It is so beautiful. A little girl, bread crumbs and seagulls. The waves are calm, the water is coolish but the sky is full of sun and the shadows make life look so simple. Sometimes that’s life. You want to capture the picture forever. You want to blow it up and hang it on the wall so that everyone sees it and ahh’s with delight. You want that moment frozen in time. You want the feeling to go on forever. You want to simply relish in the moment that makes you feel warm, loved and safe.

and…then there are days that you would wish would hurry by. If only you could close your eyes and wake up on the other side of today. If tomorrow the sun would waken you through the window and the birds would be singing. If the fears that are keeping you hostage now would be a distant memory and the warm fuzzy feeling of knowing that everything will be fine, is tapping on your hearts door.

When the husband says he needs help, someone hurt themselves it’s not what you think. He is not a doctor or a  day care provider, he is simply a farmer. So, who is someone? probably an animal… I played in school early and returned home to see the farmer running hot water into a big white tub in the kitchen sink. “Someone hurt themselves” was interpreted as one of the horses is hurt.  Now the farmer is rather unobservant.  I will ask him if he does the chores how everyone is and his answer is upright. If all the horses are moving on four legs, he figures they are fine and when they rush him for hay and start eating, all is well. When I check on horses, I feel them over, check their legs, rub my hands down their backs, look at their eyes, feel their muzzles and basically do a very complex job of making sure they are upright and walking. The farmer did observe something the other day; blood. Not just blood but lots of blood. Blood all over. That is not normal in a horse pasture. A little blood would have been a concern but a lot of blood. And, he didn’t see the blood right away, he saw that someone had kicked a big hole in his lean to! His lean to; not the horses lean to. Then he had to begin checking over horses to see which one of the brown and black horses had red on them.  And even though farmer is non emotional, I think it worried him about the vast amount of blood that had been shed.  A small cut- washed, put iodine on it and put her back out. It’s clean- snow is clean and it’s cold! Awesome time of the year for a cut. Last night we bound her cut up a bit more with compression and vet wrap and duct tape.  No fresh blood in the pasture this a.m. And I did look over everyone a bit more as I pulled the wagon of hay around and spread it for the woolly beasts.

We tend to see things and think it’s bad. When we get in the middle of cleaning up the mess we can often hear ourselves saying, “well that’s not too bad now was it”. Perhaps we say it to sooth others that we are helping because in our minds things always blow up and get bigger.

Matthew 6 has some  of my favorite verses..vs 25 .“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? ²⁶ Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? ²⁷ Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life”   In my world there are days that I could interpret that as, “Don’t look at it so closely- it’s not as bad as it looks.”  There are days when tomorrow looks horrifying.  The signs of the day seem to indicate it will be a doozy- blazing with both barrels and shooting right at me. And I don’t worry by the way- I just am very concerned with added emphasis on the very.  By the look of the blood in the pasture, we had a dead horse. I have made suppositions based on the looks of things and usually God is laughing because he knows its not that bad.  Why, then, do I make it seem like it is life threatening? Based on the looks of things, I need to worry… and worry alot.  God wants me to not be VERY CONCERNED even when there seems to be all indications this is the last straw, and remember who gave me life, who gave me food, who gave me my body, who always seems to make sure I have the basics.. And then he compares my existence with a bird. Of all things, a bird.  A bird… birds poop all over. Birds hit windshields. Birds lay nests in the eaves in my barn and make a mess. Birds also are beautiful to watch, they are great mothers, they are creative in building and making a home and birds will never let a storm keep them from the birdfeeder.   So I need to remind myself that often things look worse than they are but also that God is bigger than how ever much blood is all over the white snow. He has got my life. If he can handle making it work for the birds who make a mess all over the farm, the deck, the trees and the barn, then I think he can make my life; one of which has much more complexities than the birds, he can make my life doable.. And if there is alot of mess lying all over the ground, well then perhaps God has some things for me to think about while I clean them up and I have a feeling God will make that clean up also. He has an awesome track record of making things whiter than snow… Of course the horse pastures are still quite colored she is walking normal and baring her ears back at others today.  Life goes on… and the purple and pink vet wrap and duct tape is still around the hoof.

If only. Two words that seem to haunt our hearts and our souls.  Regret, do overs, desperate wishes to change something, the results of living in a fallen world and the hope we have clinging to a faith in God that somewhere, someday, sometime this will all be explained. But, in our finite minds, we are still holding onto the “if only’s” of life.

For some it’s as simple as, if only I had chosen a different house, a different car, an educational change, a friendship or a job opportunity ended.  For others it’s the if only’s of a marriage, child’s poor decisions, addictions and choices that affect others, and we are left wondering what would have happened if….

Then it’s the heart wrenching phone call, the accident, the moment one looked away, the consequences of living in a world where so quickly life changes. As many options as we have we can’t go back. We won’t know what would have happened if.  We don’t know if we would be any happier, any more successful, any more creative, any more financially stable or anymore content in our relationships.  The underlining part of the “if only’s” is simply how our faith in Jesus Christ is holding us from falling apart.

