Early Morning Reflections

Good morning!

Jeremiah 29:11 is a lovely verse.  Truly.  Even in the context it's used in, it still says amazing things about God.

For I know the plans that I have for you,’ declares the LORD, ‘plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope.

Before you begin to think that I'm going to bash this verse, let me ease your worries.  I'm not.  I just noticed something that I had not been taught before.  


This week needed to end.  Fact of life, I suppose.  It's not that I do not appreciate the blessings of this week, but merely that I am so drained that I am pretty sure that if my classes did not end at noon yesterday, I would not have lasted until the weekend.  All right, so that's the background story.  Now, picture this:  I'm in that mindset when reading Jeremiah yesterday morning--the one where I think the day hasn't even started and it already needs to end.  Well, The Lord is telling Jeremiah to tell the exiles that He sent to Babylon to make lives where they are.  Build houses, and eat the food they grow (29:5); get married and have sons and daughters (29:6); move ahead with their lives despite being in exile (29:7).  But here was the kicker.  This is the verse that snapped me out of that early-morning blahh and into a full out "What did he just say?"

Jeremiah 29:10
For thus says the LORD, "When seventy years have been completed for Babylon, I will visit you and fulfill My good word to you, to bring you back to this place."

Seventy. Years.  Seventy?  You mean just seven, right?  The "-ty" was a typo, yes?  And maybe someone accidentally mistranslated "days" to "years" because a single week is long enough to start wearing at my faith, much less SEVENTY YEARS.  That's 3640 weeks, plus a couple of days for leap years.  No ma'am.  Good day to you, sir.  


It is a daunting--and terrifying--realization to see that.  But it's also very humbling, and the more that I think on this passage the more I realize just how sovereign God is.  My faith is so small sometimes.  Some days, I can feel it expanding beneath my feet, taking me to far distant places to do God's work for me, and some days, I can hardly balance one foot on it, much less walk with it.  I get to a point where I begin to wonder and question Him.  Why did that have to happen?  What good did that do?  So how do You expect me to move on from here?  Weren't You supposed to keep that kind of thing from happening?   What are You doing, now?  Where are Your works?  I ask far too many questions sometimes...
The thing is, He's sovereign.  His will is bigger than my own, and believe me when I say that that is such a blessing.

There will be things that we do not understand, and there are going to be times when God's plan and ours do not line up (I'm sure there were a few exiles that were questioning, "What was that for?").  There are things that we simply cannot change.  There are going to be days that are not OK, and sometimes a day is going to stretch into a week.  Sometimes it's one month, and other times it's nine.  This is something I've had to struggle with for the past few weeks, and please note, this next part is most definitely a Thus Saith Sara moment (and if you haven't picked up on those yet, I'm telling you to take it with a grain of salt):

The point of our lives is to give glory to the Most High Lord, who is able to do far more abundantly than anything we can imagine.  He's got it all sorted and figured out.  We will be put into situations that test and try us, and sometimes those situations will stretch out over time spans that make us want to prematurely surrender our last breaths.  It will not be easy, and we won't always feel like we're running on a week-after-church-camp-God-high, and we are going to fail sometimes.  We're human, after all.  When we go through those times, though, God's command to Jerusalem was to keep on going.Continue living in the circumstances that weren't exactly what the exiles had planned for themselves.

Life doesn't stop just because it ceases to be what we originally wanted.  

Keep running the race.  Keep fighting the good fight, because I promise you, just as God is able to deliver, He will.


And on a completely unrelated note, this made me smile, and I wanted to share it with you.  =]



Because I have a soft spot for awkward moments and can't help but want nothing more than to use this sometime.
























Have a blessed day!