Steel!

I hope that all of you had a great Memorial Day weekend!  We intermixed some sight-seeing, numerous walks and the emptying and moving of boxes throughout the three day holiday.  At times it was sweet sorrow and at others it was recommitment and victory.  Let me explain…

Many of the boxes that I went through were filled with old family photos.  They covered many of the kid’s events as they were growing up like school graduations and special events, birthdays, soccer, ballet performances, and a multitude of church plays and other presentations.  There were also many long forgotten photos that I had taken of my wonderful wife during some of our various three day holidays at the coast away from the kids over the years.

One of these pictures that especially captured my imagination and my heart was a pose of Piper on the patio of our room at The Inn at the Tides resort in Bodega Bay, California.  The purpose of that stay was in celebration of our 25 wedding anniversary back in July of 2000.  Besides other things, it is another memory of how she has retained her youthful looks over the many years of our marriage (like I had mentioned in Friday’s blog post!).  While she was in her late forties at this particular time, to me she still looked like she was in her late twenties!

There is another picture that I had taken a few years previous to the Inn at the Tides photo, which is of Piper and our four kids during a camping trip in the Sierras as they cooked hot dogs around the fire.  As I looked at it over the weekend, it almost seemed like there were five kids in the picture!

My first response to the anniversary print was to become all choked up with emotions.  In the picture Piper looked like her normal perky, spunky self with that glint of mischief in her eyes.  You can almost see her mind working to come up with some unexpected action that would surprise me!  To climb up on the rail of the deck and pose for a picture was simply natural for her!  She was always at home in front of the lens of my camera.  And since I almost always had a camera in my hand… I guess that is a good thing!

After I fought off the tears and sadness at the current stage of my wife’s health in comparison to that picture taken fourteen years past, I suddenly found a righteous indignation rising up within me!  Before I fully realized what was going on I discovered that my mind was being filled with the Word of God concerning His thoughts on the current stage of my wife’s health.  It rapidly became clear that His thoughts were not matching the emotional thoughts that I had briefly considered!  At that moment I had a definite choice to make and to be honest… it was an easy one to make!  In an instant I chose life!  His Zoë, absolute fullness of life!  And just as suddenly as the emotions had come, they dissolved into a steely resolution and increased faith in the love and truth and infallibility of His Word concerning Piper’s total, complete recovery and as it states in Matthew 14:15, that at His touch, she has been “made perfectly whole.” (KJV)

I Thessalonians 1:5 in The Message Bible perfectly explains what happened to me over the weekend.  Here Paul writes: “When the Message (of God’s Word) we preached came to you, it wasn’t just words.  Something happened in you.  The Holy Spirit put steel in your conviction.” (parenthesis mine)  In the face of sorrow, mixed with a little self-pity, the steel in my conviction of God’s Word overcame the weakness of the moment.

That experience has given me a renewed resolve!  I sense that my faith has been revived and I am even more certain that we WILL see what the Lord has not only promised, but has already provided for Piper and any other Christian who is dealing with sickness and/or disease.  I Peter 2:24 gives us one of the clearest remembrances of this provision stating: “By whose stripes you were healed.” (KJV)  Hebrews 13:8 tells us that “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever” (God’s Word ©) and since He spent a great majority of His physical time on the earth healing the sick, why would He stop now?

So what do you think about it?  Isn’t it time for you to steel up your resolve in the truth of God’s Word that is backed by His tremendous love for you?  I think so!  Have a great week.  Stay in tune (and in faith) to His Word, and keep asking yourself… “What or Whom am I expecting (to believe) today?”