Tag: attitude

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Veterans and the Christian Life

After I left the Air Force, I spent some time as a contractor working for the Department of Defense. The DoD is a lot more than just people in military uniforms. There are also government civilians and government contractors. (Military members normally move around to different assignments every few years, so government civilians are there longer term to provide continuity. Government contractors are more of the “hired muscle” who bring specialized skills, highly sought-after knowledge, and/or certain kinds of experience.)

As you might imagine, many of the folks working as civilians or contractors in the DoD are veterans. I’ve met men and women who have seen or done all kinds of amazing things. I’ve heard some of them tell stories that left my jaw on the floor. Sometimes it seems like they survived epic events by pure luck. Other times they displayed true heroism. I’ve met a lot of people who spent a great deal of time stationed underground in a missile silo, ready for the command to launch a nuclear strike. I knew a guy who, years ago, witnessed a car careen off the road into a canal, jumped in and dove to the bottom, waited for the car to fill with water so the pressure equalized, then opened the door and pulled the lady out to safety. I’ve known people who disarmed or intentionally detonated explosive devices. I know a dude who parachuted into Area 51. I met someone who used to take apart and put back together portions of nuclear weapons. I met a guy who was portrayed in the movie “Blackhawk Down.” I once worked with two guys who initially met when they were engaged in a firefight…against each other.

One of the fun things about working in an office environment with a bunch of veterans is that, even when the stress factor gets cranked way up, many of them keep their cool. When the tempo really picks up and deadlines loom, they move as fast as they need to, but they don’t seem perturbed. I heard someone explain why once. “I’ve been shot at. This ain’t stressful.”

It’s nice to work with people that have such a clear view of what’s important and what’s not.

It got me thinking, though. Christians should have a similar mindset, shouldn’t they?

What if we looked at it this way? We’ve been rescued from a destiny of eternal condemnation. We make mistakes over and over again, yet always receive forgiveness when we’re truly sorry. We have the opportunity to share this life-giving miracle with others. We serve the universe’s King. Our Lord empowers us to do things we can’t even anticipate. He protects us from eventualities that are not assigned to the same future as us.

It’s December. In many ways, this is the busiest, and most stressful, time of the year. Remember why we really celebrate Christmas. It’s because we take time to remember the event that changed history forever, and was the beginning of the end for Satan’s reign on Earth. If you’re a Christ follower, you’ve been saved from an eternity of suffering, so don’t sweat the small stuff. “I’ve been condemned to, then rescued from, Hell. This ain’t stressful.”

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Never Have I Ever Done This…

Never in my life have I been excited to watch a live boxing match…until last week, when “Iron Mike” Tyson returned to the ring.

Back in his prime, Tyson was known as “the baddest man on the planet.” His punching power and pure tenacity were unrivaled. He’s the dude that bit off part of Evander Holyfield’s ear! Not only would I not want to meet this guy in a dark alley; I’d be skittish meeting him with a bunch of burly dudes between him and I. When I was a kid, they had video games featuring this guy. If you could beat him in the game, you were the cat’s pajamas!

So when the much-hyped fight between him and a young boxing upstart arrived, I had to tune in. Tyson, a 58-year-old man, was stepping in the ring with an arrogant social media star less than half his age. Everybody I knew wanted Iron Mike to clean this guy’s clock. I hadn’t been this excited about a boxing match since watching a Rocky movie!

Coverage began at 8:00 pm, and there was an undercard to get through before the main event. I watched a movie with one of my kiddos to help pass the time. I checked back in around 10:30. We still had a long time to go before the big fight. People around me started going to bed. Things just kept dragging on and on. I finally threw in the towel and ended up going to bed probably around 12:30-1:00 in the morning, and the fight was still some time away.

The next morning was a Saturday, but I couldn’t sleep. I woke up after just a few hours and tried in vain to go back to sleep. I got out of bed probably at 5 in the morning to go watch the fight. Everybody else in the house was still asleep. I didn’t check online to find out what happened, I wanted to watch it unfold the way it really happened.

After watching the hype videos and the fighters’ entrances, it was finally time to start the bout! In the first round, Tyson stood toe to toe with his opponent and delivered some decent shots. Could he knock the guy out?

