I’m learning lots of lessons lately and have been thinking about them, trying to process them, mulling over them so they will sink in and take root in my heart. Here are two that God’s been bringing me through this week:
Lesson #1: Contentment. True contentment in God. How many times have I said or sung that God is all I need? Many, many times. When it comes down to possibly never buying a house or having some material things that before seemed like “givens” in life, however, does my heart change its tune? Can I hold onto that claim when my paradigm is shifting? Just because I’ve always thought something doesn’t necessarily make it true or necessary, I’m learning. It’s been time for me to put my money where my mouth is in regard to relying on God and being content with just Him and what He provides. We may not be able to buy a house for a year or so, or several years due to the situation we find ourselves in. Does that matter? Really? Continue reading
card. “Why no, I don’t” I replied. “Well then, fill this out and take this,” she said as she handed me this tiny card to put on my key chain. “And,” she added, smiling, “since you’re signing up for the card today your drink is free.” Cha-ching! Bonus!
Or think of yourself wearing black clothes in a moderately dark room. You could be covered in lint and “fuzzies” but none really show because of your dim surroundings. Walk into a bright spotlight, like the ones they use in a play, and suddenly every little speck, hair or particle is visible to everyone. Flaws and smudges you didn’t even realize were there are suddenly glaringly obvious.
Yesterday afternoon I hopped into our gold mini-van with my three daughters and two of their friends. We headed happily down the road toward Ft. Wayne to see “Winter Jam” an annual concert event with 5-6 great Christian bands and a speaker. My girls and I have probably been to 4-5 Winter Jams in the past few years and love it every time. We had been looking forward to it for several months.
At least it was sunny out, even though still chilly. We waited, walked a few steps, waited some more, hoped and hoped as we got closer that before long the line would really start moving and we’d be finding our way to some seats and an awesome evening of music, shouting, standing and clapping, and fun.
A guy came out and started walking from the back of the line up toward where we stood. We heard him telling people something as he walked along. As he got closer we heard him talking about an extra music appearance at a local church following the concert and then he turned to us and said, “You’re not getting in. Sold out show.” After a moment of shock and disbelief, the line started breaking up as the people around us began to wander back to their cars, vans and church buses. We stood there for a moment looking at each other – “What?!” “No way!” 
Has your computer ever crashed? Have you ever had to completely format the hard drive and re-install everything, starting over? I’ve been through this ingratiating process a few times and while it’s aggravating enough to pull some hair and can be a big pain if you lose files or data, it is nice to have a fresh start. When the disk has been completely wiped clean and loaded up anew with the programs it runs so much better and more quickly. There aren’t all those downloaded, uploaded, accumulated files and programs that piled up over the last year or so. All the temp files that were dragging the system down are gone. Any spam or spy ware – gone! It’s clean and zippy – ready to go. You can almost hear your computer sigh a happy “ahhhhh.”
Along the Narrow Path 