Resting in Him who is Trustworthy

Sunday, August 20, 2017

Forwarding Address

Many months have gone by and God's faithfulness is still evident. His mercies are new every morning. Sunday is always an especially reflective day. Today was incredible. I had the special privilege to see four of the young people I have been teaching in Sunday school be baptized. What a joy to see them emerge dripping from the water knowing that the Lord has been at work in their lives. God is the best teacher and He never quits investing in us. Thank you, Jesus!

Well, life is more calm than back in November, but the pain of not finalizing B & L's adoptions remains a daily scar. Originally, I removed a few photos which hurt too much to look at, but then I realized I had to just close the door on my former blog and begin again. If you have wondered where I have been, I am now at www.rivetedtogether.blogspot.com

Come over and visit anytime.

Wednesday, January 04, 2017

Humbled, Hungry and Hope

A year begins again and I'm struck with the humbling of the year before. God led our family into a desert in 2016. It was not a partial desert; it was a whole sweeping, swirling, devoid of life landscape. As we felt desolate, the Lord was causing us to hunger for a deeper trust of Himself. Through circumstances too recent to recount, God tested us to know what was in our hearts. Though He already knew our hearts, did we?

Would we be content in Christ when our life was stripped from a safe and wholesome reality to one filled with anguish and distress?

Would we be willing to be taught that our best plans fall short of his?

Would we invite him to rewrite our chapters to include the painful unfinished?

Would we see His blessing in the cursed land?

Looking back, I think God desired us to know that only He, Himself, would sustain us in a land of unrelenting disappointment and heartache. God began a process of releasing us from an existence of self-sufficiency to a state of God-sufficiency. In the taking away, God added Himself, so we lacked no good thing. His character was sufficient for our great deficit. He remained when nothing else did. Such a gentle love enfolds us. The Lord holds out a promise that he is bringing us into a good land where emotional scarcity will be forgotten, because in the giving of his self-offered body, the Bread of Life, Jesus made sure there would always and forever be an over-abundance of himself for our need.

Here we stand on the brink of a promise, trusting in Lamentations 3:22-24.

"Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. I say to myself, 'The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.' "

We pray 2017 will be another year that we Taste and See the Lord is Good.

Tuesday, November 08, 2016

Cinco

Cinco, our new kitten

Monday, October 31, 2016

Shining Faces

Do I Wish to be Disturbed?

I came across this prayer in an email the other day and found it beautiful. Do I want to know God in such a way that I am disturbed from the ordinary?

Disturb us, Lord, when
We are too pleased with ourselves,
When our dreams have come true
Because we dreamed too little,
When we arrived safely
Because we sailed too close to the shore.

Disturb us, Lord, when
with the abundance of things we possess
We have lost our thirst
For the waters of life;
Having fallen in love with life,
We have ceased to dream of eternity
And in our efforts to build a new earth,
We have allowed our vision
Of the new Heaven to dim.

Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly,
To venture on wilder seas
Where storms will show Your mastery;
Where losing sight of land,
We shall find the stars.

We ask you to push back
The horizons of our hopes;
And to push back the future
In strength, courage, hope, and love.

This we ask in the name of our Captain,
Who is Jesus Christ.

--Sir Francis Drake, 1577