As time went on, it became very apparent that time waits for no man, not even the baddest man on the planet. He still had punching power, but had lost his timing and reflexes, and the killer instinct had faded. He looked nervous and tentative as he grew tired. His old legs didn’t allow him to pursue his opponent around the ring, so he was forced to mostly play defense as the younger man circled around him. Tyson just didn’t have the tools he used to possess. By the start of the last round, I was just hoping Tyson could get through it without getting seriously hurt. In the end, nobody scored any knockdowns or knockouts. The younger guy landed more punches, and the judges awarded him the win.

Time doesn’t stop ticking. I’m at an age now where I can no longer do some of the things I could formerly do, but I’m not so old that I let it stop me from trying. Sometimes it works out okay, but other times I end up being sore for days. I think it’s good to take a lesson from Iron Mike and recognize that your combination of abilities, skills, and desire will change as you get older. The Lord has charged you with certain things to accomplish in this life, whether it be something in ministry or some other area in which He created you to pursue excellence. During the course of your life it’s important to be open to being flexible; the ways you honor God as a young adult probably won’t look the same when you hit middle age, and likewise will probably shift again by the time you reach retirement age and then again by the time you reach old age. You’re not going to have the same tools you formerly possessed (not all of them, anyway). Sometimes that could mean staying in the same line of work but teaming with someone who still has the advantages of youth, while other times it means moving into something entirely different.

I urge you to pursue God’s calling for your life, knowing full well your skillset is likely to look very different at various periods in your life. Don’t waste time pining for the victories of yesteryear; press on to face the challenge God’s placed in your path today. There will always be something too big for you to do on your own, but there will never be something He charges you with doing that He doesn’t equip you to accomplish. He hasn’t stopped being faithful to you, and though your physical and/or mental limits have changed from what they used to be, honor Him with your best today.

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The Election’s Finally Over!

Just a quick note today. Congratulations to President-Elect Trump and all those who supported him.

As we all know, elections are contentious issues in our country. Just about half of the country is guaranteed to be disappointed. Many times the winning candidate will speak of unity, or about “being a president for all Americans.” I think that’s noble, but things often go off the rails and that notion falls by the wayside quickly.

So today, I ask that if you’re a Trump supporter interacting with those who supported Vice President Harris, please don’t gloat or spike the football. It could be family, friends, coworkers, or the person you see at the grocery store. Maybe it’s at the Thanksgiving table in a few weeks. If we truly want to move forward as a country under the banner of unity, it’s not helpful to throw a victory in anyone’s face. Let’s assume we’re all Americans and want to move closer together, not further apart.

Maybe this post is reaching you a day or two late and you’ve already been an instigator in some of those “victory!” conversations. I ask that you build people up, not tear them down. Criticize ideas, not people. If an apology is in order, please follow through with one.

And if nothing else, at least the political ads are over now!

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Is There Really Any Purpose To Being Made To Wait?

Lately there’s been a beautiful stretch of weather where I live, but it’s not always this nice in August. The current low-humidity 70s and 80s are very nice, but once upon a time I worked in the field of residential construction, and I’ve had to deal with some nasty weather conditions.

I don’t even remember this dude’s real name, but everybody called him “Lumpy.” (The origin of the name, I think, had to do with some poorly mixed spackle or grout.) One hot August day Lumpy and I were working in Jersey somewhere, and it was time to call it a day. We jumped in the company truck and got on Interstate 80 to drive back to Pennsylvania. Everything went fine for awhile, but we ended up running into a wall of red brake lights on the highway.

I stopped the truck and we just sat for a bit, waiting for the jam to start breaking loose. Only it didn’t. We just sat there, waiting. The truck idled so long the fuel gauge began dipping. Brake lights turned off as people put their cars in park and killed their engines. Eventually people got out of their vehicles and walked around.

Not knowing how long we’d be there, we shut off our engine, too. The cold air from the A/C stopped blowing, and rather than bake in a hot vehicle, we opened the windows and got hit with hot, humid air. As we sat there sweating, we saw people get out of their cars and go sit in the shade of the trees, either talking on their flip phones or Blackberries, lighting (or bumming) cigarettes, or wandering into the treeline to find an impromptu restroom. People rolled down their windows and began talking with complete strangers. Lumpy wasn’t the most talkative guy, so we just sat there, listening to the radio and waiting for something to happen. What else could we do? We were powerless to get ourselves out of the situation.

I don’t know how people sensed movement, but at some point they started getting back in their cars. The brake lights turned on again as they cranked engines and put cars into gear. I can’t think of many times I was more relieved to see a traffic jam start to move again. I was psyched to hit 30 mph. I have no idea what snarled traffic so badly, but we made it back without further incident.

