"Taking Hold of Your Miracle"

Church this morning was phenomenal. The pastor was concluding a series entitled “Taking Hold of Your Miracle.” The series centered on the Children of Israel and their journey from Egypt into the promised land. Let me (John) just share a few things that impacted me from today:

· “We can talk so long about the things that are ahead, but when we come to our deterministic moments we can either possess what’s before us or miss it forever.”

· God often does not announce plainly that our deterministic moments are before us. Rather, He simply leads us to them, and we must recognize the importance of those decisions ourselves.

· A quote from Theodore Roosevelt: “Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”

· We have to be careful not to get stuck in a “Christian” rut, thinking that we are in the center of God’s will. When the children of Israel missed their deterministic moment, leading to 40 years of wandering in the wilderness, they did not lose God. “They didn’t lose the glory cloud or the fire by night. They didn’t lose the provision of daily manna or the leading of God, but they died in a monotonous, mundane rut of emptiness.”

At the end of my life, I do not want to realize that I lived the whole thing in a “monotonous, mundane rut of emptiness.” I am reminded of another quote by George Bernard Shaw: "Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before passing it on to future generations." Who knows, maybe today will bring about that deterministic moment when we will choose between a demanding life of faith and battles that may be “checkered by failure” or a monotonous rut of emptiness. I was convicted to be ready, to live every moment in faith so that when the moment that matters comes, I will make the right decision.

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