John gave me a Max Lucado Bible several years ago and I use it off and on with another Bible or two. One reason I like it is because it has lots of mini-devotionals along the sides and in special inserts.
Tonight we read in Ezra about the captives that returned from Babylon and began to rebuild the Temple, and all the opposition they met with as a result of the rebuilding. I have to admit, I'd never read Ezra before. But it's been very interesting.
Anyway, I'd like to share one of those little devotionals here:
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The exile was the "crucible of Israel's faith." They were pushed to the edge of existence where they thought they were hanging on by the skin of their teeth, and they found that in fact they had been pushed to the center, where God was.
They experienced not bare survival, but abundant life. Now they saw their previous life as subsistence living, a marginal existence absorbed in consumption and fashion, empty ritual and insensitive exploitation...
It keeps on happening. Exile is the worst that reveals the best. "It's hard believing," says Faulkner, "but disaster seems to be good for people."...All of us are given moments, days, months, years of exile. What will we do with them? Wish we were someplace else? Complain? Escape into fantasies?... Or build and plant and marry and seek the shalom of the place we inhabit and the people we are with?
Exile reveals what really matters and frees us to pursue what really matters and frees us to pursue what really matters, which is to seek the Lord with all our hearts.
From Run with the Horses by Eugene Peterson
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This really made me think. A bit heavy, but really powerful as well.
God's blessings to you...
(I took this photo of some ruins at Pecos National Park in New Mexico in Nov. 2005)
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