The Good News About Scary Stuff

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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

Staring at a wall of water these days?  Don’t blink…keep trusting; you’re not home yet!  And if God promised He wouldn’t destroy the earth with a flood, he certainly won’t destroy His children that way.  Whatever happens will turn out for your good.

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road…have a blessed day!

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[1] Title Image: Courtesy:  Pixabay.com