Friday, August 30, 2019

Wise Choices

Monday, September 2, 2019

The end of the world is coming soon.  Therefore, be earnest and disciplined in your prayers.  Most important of all, continue to show deep love for each other, for love covers a multitude of sins.  Cheerfully share your home with those who need a meal or a place to stay.  God has given each of you a gift from his great variety of spiritual gifts.  Use them well to serve one another.  Do you have the gift of speaking?  Then speak as though God himself were speaking through you.  Do you have the gift of helping others?  Do it with all the strength and energy that God supplies.  Then everything you do will bring glory to God through Jesus Christ.  All glory and power to him forever and ever! Amen.  1 Peter 4:7-11[2]

Grandchildren are an incredible joy in many ways…sometimes you get surprised!  Here’s an example from my daughter’s Face Book page; she wrote:
With the boys starting at new schools this year we’ve been anxiously asking how their days have gone.  If you know Jonah (age 11), you know he has never ventured from bringing his lunch to school so when he offered to try school lunch this year I was ecstatic.  Thoughts for today, from him...
J:  “Lunch was good today.” 
Me:  “awesome!  What’d you have?”
J:  “the outside of a corn dog.”[3]
Sometimes it’s fear that makes us cautious; sometimes it’s wise prudence.  All of us choose very carefully how deeply we’ll venture into change.  Sometimes the outside of a corn dog will do for now. 
That old question about what three things you’d take with you if you’re going to spend the rest of your life on a deserted island is something the apostle Peter must’ve thought about deeply before he wrote this epistle.  His three choices, and what he wanted his flock to excel in, were prayer for others, loving deeply, and offering hospitality.  Did you notice none of those can be bought on Amazon.com? 
For Peter, end-of-the-world priorities have little to do with the balance sheet of stuff.  When all is said and done nobody is going to care what you’ve managed to accumulate, money, lands, or a warehouse full of antiques and toys.  He cautions his readers to use everything God has placed in their hands to serve one another.  That’s a whole universe opposite of gaining stuff for yourself.  It took Peter awhile to learn this, but he reminds us that, in the end, the only standard by which we will be judged is how well we did with Jesus’ command:

“A new command I give you:  Love one another.  As I have loved you, so you must love one another.  By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”  John 13:34-35

For You Today
Like Jonah’s corn dogs or Forest Gump’s box of chocolates, you never really know what life will bring when you bite down, but the wise choice is to be ready to serve one another; on God’s island that’s what matters!
You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day. 

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[1] Title Image:  Courtesy of  Pixabay.com     Unless otherwise noted, Scripture used from The New Living Translation©
[2]For another post on this text:  Glory by Russell Brownworth
[3] Carrie Brownworth Wynne (used with permission)

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