Harvest

But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace. (James 3:17, 18 ESV)

My prayer is to faithfully sow peace and righteousness.


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Lesson One

I need constant reminders, but one of the biggest lessons from my own health issues of the last couple years is that just because someone looks fine, it does not mean they are fine. We are all wearing masks in one way or another. The person who just cut me off in traffic may well be rushing to a bathroom, or perhaps taking a child to ER due to an allergic reaction. Sure we're all jerks, too, but I can choose to respond with compassion instead of irritation. I can empathize rather than criticize.
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You Must Remember This

Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.
(Ephesians 4:31, 32 ESV)
Lord, please help me do this. Today and every day.


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New Every Morning

I see the sky painted pink and gold and azure, the bird on wing, and I say: bless the Lord, O my soul. Your mercies are new every morning.


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Quote

"What is good? What counts as grace? What is the heart of God?
Do I believe in a God who rouses Himself just now and then to spill a bit of benevolence on a hemorrhaging humanity? A God who breaks through the carapace of this orb only now and then, surprises us with a spared hand, a reprieve from sickness, a good job and a nice house in the burbs---and then finds Himself again too impotent to deal with all I see as suffering and evil? A God of sporadic, random, splattering goodness---that now and then splatters across a gratitude journal? Somebody tell me:
What are all the other moments?"
From One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp
The answer is no. That is not what I believe. ALL the moments are gifts. Sometimes the hardest ones are in fact the best ones. The very essence of faith is choosing to trust God's goodness and wisdom when the moment tastes bitter, to distill all my experience through my trust in His love and the reality of the cross. God does not answer our demands for explanation the way we'd like. His answer is to share the human experience of pain as our substitute, our example, our Savior, and in so doing transform it all into beauty.
I think we all are just repeating that same first sin over and over.
We look, without truly seeing, at blessings without number and we listen to the lie: that God is keeping something from us, that He doesn't really know what's best and we deserve that fruit He has put off limits in His stingy manner. It was a lie in paradise and its still a lie now after Adam and Eve opened the door to let pain and death into the world. The pain is still painful; God never denies this nor dismisses it. He weeps with us. Yet He allows and uses it. God is so great that ALL things work together for good. I cling to the hope that not only will we one day see all the goodness as 'worth it' but will even see it all utterly transformed into perfection.
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