And the week continues with multiple elements! Thank You, Father, for enabling me to accomplish so much. Your focus and direction have gotten me to where I am! All praise to You!
********
This morning, on one of the many rural roads of my elementary route, I crested a rise, and as I glanced to my right, there stood a fantastic sight – a beautiful 8- or 10-point buck! I just caught a quick look in that a doe was behind him and another doe on the left side of the road. The buck didn’t seem the least bit disturbed by the presence of my bus, but the does took off almost immediately.
How do you handle stressors in your life? Do they set you off to running and worrying and stressing? Or do you even notice most of them? When those stressors come zooming up beside you, do you fall apart, or do you stand solid and firm in the presence and strength of your Heavenly Father?
I want to stress here, too, that gender has absolutely nothing to do with where we stand in relation to our God. It has no bearing. Our personal relationship with Him is all that matters.
You hear me say frequently that it’s important to pray. For clarity, that’s not just rattling off a list of what we want or think we need. Corporately praying the Lord’s Prayer in a worship setting is essential, but that cannot be our only communication with God. We can use it as a basis for communication, but that alone will not suffice.
A couple of weekends ago, on the way back from a band competition an hour plus away from home, I was having a hard time making sure I was on my side of the road. It was freshly paved for several miles. Initially, there were yellow lines down the middle and no white lines at all. Then, for quite a while, there were just yellow hash marks down the middle of the road and nothing else. I tell you, I prayed that whole time – “Lord, watch over us! Lord, keep us safe! Lord, help me!”
The Lord’s Prayer would have provided me no comfort, but the Lord Himself sure did!
We must talk to Him about all the many aspects of our lives. He is there to listen and to respond – but we have to communicate to understand that He’s responding.
The Bible is not just a dusty old book of stories. He is the living, breathing Word of God. To know His will for our lives, we need to read it, ponder it, discuss it, study it, and, yes, pray over it. It provides sustenance for our malnourished lives!
Again, hearing it read on Sundays is important, but we need more than that. It is not a “let someone else do it for us” thing. It has to be a “do it yourself” thing!
Build that relationship with God, for when we invest in that, we can stand solid and firm in the presence and strength of our Heavenly Father no matter what comes zooming up beside us in our life journey.
The Lord is my light and my salvation;
Whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the strength of my life;
Of whom shall I be afraid? Psalm 27:1 NKJV
Nov 2nd, 2023, Thurs, 3:33 pm
