So the other day I celebrated my birthday. To be fair, it was the longest birthday of my life. Most birthdays I’ve had last for a day – which is kinda what the point is meant to be. On this occasion, though, it felt as though my birthday lasted an entire week. This was largely thanks to my incredibly, amazingly outstanding and sacrificial wife.
One of the things about the birthday week of celebration was getting to reflect on the enduring faithfulness of God. I hear it said by others and can certainly attest to it myself – I really shouldn’t be alive today. I shouldn’t have such an incredibly, amazingly outstanding and sacrificial wife. I shouldn’t have such loyal, compassionate and devoted siblings. I shouldn’t have such brilliantly blessed daughters. I shouldn’t have people I call friends and family who have not blinked twice when the call has come to be a help in my time of need. There is nothing I have done and there is nothing about me at all that in any way deserves all of that. It’s really down to the faithfulness of God. These are realities in my life purely out of the faithfulness of God.
To give that context, too, His faithfulness has been there even when I didn’t have all that. I would be griping and moaning about what I didn’t have. I would complain about the bad things I was going through. In it all, God did not give up on me, in it all God did not leave me. I would blunder, I would stray, I would deliberately act against what I knew He told me and yet He didn’t reject me, His love and His goodness told me that He meant it when He said He was faithful.
It makes me marvel even more at how good God has been to my parents over these years. It makes me marvel even more how good God has been to characters like Paul, Peter, Moses, David, Abraham and Noah. It makes me marvel that in spite of it all, He really does remain faithful and truly great is that faithfulness.
There is something about that faithfulness too that has got to me to the extent that I don’t want to take it for granted. I don’t want to coast on it as though I’m virtually guaranteed a win and don’t have to sweat it at all and can do what I like. I don’t want to get complacent.
I want to respond to that faithfulness … ooooohhhhh I have just the thing and another thing too!
For His Name’s Sake
Shalom
C. L. J. Dryden
Life With CD 