I’d waited weeks for this moment: toes in the sand, waves crashing in the distance, sun warming my soul. I watched as my two-year-old made happy piles of sand in front of me, experiencing the beach for the first time.
Then from beside me I heard a sigh and a mutter. “It’s not fair. I wasted my money.”
My ten-year-old son pouted and kicked his body board further from him. From the outside it looked fine, blue cloth stretched over the foam core displaying South Carolina’s traditional palmetto tree and crescent. But beneath the covering, the board was broken in two.
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Sometimes God makes promises to us for our future and we find ourselves facing new lands, a new direction–the unknown.
Before we can harness the blessing of God’s gifts, the fullness of His vision must be realized.
God made Abraham such a promise. Abraham, already a wealthy man, lived along side Lot in a land unable to sustain their two families. Before moving on, Abraham calls on the Lord. While we aren’t privy to the words of this call, what matters most is that Abraham prayed first.
With all of the crowding from the two large families, unrest began to take its toll among the people.
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He’s in a competitive phase lately — my son. Everything is “faster” and “stronger” and “better”.
And he’s the fastest and the best.
We remind him to be humble.
But the other day, during one of his “I’m faster than so-and-so monologues” he said thoughtfully, “mommy, no one is faster than God”.
Oh son. How right you are.
God can always catch up to us, no matter how far away we run. When we’re searching for Him, He’s there like a finger-snap. When we run down the beach toward him, He meets us way before we get halfway.
God is the fastest.
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Dear Mother,
God sees you. I needed to tell you that. Yes, I’m talking to you. Yes, you. God knows your hurts. He hears your quiet sobs in the night.
It stormed here last night. The rain fell, and my baby cried. I paced the floor between her bed and mine. The well-worn path needed nothing to illuminate the way. My heart led. That’s the way of things when your child is sick.
I wanted you to know there’ll be nights like this. There will be strings of nights like this. Each time you lay your body down, you’ll wonder, “Will I wake when she calls?”
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If you exercise or participate in any athletic activities, you know the importance of breathing to keep oxygen going to the mind and body. We don’t really think about breathing, we just do it. But during physical exertion, we can become so focused on the activity at hand, our breathing becomes shallow. We need the reminder to take deep breaths and keep breathing.
“Make sure you’re breathing!”
It was during this reminder when I realized I need to think about breathing at other times as well.
When the stress in life is mounting…
When nothing seems to be going the way I hoped…
When I feel alone…
When fear begins to grasp at me…
When the future looks bleak…
Be still, and know that I am God!
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Pages flipped behind me as I tried to listen to the preacher.
Flip. Flip. Flip.
It was rhythmic. My concentration paused as I waited for it to stop. A second of silence and then –
flip, flip, flip.
I glanced at the middle schoolers behind me willing them to give it a rest.
Bibles have the loudest pages, I thought and began to wonder about how the people at Tyndale and Zondervan dipped the edges of the pages in gold and silver. Who even published my Bible? I turned to the front pages to find out. Tyndale and Zondervan. I never knew two publishers worked together to publish something.
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Then the Lord God asked the woman, “What have you done?” (Genesis 3:13 NLT)
I’ve read this Scripture verse many times and always thought about how angry God must have been at Adam and Eve. As a parent, I know I would have been angry. I mean, really, the one tree they were told not to eat from is the one they couldn’t resist.
But not long ago I was reading this section of Genesis, and I heard something different in God’s words.
“What have you done?”
I heard sadness and disappointment.
God created Adam and Eve desiring the personal relationship He had with them.
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It wasn’t like I turned my back on God. 
I just couldn’t fit Him in my schedule. The birth of our third child pushed me over the edge – the pages of my carefully crafted day planner fluttering in the breeze. Normally, I spent time in Bible study and prayer in the morning after the kids left for school. But nothing was normal.
I tried getting up earlier for a while, but my sleep deprived body revolted. I tried doing it during naptime, but realized I needed a big dose of Jesus just to get me through the morning.
For two years (Did you read that?
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