All in Salvation
Duke, our labrador retriever, seldom retrieves a ball in our yard. However, the first time we took Duke to our land, he quickly found the pond and plunged in. Don threw a stick into the water. Duke immediately swam to the stick and brought it back. Duke retrieved the stick again and again and again. With his webbed feet, he is designed to swim and retrieve. He naturally does what he’s created to do.
I love dogs! Every dog we have owned has been my close companion. Therefore, when our 7-year-old Chocolate Lab died suddenly of a stroke, I was heartbroken. Two days later, Don noticed an advertisement in the newspaper for a litter of chocolate labs. Though I was still grieving, I decided to begin looking for a puppy.
As I ate lunch with a fairly new friend, I shared my adoption story with her. Conceived in an act of adultery, my biological mother chose adoption. After seven months in a foster home, a young couple became my adoptive parents.
Our youngest grandson got so excited when he saw the Christmas lights on our house. He could not wait for us to turn them on. Then he came inside and saw our decorated tree with wrapped presents already underneath it.
Nothing gives me joy like Christmas carols—the ones about the birth of Jesus, anyway. The other ones are cute, funny, and fun to sing, but they do not touch my spirit. The ones that move me declare Jesus’ deity while coming to earth through the virgin birth. I love to sit in my living room in front of the lit Christmas tree and contemplate the true meaning of those songs, Jesus’ birth, and Christmas.
My life story is being rewritten by the one true God, who is, always has been, and always will be—Creator of the universe.
When my daughter was about two years old, she loved to play games with her daddy. During one of these games, she would run to her daddy, he would catch her and throw her up in the air. She would giggle and as he put her down, she would run away and say, “Do it again!” and run back toward him giggling.
We spent the day in lawn chairs watching my brother, his grandsons, and a “windmill expert” assemble a 100-year-old windmill in our pasture. By the evening, the seemingly random pile of metal transformed into a functioning mechanism for pumping water from a hundred feet below the ground’s surface.
Yesterday, as I sat on our backyard deck and basked in the warmth of the Son, God moved my heart to praise Him. I'd just returned from a gathering of women who were assembled to learn about a local organization that supports teenage girls in foster care.
I noticed a For Sale sign in a yard yesterday. Written at the bottom of the sign in bold red letters were the words TOO LATE. I remarked to Jerry that life is full of those signs. I think we all experience them.
But God is faithful. He promised to send a final prophet to awaken the hearts of His people. According to Constable: “Whether the original Elijah will appear before the day of the LORD, or if an Elijah-like figure, similar to John the Baptist, will appear, remains to be seen.”* We rest assured that God has it under control.
My husband, Don, is a woodworker. He designed the box in this picture from discarded lumber—wood that was fit to be thrown away. The decayed, cracked wood was perfect for Don’s project. He broke the wood, poured resin to fill the cracks and holes, and then carefully constructed this beautiful box. The beauty of the resin is seen only because of the broken and cracked places in the wood.
It had been a full day of running errands, traveling out of town, swimming with my grandchildren… That night I noticed the diamond in my ring was missing. It wasn’t a large diamond, but it was treasured.
Throughout the Old Testament we see a “remnant” of God’s followers who live through the hardest circumstances and the greatest sins. They came back to God time and again and received forgiveness.
A song touched my heart today. Rich lyrics tell the story of a motley crew of misfits who have accepted an invitation to come and share—to “come to the table.”
However, death is not the end of Jesus’ story. If not for the resurrection of Jesus, our faith would be in vain. Paul stated this best, “…if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins” (1 Corinthians 15:17).
Through the centuries, many have rejected Jesus as King, but He is and always will be King.
What was worship to one was waste to another. He, the disciples’ treasurer, was focused on money, not Jesus. Was Mary’s extravagant worship the final act that turned Judas from Jesus?
No suspicion of a cancer diagnosis was in my mind that day—it was just a routine checkup. The shock of the radiologist’s brief clinical explanation caused me to sense a surreal atmosphere. I visualized to-do lists and calendar pages flying through the air like paper airplanes landing directly into the wastebasket. Recovery from shock was gradually realized in a few days when a reservoir of inner peace began to flow.
My friend told me the story about her early Christmas present. Her mother bought a new car for her and her husband. At first I was struck by the generosity of this mother, but the rest of the story intrigued me more.
