldn't because I was too busy (and exhausted by) having those very same kids.
I'd like to say that somehow the clouds have lifted a bit and there seems to be a moment of relative quiet. In truth, things are only going faster. Life is, if anything, crazier than before.
But I realized that my boys are probably closer in time to when they'll leave our house than the time we first brought them home. Whatever I may feel about time, it's going ahead. And I don't want to wait twenty-five years to reconnect with my friends."