Sometimes you find yourself in a period of waiting, where all you can do is watch beyond-your-control circumstances play out. They are agonizing at times, often emotionally draining. This example is much more lighthearted than what a lot of other people have to deal with, but it illustrates the concept that sometimes God just wants you to wait. Maybe it’s to teach you to rest in Him, maybe it’s to force you to deal with something you’ve been avoiding. It could be a time where something’s being prepared for later. I know it’s hard. Sometimes it’s really hard. This is one time I can’t provide much insight, as God’s purpose in making you wait could be tied to any number of reasons. Spend time in the Word and in prayer, listen with everything you’ve got to what the Lord may be saying to you, and look for ways to make the most of this unusual season. I don’t know when it will be over, but seasons don’t last forever.

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Quick Hit: Time for a Heart Checkup

Did you know you can tell what’s in a person’s heart by what comes out of their mouth?

The contents of your heart are important; they overflow your heart and come out of your mouth, acting like a window for others to see the type of things your heart contains.

A good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth good; and an evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart brings forth evil. For out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.  Luke 6:45

Think of this as an opportunity for a self-check. What kind of things are coming out of your mouth? Are there any changes you need to make?

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You Won’t Know how Strong you are Until Being Strong is Your Only Option

I’d bet few of the people reading this have given much thought to the types of rope used in rock climbing. Climbing ropes are meant to catch somebody who’s lost their grip and taken a fall. As you might imagine, if you’re going to be betting your life on the integrity of your equipment, you don’t want to use just any old rope.

When used properly, the gear used in climbing can withstand harder shocks than your body can. The human body itself is the weak link in the system. To help the climber endure hard falls, the rope itself is designed to have some stretch to it.

As you can imagine, it’s very important that the rope’s owner/user keep track of the number and intensity of falls the rope sustains. Some falls are very easy on the rope; sometimes a climber just kind of slowly loses their balance or their grip and rolls away from the wall without actually falling. In this case the rope holds the weight of the climber, but doesn’t absorb a shock. On the other end of the spectrum, if a climber freefalls 8-10 feet before the rope starts going taut, not only is the climber going to be wincing in pain, but the rope will have used up a great deal of the stretch it’s capable of. That portion of the rope is now both less stretchy during a future fall, and it has less tensile strength and is more likely to break since the stretch is gone. After enough falls, that rope can no longer be considered safe, has to be pulled out of active use, and is retired.

In the last post we talked about succession and training your replacement. This time I’d like to focus on people that may feel like they’ve been forced into something different.

Although many times God will move you from one challenge to a larger one, there are other times He seemingly pulls you out of something and just kinda…leaves you hanging for awhile. Whether it’s ministry or some other profession, or something in your personal life, sudden changes can throw you for a loop. A job loss, a sudden injury, or maybe retirement that came sooner than expected are all examples of a situation leaving you scratching your head and saying “well, what now, God?”

In college I had a professor who taught us about how to safely set up ropes for climbing. He taught us all about knots, setting anchors, and proper care for ropes and gear; these are all technical skills needed for safely scaling or descending walls. As a part of the course he gave all us students a piece of climbing rope about a foot and a half long. He expected us to bring the ropes to class and we used these ropes to practice different knots throughout the course. He didn’t just take a new rope and chop it in pieces; it was a retired rope repurposed to be useful in a different way. Cutting up an active rope to serve this purpose would have worked, but it would have cost the overall enterprise.

If you’ve been forced into a position you wouldn’t have chosen, it’s certainly something easy to grumble about. Maybe you simply can’t perform the same way you previously could, and others that have been waiting for a shot at the role you held are getting a turn at it now. Don’t think that means you have less value. It means your value is going to be used differently. If lots of people can do the job, maybe it’s better to move into something fewer people can do, like a role benefitting from hard-won experience. Just because you can no longer do something you formerly could doesn’t mean you’re without purpose; it means your purpose has changed.

That same professor told a story about when he was younger and managed a nearby ropes course. Since the course was fairly secluded, it was inconvenient to carry ropes back and forth each time the course was going to be used, so the staff had a shed or a box near the course where they secured the ropes after being used. He arrived at the course one day to find the shed had been broken into and one of the ropes stolen. Strangely, a few days later the rope showed up again at the shed.

