"May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in Him so that you may overflow with hope through the power of the Holy Spirit." Romans 15:13.
It is amazing how one simple email can lift your spirits. My friend sent me an email this morning with this verse in it. I am not really sad, just feeling a little overwhelmed with all the stuff I have to do before I leave town next week and the decisions about my house to be made.
I am busy cleaning and sorting and going through and deciding what is important enough to me to pay storage on it for three years. My head is full of thoughts about what to do if my house doesn’t sell and what if, by some miracle from God, do I do if it should happen to sell while I am gone.
I know I left my kids with a huge burden of “stuff” to take care of at the last minute when I left last time. I am determined not to do that this time. Mostly packing and sorting and getting rid of. I am trying to do all of that before I leave next week. And cleaning out, always leaves more to do. You start to find all those cracks, corners and crevices where dirt tends to hide and I tend not to look. You know, the ceiling fans that never get turned off so you don’t see the dirt on the blades, the corners that are hidden by furniture that I don’t or can’t move.
Her words remind me that God is always there and that if I put my trust in Him, things will work out. They remind me that if I get all of this taken care of before I go, I will have time and room for the Holy Spirit to work in my life in the coming days. In a lot of ways, the cleaning and sorting and getting rid of is a good thing. It is helping me to decide what is really important in my life. I know that if it is done before I leave for training it will leave me time to concentrate of family and friends in the days to come. Those are what are really important to me. The stuff can be replaced, they can’t.
“Hope” is my message today. I received another email, from another friend, with a story about survival in the concentration camps during WWII. It is the story of a boy separated from his mother and his time in the camps. At one camp a little girl came every day and threw bread or apples over the fence to him. As he tells of moving to another camp and working the ovens at the crematorium, and then standing waiting as he was to be next, he wrote these words:
“In a place where evil seemed triumphant, one person's goodness had saved my life, had given me hope in a place where there was none.”
That is my hope for this journey, that in spite of what I see as hardships and burdens of the decisions I have to make and the things I have to do, they are nothing compared to the suffering of others. In reality, they are blessings – blessings that I have things to decide what to do with, and decisions that I can make, not someone else make for me.
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