Today is my birthday. I have, as of 6:55 AM today, sojourned this earth for 54 years. They have been blessed and rich years in ways too many to count. If you’re reading this, you are part of the treasure and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
So far, celebrations have included breakfast with 2/3 of my guys at McDonald’s, a chocolate cream pie brought by Gayla to our graduation open house planning meeting (which of course we had to sample in order to be fortified for our work), cards that have arrived in the mail or in person the past couple of days that I saved to open today (I’m so proud of myself!), and lots of birthday wishes from Facebook friends.
I was thinking of things in my life that have changed since my last birthday:
- I can now carry on conversations with my granddaughter, who turned 20 months old yesterday.
- Michael is no longer an employee of Taylor University and we are in the job-hunting mode.
- I have definitely decided that gray is okay…no longer on the color? no color? fence.
- I am no longer homeschooling and Zach has successfully completed a year in public high school.
- Some dear people I know who were here last year are in Heaven now.
- Everybody who reads this is a year older today than they were a year ago today.
We tend to measure our lives by a couple of things, I think–at least I do: change and milestone events. One–marking the milestones–almost always forces a measure of the other–change. It is probably good to reflect along those lines now and then, and birthdays are as good a time as any.
But, here’s a different twist, and I think maybe I’d like to make this a bigger part of my regular reflection on life in the coming year. We are almost at the end of our year of reading through Chuck Swindoll’s little devotional book Bedside Blessings, to which I’ve referred here more than once. This one from the other day has stuck with me this week:
God’s hand is not so short that it cannot save, nor is His ear so heavy that He cannot hear. Whether you see Him or not, He is at work in your life this very moment. God specializes in turning the mundane into the meaningful. God not only moves in unusual ways, He also moves on uneventful days. He is just as involved in the mundane events as He is in the miraculous. One of my longtime friends…often says with a smile, “God moves among the casseroles.”
I like that. And I will be watching for Him more often there, as I move from this celebration day into a new year of everyday.
That passage from the devotional book you’ve been reading is interesting…whether considering the “don’t put God in a box” cliche or thinking about how I’m always waiting too see or hear about the “big” things that God does while multiple “little” God things pass by without me batting an eye. As “small” as some acts of God may seem, they are all enacted by a BIG God who is the same always. He oversees a world full of changing people, yet He himself changes not. Our prayers and petitions to Him may influence the specific ways in which His power comes forth (i.e. though He does as He pleases and can act regardless of whether or not we pray, He does act based on our prayers — He gives because we ask), but nothing we ever ask for, neglect, do, or fail to do can change who He is/His make up/the core of what makes Him God.
I’ve thought often as of late about pain and my problem with it (I really need to make a priority of reading Lewis’ book on that very subject). I wonder why a God of love allows suffering, especially, from what I can gather, that He allows some people to experience deeper and/or more frequent pain than others. I do not think that we humans suffer to the same degree, though we all do suffer at one time or another. Maybe this thinking is flawed, but that is what I think at this time…