Psalm 147:11 “the LORD delights in those who fear him, who put their hope in his unfailing love.”   When nothing else seems to make sense, God’s unfailing love is what I have to totally rest in. I can’t go back and redo the “if only’s” and that leaves me petrified with fear. I can simply rest in knowing the God is in control of the out of control stuff in life and I have to be okay with that.  We live in a world that is broken. Good people have bad things happen to them, children get cancer, children get hurt and die, mom’s leave this world before their children are grown, men don’t love their wives and wives walk out and never come home. Fallen, broken, hurt, desperate, damaged, shattered and I have to look at the pieces and cry. But there is a God… Daniel said that. He had seen God walk with them through the long trek to Babylon, shackled as slaves, made into eunuchs, forced to work in a pagan culture. But Daniel knew, there was a God. It didn’t seem fair, it wasn’t just, it wasn’t the right thing to take young men thousands of miles away from their home, it wasn’t their choice, but the God who was walking with them every step of the way to Babylon, was the God we helped them find favor in the eyes of the Pagan rulers, who converted one of them to the Jehovah God. We rescued them from the Fiery Furnace, the Lions Den, and walk into the palace with a dream interpretation so they wouldn’t lose their lives. Fair, no; a God thing? Yes! I don’t look for the bad stuff in life, it finds me pretty quickly. I don’t look for God in the bad stuff; I can’t miss Him. He is in, on, around, about, through and stuck on every bad thing thing we spend our time thinking, “if only”. He is holding the hand of thee hurting mom in the hospital, the young boy in the cancer ward, sitting beside the chaplain as he tells the young women her husband is missing in action. God is and always will be right in the middle of our lives. We will always have “if only’s” but God only has time for “what now’s”.  “What now God?” when we  can’t cry anymore. What now God when our heart is so broken the pieces seem too many to put back together. What now God when plan A, plan B an plan C all have totally fallen apart?  Some days, what now God doesn’t even make sense.  We are trusting that God will keep us upright, keep our heart from bursting, keep our soul from  going insane and keep us looking forward to a time where we won’t remember and ask “if only” or “what next God”.
Revelation 21:4   “And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.”

Monday… there are all sorts of names we call Monday. For some it’s a relief as the weekend has been stressful. For many in ministry, it’s their day off. For teachers, it’s the reality of back to school. Monday.. according to Wikipedia  Judaism considers Mondays  for fasting and for reading the Torah. Early Christians were asked to fast on Wednesdays instead. In some Orthodox churches, angels are commemorated on Mondays.  Other religions consider Monday to be a family day, and in monasteries abstaining from meat, fowl, dairy products fish, wine and oil were the protocol.

So what’s on the calendar for your Monday? For me, it’s reflection time from what’s happened over the weekend. What did I hear, what did I experience,  where did I go, what did my heart tell me?  Sermons- a phenomenal sermon on Ruth,  visiting an old friend, small group and of course a couple football games that I didn’t have to get emotionally involved in since the Vikings had a bye week.  It’s good to think back- reflect. It’s good to remember, it’s good to recall and even good to remind ourselves what we might not want to do next weekend.  Our weekends tend to be selfish attempts to make ourselves happy rather than intentional plans to bless others.

In my planner, I actually bought a Christian planner this year and although only into the second week, I like it.  I take sermon notes in it, write down plans, write down prayer lists, check off goals, make goals, rewrite goals; it’s like everyday is a Monday. A time to reflect and rework my life so it’s effective. So, based on my weekend, reflecting on what I heard, felt, did, ate, sensed and cared about, what will change today that will make Tuesday better?   Hope is the word from the weekend. Hope lost, hope renewed, hope pursued and hope restored. Of course that’s the story of Ruth in a nutshell, but it’s also the story of our lives.  We lose hope everyday. We get excited, we get disappointed. We get good news, we get bad news.  That’s life- we lose hope but in the same breath we have our hope renewed. For me this week on a very bad day, it was a note from a total stranger who heard me lead worship and was writing to say how much the CD changed her day and how it encourages her. Then, my hope was renewed when I went to visit my old friend. That’s a literal statement; she is old. Grey hair, bent knees, shoulders that sag , a smile that never quits and wisdom that was waiting to be shared.  Hope renewed is like that cold cup of water when it’s a really hot day in July. Right now, it would be a hot cup of coffee in the Midwest cold spell, but hope refreshes. Hope also is what we pursue. We make changes in our week, based on what we reflect because we HOPE things will be better. If we didn’t have hope, we wouldn’t crawl out of bed. It’s what kept Ruth from jumping ship and heading back to  Moab. She believed in the God of Naomi and had hope.  God spends our days renewing and restoring our hope. He did it with a baby in a manger and he does it with a word from a friend. He speaks hope in a Bible verse or a podcast. He gives us hope in the hug of a child and the prayer of a saint. Hope… what reflecting on the Monday’s in our lives should give us.  A bad week? God will make this week better.  A trying week? God helped you endure. A tearful week? God wiped the tears away and gave a hug. A wonderful week? Give God the glory and walk on.

1 Corinthians 2:9 “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him”  Hope!  I can imagine some really cool things and it tells me that not even my crazy imagination can come up with what God is planning for this week.  That’s Hope!

Prayer:

Lord, we get so discouraged when we look at places we have come from. Give us the imagination to look for Hope from you in situations we find ourselves in. When we think it’s useless, remind us that Hope brings out You.  Remind us that You are a God of reflections, memories and have so many great things in store for us. Lord, remind us to give you the glory