Good morning!
Welcome to your morning coffee! May our Heavenly Father prepare our hearts for spilled coffee. Father we try so hard to make our lives safe and predictable. But we are broken people living in a broken world. And sometimes the suffering of bad news, of tragedy, of small frustrations, it can surprise us and leave us struggling to deal with it. Help us Father. Help us to entrust ourselves to your Will. Teach us about yourself today Father. Show us your desires and designs for us, and help us to obey you and entrust ourselves to your wisdom and guidance. In Jesus's name help us Father.
Your Morning Song: "Evidence" by Josh Baldwin
Your Morning Scripture: 1 John 2:17
And the world is passing away along with its desires,
but whoever does the will of God abides forever.
...
Life is strange, sometimes. Our day to day lives are build of routines, habits, appointments, work hours, meals, sleep, meetings, predictable thing after predictable thing. Though I am broken, I am still made for eternity, and so the predictable order of my day to day life seems to me to be something that will never change. And in some ways I find comfort in the predictability of my every day life.
We all have our habits, our routines, our predictable things. This feels comfortable. Safe. Under control.
But we are living our lives, however structured they might be, in a world, made good, but currently broken by the chaos of sin and death. Tragedy and struggle seem to seep into my day to day life, catching me off guard. Unsettling me to my core.
This broken world, full of people broken just like us, will catch us by surprise. And what will we do? When we stub our toe? When we drop something and it breaks? When your son asks ANOTHER question? When there are more bills than we thought? When the car we just fixed breaks down again? When your child gets in trouble at school? When you get an angry call from someone? When someone criticizes you unfairly, or fairly? (neither feel good). When a friend is told that they have only months to a year to live?
How will we react when life breaks our predictable mold and catches us painfully off guard?
CS Lewis, who you might know as the author of the Chronicles of Narnia, once wrote, "Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is." And that thought has always stuck with me.
We live in an unpredictable world. How we respond when we are caught off guard by whatever suddenly surprises us, says a great deal about who we are.
This unpredictable world, with its thin veneer of predictability, is passing away. It is not stable or sound. But God is. His will, his desires and his designs are trustworthy, now unto forever.
And the more we submit our whole selves and lives to the shaping of God's will, the more steady and sound we will be as well. And when life catches us off guard, when sudden suffering strikes us through the heart into the bone, we will be steady and sound. We will abide, having entrusted our whole selves and lives to God's desires and designs.
But if we do not, then we know no joy, no peace, no lasting comfort of any kind. We will be tossed about by the waves of worse and worse suffering as the brokenness of the world washes over and into us, into our own brokenness. And the reverberating echo will break us again and again, like boots cracking on bits of broken glass.
May we be known as those who know God's will by doing it.
