The right move

Lately I have been having trouble with muscle knots in my shoulder blade which have lead to excruciating headaches, some worse than the migraines my body sometimes gets, and even those are less problematic these days. I have tried a stack of stretching exercises, heat bags, massage and any other idea I could to get rid of them, but with no success.

Today for some strange reason I tried a simple move of just pulling my shoulders forward, not up or down or in circles. Guess what? It seemed to somehow hit the spot and do the trick, and walla, no headache. I suppose only time will tell if this is a permanent solution, but I am hoping it is.

That made me wonder, are there simple moves that we can make in our spiritual lives that can make a difference? I think there are. Can you steal a few minutes to read a devotional in the morning before you head off to work, maybe with the kids at the breakfast table? Can you read a quick scripture during the day, maybe while your lunch is warming in the microwave? Can you offer up a song of praise or worship while you are washing the dishes? I am sure you can and all these little things could add up to a whole day of being Christ centred.

It really is the little things and not necessarily the big things that we do on a daily basis that add up to real spiritual growth. So I encourage you today to let those little moments become precious and special.

Respect the rule book

It is my opinion that a particular team that shall remain nameless lost their match due wholly to a serious lack of discipline and respect for the rules of soccer and not necessarily because they were out played. In the end however, I feel the better team did win.

Lack of discipline does not only plague sports teams. It affects us in our office environment as well. It is often the case that certain people drag a team down with negative behaviour and in the end everyone suffers.

Likewise our spiritual lives can be plagued with undisciplined behaviour. I do hear you say, “ but I thought God was all about grace?” Yes, God in His mercy shows us grace and forgiveness in our times of failure, but He will never divorce this from the consequences of our bad behaviour. If you have committed a criminal act, you will still need to face the law.

So how do we balance grace and law? By remembering the price that Jesus paid for our salvation and responding in gratitude by living our lives according to God's principles. If you know in your heart that this is an area in which you have transgressed, then remember this too. God will forgive you when you confess your sins to Him, so step up to the throne of grace and receive your forgiveness and remember Jesus words to the women caught in adultery, “Go and sin no more.”

Closest to Friday

As a kid I once heard someone say that Thursday is the best day of the week as it is closest to Friday and furthest from Monday. That used to keep me fired up for Thursday's and then Friday was a breeze. As I have grown older though I have found that Monday through Friday just feel like one very long day.....

Time just moves at a different pace when you are older. Our fast paced world just feels like it moves to quickly. I've always wondered what it must be like for God, He has no time restraints. A day to Him is as a thousand years and a thousand years as a day.... confusing to our limited understanding of time.

With that being said, I cannot imagine what God must have felt those hours on that one Friday when Jesus hung on the cross for our sins. For God that must have been torture knowing that His Son's death would be the defining moment in Earth time.

When next you feel tired and unable to keep your head up, know that God is intimately aware of how you feel. Hang in there!

Bootstraps

I've been talking a lot recently about the challenges that life throws at us and how we need to guide our attitudes to bring us to a place of strength. Well sometimes that means that we are going to have to pick ourselves up by the bootstraps and encourage ourselves. We cannot expect somebody else to do that job for us, it is our responsibility.

David knew that all too well for he tells himself:

• Bless the Lord oh my soul, and all that is within me, bless His holy name.
• I lift up mine eyes to the hills, from whence comes my help?
• Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil.

But what do you do if you don't even have the strength to bend down and grab those bootstraps?

Sing:

Come, Holy Spirit I need you,

Come Sweet Spirit I pray,

Come in thine strength and thine power,

Come in thine own gentle way!

My own journey of blogging started with a desire to encourage myself to see the good things in life, so today I encourage you, to look your circumstances and declare,

“It is well with my soul”

All to play for

These final matches in the group stages of the world cup are so very interesting. In some groups it is all but decided and all the loosing teams have to play for is pride, more like the salvation thereof. In other groups the scores are so tight that it is only certain for one team while the other three have to duke it out and hope that the other match ends in their favour. What a dicey situation to find yourself in.

I can't imagine how difficult it must be to try and play your own match, all the while wondering what is happening in another game being played at the same time. The uncertainty surely can't build any confidence, yet you have it all to play for and you have to deliver your best.

They say art imitates life, but what I love about team sports is that they really do depict real life situations and there is so much you can learn from people's behaviour while they are on the field. Those parallels cross over easily to our spiritual lives too.

There are certainly times in life when things are uncertain. In Ephesians 6 Paul gives us clear guidelines as to how our behaviour should impact our lives. Although he is speaking to servants, this is relevant to so many areas:

Eph 6:5 Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ;

Eph 6:6 Not with eye service, as menpleasers; but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart;

Eph 6:7 With good will doing service, as to the Lord, and not to men:

Eph 6:8 Knowing that whatsoever good thing any man doeth, the same shall he receive of the Lord, whether he be bond or free.

Eph 6:9 And, ye masters, do the same things unto them, forbearing threatening: knowing that your Master also is in heaven; neither is there respect of persons with him.

Let us keep our heart and mind in focus knowing that as we do all things unto Christ, that our reward will come from God and not from men!

No map or GPS

He had no map or GPS to tell him where to go. No road signs and certainly no highways or paved roads. The only thing Moses had as he lead the children of Israel out of Egypt was the word of a God he met in a burning bush. “BUT”, I can hear you say, “he had that cloud by day and pillar of fire by night.” You are right about that, but the truth is that even though Moses had these spectacular miracles to guide him, he still did not have at his disposal what we have today.

You see today we have the benefit of thousands of years of scripture, recorded and preserved in tact. In those scriptures we have we have thousands of years of wisdom recorded through the peoples lives that are depicted within the hallowed pages we admire. What we also have is an understanding of each of these peoples personal experiences as they grew to know God and nothing Moses had to guide him could compare to that.

If you are facing dark and troublesome times, take heart, God is near! Draw strength from scripture and draw strength from your personal connection and relationship with God.

Caught with a rat

Yip, you guessed it, my little monster got up to mischief again.  He has on two occasions now brought home small mice.  This got me worried as to where he could have gotten them from but I has my suspicions.

You see during summer with our heavy rainfalls one of our boundary walls had collapsed from flood damage but I did not know the full story.  In replacing the wall the builders had left open a small section to allow the water to come through without the pressure.  The hole had a metal grid and I thought for sure that my cats would not go through there.

I was wrong!  On Friday I arrived home early and Honey wasn't home.  On a hunch I thought I'd go and investigate the wall area.  Sure enough as I came closer, out popped Honey with a big meeooooow!  As I peeped through the grid I found his mouse supply station, a big drain pipe opening.  I made haste to close it up with some gardening gauze.

Morale of the story?  When life brings you a mouse there's a hole that needs closing.  Restated spiritually, when sin creeps in there is a spiritual hole that we have left open for the devil and we need to take action to stop him!

Time to get rid of that mouse.