Well Sister, the calendar page has turned and we find ourselves at the beginning of all new possibilities. 525,600 minutes are stretched between our here and now and the closing pendulum swing of 2015. So much life, so much love, so much everything will happen between now and then.
Life takes such unexpected twists and turns that to even try and anticipate where we might journey or where we will end up when the next 12 months draw to a close seems almost an exercise in futility.
Don’t get me wrong, I love looking out over the unsmudged landscape of 2015 with great expectation and hope of the what to come. I’m one of the geeky types that likes filling in the squares on my new day planner with birthdays and important things I want to remember. I enjoy thinking about things I’d like to do and how accomplishing them might look. But at 50, I’ve finally started to wrap my mind around the truth that I rarely travel the path I imagine. And I mean that in the best way. If I were to be confined by what my finite mind can dream up, I’d miss out on the Divine Adventure. I’d come to the end of the year and all I’d have is what I wanted and Girlfriend, He has so much more in store for us!
I would be so quick to settle for the ordinary when that is just not the life He has planned for His daughters. He wants you and I to live the Extraordinary. If you’ve walked with Jesus a while, you know exactly what I’m talking about and if you’re new to the faith, well hang on Beloved because it’s a wild ride! I say with full and complete certainty that there are no ordinary moments, no mundane actions, no seconds that simply tick by when you’re actively living out your faith. The wind of the Spirit just won’t let us define our days that way.
Every moment we experience after accepting Christ as our Savior contains more than what we see on this temporal planet. Every second is part of the Kingdom timeline and when we ask Jesus to be the Lord of our lives, He makes every minute count. The minutes we rejoice in, the minutes we mourn in and the minutes we see as absolutely nothing special.
But Beloved, our vision can’t be trusted. Rarely do we see the significance of the moments as they really are. So we have to know and live, until our faith becomes sight, that our eternity, our life as the redeemed and chosen of God, has already begun. We fight the good fight of faith and we live with our eye, not toward a destination yet to be had, but fixed on a destiny we already possess.
Do we possess it in full? Certainly not. But are we living the eternal life, the Kingdom timeline, the Kairos Moments, in the here and now?
Based on the authority of God’s Word I believe we are.
1 Timothy 6:11-12
But as for you, O man of God, flee these things. Pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, steadfastness, gentleness. Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called and about which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses.
The hard part, O woman of God, can be that “fleeing these things” and “pursuing righteousness, godliness, faith, love, steadfastness, gentleness” may feel like a fight at times but often times it doesn’t really feel like eternal living . . . it feels ordinary.
Extending kindness to someone doesn’t feel like an eternal act. Being steadfast and following through on your commitments might not seem extraordinary. Offering a gentle word to someone who needs to hear it rarely seems heaven altering. But may I be so bold as to tell you, if you are buying into that mindset, you are wrong.
Sister, everything you do,
every minute you live makes a difference . . .to someone.
I got to witness the truth of this up close and personal this past year when God pulled back the veil and let
every onlooker glimpse His glory in the life of our precious friends, Matt and Sara. Matt and Sara share their testimonies and the Good News of redemption openly, and it’s with their full permission that I am sharing this small slice of their journey. I don’t overstep my bounds when I tell you, because they would be the first to declare it, that this couple was living life in the pit of sin and if God had not swooped in from heaven in all of His Sovereignty to draw them out . . . they would still be there. What a rescue He orchestrated! What freedom He blessed with! What sweet salvation He granted!
And we might be tempted to think that it all happened in one lightning bolt moment, with a glorious flourish, and a wild roar from the Lion of Judah . . . but we’d be wrong. God sent quiet servants to live life in front of them . . . one moment at a time. To “flee these things” and “pursue” the eternal life to which they were called in the everyday minutes.
The events that occurred, the acts of God that transpired, to bring Matt and Sara to a place of grabbing hold of Jesus were set in motion long before the ones I am describing, but none were more important or more significant than the earthly family He placed Matt in. The faithful ones God sent to do life, tough and difficult life, were placed there directly by the hand of God to influence the generations. It was God who chose to make Lori his aunt and Karl his uncle and to connect them to Sara through him.
And it was God who, many years earlier rescued Karl and Lori from the same pit of sin and transformed their ordinary temporal moments into extraordinary, eternity altering life.
Full confession is that Karl and Lori are two of our dearest friends and I might be tempted to describe their walk of faith with glowing terms that neither of them would assign to themselves. They would tell you that they didn’t do anything out of the ordinary and if I know them as well as I think I do, I’m going to go a step further and say that they would begin to outline all the ways they think they fell short over the years. See, fighting the good fight never looks the same from inside the ring.
So while they may have felt that they were just living ordinary lives, from their ringside seats Matt and Sara saw the activity of the Extraordinary. The steadiness of the walk, the gentleness of the faith, the pursuit of the Savior, so obvious that when God prompted them to reach for a hand there was no other choice. And true to their eternal calling, Lori and Karl grabbed hold. God reached out through real and tangible people and pulled Matt and Sara home.
Matt and Karl at Matt’s Baptism
Matt and Lori at Matt’s Baptism
Matt and Sara at Matt’s Baptism
Sara’s Baptism Testimony
Karl, Sara, and Pastor Jerry at Sara’s Baptism
I’ve seen few people burn as hotly or be changed as dramatically as Matt and Sara and I pray with everything I have that they are never satisfied with what they know of Him but they keep seeking His face and chasing His heart.
Sister, Matt and Sara have been liberated from the bondage of sin and live in wild appreciation of their freedom in part because Karl and Lori have taken hold of the eternal life to which they were called. Living life with and for the Savior has become who they are and with their eyes fixed on Him they continue to live moment upon moment in His Name. God reached down through what our finite eyes may have seen as commonplace, normal, everyday moments and extended His love to the generations.
And Matt and Sara’s legacy was changed. Bondage was exchanged for freedom. Death was redeemed by life and an inheritance fit for a princess was born . . .the life of their sweet Baby Girl changed forever.
Matt and Sara’s Baby Girl
Due 07/05/2015
Can you even take how good God is? Look over that little one, knit together in her momma’s womb, entering into a redeemed heritage. Welcomed with love, not just by her Momma and Daddy, but by the quiet servants who lived one eternal moment after another.
And here we stand Girlfriend, you and I, with our feet firmly planted in the first square of our 2015 day planners. All those moments lay before us. . .every one of them poised to alter eternity . . . how are we going to live them?
glimpsedglory 