Yesterday started out very melancholic for me. There is a wave of health issues surrounding us concerning friends and relatives. My father faces open heart surgery. My aunt who has muscular distrophy just had a tracheotomy and is under constant care. A young 17 year old that we know recently had an aggressive form a cancer return with a bad prognosis. The father of a friend we know was just diagnosed with cancer. Yikes!
My Bible reading plan is now in Ecclesiastes. It was talking about the meaninglessness of life under the sun and how so much of it is just chasing after the wind. However, the whole point is that life viewed apart from God doesn't make much sense. If we are born, live life and then die and are no more, what is the whole point! A friend recently emailed us a letter from a prominent minister with some interesting insight:
"People ask me, What is the purpose of life? And I respond : In a nutshell, life is preparation for eternity. We were made to last forever, and God wants us to be with Him in Heaven. One day my heart is going to stop, and that will be the end of my body -- but not the end of me. I may live 60 to 100 years on earth, but I am going to spend trillions of years in eternity. This is the warm-up act - the dress rehearsal. God wants us to practice on earth what we will do forever in eternity. We were made by God and for God, and until you figure that out, life isn't going to make sense.
Life is a series of problems : Either you are in one now, you're just coming out of one, or you're getting ready to go into another one. The reason for this is that God is more interested in your character than your comfort. God is more interested in making your life holy than He is in making your life happy.We can be reasonably happy here on earth, but that's not the goal of life. The goal is to grow in character, in Christ likeness.
[...] I used to think that life was hills and valleys - you go through a dark time, then you go to the mountaintop, back and forth. I don't believe that anymore. Rather than life being hills and valleys, I believe that it's kind of like two rails on a railroad track, and at all times you have something good and something bad in your life. No matter how good things are in your life, there is always something bad that needs to be worked on. And no matter how bad things are in your life, there is always something good you can thank God for. You can focus on your purposes, or you can focus on your problems. If you focus on your problems, you're going into self-centeredness, "which is my problem, my issues, my pain." But one of the easiest ways to get rid of pain is to get your focus off yourself and onto God and others."
With all that has been going on, I decided to check up on a precious little girl who was going through cancer treatment the same time as Brent. She is under the care of her grandparents. The cancer treatment did not work for he so she is under hospice care, pretty much waiting for things to take thier course. My heart has gone out to the Lord in prayer many times for her. I was assuming the worst news. However, the report I heard from her grandmother made my day, helping to lift me out of my melancholy. Her grandmother said that she just keeps going and going. The hospice workers can't figure it out. They are even considering having some tests run on her to see if the cancer is in remission or if it has miraculously disappeared.
Just like the pastor's words said, light shining in the darkness.
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