Hoping...

Posted by Lisa Laree to Beer Lahai Roi
I actually made it to staff prayer on Tuesday, and I found myself reading Romans 4.  I've been ruminating on this little phrase ever since:

Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed and so became...  (Rom 4:18a)

That little piece of a verse seemed to jump right off the page at me, and I felt a nudge to consider the things that are in my life now that, to all appearances, are hopeless.

Some of them I do believe I have even given up on.  Hopeless.

When it truth, those things are not hopeless...they are just situations that are totally beyond my control.  If there is going to be any change, it is God who will do it.  There is no point in me fretting over them; if they are important in God's plan, He will take care of it.  If any of those things are not part of His plan, why then, I really shouldn't want it anyway.   So how do I hope...how do I believe...how do I put it into action?

Tenish years after the original promise, Abram still didn't have a son and he made his servant Eliezer his legal heir.   He had structured his life as if God would not keep his promise...yet Romans tells us that Abraham hoped when it didn't make sense to hope.

What is the evidence that Abram hoped against all hope?

He reminded God of the promise... You have given me no children; so a servant in my household will be my heir (Gen. 15:3).  While arranging his life in a practical manner, Abram had not forgotten the promise God made to him.

At that moment, God didn't do anything towards fulfilling the promise.  But He reaffirmed it with a covenant. 

And Abram believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness (Gen. 15:6)

Then he turned right around and fathered Ishmael.

Ishmael wasn't a result of a lack of faith...Ishmael was a result of wrong thinking.  Abram believed God would give him a son, but he didn't expect it to happen in a supernatural way.  So the family...and it was the whole family...came up with the way that they could create the opportunity for God to fulfill his promise.  It was years and years before they found out they'd messed it up...and the way they found out was that God kept his promise according to His plan.  So they had to deal with the consequences of their wrong thinking...just as Isaac has had to deal with Ishmael ever since.

I have to be very, very careful that I don't confuse reminding God of the promise with doing something to cause the promise to come about.  But neither do I want to throw away all hope...even if it means I need to order my life just as if that promise will never come to pass.   If I make the servant my heir, I at least will not be attempting to create the answer myself.

Maybe I should go back and re-read those posts on patience...

WIP

Progressing along with the update; I think I've got the basics down; it'll probably be a while before I get all the links back.  I've edited them a bit; a number of bloggers that I had linked have all but stopped posting; if/when they pick back up I'll reactivate their links.  I have a few more that I'm reading but I just haven't managed to link 'em up yet.

I'm not sure why the timestamp is overwriting my name; I can't find anywhere to adjust that.  I may have to look at the actual html for that...sigh.    Ah.  Found it.  Fixed it.  Now I'm happier.

But the real test of the success/failure will be when I start linking up the old series/studies, to see if I can just do one link for a whole series instead of breaking it up into page-size chunks.

But that'll be a task for another day...

It's Friday

And Friday is my normal 'post something rather Bible-studyish' day.

For well over a year now, that's been skim through the next book of the Bible and talk about one verse or passage that stirred my spirit.

But all things do come to an end, and I've even posted the summary of all 66 verses/passages.  Time to move 'Faithful Friday Faves' to the 'Past Series' column and begin afresh.

Two things are holding that up.

1) I haven't decided what to dig into next and
2) I really, really need to do a little sprucing up/cleaning up/ reworking the ol' blog.  This nice green is restful and easy on the eyes, which is important, but... the 'body' column is awfully narrow and  when you click on a label, you  get one page of posts with that label.  That's it.  That's why I have so many series posts broken down into chunks; it's my attempt to keep them all searchable.  'Cause when a topic runs longer than one page, the older posts can't be searched and found.  I think that's just because Blogger is moving away from these ancient template styles and they're not supporting them anymore.  Whatever.  It's annoying and inconvenient.

So it's time to move to a more current version of Blogger, if only so I can just make ONE label for each series, instead of this silly 'Part 1, Part 2' stuff.

It's a metaphor for my house, actually.  It's a wreck.  Housework has been neglected for so long I'm ashamed...yes, ASHAMED...to even think of having folks over or entertaining.  I was embarrassed for our contractor to walk through while he was rebuilding the porch (which, as I've said, is at an indefinite hold point as well).

I need to do some cleaning up, sprucing up, throwing out, reorganizing here, too.  (Not to mention painting and changing out window treatments and moving things around).

So, in more ways than one, moving forward is going to go on hold a bit while things are rejuvenated.

However, just how I'm going to manage this while working and participating in two costuming efforts remains to be seen.

I need a 48 hour day.  About a month's worth.

And lots and lots of grace.

A Sowing Blog?

I ran into a friend today whose hubby has just started his blogging journey (Tube Sock Days, on the sidebar).  We talked about blogging a bit, and I told her a little of my story and how I ended up with two blogs.  For anyone late to the show, I explained that I started about 6 1/2 years ago with a sewing blog, then after two or three years realized that I needed a little more freedom to discuss things relating to faith.

It was about that point in my narrative that my friend broke in, 'So you started a sowing blog!'

Y'know, I never thought of it that way

Off the line...

Just dropping in for a status update; while scrolling through my feed burner Monday evening, catching up on the weekend blog posts, my desktop suddenly went berserk.  We'd been hit with an exceedingly nasty cyber virus of some sort (I didn't click ANYTHING!).  We've spent the week trying to get everything cleaned up and back to normal, but we're not there yet.  We have been doing a massive back up, with plans to wipe the hard drive and reset everything.

So I'm not sure when I'll get back to regular posting...I'd been doing so well, too. 

But this too shall pass... ;-)

I will be still...

This isn't April 27, but that day made such a mark on everyone in the south that I sometimes have to remind myself who really is King over the storm..