The thought of my
suffering and homelessness is bitter beyond words. I will never forget this awful time, as I
grieve over my loss. Yet I
still dare to hope when I remember this: The faithful love of the Lord never
ends! His mercies never cease. Great is his faithfulness; his mercies
begin afresh each morning. I
say to myself, “The Lord is my inheritance; therefore, I will hope in
him!” The Lord is
good to those who depend on him, to those who search for him. So it is good to wait quietly for
salvation from the Lord. Lamentations
3:19-26
When you’ve either been through, or going through a rough patch (COVID,
War, Divorce, Prison, or a thousand other nightmares), the tendency is usually
to stare into one of two places – the road ahead, or the rearview mirror. To be glued to the rearview mirror is to hold
on to the anguish and pain of the past, embracing the rough patch as the future. To dwell on the past means you are driving
blindly into the future, and we know where failing to keep your eyes on the
road will lead. (Laws against texting
while driving were placed on the books for a reason!).
However painful the rearview mirror can be, at times we must shoot a quick
look there, to be sure of two things:
1.
We are aware of what we left behind.
2.
We are still progressing away from
the road that led to the rough patch.
If knowledge is power, running on a low battery is
a dumb thing. It is foolish to not remember
what got you into the rough patch, or the dangers that might lead you back
there. Real wisdom is the common sense
that puts knowledge (good or evil) to good use.
As the wise person once said: if we fail to
remember the mistakes of the past, we are doomed to repeat them in the future.
Even an ostrich in a hurricane has enough sense to look above the storm to chart his course.
For You Today
So, to be (at least)
as wise as a bird-brain, use the rearview mirror to poke your head out of the
hole in the ground so you can get above the harsh conditions, and get a bead on
where you need to go. In short, look above, you’ll find plenty of answers as the Lord leads you out of the rough
patch, even if the road seems rocky.
There
are about 2,000 devotional posts and 400 sermons in the Rocky Road Devotions library. To dig deeper on today’s topic, explore some
of these:
Has God Forgotten to Be
Gracious? and
Hard Times & Growing
Churches
[1] Images: via Pixabay.com Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation©
No comments:
Post a Comment