There is Something About This Year!

‘In this Year of Jubilee, each of you shall return to his possession. – Leviticus 25:13

It dropped into my spirit man yesterday morning that there is something about this year and the fulfilment of dreams or long held desires. I was doing my toiletries when I started to recollect the many scenarios and numerous testimonies about dreams and prayer requests of many years coming to fruition this year alone.

Although it may be the dusk of the eighth month of the year, there is still ample time for you to start up on that idea or resume work on that abandoned project. You don’t need to wait for all the resources you need to start or continue; nor should you wait for encouragement from anyone. God Himself is committed to giving you the push you need to start and the momentum you require to finish well. So don’t disqualify yourself by talking yourself out of it or get bogged down in what is popularly called ‘paralysis by analysis’; trying to figure out all the fine details you need to tick off before you do anything. You will be doing no one any good by so doing, let alone yourself.

For He says: “In an acceptable time I have heard you, and in the day of salvation I have helped you.” Behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation (2 Corinthians 6:2). That is the word of God to you at this time. And the smart thing to do is to run with it without looking back, then you will see how faithful God can be.

There is a grace for fulfilment in the air for anyone who wishes to latch on to it; so don’t be left out. Take advantage of it now by pursuing your dream or take some steps of faith.

You will succeed in Jesus Name!

The True Test

Examine yourselves as to whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. – 2 Corinthians 13:5

When asked to define knowledge, someone said, “Knowledge is not what you can remember but what you cannot forget.” Another person responded, “Knowledge is what you can remember after you have forgotten what you have been taught.” These may sound paradoxical, but they ring true. That a student answers questions in a class does not mean he has a good knowledge of the subject. The teacher uses a test or an examination to judge him.

In the same vein, the true test of faith is not when everything around you is all roses and no thorns, but rather when challenges of life are starring you in the eyes and literally telling you ‘God’s word may not be true.’ Moreover, that God gave a word does not mean it will come to fulfilment unchallenged. He said He had made Abraham the father of many nations but Abraham still had to believe so he might become the father of many nations, which God had already made him (Romans 4:17-18).

Being Christians is not proved by how much of scriptures we can quote – which, of course, is not bad in itself – but how much we love other believers (John 13:35); how we accept those of different doctrines from ours and love our unbelieving neighbours.

Your readiness to give is not truly tested when you have $1,000 and you can offer $50 to someone in need. Of course, you have done well; but when all you have is $5 and you are willing to split that into two in order to give someone in need is when the depth of your love can be measured.

Adversities remain the true test of our inner strength. That is why ‘if you faint in the days of adversity, your strength is small’ (Proverbs 24:10)! So, let’s not go about with the theories of faith, character, knowledge, patience, etc. We earn God’s approval and the respect of others when we put them into practice. To do the right thing will always be tasking, but the reward is more than sure.

You will succeed in Jesus Name!

Threads of Life

“Son of man, I have made you a watchman for the house of Israel; therefore hear a word from My mouth, and give them warning from Me:” – Ezekiel 3:17

A mouse looked through the crack in the wall to see the farmer and his wife open a package.

What food might this contain?” The mouse wondered – he was devastated to discover it was a mousetrap.

Retreating to the farmyard, the mouse proclaimed the warning: “There is a mousetrap in the house! There is a mousetrap in the house!”

The chicken clucked and scratched, raised her head and said, “Mr. Mouse, I can tell this is a grave concern to you, but it is of no consequence to me. I cannot be bothered by it.”

The mouse turned to the pig and told him, “There is a mousetrap in the house! There is a mousetrap in the house!”

The pig sympathized, but said, “I am so very sorry, Mr. Mouse, but there is nothing I can do about it but pray. Be assured you are in my prayers.”

The mouse turned to the cow and said “There is a mousetrap in the house! There is a mousetrap in the house!”

The cow said, “Wow, Mr. Mouse. I’m sorry for you, but it’s no skin off my nose.”

So, the mouse returned to the house, head down and dejected, to face the farmer’s mousetrap alone.

That very night a sound was heard throughout the house — like the sound of a mousetrap catching its prey.

The farmer’s wife rushed to see what was caught. In the darkness, she did not see it was a venomous snake whose tail the trap had caught. The snake bit the farmer’s wife. The farmer rushed her to the hospital, and she returned home with a fever.

Everyone knows you treat a fever with fresh chicken soup, so the farmer took his hatchet to the farmyard for the soup’s main ingredient. But his wife’s sickness continued, so friends and neighbours came to sit with her around the clock.  The farmer had to feed them, so he butchered the pig.

The farmer’s wife did not get well; she eventually died.

So many people came for her funeral; the farmer had the cow slaughtered to provide enough meat for all of them. The mouse looked upon it all from his crack in the wall with great sadness.

