Just some early morning thoughts from me to you…

The days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah…“I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people…I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.”

Jeremiah 31: 31, 33-34

I remember a few years ago, when we were in North Carolina with our children. It was early in the morning, and I was up early as I normally am. Despite an occasional coughing spell I could hear in the bedroom nearby, my granddaughter Hannah continued to sleep.

Looking in the bedroom at her, I could see her surrounded by at least three of her precious baby dolls and some other stuffed toy friends who were her last playmates from the night before. She would awaken in a moment, I remember thinking, fully equipped to teach this sometimes slow-to-learn, but always ready, pupil of hers about the abundant blessings of God in every day of our lives.

Isn’t it a beautiful day?” she exclaimed from her vantage point on the couch when she awoke and burst into the living room, looking out the window at a gray, drizzly, damp morning, which is what I had observed just moments before. She saw something different, and I learned yet another lesson from her.

So, with lesson one in the books for that day, we began to arrange her toy friends around the room for what she described as a game of hide-and-seek. Carrying a small table from one room to another, to an area where I was informed by her that it would magically become a boat, we accidentally bumped the table against a half-opened door. While I suggested that she and I probably needed to be more careful, she softly chortled:

Well, sometimes that happens, but that’s okay, right?

Sometimes things get broken, but that’s okay, right, Gran? Sometimes we make mistakes, but that’s okay, right?”

Her tone was not disrespectful. It did not convey a disregard for our need to care for people or things.

And although fashioned in the form of a question, it was so much more than that. It was a statement of the truth she had learned that sometimes things happen in life, and we learn to move on. Things happen to us. We do things we shouldn’t.

But that’s okay, right?”

Yes, it’s okay, because we’ve learned the lessons of redemption, and forgiveness and grace from our gracious God.

A God Who reaches down and helps us wipe up the “spilled milk” of our lives. A God Who through the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah tells us, as we read above, that He “will make a new covenant with us. . . and write His law upon our hearts; and will be our God, and we will be His people…and He will forgive our mistakes and remember them no more.”

A God Who says, “I know what has happened to you, I know what burdens or problems you’re carrying today. I know what doors you’re bumping into, and I know what you have done.”

But that God who knows everything about us, is the same God who picks us up and offers us a second chance to move on. Helping us to remember in the midst of whatever we find ourselves in—that His grace assures us that it’s okay—right?

Yes. Move on.

In His Name—Scott

 

Copyright 2016. Scott L. Whitaker. All rights reserved.