Not quite sure what to make of this, he knew better than to trust the rope. It had been outside of the ropes course staff’s control, and could not account for the activities that had been done with it. He later heard through the grapevine some students had “borrowed” the rope to pull a car out of a snow bank or something. If that’s true, it was probably a few guys that simply didn’t know their use of the rope would cause it to be retired. I don’t know what my professor ended up using the rope for, but there are plenty of other possibilities. Aside from cutting it up to be used for instruction, rope can also be used for hauling gear up and down a wall, lashing gear to packs, tying down equipment to keep it safe during high winds (or in the back of a vehicle), acting as a drying line for wet gear, improvising shelters out of tarps, etc. After its retirement, the same rope can be used for all of these purposes before they stop being useful.

If you find yourself in a situation where a few bozos made a snow bank-like blunder that ended up costing you, I’m sorry things went down that way. It’s understandable to be upset for a bit, but I have to ask…how long will you dwell on it? If you’ve still got plenty to offer and you’ve got the desire, what other ways can you use your knowledge and experience to benefit others?

It’s never too late to be who you might have been. –Mary Ann Evans

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Have You Thought About Training Your Replacement?

Not long ago I went to an estate sale. I don’t know that I’d ever been to one before. For those who don’t know, when someone passes away and their heirs/loved ones begin the process of emptying out the home, there’s often a lot of “I don’t need this, I don’t want this, or I have no room for this.” The heirs set aside what they want to keep, then hold an event where pretty much everything left in the home is up for sale.

It’s both very interesting, and very sad. On the one hand, you’ve got this eclectic collection of items that tells a story about the person that last lived here. “This lady obviously loved sunglasses, ravens, and hedge trimmers.” On the other hand, you see just how much clutter they lived with, and it’s a little depressing to see crowds of complete strangers coming in, picking through the departed’s belongings, and haggling over already-low prices. “Why in the world would anybody hang onto this, and why in the world wouldn’t the people putting on the sale throw it out before starting the sale?”

A few years back, I chronicled the story of how our family unexpectedly lost my wife’s dad, Lee, to some health struggles. We thought he’d made it past the most difficult part of his health challenges, but it turns out God wanted him to come home more than He wanted him to stay with us. Lee was a devout Christian, and everybody who knew him understood his faith to be an important part of who he was.

As the pastor concluded Lee’s memorial service, he issued a challenge. “Today we’re saying goodbye to a very godly man. I ask you, who here will take his place?”

Today I’d like to talk about the idea of succession.

Think for a moment about the capacity in which you serve the Lord. It could be any number of ways, and none of them need to come with a fancy title. The day will come when you no longer fill that role. My challenge for you today is to think about this: are you helping to prepare someone else to fill the vacancy you’ll one day leave behind?

In some cases you won’t be able to see the transition coming, and you may not be available to offer advice or insight during that chaotic time. In other cases you might still be around to lend your expertise. I’ve written before about how once you complete a task God’s laid before you, there’s often another, larger task waiting for you. I once heard a famous leader say “if you’re still excited about the same thing you were excited about five years ago, you’re not growing.” Part of the reason you should regularly think about training your replacement is because if you consistently demonstrate faithfulness in smaller things, you should expect God to “promote” you into something larger. It doesn’t mean you’re giving up on something; it could mean God’s used you to set up a situation for someone new, it’s time to move you into another challenge, and now it’s time to turn things over to someone else who’s stepping into a larger challenge of their own so they, too, can keep growing. What feels like closing the door on something is actually a profound opportunity for you to demonstrate leadership and expand your Christ-focused influence.

What does that type of preparation look like? The possibilities are limitless. Some of them are on the process and technical side of the house, like CEOs, family businesses, specific ministry work or leadership roles, etc. Others include volunteer roles, or maybe even roles without titles. Some examples include Sunday school teachers, mentoring someone younger in the faith than you, being the person that shovels the driveway of an elderly neighbor, brings meals to a shut in, or drives someone to a doctor’s appointment or to go grocery shopping. “Grandmother” is a title that carries a lot of weight, and being a godly influence in your grandchildren’s lives comes with an opportunity to have a lasting impact years after you’ve taken your last breath. These roles are less about technical skills than they are about willing hearts and people skills, and those attitudes need to be lived out or demonstrated to others before they can learn them.

