CHANGING SEASONS

As I walked around my neighborhood enjoying the changing landscape, I thought of how this year, October had ushered in more than the colorful autumn season. It had also marked the beginning of a new decade in my life, a season that would perhaps be the home stretch. 

Memories welled up that were bittersweet. Shattered dreams, things done I wish I had not, missed opportunities, poor choices with far reaching effects, and most haunting of all, pain unintentionally caused to those I loved. Not a very good read.  But God...

And now, back to the dangling sentence I left you with at the beginning of this post--"But God...." His timing is always perfect, and at the end of the day, He had a word of encouragement for me to ponder.

Since the pandemic, I've been visiting various churches via Livestream, as well as binge watching Pastor Gary Hamrick's sermons from the teaching archives at Cornerstone Chapel in Leesburg. Pastor Gary preaches straight through the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, a process that takes quite a few years. I've been watching the sermons in order, and we were up to Gideon in the book of Judges. 

The message felt so personal it took me by surprise. Two statements in particular, addressed the very thoughts I had been grappling with on my morning walk, and it was as though the Lord were speaking directly to my heart.

The first was, that to get up every day and live a routine, mundane, everyday, ordinary life takes courage, and sometimes this kind of courage is harder to maintain than performing a mighty feat, because it's a consistent courage that demands strong, steady, ongoing faith.  

The second statement was both a question and an exhortation. What will the last chapters of your life read like? It really doesn't matter as much what kind of start you got off to. What matters is that you finish well. 

My prayer is that the last chapter of my life would be a good read, that the Lord would help me keep on keeping on, and that He would be glorified in the everyday, mundane ways of my life. May He enable me to finish strong, and finish well.