Thank You for using even the hard places in our lives to teach us, deepen us, and grow us closer to Your likeness. Thank You for Your Word and Your rock-solid, never-failing promises that all, all, all things are for our greater good and for Your greater glory.
Today was one of those typical days in life--plenty of wonderful, joyful goodness--all praise be to God--but also a share of challenges and disappointments. Lord, help us to praise You just as loudly and faithfully in both...for You are moving and working in each and every circumstance of life.
One of our children had a particularly good day, while another one had a disappointing one...and that's tough on a mama's heart. Happy, and yet sad. Excited, and yet discouraged. Thankful, and yet, well, just a bit weary. In other words, an ordinary day full of ups and downs.
But God is so faithful...even when we are faithless. When I finally slowed down long enough to sit down quietly with Him, the Lord brought to mind something I read several weeks ago from the wonderful biographer, David McCullough. Here's what he wrote:
“Another of those moments in my work where I was almost lifted out of the chair by reading something was when I read the sentence in a letter to John Adams' wife, Abigail, written by Adams at Philadelphia in what seemed one of the darkest moments of the whole story, and he knew how worried she was, how frightened she was of what the outcome of all this might be. And he said to her, "We can't guarantee success, but we can deserve it."
And when I read that I thought how different that is from our time, when all that matters is success, being number one, being at the top, irrespective of how you got there, what devices, what elbows and knees and the rest you used to get there. They're saying something exactly the reverse. And when I read that sentence I thought what a mind he had and what a moral lesson that is.
And then I read the same sentence in a letter that Washington had written, and then I read the same sentence again in another letter that Washington had written. And I began to think, maybe it's not their line. And it isn't. I took down the good old Bartlett's Familiar Quotations and started going through all the things that dated from the 18th Century, and bingo, there it was. It's a line from the Play "Cato" by Joseph Addison, the most popular play of the time. Washington is said to have seen it maybe six or seven times. Actually the line in the play is even better. The line in the play is, "We can't guarantee success, we can do something better, we can deserve it."
Now, what does that all mean? It means that what happens, the outcome of what happens, is in the hands of God, it's out of our hands. But how we behave, how we perform, how we measure up, that's something we can control. Or to put it another way, if we are in a noble cause, even if that cause is doomed to failure, let's fail nobly."
I love that. "We can't guarantee success. We can do something better; we can deserve it." Because we're not in charge of the results. That's not our job. All we can do is "Walk worthy of the calling" in the words of Paul in Ephesian 4.
We do our best, do it faithfully, and do it to God's glory. And then we leave the results up to the all-wise, all-powerful, all-loving Sovereign of the universe. Whether it's an election...or a business...or a sporting event...or school work...or a nation's destiny...or a whatever...we do what He's called us to do as faithfully as we know how, and then entrust the outcome to Him.
Walk worthy...and rest securely.
Boy, there's such peace in that. Peace in knowing our Heavenly Daddy's got it, no matter what, no matter how. Even if His plans differ from ours, we trust and know that His will and His ways are always ultimately "good, pleasing, and perfect." (Rom.12:2) So let's keep on showing up...walking worthy...and resting securely in Him.
To God be the glory.
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