Think of the Christian leaders in your own life and the influence they’ve had on you. They don’t need to have held an official title. You don’t need a degree or special training to offer God-honoring advice to a friend, neighbor, or co-worker. You just need to use the influence you’ve got to show others around you what Christian living, especially in difficult times, looks like.

Succession planning is a natural part of any endeavor. You can cling to something if you really want to, but are you giving careful consideration to the idea that the thing you’re refusing to let go of may suffer because of your unwillingness to let go, and you may even be preventing someone well suited for a new role from having the opportunity to grow into it? “Today we’re saying goodbye to a very godly man. I ask you, who here will take his place?”

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Need a Confidence Boost?

Most of my posts are somehow geared at being willing to step out in faith to accomplish tasks you think are beyond your reach, yet which God has enabled you to perform. While I absolutely believe in that idea and use it as the blog’s central theme, it’s also important to help lay the mental groundwork for meeting such challenges. If you think of my normal blog posts as a movie, think of this one as their prequel.

I’ve learned through experience that if you’re willing to take risks in just about any aspect of your life, usually one of two circumstances hold true. The first possibility is that your back is against the wall and you’ve got no real choice; the risk you’re taking is probably the best of your bad options or it’s your last resort. While I acknowledge this as a driving force behind some risky behavior, it’s not the one I want to focus on.

The second possibility is that if you’re willing to take risks, you’re secure enough in who you are that the idea of failing doesn’t paralyze you with fear. If Christ is your savior, He will call you to do things you’re not comfortable with. It’s a risk to obey. You might fail. You may look like a fool. It could cost you.

I don’t know who I’m talking to right now, but you need to hear this. If you’re a Christ-follower and feel God’s called you to some challenge requiring a lot of faith, let me remind you: you are a child of the One True King. Walk down the path with the confidence that comes along with your position. If the Lord commissioned you to pursue a specific undertaking, remember the enemy can harass you, but he cannot harm you without permission. Your idea of what success looks like might not jive with God’s take on it, but it’s part of the life your Lord called you to, so take that next step.

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We’ll Never Know the Cost of Saying No

I’ve written previously about God placing certain ideas or desires on people’s hearts. It’s usually manifested as a sort of supernatural notion, it’s an unexplainable sense of “I can’t explain it, but I’m supposed to do this thing.” Anything from “I’m supposed to stop and talk to that stranger” to “I’m supposed to give that person some money” to “I think God wants me to start a new business,” or any number of other possibilities. I’ve referred to it in the past as “God’s nudge.”

I can remember one time as a kid, I received one of these nudges. It was probably my first one. I can’t remember what it was, but I clearly remember that I ignored it. Whatever I felt like I was being prompted to do, I thought “No, that doesn’t make sense. Why would I do that? That’s ridiculous.” I wish I could remember what it was, but whatever it ended up being, the action that was supposed to be taken…didn’t get taken (at least by me).

I’ve also written before that God doesn’t need us to be a part of fulfilling His plan, but He invites us to be a part of it. This is one case where I refused the invitation. As a result, I missed out on something, and this side of Heaven I won’t ever know what it was. It may have been something limited to that day, right then and there, or it might have been on a grander scale, setting back a lifestyle of “saying yes to God” (and the corresponding level of positively impacting the world) by a period of years. I essentially told the Holy Spirit to buzz off. As you might imagine, that has its downsides; I couldn’t tell you how long it was after that before I received the next nudge.

This probably isn’t a commonly discussed concept, but every Christ-follower has a certain number of these nudges they’ll receive between the time they accept Christ and the time He calls them home. It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach, I imagine there’s quite a bit of variation from believer to believer. Like me, I’m sure many people have declined to accept a nudge at least once. It’s impossible to know what we’re forfeiting by not taking part. Here’s how I see it though. One of your goals as a believer, from here on out, should be to respond positively to 100% of the remaining “nudges” you get from God. I don’t have any idea how many that means; you could be shooting for one out of one, 50 out of 50, or 1021 out of 1021. The goal is 100%.

Think of that 100% fraction, whatever the size of the denominator, as being “full.” Then, looking through that lens, see if the two parts in the second half of this verse hit you any differently:

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. –John 10:10

Instead of “full,” many translations say “abundantly.” Not only does Christ come so we can have life, but so that we can have it abundantly. I believe the abundance, the fullness, discussed here goes hand-in-hand with those nudges and our response to them.

