Focus

When little is happening in your life some days, it is important to have a focus for each day. Otherwise a sense of drift and aimlessness takes over.

Your quiet time with God is a key element in that focus: Bible reading and prayer. All sorts of thoughts may have been floating around in your head, some of them having little to do with reality. The Bible deals with real life and helps bring you back - I nearly said "back down to earth", but that's only part of it: it brings you back "up to heaven" as well! Having read the Bible passages, you can turn to God in prayer in a "real" frame of mind.

I love the importance prayer times had for Daniel of old, when he was under pressure from envious colleagues who wanted to get rid of him. A decree had gone out that no prayer was to be offered except to the king for thirty days - unacceptable to Daniel. We are told that Daniel simply and deliberately opened an upstairs window facing towards Jerusalem, and three times a day he knelt down and prayed. What a wonderful habit of life to have when he could have spent his days frantic with despair! What a great focus those prayer times must have been each day! In his prayers he gave thanks to his God, which shows us that it wasn't just an exercise for his own benefit, to calm him down. We read the Bible and pray because God means us to.

Believe it or not, even Jesus needed to pray. It was a focus for His day too.

On the lone mountain side,
before the morning's light,
the Man of Sorrows wept and cried,
and rose refreshed with might.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Headlights

My way ahead is as yet unclear, and I need the Psalm-writer's words in Psalm 119:105 "Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path".

I have been following Our Daily Bread daily Bible notes (produced by Radio Bible Class) for many years. Often the writer has put in something which I needed that day.

Today's offering came from Joe Stowell: "God usually doesn’t show us where He is taking us. He just asks us to trust Him. It’s like driving a car at night. Our headlights never shine all the way to our destination; they illuminate only about 160 feet ahead. But that doesn’t deter us from moving forward. We trust our headlights. All we really need is enough light to keep moving forward. God’s Word is like headlights in dark times."

160 feet is next to nothing in a car travelling at any speed. Yet, 160 feet at a time, I can keep going. I have as much light as I need until the future becomes plainer.

Meanwhile small delights are indicators, however tiny, of a providing God. I was out walking and hoping to see an historical feature in the landscape. Given my lack of skill with map reading and interpretation, I was almost guaranteed to miss it. Yet I met a lady walking her dog who knew the feature and could describe every bend in the road leading up to it. Happily I went straight to it. A mere nothing, you might say, but to me at this time everything that goes right is a boost.