Our Reason to Hope and to Love

"And be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.
1Peter 3:15

Dear Readership,

Life is good! Life is good because of God! Life is good because of the God we serve (who is Merciful, Gracious, Kind and Awesome)!

Our God has a plan for us. His Plan for us is so indescribably grand and all-encompassing that if we were to realize but for a moment all that is involved in Him bringing us to His Will, we would stay on our knees continually praising His Mighty Name for I have found that the Lord our God wants to bless us!

I never understood until most recently just how much our Heavenly Father loves each of His children. More specifically, He loves me! He wants to bless me! He always has wanted to bless me even when I couldn't see my own worth.

In the past I always pictured Him loving everyone else, or I pictured that there was only so much love to go around so if I wasn't the center of attention and shining more brightly than everyone else, then I wouldn't be able to receive any of His love. Strictly a performance-based mindset, I am grateful to report that was a long time ago.

To go from not feeling the love of the Father to feeling the love of the Father; to go from not feeling His desire to bless me to feeling His desire to bless me is my journey to date on this earth in a nutshell.

Now I know love and blessings go together. They are not separate in His eyes. We separate them with our mortal eyes and with our limited, earthly understanding, that is all.

Not long ago, I went to the mailbox and found a card addressed to Randy and me from a dear friend. Contained within the card was a lovely note and a sum of money. When I saw the amount sent, I felt an electric charge (the Holy Spirit) through my entire body, and I had to sit down before I fell down. And I wept...for a good ten minutes. Not because the sum of money was so large in comparison to our whole adoption bill, but because I knew this person had to sacrifice a lot in order to help us.

And I wept because I felt the delight of the Lord all over me and through me, and He gave me a picture in my mind of how much He plans on blessing this young woman - for her obedience to Him, for her desire to do His will for the sake of doing His will and for no other reason than this.

And the Lord showed me the reason he wants us to obey Him is because He knows that when we obey Him, He can bless us fully and richly. There is no way to receive His blessings than through our obedience to Him.

He showed me what delights Him more than anything, what gives Him the most joy, is in blessing His children who obey Him for the sake of obeying Him and not because they are seeking a blessing! It is so simple really yet so profound for my mortal mind to comprehend such a love as this!

In my daily life, it is not so easy for me to see His Hand of Blessing in certain situations because I already have an idea in my mind of how something should go or how something should be. For instance, Sonya's filling fell out today which means we need to go to the dentist tomorrow and pay to have a new one put in which wasn't in my plans or our budget.

Very quickly, initial discouragement led to agitation over the whole situation, and I forgot to Praise the Lord that we have dental insurance or even that Sonya could feel the whole in her tooth with her tongue to let me know there is something wrong that needs to be fixed in order for us, her parents, to help maintain her oral health. Which, is our job, BTW.

Praise You, Father! Thank you for Your desire to help me to grow and to overcome and to learn lessons and to be the woman You designed me to be, free from fear and doubt and anxiety and hang-ups and all the things in my past that prevented me from feeling You and hearing You! Thank you for giving me a sharp mind and a ready heart! Thank you for hanging in there with me and knowing from the very foundations of the earth that You always would! Lord, I know and You know I am not perfect. I am "a work in progress", but man oh man, have I come a long way through Your extended Hand of Grace and Mercy! Lord, please continue to guide, guard and protect me as I seek to do Your will as a mother, wife, friend. Thank You for my many blessings! Help me, Father, to never take them for granted. In Jesus' Holy and Mighty Name, I pray. Amen and Amen!