Good Thursday morning! A blank slate for you to fill in, Lord! We have all heard similar statements intended to motivate us to give our lives to the control of the Lord. This is good when we are first saved, but God is not likely to give up all of the hard work that he has put into your life already. If you have grown past the infant Christian stage of your life, you are probably no longer a blank slate for the Lord. Even as a Christian youth, if we continue the metaphor, you most likely have noticed that you don't sin quite as easily as you once did. A temptation of the flesh begins a fight and not an automatic failure. Some temptations may not bother you as they once did. Jesus may have moved you somewhere too.
Many, in our country at least, tend to move fairly often in their lives; sometimes until they find a place and say, "That's it! I'm settling down right here." That may work and then again God may have further plans for you. Others find themselves planted by God at birth and they never leave their hometown. Some leave home after high school and never again have a place that we would call a home. Of course, our true home is with God in Heaven in any case. Where you are now is a part of God filling in that blank slate. You may have changed jobs after your first visit to the cross.
Almost all of us will through one reason or another have more than one job in our lives. Leaving your first one may have been your decision through going off to college or through having an 'oops' moment of some type. Other circumstances can affect jobs held in your working years as many of us have experienced not so long ago, and then you may be one of those who make it to a retirement. All of those situations can be a part of God writing on that blank slate. Where you are working is a part of where you have been planted by God. Some of us may hold jobs that do not seem to be directly related to a life in Christ, while others are the pastors and missionaries that we commonly see as jobs that are directly under God's supervision. God uses all of us when our lives are given to Him.
Your family situation: married or single or divorced or not sure, all can be used by God to write on that once blank slate. Your situation may have changed after that first visit to the cross, or it may not have changed at all. God can use us as single persons or as married couples. Marriage, I suspect, will make some rather large marks on the ol' slate, better that God be in charge of those marks than the world or me! A young couple will soon marry up on the hill at the E-Free, no doubt they will see some of the big changes in their own lives very soon.
Speaking of changes, jobs, family, homes, and many other things do change as we grow older and better in Christ. In a life given to Christ, we have the blessed assurance that all of these changes are for the good. I like that assurance because the changes can at times be traumatic. Knowing that God is in charge of my life and that He is carefully controlling the changes to make me a better reflection of His Son helps me to accept and even embrace changes from the past and those that may happen today. The future? Well, that is in God's hands. However far I have come in my journey with Jesus, I know that I am no longer a blank slate.
Have a wonderful day as God writes a bit more on that slate of your life,
Bucky
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