A wet Saturday morning to you! We are under a flood warning today, but the stories coming out of Arkansas are much worse. Driving around the country roads is probably not advised this morning as we had a pouring rain yesterday evening and more through the night. Just when we think we have cause to worry: too much rain, the basement flooded (mine isn't, but there will be some), saturated ground and full creek beds, the voice of God comes through with reassurance. A crisis can make our prayer a bit more urgent than the usual; we might take a moment to pray like we mean it. God may allow a bit of chaos to invade our cautious life, but we may fail to see how carefully controlled that chaos is in the heat of the crisis.
Carefully controlled chaos would seem to be a complete contradiction, but only when seen from our viewpoint. We see chaos and pray urgently like a child; God sees just the right amount of crisis to get us to open up to him honestly and without holding back. We are blessed to have what seems chaos and crisis to us, carefully controlled by God at all times.
What seems to be the wrong verse comes along today - John 1:16: From his abundance we have all received one gracious blessing after another.
Eh? Some mornings don't remind us of blessing after blessing. I'm tired; the cat didn't even get up to be fed this morning, which is really saying something about our sleep last night; and many people have it worse than we do. This just doesn't seem like the morning to talk about blessing. Yet, the Internet is working, the power is on, the house is still where it was last night, the hail was small and the wind didn't turn into the dreaded tornado. We may be tired, but we are still alive and able to glorify God with our life and attitude. And above all, the verse comes from God's eternal and omniscient view, not our short-sighted and 'poor, pitiful me' view.
Sometimes we concentrate on how we feel. A little chaos and our sleep is interrupted and we feel down the next morning. Yet one cup of hot coffee says much about the state of our situation. We have coffee in the cupboard which speaks of needs met, we have water to fill the coffee maker and electricity to run it which speaks of systems working, we have the ability to get up and make the coffee which speaks of health... and then of course I have the time and ability to yammer on about it which speaks to the peace of the morning. Yup, kind of looks like gracious blessing after gracious blessing this morning. Maybe the day isn't so bad after all! God has managed the chaos and brought blessing to the morning.
What a great day in Christ!
Bucky
1 comment:
Post a Comment