A friend shared this Spurgeon quote with me today, and it is quite applicable for us as we wait for our sister Diane Garaway’s departure from this earth. Her daughter, my daughter-in-law Heather, sits at her bedside with other family members as she finishes her well-run race.

“I’m standing on the seashore. A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean. She’s an object of beauty and strength, and I stand and watch her until, at length, she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where the sea and the sky come down to mingle with each other. And then I hear someone at my side saying, ‘There, she’s gone.’

Gone where? Gone from my sight, that is all. She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side. And just as able to bear her load of living freight to the place of destination. Her diminished size is in me, not in her.

And just at the moment when someone at my side says, ‘There, she’s gone,’ there are other eyes watching her coming, and there are other voices ready to take up the glad shout, ‘Here she comes!’

And that is dying.”

If we think about all the fretting we can allow ourselves to do, and when we hold our tendency to do this up next to the promises of God, it is surprising that we are not cured of worry forever. We should be. Everything about our lives is under His good design and care. He is preparing good things for us. REALLY good things.

Consider what Jesus told His disciples right after He  identified Judas as His betrayer and predicted that His friend Peter would deny Him three times. All the disciples must have been worried about what was coming. It was in that troubled moment that Jesus turned to comfort His confused disciples.

“Let not your heart be troubled; you believe in God, believe also in Me. In My Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also. And where I go you know, and the way you know” (John 14:1-4).

Jesus is preparing a place for each one of us, a mansion in fact. Even now, He is getting ready to receive us. This struck me particularly recently when a friend of mine was telling me about her new house. She did not think that a house so perfect for her very specific needs existed in our small town. When she and her husband met with the owners, they found out that the owners had meticulously planned this house, built it and lived in it for seven years before selling. The owner said something like, “It turns out, we built this house for you!” And they did, even though they did not know it at the time.

God is not only preparing things for us in this life, but He is also preparing us for eternity and eternity for us. We sometimes worry about what we are going to do at the next stage of life, but God is preparing it all for us right now. When we walk by faith, we believe that God is preparing for us. This is the best kind of comfort in all kinds of trials. Jesus knew His disciples were worried at His coming death. He comforted them that He was not leaving them, but going to get a place ready for them. And He promised to come back for them, and for us.

Where will we be in seven years or in seventy years? Someone, our Lord Jesus Christ Himself,  is preparing a place for us, especially and specifically for us. This is why we can comfort our hearts and rest in contentment and peace, even when our lives are full of troubles.

God loves new beginnings, have you noticed? And we, being His creatures, do too. Why are the stores going to be filled with cleaning and organizing supplies in January? Because we like to clean up, throw out, rearrange, and start over. Again. We are not being bad when we do this. Well, most of the time we are not being bad. I have thrown out or sold a few things over the years that I shouldn’t have. But we won’t go into that. Those bad things have since been forgiven. So I am starting fresh, a wiser woman for it.

We all want to put our best foot forward on the first day of the brand new year. But I guarantee you that we are all bound to trip up in some way sooner than we would like. But we must, absolutely must, remember that God washes us and forgives us anew every day, when ever we ask for it. We don’t have to wait for a new day or a new week or a new month or for a new year to start over. We don’t have to be bummed that we already broke a couple of new year’s resolutions before noon on day #1. God doesn’t care about our new year’s resolutions. He cares us about us looking to Him for our salvation, our repentance, our faith, our growth, our sanctification. Everything. And He is there for us 24/7. “Thanks be unto God for His unspeakable gift” (2 Cor. 9:15).

Psalm 66:10-12

For you, O God, have tested us;

you have tried us as silver is tried.

You brought us into the net;

you laid a crushing burden on our backs;

you let men ride over our heads;

we went through fire and through water;

yet you have brought us out to a place of abundance.

I imagine that we all know what it is like to go through a season where things are especially hard. You may feel like that has been the last 15 years of your life. As it wears on and you still miss your mom, or the rain just keeps coming, or the heat continues to be awful, or your baby continues to be teething, or you continue to not go into labor, or your house continues to not be remodeled, or you continue to struggle with patience, or your old friends continue to avoid you, or your health continues to be a problem.  Sometimes the problem is the weight of blessings – the fact that having a bunch of little children is simply not easy, although you once thought it would be.

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Proverbs 16:6: “By mercy and truth iniquity is purged: and by the fear of the Lord men depart from evil.”

In order to really deal with sin, we need both mercy and truth. The mercy is a disposition inclined to forgive; the truth means that we are naming the sin and calling it what God calls it. That means we call it adultery, not “an inappropriate relationship.” Or we call it gossip, not over-sharing at the prayer meeting.

But what do we do when there is absolutely no acknowledgement of sin on the side of the offender? How do we forgive when we are never asked to forgive? First I want to point out that Jesus prayed that God would forgive those who crucified Him. They certainly weren’t asking for His forgiveness, but He was disposed to forgive even at that moment. We follow His example in asking God to forgive the people who have wronged us. If you can’t do this, then you are probably in the grip of bitterness.

Second, when people wrong you and then act like nothing happened, you need to ask God for love to cover it. “Love covers a multitude of sins.” But sometimes it is clear that there’s no way love is going to cover this one. In that case, it is important to go to the one who did the wrong. But the problem is this: we don’t know our own hearts. Sometimes we don’t want love to cover it because we want to get even. So we have to get our hearts into a frame of forgiveness before we go to confront. Read More

Proverbs 3:3-4 says, “Let not mercy and truth forsake you; Bind them around your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart, and so find favor and high esteem in the sight of God and man.”

It’s pretty clear that mercy is a virtue that we have to hang on to and practice constantly.  In fact, we need to wear reminders on a necklace, commit to memory what God says about it, and recite it often so we don’t forget. Otherwise, mercy can run away from us, taking truth with it, and leave us among some very hard companions.

Romans 1:28-31 lists some of the hard companions as those with a “debased mind.”  Very ugly stuff. Look at the company that the unmerciful keep: wickedness, maliciousness, and murder to name a few. And wrapping us the list of nasties are “unloving, unforgiving, unmerciful.”

Jesus said, “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy” (Matthew 5:7). When we show mercy to one another, we find mercy from God: “favor and high esteem in the sight of God and man.” Who wouldn’t want Read More