Five year old son:  "Mom, wouldn’t it be cool if you farted and the house blew up?"
Me: (not wanting to encourage such lude talk!!)  "Well, no, because then we wouldn’t have anywhere to live."
Five year old son:  "Well, we could just go live at Kalie’s house."

Kalie is a friend of his who is also five.  They go to school together and were born just a couple weeks apart.

Hope so.

Tuesday my husband flew from AZ to Detroit and then back home.  As many of you know the northeast had near blizzard conditions  on Tuesday and Wednesday.  God had me and the kids praying for his safety most of the day.  It wasn’t a pressing urgent prayer just a reminder that he was traveling in bad weather.

They arrived in Detroit okay but it was snowing a lot.  After a short layover they got on the departing flight and the ground crew set about de-icing the plane.  As they were waiting in line to take off a passenger sitting over the wing noticed there was ice on the wing flaps of the airplane.  They were third in line for take-off.  He rang the call button for the flight attendant.  She got the pilot.  The pilot came back into the passenger section of the plane with a flashlight and looked out the window where the passenger was sitting.  Sure enough the maintenance crew had missed a spot and there was ice on the wing.

Praise God for a pilot with lots of good sense.  He pulled out of line for takeoff and returned to the terminal for another round of deicing. 

What would have happened had that particular passenger would not have been sitting on the wing?
What if he had thought the ice was normal?
What if the pilot had not paid attention to the passengers concern?
I wonder if that man knows he very well may have saved the lives of everyone on board?

The delay caused my husband to be over an hour and a half late arriving home.  Just as a very bad band of weather causing Tornado Watches moved out of our area. 

Luck?  Circumstance?
I beg not!

God had HIS all encompassing hand over my husband and the lives of many others on Tuesday.

And whoever that man is who sat on the wing of the plane and the pilot who took the time to de-ice again…."May God richly bless your lives and may your heart forever follow after HIM."

This, from one very grateful wife and 4 children who adore their dad.
Julie

What do you love to do? Chances are that love can be tapped into as service for the Lord. This kind of thinking may seem obvious, but it is radical at least to my Christian upbringing.

I grew up with a kind of warped Christianity that taught that if I was passionate about something, it was probably wrong. God was the great killjoy in the sky. Virtue was painful. The good usually felt bad. The bad (we were told) felt good. Denying yourself meant never doing anything you really wanted to do. Conversely, if you hated doing something, that was most likely what God was calling you to do. “God, please don’t send me to Africa” was a prayer you’d better not pray, because that was the first place he would probably send you if you prayed that prayer. As you might imagine, this kind of thinking turned out a generation of very dull, boring Christians who were always suspicious of having fun. Where do you think the Church Lady on Saturday Night Live came from, anyway?

Actually, God is one who delights in giving us our heart’s desire. In fact, he’s the one who gave us our desires in the first place, and he gave them to us not to frustrate us but to help us be useful and fulfilled in our service for him.

Think of what you know about King David in the Old Testament. Now here’s a guy who obviously loved music, poetry, women, and war. So he became a warrior/king and all his passions, in their proper places and under the Spirit’s control, drove him to be not only a great king, but a man after God’s own heart. God didn’t give him all these passions and then tell him to spend his life being a scribe in a cave somewhere. (He saved that for me!)

As a child, I had a passion for music. I would spend hours doodling on the piano, and when I got my first guitar, it became the goal of my life to make the same sounds I heard in my favorite songs. When, as a young adult, God put the idea in my head to use all these passions and skills to write and perform music about his Gospel and his truth, I thought I wasn’t hearing correctly at first. That couldn’t be serving God; that would be too much fun! It took an adjustment of my understanding of God and his ways to really believe God was in this. Now I know that this is the way he works. If he wants us to do something, he’ll put a desire in our heart to do it.

God is not in the frustrating business; he is in the fulfilling, joy-filled business. So if you are desirous of serving God, think first about what you can do and what you love to do. Serving God will be along those lines.

“Because of his love God had already decided that through Jesus Christ he would make us his children – this was his pleasure and purpose.” (Ephesians 1:5 NEV )

We will never get to the bottom of this: that God made us for his pleasure. We are much more likely to think of God as someone to obey, revere, and not offend. Our natural tendency is to think that God is out to get us. We walk on eggshells around him. We imagine him at best disinterested in our lives, and at worst, as one waiting to pounce on us over our next misdeed. But to gain pleasure from us? To have created us for his own joy is beyond us. That, by the way, is one reason why I know this is true. Something this wonderful could only be something God revealed to us; we could never have come up with this on our own.

Just what is it about us that brings him pleasure? First off, we are like him. He looks at us and sees himself because he made us to reflect his image. We have a heart, a will, emotions, and a moral conscience. Because of this, God can relate to us and communicate with us. God can have fellowship with us, in other words, and this is one of the main reasons we were created. Plus, we know from examples of men and women in the Old Testament that this fellowship can take on all the typical characteristics of human relationships – arguing, bargaining, cajoling, forgiving, even wrestling (God and Jacob – Genesis 32:22-32) appears to be a part of the human/divine relationship and something in which God takes pleasure or he wouldn’t indulge in it.

This is why we receive so much pleasure when we worship God outright through prayer, meditation, or music. We are doing the most important part of what we were meant to do. David’s greatest joy was to meditate on the law of God day and night.

But don’t leave out the rest of our lives that can be lived out as an act of worship. Paul encourages us to do everything we do to the glory of God (1 Corinthians 10:31). He wouldn’t have suggested this if it weren’t possible. That would mean that a host of activities and interests commonly thought of as “secular” could take on the quality and function of worship in our daily lives. And in all of this, God takes pleasure.

Try and live today within the reality that you are bringing God pleasure. We started out that way without doing anything, so consider how living with that consciousness can affect your choices, thoughts, and actions.