It's another rainy day here in south Louisiana. It's kinda put me in a blah mood the past few days!! But overall, life is good!
It's been a pretty hard week adjusting to the fact that my two oldest have chosen to live with their dad in OH....so far away!! :( We all miss them...I keep reminding myself (and sometimes have to be reminded by Sean!) that God is STILL in control and He's STILL working it all out for all of our good!
Isn't it funny how we think that God must NOT be in control simply because things don't go the way WE imagine they should??
This past weekend, back in IN, I heard the saddest thing....My younger sister said 'It's funny...I see 'church people' all the time at work, and I always say 'Hi' and ask where they go to church, and tell them I used to go too....but they never talk to me about church or invite me to theirs...'
Wow.
If only those people knew how often I prayed, 'God put people in the path of my lost loved ones, to reach out to them, to be there for them in a way that I can not!'
It breaks my heart. It really does.
I recently read a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder that my parents had picked up in Missouri on vacation. It was a pretty neat story....they had bought the book at the museum, and a descendant of Laura Ingalls Wilder noticed it sitting on the seat of their car while they were eating at a Denny's and left them a post-it note on their windshield welcoming them to Branson. They eventually met this man, along with two other descendants, who then signed their book. Being a HUGE 'Little House' fan growing up, I found that pretty cool! :)
In the book, it recounts a incident that happened while they (The Ingalls Family) were living and working in Burr Oak, Iowa. The hotel they worked in was next door to a saloon. One night, it caught fire....
"...and Ma awakened Mary and Laura and Carrie, telling them to dress quickly in case their place started burning too. Ma and the girls stood by the front windows, looking down at a group of Burr Oak men lined up in front of the town pump. They had started a bucket brigade to pass the filled pails down the line to be poured on the flames. But the line seemed to be standing still.
Ma kept saying, 'Why don't they hurry!' Nothing moved. Finally Pa gave a shout and jerked Mr Bisbee [boarder at the hotel] away from the flowing pump. In his panic, he had been pumping water into a pail with no bottom, screaming 'Fire' but doing nothing to stop the blaze." [Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Biography, by William Anderson]
Reading that, after hearing what my sister had said, spoke volumes to me! How often do we sit in church, Amen-ing the preacher and shouting and clapping when he talks of winning the lost, or pray for lost souls while in the comfort of the four walls of the church, yet when confronted with a real-life opportunity to reach someone, we pull back. We crawl back into our shell, afraid that the Gospel we want to share will be rejected. Or perhaps we see the person in front of us as 'not interested' and too far gone to reach. Our spirit within sees the lost and cries 'Fire!, Fire', yet like the man with the bottomless bucket, we are not doing all we can to stop the blaze, out of fear, panic, disinterest or whatever the case may be.
All along there stands a soul that says, 'All I am waiting for is for someone to ask one more time'.
Will I be that someone? Will you? My prayer today is that when I feel led to speak to someone, I'll do it. That I will respond to that hopelessness that I see in their eyes, and ignore the tough exterior and 'Who Cares?' attitude. It doesn't matter if that person has said 'No' one hundred times. Maybe the very next time I ask, they'll say 'Sure...Why not!'.
I do not want to simply acknowledge that there is a fire, for it goes without saying that many that I see on a daily basis are not where they should be with God. I want to do MY part to stop the blaze from spreading. The days of sitting safely away from the fire are gone. It's time for the Firefighters for Souls to rise up!