Day 22 - Issue 24
Psalm 89:2 NLT
Your unfailing love will last forever. Your faithfulness is as enduring as the heavens.
I can be flaky at times. I can be adamant about something one day and months later take a different view. Consistency is not an enduring human characteristic. For me, the clearest measure of that is friendship. Today I have little meaningful interaction with people who at one time I described as friends for life. I guess if we sat down for a drink together we might revisit and affirm that. This would be perhaps more about satisfying our consciences than having any meaningful substance within life. If I’m honest, I miss any number of such friendships. Yet, upon reflection, I wonder about the integrity of these declarations of commitment to friendship; mine and my ‘friends’.
Am I complaining? Not really. If I’m honest, I reflect upon an isolated childhood in which I was very comfortable living within my own world. My mind was a place of many adventures and satisfying discoveries. So perhaps I am not hardwired for friendship and my inconsistency is a consequence of this attitude. However, God is consistent. Even when I cannot experience God’s love, there is apparent distance, pain, disappointment of a period of disillusion; God’s friendship is unshakeable. I might attempt to shrug it off, yet like a shadow, God accompanies me even when the sun is masked by clouds.
So I rise with the dawn, embrace the return of daylight as a symbol of God’s forever presence and declare God’s love and faithfulness, no matter how I feel. My own mood, my apparent failures, my fractured and therefore sinful life is no impediment to God’s enduring love. Only my reluctance to speak of that faithfulness or my preference to wallow in my own pit of self-pitying pain can darken the skies above and obliterate God’s shadow. It was a difficult lesson, learning to declare the reality of God in the middle of hardship and heartbreak. Yet, doing so, through gritted teeth, was a declaration of where I placed my hope, even as I felt I was drowning within a hopeless situation. This was the lifebuoy that kept me afloat in tempestuous seas.
QUESTION: Can you declare God’s faithfulness as you gaze upon your own life experience?
PRAYER: Thank you, God, that you are the same yesterday, today and forever.
