These are the days of your life!

    In some ways I have been preparing for these days. Something down deep within me has been getting ready. Maybe that is the product of being in school for most of my life. Maybe the “getting ready feeling” is the product of the persistent dissatisfaction that plagues me. One of these days we are going to fly. One of these days we are going to get to the good stuff. This summer I woke up. These are the days. This is it. I am not sure that this is the peak point of life, but this is the life. I do not think it matters where you might be in the course of your journey, either. The joy is in this — in this work, in this stage of your relationship with your family. These are the days that you get.

    Where do we find our joy, if these are the days that you get?

    I think our capacity for joy is rooted in our faith. What do you believe about the world and your place in it? John Updike says, if there is no God, then the universe is a freak show. Sometimes the trouble, the darkness, the evil that people do is just unexplainable. “Is the Lord among us, or not?” (Exodus 17:7)

    My strong conviction is that God is alive and doing things. Sometimes, I am aware that God is working in very subtle ways. We read an article, we talk to a stranger, or we move to a new place and all the while God is working in the background shaping our experiences of life and love. God brings people into our path and we are changed. Sometimes I am aware that God is working in powerful and overwhelming ways. God is knitting babies in their mother’s wombs. God is putting whiskers on kittens and launching comets through the universe. God is so big and so pervasive that we cannot back away far enough to get a glimpse of him.

    When we moved to Houston, I marveled at the consequences of the choice. This choice would give my children new and different friendships. They would have different teachers who would have opportunities to shape their lives. They will likely fall in love with people they would not otherwise have known. God will change someone’s life because they will be touched by Sandra’s kind attention. Someone may chose to have faith, may choose heaven, because of the impact of the lives and stories of my children. These are the days in which God is at work. Our joy is rooted in our faith that God is at work with us, for us, and through us.

    Frederick Buechner, writer and preacher, reminds me of the dangerous importance of what I get to do every week. The people who gather on a Sunday morning, or the people who see these words in a newspaper, an e-mail, or on a website are somewhere on their journey tuning in. This is my chance. Who is out there?

    There are some folks who turn up their hearing aids seeking a God who is there for them as they approach the end of their lives. There is the teenager who is here because his parents make him come, leaning on the pretty girl next to him in the pew. There is the college student home for the summer, wondering about his or her place in the world. There is the wife who has been rejected by her husband — a wife who wonders if she deserves to be thrown away. There is the pregnant young woman who has the sequence of events out of the usual order, wondering what she is going to do when she can no longer deny the life growing in her. There is the melancholy man who today sits in the pew, but from time to time through the week has thought about suicide. There is the family that is in debt up to its eyeballs, trying to pedal as fast as it can. In the face of this, as Buechner, puts it, “The preacher pulls the little cord that turns on the lectern light and deals out his note cards like a riverboat gambler. The stakes have never been higher.”

“The stakes have never been higher.”

    You meet these same people every day. These are your friends and your neighbors. These are your children and your husbands and wives. These are the children in your classroom and the folks in your office. These are the people that God has given you that you might encourage them and help them to know that life is no freak show.

    These are the days of your life.

    You have so much to do. You have burdens to bear. Sometimes it can all seem overwhelming and joyless. When this happens, I think we have forgotten the big picture. God is at work in the things we are doing, every time we allow Him. We are God’s instruments for encouragement. We change the world with our expressions of love for our families and friends. When we are loyal and fearless and joyful and available, we change somebody’s world, including our own.

    These are the days. I don’t want to miss them.

This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it! (Psalm 118:12)

God is working in you, giving you the desire to obey him and the power to do what pleases him. (Philippians 2:13)