In Jesus I Have Everything

It’s really hard to keep my mind quiet some times. I keep thinking about things I don’t have and push myself harder to provide for my family. Sometimes I want to become like the Old Testament man which God raised up. Except the man I’m thinking of supported his whole family, and God sheared off his ability to provide for his family. Like string attached to a nail, once he was “shorn off” they fell.

I pray that I am given the gift to support my family during this stage in my life. For some reason I spend more time about storing up enough for all of us to live on in our old age. Not just me, but my entire extended family.

When I “tried to do good, look, there is evil right there with it.” I don’t know if this desire is altogether pure. There must be some pride in it, some lack of faith i my dear God who loves me and promises to care for me as his child.

Even on the playing field of life, in work, I see good mixed with evil. Sometimes I feel like Lot must have, “tortured in his righteous soul” living and working in Sodom. There are thorns, where I would have yield fruit. There are thorns in my hands, and I truly see them interwoven in my labor.

“Yet I will see good in the land of the living” because I “know that my redeemer lives and that in the end I shall see him with my own eyes, I and not another.” Passages like these comfort my soul because I been taught to run to them for shelter. The “fool says in his heart that there is no God” and how I yearn that they would look and God would heal them.

He would heal them like he heals me. Teaching me that even if my nail were to be shorn off, I would not fall for his rod and his staff, they comfort me, catch me. The nails that held him to the cross support me in my every hour. The cross is my glory. His cross, my glory.

Thanks be to God. Rejoice in the world’s dear Lord who saves us with the blood from a head pierced with thorns! Through the thorns and the cross, his thorns and cross, we have everything.