There are a number of short prayers, “Help!” being one of the most popular. “Save me,” being another. But the one that I find myself praying most often is, “Father, lead me.” And I know that God does. How can I be so confident? Because the Lord is my shepherd, and I am asking him to do something that he has already promised in his word.
It is hard to reconcile the terrible things that happen to us with God’s great love for us. Yet, those who I admire most have found a way to keep loving and trusting God anyway while working to lessen the suffering of others.
Did you know that in Jewish culture at the time of Jesus there were six ways in which a person could be “born again”? According to my Complete Jewish Study Bible these included: when a boy becomes bar mitzvah at age thirteen, when a Jewish man married, when he was ordained as a rabbi, when he became the head of a rabbinical school, or when a Gentile converted to Judaism or was crowned as King.
I’ve always loved old houses. But what I love most, especially when I drive down Maine’s winding back roads, is glimpsing a dilapidated old house that someone is lovingly restoring back to life. Often in life, when we encounter something hard, we view it as bad. Or when something is easy, we view it as good. But most often in life, I find that hard and good are not antonyms.
When was pregnant with my second child, instead of driving to my local doctor’s office for prenatal checkups, I drove 45-minutes from our house in Bath, Maine, to an abandoned church in Lewiston where boxes of donated food filled the lobby and economically disadvantaged, single moms came together for support for their young children.
Growing up on a farm with a single mom who was working her way through college, we didn’t have a lot of extras. Most of my clothes were passed down from my older brother, and most of our food came from our flocks of sheep and chickens and from our garden. Only many decades later did I discover that for much of my childhood my grandparents had sent my mom money to help pay the mortgage.
Wife, mom, writer, friend, sharing God in my everyday life through “Faith Notes.”