Saturday, December 26, 2009

The Battle Rages On

My husband has a dear friend, one he has never met, one who lives all the way across the country. Sometime ago this man’s wife took his three children and left with a restraining order in hand that he was not to contact them. My husband has been praying fervently for several weeks that there might be some contact over Christmas. It did not happen. What to make of this. How is God working in it all?

Do you have issues like this in your life? Oh! I know! nothing as bizarre, nothing as serious as our friend’s story But let’s be honest - do we have absolute peace in our lives? Is our health everything we would like it to be? Can we count on our job being there for another year and paying what it has paid for the last? Are all of our children conducting their lives exactly as we think they should? It goes on and on!

In mulling this over in my mind this morning I became re-convinced of something I came to believe fifteen or so years ago. Exactly when this world was created and exactly how I don’t know! Exactly who God will save and on what conditions I don’t know! But this I feel fairly certain about. There is a huge battle going on between God and Satan and God wants to use me to win that battle. How He needs to use me I know not, nor can I ascertain the amount of hurt I will suffer nor what form it will take. But one thing I know, I will not be called to endure more than I can bear and that in the bearing I will learn and become a better person. And so, it seems to me, that even in the worst of what life has to offer I should be able to find peace. I should be able to say with Mary this Christmas: “May it be to me as You have said.”

Sunday, December 20, 2009

My Inheritance

I was raised in a home where money was scarce. Most of my clothes came from boxes given to us by other people or were made from material that my mother ripped up and remade to fit me. I remember my mother making me a dress from new material when I was six, a white voile dress with yellow flowers. She bought me a new dress when I was eeven and made me a suit from new material when I was fifteen. Those stand out in my memory. I think everything else fell into the first described categories.

My mother lived until she was past 90. The last five years of her life were spent in her own room at the Meaford Nursing Home - a place she loved and enjoyed to the full. Her rent for this modest space was something around $2000 a month. Despite the very modest means of her life and the expense of these last years, when she passed away there was a modest inheritance for each of her six children. That was the most poignant part of her passing to me - not that I had a little cash but that after all the years of careful living financially, she had cared for a family and then for herself and still a little to spare at the end. It was our inheritance.

When I picked up my devotional book this morning the page fell open informing me of another inheritance. Jesus said, “Peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you. Let not your heart be troubled.” John 14:27. My inheritance!! My little inheritance from my mother is long gone - spent!! Yet this huge inheritance from my Father above, at the deepest levels of my emotion, of my thinking, of my attitudes, of my behaviors, so many times sits unused, unspent. I wonder why! Do you know?