Devotion 388 - matters

It’s all good.

I said it for the three thousand four hundredth time to my kids and I am pretty sure I watched some eyes roll.

This is the dance we do every day.  Four children careening their way to adulthood and two parents holding on and trying to steer.

 

“It’s all good,” I tell the sisters that are spread apart by six years and share an occasional misunderstanding.  

 

“It’s all good,” I tell the boy who is trying to pretend he is grown to impress the brother that is. 

I want them to remember in all things even the hardest, heart breaking events in our space of life that God is good.

I wish I had known that at their ages, but the uncanny thing is as much as we teach and whisper and yell and pray, the lesson of God’s goodness comes from the classroom of experience and the teacher of trust.

 

The world is confusing.  More than any other time in my life I have felt the confusion.  We see evil and we are told to seize what matters.

Does one color matter over other colors?

Does a certain occupation matter over another?

Does the speech of one hold more value than the words or tears of another?

It is hard, but even in this I am convinced God is all good.

I search for what matters. 

The Bible tells us a single lamb matters.

A single coin matters as well and a single son who wandered away, he mattered most of all.  Above the wisdom of his daddy he left, then learned exactly the wisdom his father had strove to impart.

Another lesson that could not be learned but lived.

The recovered lamb found a ride on the shoulders of his shepherd, a coin found and cherished in a tight-gripped hand of its owner and a son,  a beloved son, embraced and clothed and fed.  The son is held, a party thrown as if the father had been waiting his whole life for this moment because he had.

What matters?

It is those that are lost.

We are all precious.  We are all His.  

We all draw breath and life and hope and dreams because He gave us permission. 

We all sin and we all stand together hoping for something more.  But some are yet to understand that they are being sought.  They have yet to see the lights on, the voices calling, the words beckoning, the signs pointing.

They wonder if this life they have lived is all there is;  they are waiting to hear what matters.

Dear one, we must be ready, not to point out the sin, but to point towards salvation. The confusion, the evil, the rhetoric, it all comes from a reservoir of wandering and wanting.

We hold the map; we embrace the answer.

We need to make the introduction.

  

We need to show the love.

We need to open the door so that the Holy Spirit can rush in.  

It is all good dear one for one magnificent reason, because He is all good.

Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man too is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost."
Luke 19:9-10