So, the next time you hear someone is facing a problem and think it doesn’t concern you, remember — when one of us is threatened, we are all at risk.

We are all involved in this journey called life. We must keep an eye out for one another and make an extra effort to encourage one another.

Remember, each of us is a vital thread in another person’s tapestry; our lives are woven together for a reason.

You will succeed in Jesus Name!

How to Attract Divine Presence

Now the Lord was with Jehoshaphat, because he…did not seek the Baals, but sought the God of his father, and walked in His commandments and not according to the acts of Israel. Therefore the Lord established the kingdom in his hand; – 2 Chronicles 17:3-5

The passage above presents us with a principle that attracts the company of God in the journey of life. In summary, the Scripture says Jehoshaphat was not given to idolatry; but he sought God and walked in His commandments. Those were enough reasons for him to have God as company.

Life can be tough even for people who are committed to God, not to talk of those who do not have an ongoing relationship with Him. The latter have no divine cover and are susceptible to all forms of troubles and afflictions.

Jehoshaphat made himself attractive to God because he shunned idolatry by not seeking another god apart from the Almighty God. In this context, “sought” portrays a sense of conscious, deliberate and sustained efforts. That means, Jehoshaphat consciously, deliberately and regularly sought to understand God; how He reasoned, what He wanted, how He wanted it and when, then he disciplined himself to abide by the dictates of his findings.

He also chose not to do the popular things of his time. The Scripture says he did not walk “according to the acts of Israel.” He did not allow himself to be influenced in the opposite direction of God; instead, he shunned the distractions and followed God’s counsel all the way. Those were enough considerations for God to stay with him and establish his kingdom. And God doesn’t stay anywhere without impacts. Perhaps, we can learn from his example.

You will succeed in Jesus Name!

The Folded Napkin; A Truckers Story

Author Unknown

But do not forget to do good and to share, for with such sacrifices God is well pleased. – Hebrews 13:16

If this doesn’t light your fire … your wood is wet!

I try not to be biased, but I had my doubts about hiring Stevie. His placement counselor assured me that he would be a good, reliable busboy.

But I had never had a mentally handicapped employee and wasn’t sure I wanted one. I wasn’t sure how my customers would react to Stevie.

He was short, a little dumpy with the smooth facial features and thick-tongued speech of Downs Syndrome. I wasn’t worried about most of my trucker customers because truckers don’t generally care who buses tables as long as the meatloaf platter is good and the pies are homemade.

The four-wheeler drivers were the ones who concerned me; the mouthy college kids traveling to school; the yuppie snobs who secretly polish their silverware with their napkins for fear of catching some dreaded “truck stop germ,” the pairs of white-shirted business men on expense accounts who think every truck stop waitress wants to be flirted with. I knew those people would be uncomfortable around Stevie, so I closely watched him for the first few weeks.

I shouldn’t have worried. After the first week, Stevie had my staff wrapped around his stubby little finger, and within a month, my truck regulars had adopted him as their official truck stop mascot.

After that, I really didn’t care what the rest of the customers thought of him. He was like a 21-year-old kid in blue jeans and Nikes, eager to laugh and eager to please, but fierce in his attention to his duties. Every salt and peppershaker was exactly in its place, not a breadcrumb or coffee spill was visible when Stevie got done with the table. Our only problem was persuading him to wait to clean a table until after the customers were finished. He would hover in the background, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, scanning the dining room until a table was empty. Then he would scurry to the empty table and carefully bus dishes and glasses onto his cart and meticulously wipe the table up with a practiced flourish of his rag. If he thought a customer was watching, his brow would pucker with added concentration. He took pride in doing his job exactly right, and you had to love how hard he tried to please each and every person he met.

Over time, we learned that he lived with his mother, a widow who was disabled after repeated surgeries for cancer. They lived on their Social Security benefits in public housing two miles from the truck stop. Their social worker, who stopped to check on him every so often, admitted they had fallen between the cracks. Money was tight, and what I paid him was probably the difference between them being able to live together and Stevie being sent to a group home.

That’s why the restaurant was a gloomy place that morning last August, the first morning in three years that Stevie missed work. He was at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester getting a new valve or something put in his heart. His social worker said that people with Downs Syndrome often have heart problems at an early age so this wasn’t unexpected, and there was a good chance he would come through the surgery in good shape and be back at work in a few months.

To continue…

You will succeed in Jesus Name!

The Ant Fable

Every day, a small ant arrives at work very early and starts work immediately. She produces a lot and she was happy.

The Chief, a lion, was surprised to see that the ant was working without supervision. He thought if the ant can produce so much without supervision, wouldn’t she produce even more if she had a supervisor.

So he recruited a cockroach who had extensive experience as supervisor and who was famous for writing excellent reports. The cockroach’s first decision was to set up a clocking in attendance system. He also needed a secretary to help him write and type his reports and he recruited a spider, who managed the archives and monitored all phone calls.

