What Is Your Will In Christ?

My sweet mother graduated from this world this week and I find myself struggling just a little with the knowledge of her absence from this world while I'm left to inhabit it without her.  As a follower of Jesus like my mother, I know where she is. She's not gone and she's not missing, she's just not here. But even with my knowledge and complete confidence in Christ's word, I occasionally find myself a little overcome with moments of deep sadness as I work through processing her departure ... but then I fight back. It's so easy given our current limitations to focus on the microcosm that is this world as the content of our life. But the real and true picture isn't so small and if we believe God (which I do completely), this world is just the front doorstep of our actual lives. My precious mother was never her body of flesh and it was never our heavenly Father's intention that any of us would perish with our flesh. She inhabited her body for a time, bu...

There comes a time in every life I think, when we have the opportunity to contemplate how short the lives of our physical bodies seems to be. It really doesn't matter how old you are when you watch a loved one coming to the end of their span in this life, it seems that our desire at that time for them is almost always for more ... More time - in good health, sharing the laughter, the conversation, ... the good times. But we're not the masters of time. Each one of us is given a predetermined portion of time to inhabit these physical bodies and no one can know in advance exactly when that time will run out. It may be very short or very long and no matter how long it is, it never seems to be enough in the minds of those who are left behind. But what really happens when the figurative hour glass runs out? What will have mattered then? When the last grain of sand has fallen - in the very next moment for that soul who's time has expired ... what will the accounting look li...

I'm an imperfect spiritual being created perfectly by God for the life that He has planned and intended for me (His design for my personal character development and spiritual growth). In spite of my imperfections He has also given me the freedom to possess a will of my own and the freedom to choose to follow it. In spite of my imperfection I have the freedom to make the choices that in large part determine the course of this life that I've been given ... imperfectly and on my own. But wisdom would acknowledge the brokenness of my imperfection and the likely result of the choices I might make on my own. Wisdom would recognize that the potential impact of those choices will not only touch my own life, but will likely affect those around me. As a parent, the power of my choices is the strongest to affect most deeply those closest to me - by the example I demonstrate and the spirit modeled by them as well, to say nothing of the shared consequences. I have the freedom to make ch...