Good morning! How are you? I hope that you are having a wonderful Christmas season. You know, no two Christmases are alike, wouldn’t you agree? To be honest, I have had a rough couple of days. A flood of grief came over me at the end of my ministry trip last week, since so much of Christmas is associated with Carina. But, I am feeling better today.
When life is tough, there is one thing that is important: Stick with the plan! David reminds us of that in Psalm 37. What do you do when things go well for evildoers, but not for you? When you didn’t get the promotion, but your ungodly neighbor did. Or when people who want nothing to do with God go first, while you end up last. “Trust in the Lord anyway,” David writes, because “the steps of the righteous are ordered by Him.” God knows what is happening. Your life is decided by Him, and when things happen that you don’t understand, and you think, “Lord, now I have no idea what you are doing,” then and there it is more important than ever to hold onto Jesus and continue along the path he has been leading you on. You can cry during the day and preach at night.
It is incredibly easy, David writes, to get jealous, angry and disappointed. “Keep trusting God instead, commit your way to the Lord and stick to the plan. Do what you were going to do anyway, because your steps are ordered by the Lord, even when life seems to be against you.”
David was anointed as king one day, and then sent back to the sheep the next! He defeated Goliath and saved Saul, but still they hunted him down in the desert. His entire family was kidnapped in Ziklag! But David knew that even if he didn’t understand what was happening, “his steps were ordered by the Lord.” When those steps seemed to be taking him away from the throne instead of toward it, David knew that somehow the path of pain would still eventually lead him to his goal – Jerusalem.
It is easy to write this; it is much harder to live it. I don’t even want to write this, but the truth is that the path to the next mountaintop sometimes “goes through the valley of tears.” I don’t want to go through the valley of tears, but still the Lord is leading my steps there. I hope you don’t mind that I share these things with you. They are coming straight from my heart. And I hope that it is an encouragement from the Lord to you to never give up. No matter what happens, the Lord is still God.
