Weekend Encouragement

Its Friday again friends – wow what a week. I hope your week was good and hope this encouragement can help with anything you may face for the weekend

I am enjoying this much needed rain we are getting but I hope we don’t get too much. We are such a silly lot, complain when we don’t get enough and then complain when we seem to get too much.

The encouragement I am sending today comes from various sources that I read and I am combining three of them as they all spoke of a central theme – the various gifts God gives us and how we choose to use them.

The opening statement in Jesus Calling by Sarah Young said “Open your hands and your hearts to receive this day as a precious gift from God.”

There are many forms of gifts we are given and we know from our reading and studying God’s word that each of us has been given a gift unique to us. He takes great delight in reminding us that He is always there and He rejoices when we reflect His beauty in our actions and gifts.

I am taking a writing course in poetry, not what I thought it was going to be, but the lesson I am learning is how sad life can be without God in your corner. God opens doors often to show his great love for us but we have to be willing to open our hands and hearts to accept it. Billy Graham’s devotion had a statement that made me chuckle but only because I fully understood what he was saying where those who don’t know Christ are still floundering on the dry beach gasping for air.

“While the IRS keeps a record of how we spend our money, that is nothing compared to the records God keeps with how we spend/use our gifts.” Billy Graham

The majority of God’s gifts probably are not of monetary value. In some instances they are, but most are gifts to help further His kingdom. And these gifts affect how we walk our in Christian lives. In Oswald Chambers Devotion this morning from Utmost for His Highest, he made a statement that sometimes we can not be effective in our walk until we have been through the Fires of Sorrow.

As a saint of God, my attitude toward sorrow and difficulty should not be to ask that they be prevented, but to ask that God protect me so that I may remain what He created me to be, in spite of all my fires of sorrow. But if a person has not been through the fires of sorrow, he is apt to be contemptuous, having no respect or time for you, only turning you away. If you will receive yourself in the fires of sorrow, God will make you nourishment for other people. Oswald Chambers

And that to me is a true gift from God, the ability to stand strong when chaos is swirling about you, knowing He has got your back; the ability to still see the world through a glass half full instead of half empty; and the ability to show comfort and kindness to others when there have been times when you yourself were not show these things. So I remind you to take courage and peace in knowing God is holding your hand.