I started this blog as a result of a nudge God gave me. I’ll be the first to admit not every post is great. Some of them are just plain mediocre. As I look back over time, though, I see how God can use simple persistence and faithfulness in a fallen human to build something bigger than I once thought I would. I started posting in the Fall of 2018. It’s now been a little over five years, and this is my 300th post.

I don’t have a massive readership. Most of the people that subscribe are family, friends, or friends of family. I can tell you this, though. People from all over the world somehow stumble across the blog. I don’t see any details about who they are, all I see is that someone from country X clicked on post Y. The part about that that’s really cool for me, as an introvert who gets drained talking to people, is that I’m advancing ideas that come from God, not only to people I’ll never meet in person, but it’s happening while I’m sleeping, while I’m at work, while I’m on vacation, and when my thoughts are far away from blogging. When God gives a nudge, don’t worry about outcome. Worry about obedience. Obedience is your responsibility, and outcome is God’s responsibility. There are now 300 different posts that God can lead people to, and He can bring them to just the right one, exactly when they need to find it.

Probably in the early part of next month, I’ll fill you in on some of the insights about the blog’s readership for the year 2023. My intent is not to brag, but to show how a guy with no particularly relevant credentials, demonstrating only faithful obedience to God’s calling using the talents God’s entrusted to him, creates opportunities to reach and encourage people that he would have never had a chance of influencing before. I want to help give you the confidence to follow the nudges YOU receive. God has invited me to take part in His story, and it’s humbling to start to see how, years later, He uses my acceptance of His invitation to enable me to live my own life more abundantly. My intent is to show you for the sake of encouraging you, too, to accept His invitation. He doesn’t need us on the journey, but He wants us to come along. What better way to live our lives than in a way that brings Him glory?

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For Now This Rental’s Our Home

Christians are citizens of two worlds. We know in our minds that we’ll one day enter into eternity in Heaven, but there’s so much happening in the here and now that Heaven can sometimes seem very far off.

In the Old Testament, the Israelites were downright terrible at keeping their end of the covenant God made with them. Time and again they failed to live up to their responsibilities, and God showed enormous patience with them on many different occasions. When punishment finally did come, it was only after He provided plenty of warning.

In the book of Jeremiah, false prophets ran around proclaiming peace and security when in reality God was planning to hold the Israelites accountable. Jeremiah came along and preached repentance, but to no avail. After generations of not paying God the proper respect, He used the Babylonians as a means of chastising them, carrying the Israelites away into exile.

As far as exiles go, this one was pretty relaxed. Sometimes captives are made into slaves, or split up and distributed across the nation to ensure they can’t band together and rise up. Instead, the Babylonians allowed them to continue practicing their customs and allowed them to preserve their corporate identity. Even in this punishment, God took it a lot easier on them than He needed to.

In this new land the false prophets resumed their habit of proclaiming messages that people wanted to hear, rather than what God was actually saying. They claimed that it would only be a matter of days or weeks before God rescued them from captivity the way He brought them out of Egypt. Jeremiah came and set them straight. Can you imagine how crestfallen you’d be if, caught up in the excitement of orators confidently claiming an imminent return home, a man of God comes along and tells you “Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease. Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.” –Jer 29:5-7

That’d be a hard pill to swallow. It sounds like at least a generation or two! Then comes the part that makes you weak in the knees. Remember, these false prophets are in the middle of proclaiming an imminent return when Jeremiah hits them with This is what the Lord says: “When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my good promise to bring you back to this place. For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you,” declares the Lord, “and will bring you back from captivity. I will gather you from all the nations and places where I have banished you,” declares the Lord, “and will bring you back to the place from which I carried you into exile.” –Jer 29:10-14

Seventy years! That all but guarantees that, if Jeremiah’s right, you’re not making it back home. We know that Jeremiah’s words ended up being true and the Israelites remained in Babylon for that length of time.

You can see the similarities between them and us. The Lord could snatch us away today, but we have to plan for the long haul. Settle in, you’re probably going to be here awhile.

In the meantime, use the opportunities you have to serve the Lord. Do His will where you are, in the circumstances in which you find yourself. Life doesn’t have to go the way you planned it in order to be faithful to the Lord.

We’ll have a permanent place in Heaven someday, but for now this rental’s our home. Do a good job taking care of the things God’s charged you with doing, but don’t get too comfy here, because one day we’re all headed to our “forever” home.

Lord, thank You for being faithful even when we’re not. Please help each of us to heed your call, trust Your timing and plan, and contribute to the work You’re doing. Amen.