Beautiful Day

I've been working on making time for the fun stuff.  For rest.  For enjoyment.

What is the chief end of man?  To know God and to enjoy Him forever.  Paraphrased from the catechism.  I'm not catholic, but there is a lot of wisdom in the catechism.

Also, not just in the catechism, but in scripture itself, we are commanded to delight ourselves in the Lord.  This is one command that I love. :-)  Just thinking about the possibility of delighting in the Lord brings delight automatically.  I love that.

Today is a lovely day.  My schedule is organized, I got a good night's sleep.  My beautiful baby is feeling better and consequently is in a much better mood.  The sun is shining.  The weather is a gorgeous 77 degrees.   My windows are open and breezing in the fresh air.  My sprinkler is running outside so there's a nice swishy fresh sound in the background.  There is food in the house so we can have a leisurely yummy breakfast (when my sweet hubband wakes up).  Tonight we will worship our great God and King with our beloved brothers and sisters and hear the Truth of the Lord taught inspiringly from our anointed pastor.

It's a delightful sabbath day.  Amen.

:-)

Where do you think you're going?

A and I are in the midst of cleaning out and packing up our house.  The Lord provided a wonderful new place for us to live in answer to our prayers for a house that would hold us with more kids (we're not pregnant) for a few more years.  But that's not what this post is about.

This post is about yet another object lesson that God showed me through my baby girl this morning.

We've started the packing process, so I've got a few plastic bags and such sitting around the den waiting to be filled with stuff.  E managed to get her hands on one of these plastic bags before I could move it out of her reach.  As we all know, plastic bags are dangerous to little kiddos...so I jumped up to get it from her and tell her "danger!" as I'm trying to teach her.

E, of course, wants to play with the new "toy" she found, and she knows I'm coming to take it from her, so she starts crawling away from me as fast as she can...which is actually pretty fast.  She scoots across the room, around the big chair, and heads back into the center of the den in an effort to run faster than I can and keep her new toy for a little while.

As she was running away from me, I said to her, "Where do you think you're going?" -- meaning, this is a small room and you can't get out...you can't escape me, no matter how fast you scoot around.  I'm going to get that from you to keep you safe.

It occurred to me that we do exactly this all the time with God.  We find a new toy that could be dangerous to us, we know God is coming to take it away because he tells us He's coming and that we should put it down...so we try to run away with our new toy.

But He's going to catch us.  He's going to keep us safe.  How silly is it to try to run from a God who is everywhere?  Our world is small and we have nowhere to hide from Him.  He is so much bigger than even the world in which we live.  And as a very good Father, he's not going to let us play with things that are dangerous, because He loves us. So where do we think we're going?

~~~~

Can anyone hide in secret places 
       so that I cannot see him?" 

       declares the LORD. 

       "Do not I fill heaven and earth?" 

       declares the LORD.

~Jeremiah 23:24

Left Pinky Toe

Why oh why does my baby fight so hard against taking a nap, fighting the hardest when she's the most tired?  Doesn't she know that I would cut off my left pinky toe if it would guarantee me at least one nap every day for the rest of my life?

Poor thing has been protesting for almost an hour.  Every so often, she stops her complaining for a moment, and my heart leaps, hoping she's about to give up and rest.  How often do we do the same thing with the Lord?  We cry, complain, and protest at what he's asking us to do for hours on end, finding every excuse in the world not to stop our work and busyness until we're completely exhausted from the effort and we end up resting in Him anyway.  In the end, God still wants us to do exactly what he asked us to in the first place -- REST -- but now we're even more tired than when He first asked.

Better to rest when God gives us the time to do so, I think.  More easily said than done.

New Life

My second nephew was born today.  He's healthy and beautiful.  My sister-in-law was wonderfully strong, and I admire her for what she did today.

It's also the 15th anniversary of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City.  What a beautiful gift of new life on a day that is remembered by so many for loss of life.

Thank you, Lord, for the new soul and hope in this little boy. :-)

yep

When I don't want to go to church, it's a sure sign that I've been away too long.  Back in 2 hours, folks.