Moments

  Do you sense God's presence during painful times, or does He seem so far away?  Does prayer make a difference when you are in pain?  Does your faith help you remain steadfast and hopeful in painful times?    Times like these, it isn't easy to trust that God has a plan. It is hard to lean on God when you don't know if you will survive the night or not.  So what do you do when the reality of your mortality confronts you with pain and agony you cannot completely control?   What prayers can comfort you in these times of uncertainty?  How do you keep trusting when you are struggling so? Pain is a reality revealer. It reveals that we really cannot control much of anything for any length of time.  And for me, it brought me to my figurative knees that life or death, pain or comfort was ultimately up to God.  And in so doing—praying in the pain, accepting it for as long as God let it remain, for whatever reason He brought me to face i...

  The journey.  Isn't life just a journey from here to there?  Along the way, we age, get sick, and die. The journey ends.  Not much to it, right? Wrong. Indeed, some days, the process, the journey, is painful.  But along the way God is shaping us, communing with us, and giving us God given purpose. But, how do we remain trusting when we are struggling?  How can we possibly be strengthened in painful times?   Sometimes it's hard to keep going through the struggle and the pain and keep trusting that we can trust God. But here is where the rubber meets the road in our faith.  When can we trust God in the dark.  When we can trust Him through the struggles and pain, and still praise Him in the storm at the end of the day, we can know we know God.   And, He will make for us a better day, where there is "no more night, no more pain."

 For I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand.   II Tim 4:6 Sometimes, due to recent events, I think this is the case.  But sometimes not. Turning this into a question  for the not-so-sure, one might say,  "Lord, IF I am ready to be offered and IF the time of my departure is at hand, ------- Come Lord Jesus." But IF not.  It could read like this, "Lord, I am ready to be offered, but if the time of my departure is NOT YET at hand. What would you have me do?"

  There was not a breath of air.   The humid stillness hanging in the silence of the forest, tense in its breathlessness. Amplified by the quiet, a loudness suddenly crashed about in the limbs of a large tree.   A large dead branch was tumbling noisily through the other branches to end its days above the earth.     What made the limb fall at this one moment?   Surely, not wind or gust or freeze.   Perhaps, it was just time, that’s all: just a time, the moment, the breaking point when decay had mitigated the limb’s strength that it could not support its own weight-----Yes, perhaps, it was time.   And in life, there just sometimes comes a time to shed off the dead and rotting in life and let it crash to the ground.   Sometimes it is time to give more wholly to God and let the things rotting fall.    

  I n a world seemingly convinced that being hyper-busy is the equivalent of being hyper-important.   But w hen you get down to life in the nitty-gritty, when your health starts to fail, when you wonder if you will see the next Christmas, busy takes a back seat.  And the things that were more important all along come front and center.  You wondered why you worried about such trivial matters and wasted time chasing bubbles with busy.   And the truth is, how many people are dead and gone and forgotten and their busy pursuits gone with them.  Do we really think we are doing much that is really important or lasting?   The only truly important things we will ever do in life are what we do in response to God’s calling upon our live s.

  Today I came upon a doe deer  caught in a hog trap.  Knowing the frantic nature of a wild animal in close proximity to humans, I approached slowly, quietly, but panic still ensued.  The deer banged and ran against the walls of the cage, bloodying its mouth and tongue.  As I tried to hold the gate open to show it the way out, it continued to bang itself against the pen at the other end.  After wiring the gate open, I went around to the closed end of the cage to provoke the animal to go toward the open door.  It still banged itself unmercifully against the wires of the closed end until it passed out.  I thought it had died, but it came to and only continued to bang itself and bloody itself even more against the closed end of the trap.  Nothing seemed to dissuade this deer from self-destruction, and all the time there was an open door in the other direction, at the other end of the trap.  The deer passed out again.  In desperation, I...