thinking & writing on faith, life, mentoring, and motherhood
Over 1500 years ago, a group of seafaring raiders from an island known in its time as “the end of the world” kidnapped the son of a wealthy merchant and crossed the Irish Sea to sell him as a slave, and in the process, changed the history of its nation and its people forever.
Death cannot be avoided, but the sting of death can.
To most of the world, nothing seemed strange about that night. The same troubles, the same heartaches, the same anxieties, the same dead hearts, the same lost souls, the same chasm between man and God that had been for days, years, and centuries. It seemed that way to them as they drudged and muddled through their days and nights. But if they only knew Who had come to dwell among them, their lives could be forever changed.
This is the divine recipe for the bride’s beauty treatment: otherworldly love that compelled a King to sacrifice himself on her behalf.
A few summers ago I wrote this post after the weather in Pittsburgh had seesawed back and forth for several days between drenching rains and bright sunny skies. I have been often reminded of the lesson in it these past few weeks. Yes, we’ve had our seasonal stutter start to spring, but we’re also experiencing on a grander scale uncertainty and confusion as a result of pandemic, economic instability, and the loss of what we’ve always considered normal. Now more than ever we need the exhortation that we not, as Bridges says, “deprive ourselves of the peace” of knowing that the hand that sends it is good, wise, sovereign and perfect.
Can I say, “I can be satisfied in all things because God’s ends are my ends”?
Opportunities come and go in our lives. Most poignantly, they happen in small slices of time. A moment’s hesitation and a job prospect is gone. One second more and that car would have sideswiped you. The phone sounds its last ring and you grab it in time to hear the apology you’ve been praying for. You crest the hill at exactly the same moment the sunset sky reaches its most glorious and spectacular release of color and light.
I spent a lot of years doing this kind of running—from one deception to another, from one sin to another, from one emotional entrapment to another, abandoning myself to sorrow and sin and despair at every turn. There is a better kind of abandonment.
Here is the shared experience of those who travel Christian’s road, whether new or old in the faith: wrestling with “right” decisions, fighting doubts, putting off behavior and thoughts of the old man that do not honor Christ, grappling with understanding theology and God’s commands. These struggles threaten to steal any joy from living this life, and they don’t even come close to the battles that thousands upon thousands of worthy Pilgrims fight every single day for the sake of the gospel.
#thereyougothinkingagain 