THAT'S LIFE

How do you feel when things are going swell? Swell....headed, perhaps?

The fact is that Isaiah has it correct. "Only in the Lord, it shall be said of me, are righteousness and strength; all who were incensed against him shall come to him and be ashamed."

It is an easy thing, far too easy in fact, to forget who is responsible when things are swimmingly good. When the skies are blue and the funds are flush and the joints aren't aching, we must turn to the same God we cry out to when the storms are coming.

I wrote his a while ago in a book called Storms...


Katrina became a Cat 2 hurricane, near Cat 3 on this date in 2005. It entered the gulf stirring up fear and surf all along the Gulf Coast.
In 2006, Ernesto churned toward the gulf on the same date.
I talked to a friend of mine a while earlier and we talked about the unspoken fear everyone has now. Storms can be 1,500 miles away and people still worry.
Nehemiah 12 concludes with the words: They offered great sacrifices that day and rejoiced, for God had made them rejoice with great joy; the women and children also rejoiced.
The joy of Jerusalem was heard a long way away, the Bible says.
Isn't that what we long for, here, on the Coast, in this country? The joy of living, of being?
The joy that makes no sense but is right there anyway. The joy that means so much but costs so little. Isn't that our goal, our longing?
That's the joy of the Lord and it isn't present anywhere else. Like Jesus said, If it wasn't true I would tell you.
I would.
There isn't.
In late August 2005, my good friend Gene's church was destroyed .
It is important, it is vital however to remember two things. 1) Katrina missed New Orleans. Man did not. 2) It is time to remember to forget, to say goodbye, to end the grieving, to get past the pain.
For a year afterwards, we were victims. Though I loved what I did and where I wound up after we sold our house and moved, I didn't choose to leave my friends or my church. Katrina did that for me. Obviously there are people with much, much greater losses. But we've all had to live with this for a solid, daily, year.
It weighed on all of us in one way or another. Concern for loved ones or for ourselves doubled and tripled and eventually crippled some. Debris, trees still down without being cut, houses still not gutted, houses lying on their sides, businesses gone, all that weighs on us.
It did not go away, fast or otherwise.
The president came come and said what he wanted, but he never really dealt with all this. The mayor didn’t, the governor didn’t.
You get the point.
In today's devotional in My Utmost for His Highest says: Faith must be tested because it can be turned into a personal possession only through conflict...Faith is unutterable trust in God, trust which never dreams that He will not stand by us.
Friends, we (in all shapes and sizes) made it through. Some of us were lost, lives and/or souls. We went charging into the valley of the shadow of death, which was flooded by the way, and we swam out the other side.
I trust we are better for it. I trust that our faith, all of us no matter our circumstances, has been tested and it is now our personal possession to fall back upon when the next storm, big or small, comes blowing into our lives.
Nehemiah ends sort of weirdly. There is no end, really. Life just goes on.
Maybe that's the real secret to be found here, the real answer.
Life goes on. Storms come and go, but life, even hard life, must go on.


But when it is sweet, remember to say to God, "Thanks Be To You, O God."