Friday, September
29, 2017
O my people, listen to my instructions. Open your ears to what I am saying, for I
will speak to you in a parable. I will
teach you hidden lessons from our past—stories we have heard and known, stories
our ancestors handed down to us. We will
not hide these truths from our children; we will tell the next generation about
the glorious deeds of the Lord, about his power and his mighty wonders….the
miracles he did for their ancestors on the plain of Zoan in the land of Egypt. For he divided the sea and led them through, making
the water stand up like walls! Psalm 78:1-4, 12-13(NLT)
I can
remember as a child in Sunday School first hearing about the Israelites escaping
the pursuit of Pharaoh’s armies through the Red Sea. God made the waters stand up as a wall of water. Our teacher, Uncle Sid, could get dramatic
with this, describing at agonizing length the looming height of the water-walls
and how scary it must have been to wonder if the water would come back down on
them. For a 7 year old, that was some
scary stuff!
Now it’s
quite clear that water standing up, held back in its place by nothing visible,
forming an escape route for a million or more people, and only crashing back
down when the last one stepped on the other shore, and the Egyptian chariots
were right where a tsunami could swallow them up, like an avalanche…well, THAT kind
of suspending the natural order of the physical world is what we call a
miracle!
And a miracle
is what makes any scary stuff into good news!
Scary stuff
comes in all sorts of packages:
·
Hurricanes
·
Medical
reports
·
A phone
call from the state trooper late at night
·
A drunk
driver swerves into a head-on collision course with your vehicle
·
Your
credit card statement has a $22,000 charge for a weekend in Maui (and you haven’t
been out of town since Nixon was president).
But
sometimes those scary things are just the invitation to a larger miracle blessing:
·
A
hurricane releases terrible power, but it also is the harbinger of starting
anew and building stronger
·
A medical
report is an opinion; it has come just in time to save your life
·
A
state trooper has arrested your child for driving under the influence; that
might just save your child’s life and put him on a better pathway
…and on and
on…the scary tsunami water walls are sometimes God’s way of rescuing you from the
evil that’s after you. The issue with any
issue going on in our lives at any one moment is hardly ever the issue God is
working on.
·
Have
you ever looked back on a bad time in your life and suddenly realized that, as
rough as it was to get through that time, the lessons you learned became a
valued source of strength?
·
Has
a friend ever disappointed you, hurt you?
And yet, in time, the pain caused you to see that friend in a new way – you
now have a more compassionate love for that friend that you never knew was on
your tool belt?
·
Has
an embarrassing moment or fallout from a bad choice ever made you want to crawl
in a hole and pull the ground over you…only to turn into the very wakeup call which
caused you to change the direction of your life?
This stuff
is known as living…and it is the one certain reality for anyone who wants to
pick up a cross daily and follow Jesus.
For You Today
You chew on
that as you hit the Rocky Road…have a blessed day!
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