Weekly e-News for June 5th
Hey, everyone!
Hope you're having a beautiful day, filled with thanks, praise, love of life itself, excited about what God has prepared for this day!
If you are feeling this way, I betcha you might've had to make a decision or two upon waking up, to transport your heart across the state boundary from the State of Sleepiness, the State of Confusion, or even the Great State of Grumpiness into the State of Gladness!
'Cause some folks wake up from sleep…sleepy! Most days, your joy is the last thing to wake up!
The other day, I woke up just feeling heavy in my heart. I was just gloomy and down and I wasn't sure why. Then I remembered.
I had had the saddest dream in the middle of the night.
I was at a basketball game, cheering for my team (I have no idea who my team was. I'm not that much of a hoops fan…) Suddenly play was stopped because a player had collapsed on the sidelines. He was gasping for breath. Then he stopped breathing and died.
And the saddest thing about it was that he was a duck.
Just laying there, with his snowy feathers so still. And he had been playing so well! He was the only duck on either team. He was kind of a play-maker for his squad, dribbling up the sidelines just as easily with his left wing as with his right! And suddenly, he was gone.
I just remember waking up with such a feeling of sadness for the loss we all shared. Then I remembered…
Wait.
Even tho' it seemed like it, that wasn't real!
It didn't really happen! Ducks can't play basketball!
That morning might've been a little extreme for my norm, but often I wake up groggy, mentally and emotionally disheveled and confused, wondering why coffee is so hard to find when it's always in the same place as the night before. Sometimes I wake up a little worried about I-don't-know-what.
But if I wake up bubbly or bumbling, I just do what I always do. I sit down with a steamy cup, and open up the Scriptures and find out what is true! Not what my sleepy heart or the residuals of random crazy dreams might be telling me, but what God in His holy Word tells me!
About Himself!
About myself
And about the blessing awaiting me in the day ahead!
One of my all-time heroes was a British transplant from Hungary named George Mueller. You might heard of him! He built five orphan homes in Bristol, England in the days of Oliver Twist, and cared for 10,024 kids!
When he started in 1834 there were accommodations for 3,600 orphans in all of England and twice that many children under eight were in prison! One of the great effects of Mueller's ministry was to inspire others so that “fifty years after Mr. Mueller began his work, at least one hundred thousand orphans were cared for in England alone!"
One of the amazing thins about him is that he financed all of the food, clothes, homes, and schooling for all those thousands of kids just by trusting the promises of God! He never asked anyone for one penny (or shilling!) He would just pray and ask God for help!
What faith!
What a heart!
But I bet there were times when he didn't wake up that way! I bet he had kooky dreams and woke up groggy and confused just like we all do. But he had a morning plan!
To nudge his heart across the line to the state of faith…Check this…
“The point is this: I saw more clearly than ever that the first great and primary business to which I ought to attend every day was to have my soul happy in the Lord. The first thing to be concerned about was not how much I might serve the Lord, how I might glorify the Lord; but how I might get my soul into a happy state, and how my inner man might be nourished . . . Before this time my practice had been at least for ten years previously as a habitual thing to give myself to prayer after having dressed in the morning. Now I saw that the most important thing I had to do was to give myself to the reading of the word of God and to meditation on it, that thus my heart might be comforted and encouraged…I began, therefore, to meditate on the New Testament from the beginning early in the morning…searching as it were into every verse to get blessing out of it; not for the sake of the public ministry of the word; not for the sake of preaching on what I had meditated upon; but for the sake of obtaining food for my soul.”
Wow!
First thing…"to get my soul happy in the Lord!"
Open up the Scriptures and find awesome things for your own heart!
About your Lord!
About yourself!
About your day!
And about what is true!
So you can have a heart of thanks, praise and joy!
Because no matter how real it seems, ducks don't play basketball.
They just don't.