The lion was delighted with the cockroach’s reports and asked him to produce graphs to describe production rates and to analyse trends, so that he could use them for presentations at Board‘s meetings.

So the cockroach had to buy a new computer and a laser printer and recruited a fly to manage the IT department.

The ant, who had once been so productive and relaxed, hated this new plethora of paperwork and meetings which used up most of her time!

The lion came to the conclusion that it was high time to nominate a person in charge of the department where the ant worked. The position was given to the cicada, whose first decision was to buy a carpet and an ergonomic chair for his office.

The new person in charge, the cicada, also needed a computer and a personal assistant, whom he brought from his previous department, to help him prepare a Work and Budget Control Strategic Optimisation Plan. The Department where the ant works is now a sad place, where nobody laughs anymore and everybody has become upset.

It was at that time that the cicada convinced the boss, the lion, of the absolute necessity to start a climatic study of the environment. Having reviewed the charges for running the ant’s department, the lion found out that the production was far less than before.

So he recruited the owl, a prestigious and renowned consultant to carry out an audit and suggest solutions. The owl spent three months in the department and came up with an enormous report, in several volumes, that concluded: “The department is overstaffed.”

Guess who the lion fires first? The ant, of course, because she “showed lack of motivation and had a negative attitude”.

Moral: The beauty of life and work is in keeping it simple.

Meditation: Stand fast therefore in the liberty by which Christ has made us free, and do not be entangled again with a yoke of bondage. – Galatians 5:1

You will succeed in Jesus Name!

A Thousand Marbles

Author Unknown

Another man dies in the bitterness of his soul, Never having eaten with pleasure. – Job 21:25

The older I get, the more I enjoy Saturday mornings. Perhaps it’s the quiet solitude that comes with being the first to rise, or maybe it’s the unbounded joy of not having to be at work. Either way, the first few hours of a Saturday morning are most enjoyable. A few weeks ago, I was shuffling toward the kitchen with a steaming cup of coffee in one hand and the morning paper in the other. What began as a typical Saturday morning turned into one of those lessons that life seems to hand you from time to time.

Let me tell you about it. I turned the volume up on my radio in order to listen to a Saturday morning talk show. I heard an older sounding chap with a golden voice. You know the kind, he sounded like he should be in the broadcasting business himself. He was talking about “a thousand marbles” to someone named “Tom”. I was intrigued and sat down to listen to what he had to say.

“Well, Tom, it sure sounds like you’re busy with your job. I’m sure they pay you well but it’s a shame you have to be away from home and your family so much. Hard to believe a young fellow should have to work sixty or seventy hours a week to make ends meet. Too bad you missed your daughter’s dance recital.” He continued, “Let me tell you something Tom, something that has helped me keep a good perspective on my own priorities.” And that’s when he began to explain his theory of a “thousand marbles.”

“You see, I sat down one day and did a little arithmetic. The average person lives about seventy-five years. Know, some live more and some live less, but on average, folks live about seventy-five years.”

“Now then, I multiplied 75 times 52 and I came up with 3,900 which is the number of Saturdays that the average person has in their entire lifetime. Now stick with me Tom, I’m getting to the important part.”

“It took me until I was 55 years old to think about all this in any detail”, he went on, “and by that time I had lived through over 2800 Saturdays. I got to thinking that if I lived to be 75, I only had about a thousand of them left to enjoy.”

“So I went to a toy store and bought every single marble they had. I ended up having to visit three toy stores to round-up 1000 marbles. I took them home and put them inside of a large, clear plastic container right here in my workshop next to the radio. Every Saturday since then, I have taken one marble out and thrown it away.”

“I found that by watching the marbles diminish, I focused more on the really important things in life. There is nothing like watching your time here on this earth run out to help get your priorities straight.”

“Now let me tell you one last thing before I sign-off with you and take my lovely wife out for breakfast. This morning, I took the very last marble out of the container. I figure if I make it until next Saturday then I have been given a little extra time. And the one thing we can all use is a little more time.”

“It was nice to talk to you Tom, I hope you spend more time with your loved ones, and I hope to meet you again someday. Have a good morning!”

You could have heard a pin drop when he finished. Even the show’s moderator didn’t have anything to say for a few moments. I guess he gave us all a lot to think about. I had planned to do some work that morning, then go to the gym. Instead, I went upstairs and woke my wife up with a kiss.

“C’mon honey, I’m taking you and the kids to breakfast.”

“What brought this on?” she asked with a smile.

“Oh, nothing special, it’s just been a long time since we spent a Saturday together with the kids. Hey, can we stop at a toy store while we’re out? I need to buy some marbles.”

You will succeed in Jesus Name!