I LOVE this blog post. It speaks to me on so many levels because I’ve been there….done that. Read and be blessed with a new view of God who’s never too busy for you!
I have just wakened from a delightful dream, and it led me to an even more delightful realization, and this needed to be shared. My dream was of a very busy, very responsible, very wonderful friend…
Source: Never Too Busy
Do you long for blue skies in your life? And I don’t mean the weather. Three years ago, when I wrote this message, Northern California was desperate for rain. This month, we’ve experienced winter storms that have wreaked havoc. Either way, I still believe what I wrote in this post back then. The rain in our life is necessary if we want to grow…..
A blue sky, and the chatter of yellow finches clinging to the tube feeder beneath my Oak tree, beckons me. Come out and play. Blue skies can be deceiving in the winter. I open the front door and po…
Source: Rain Makes the People Grow
Could you forgive someone who killed your loved one? A few years ago, I reconnected with a long-distant friend on Facebook and phoned her to catch up. She told me about her husband’s heinous murder and the heartache that followed his death which included her grown son’s drug addiction. I sat there, glued to the phone. But it wasn’t the details of his murder or her son’s addiction that captivated me as much as her response to these events.
Time passed and I was inspired as I watched my friend get involved in prison ministries. I asked if I could write her story and share the message of God’s grace and forgiveness with others. This is Wendi’s incredible story Inside Job that was published in the online magazine: Now What?
As I face 2017, I’m reminded of words I wrote a few years ago:
New Year’s Day House guests are gone, house is a mess, and … much too quiet. I flip through the familiar dog-eared pages of 2013. Each week is marked with hand-written appointments and events…
Source: How to Face the Unknown
“There’s a grief that can’t be spoken. There’s a pain goes on and on.”
Thus sings a young man (in the musical Les Miserables) after his friends have died in battle. And it was these heart-wrenching lyrics from the song Empty Chairs, Empty Tables that echoed in my mind as I drove to the airport a few days before Christmas.
Although I was over-the-moon excited to hug my son who was coming home for the holidays, my heart mourned for two moms who will never hug their sons this side of heaven.
A week earlier, their eighteen-year-old sons were killed in a vehicle accident while driving in our town. I didn’t know the young men. Never met the families. But my heart still aches like an open wound whenever I think of them; pray for them.
Sadly, they’re not alone this Christmas season. I have several friends who celebrated Christ in the midst of a grief that can’t be spoken…
The death of an elderly father. The loss of an infant grandson. A broken marriage. A pre-school child with cancer. Someone facing a double mastectomy. So many lives touched by a pain that goes on and on.
I try to make sense of it all especially during Christmas when hearts are meant to be merry and bright. A friend told me that tragedies like these remind us to hold our loved ones close, forgive and keep short accounts, and share Jesus. Another woman, whose husband was killed, said, “Instead of asking why this happened, I ask how I can live to honor God despite my circumstances.”
Wise words, but I also opened my Bible to Matthew because I thought of those ancient moms who grieved for their sons—martyred babes, slain by the sword when Jesus was born.
For even though a bright star led the Magi to worship the Christ Child, the troubled soul of King Herod resulted in the blood-thirsty slaughter of children.
“Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, became furious, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had ascertained from the wise men.
Then was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah: ‘A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be comforted, because they are no more.’”
When I look at the current mayhem and sorrow in the world, has anything changed since that blessed year when Christ was born?
After all, one of the Magi’s gifts was Myrrh, a bitter perfume, that breathed “gathering gloom, sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying, sealed in the stone-cold tomb.”
However, outward appearances can be deceiving.
Jesus wasn’t born to spare folks from pain and death on earth. He came as the Lamb of God to take away the sins of the world. To prove God’s great love by dying for us while we were still sinners. And His resurrection guarantees us new life when He’ll wipe away every tear and there will be no more death.
“Rachel wept…refused to be comforted.” Maybe you’re mourning too.
Just remember, when we believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing we may have life in His name, it truly is possible to experience His peace and comfort that defies human logic…
Even in this grief that can’t be spoken.
References: Matthew 2:16-18, John 1:29, Romans 5:8, John 20:31, Rev. 21:4 & lyrics from We Three Kings of Orient Are
Even In This 