Potholes
"It's so hot inside my soul,
I swear there must be blisters on my heart..."
Rich Mullins
You ever have one of those nights? Where some concern or the other just nagged you all night? You know the ones I mean. Where you are anxious enough that you can't actually stay asleep and when you do wake up you return immediately to whatever the situation is that has you so discombobulated.
And then, to make matters worse, it's one of those deals that you may have no control over or nothing that you could do or could have done to fix or avoid the problem. It's like driving into a pothole in the rain, you see that there's a hole there but, you can't avoid it without endangering the car, then you hit it and discover that the hole was several inches deeper than you expected. So you slam into the pothole and bounce out the other side, hoping beyond hope that you just haven't completely realigned your wheels, and not in a good way.
That, of course, doesn't scratch the surface when you include the fact that people you care about are usually involved. Then it gets really complicated because words like love and risk and loss enter the equation. Potholes, indeed.
Suffice it to repeat, life is hard but God is good. Endurance (Patience) is a gift of the Spirit. And, I'll be preaching this on Sunday, in Matthew 11:6 Jesus says, "Blessed is he who does not fall away on account of me." That means that when difficulty arises that is born of your walk with Christ, we are blessed if we don't give in, like God wrestling with Jacob all night and Jacob, although way out of his weight class, vowing to not let go until he received a blessing.
'Course, that's directed at me, not you, dear reader. You have to work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.
We don't drive through the same potholes.
I swear there must be blisters on my heart..."
Rich Mullins
You ever have one of those nights? Where some concern or the other just nagged you all night? You know the ones I mean. Where you are anxious enough that you can't actually stay asleep and when you do wake up you return immediately to whatever the situation is that has you so discombobulated.
And then, to make matters worse, it's one of those deals that you may have no control over or nothing that you could do or could have done to fix or avoid the problem. It's like driving into a pothole in the rain, you see that there's a hole there but, you can't avoid it without endangering the car, then you hit it and discover that the hole was several inches deeper than you expected. So you slam into the pothole and bounce out the other side, hoping beyond hope that you just haven't completely realigned your wheels, and not in a good way.
That, of course, doesn't scratch the surface when you include the fact that people you care about are usually involved. Then it gets really complicated because words like love and risk and loss enter the equation. Potholes, indeed.
Suffice it to repeat, life is hard but God is good. Endurance (Patience) is a gift of the Spirit. And, I'll be preaching this on Sunday, in Matthew 11:6 Jesus says, "Blessed is he who does not fall away on account of me." That means that when difficulty arises that is born of your walk with Christ, we are blessed if we don't give in, like God wrestling with Jacob all night and Jacob, although way out of his weight class, vowing to not let go until he received a blessing.
'Course, that's directed at me, not you, dear reader. You have to work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.
We don't drive through the same potholes.