Last week was not a good week for me. Something unpleasant had to be dealt with, and I didn’t respond the way I wish I would have. “Be angry and sin not.” I’m afraid I was angry, and it showed in my thought life and in my spoken words. My flesh triumphed. Sigh.
I was so unhappy with myself, and I was sure that God was pretty unhappy with me too. Do you ever think the Lord is looking at you and just wants to throw up His hands in despair that you will ever get it right? That’s sure how I felt.
At church on Sunday, the pastor talked about the need to make space for God to talk to us and to allow Him to talk to us in new ways. I began praying about my less-than-admirable-attitude and I asked the Lord to speak to me in a new way.
When the service was over, a man came over to me. We were in a small group together back in the early ’90s when we attended a different church, but we haven’t seen much of one another over the past decade or so. He said that when he saw me across the sanctuary, he believed God had a word for me. What he had written down for me was this:
“You are a living tree planted firmly in the streams of water, yielding your fruit in this season. Your leaves do not wither and in what you are doing you prosper.”
Wow! There was no way this brother in Christ could have known how much those words would mean to me. But God knew. And He answered my prayer to speak to me in a new way by putting these words in my hand on a small yellow sheet of paper. It felt like a caress. Like God was saying, “I do see you, My daughter, and I am not throwing up My hands in despair.”
It’s going to be a much better week.
~robin
