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- Written by: Don Goulding
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? (Matthew 27:46)
I stared over the edge of a precipice that dropped into despair. Behind me was the theory of peace with the God who cared. Wavering between the pit and the theory, I asked that God would speak. The returning silence sickened my heart.
With my toes over the edge, I examined thought trails down the cliff—did I have a purpose? was joy snuffed by pain? The more I thought, the less clear was the difference between the silent God behind me and the void of puzzles below. Insanity seemed the natural conclusion of reasonable contemplation.
It’s called the dark night of the soul, and both classical and contemporary teachers speak of times when God withholds his presence and forces us to depend on the promises of Scripture alone. It can last for days, months, even years. Often, the reasons our loving Father chooses to subject us to spiritual vacuums are only revealed much later.
For me, the nearness of Jesus flowed through the fuel line to my soul until I took it for granted. When a bubble of deprivation slipped into the line, I sputtered and reeled, sucking on the air of my own thoughts. Too much thinking about me is always perilous. I experienced the pointlessness of life without the Holy Spirit.
Teetering on the brink of that abyss, I smelled rancid breath calling me downward, and was horrified out of complacency. I fell to my knees and begged God to whisper. Then I waited, and waited some more.
The faintest movement of hope blew and I said, “Good enough, I’ll take it.”
Prayer: Father, may I never go into that night again, but if I do, even then will I trust you.
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- Written by: Don Goulding
From one man he [God] made every nation of the human race to inhabit the entire earth, determining their set times and the fixed limits of the places where they would live… (Acts 17:26)
Scientists wanted to know if Einstein’s theory of relativity was true, so they placed an atomic clock, accurate to a billionth of a second, on an airplane. They flew the clock around the globe then compared its time to another atomic clock. The times were different—proof that time changes with motion.
With data streams beamed from the space probe Cassini near our heavy sun, physicists demonstrated that gravity also alters time. Seconds, minutes, and hours pass more slowly on a massive star than on earth, relative to motion and gravity.
God created the universe and the multitude of laws that govern. He is sovereign over the dimensions of time that I cannot begin to grasp. Time is merely one of the tools he uses to carve history into a monument to his glory.
On God’s timeline, we have lived in the era of redemption since Adam. The tiny span of each life must be redeemed through Christ—some retroactively through the years and others prospectively. Indeed, the goal of every minute of this era is eternal redemption.
Inside this era, God uses time to make us his partners in the work of redemption. The master of time let’s me join his cause for a few sacred years. And yet, it’s limited. Time will run out. The minutes of our lives will end, and the era of redemption will close. It’s vital that I use whatever time God gives me to insure redemption for myself and others.
Prayer: Master Creator, may I honor you through my allotted time.
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- Written by: Don Goulding
“Indeed, my plans are not like your plans,
and my deeds are not like your deeds,
for just as the sky is higher than the earth,
so my deeds are superior to your deeds
and my plans superior to your plans.” (Isaiah 55:8-9)
“Go ahead son, let go. You can trust me,” Dad said.
My feet dangled from a walnut tree, just beyond his reach. I shook my head and clutched the branches. A skinny six-year-old would have been an easy catch, but I wouldn’t make the leap. Something in my juvenile reasoning concluded that if I couldn’t catch a falling person nobody else could either, not even my strong father.