This morning I woke to realize that I hadn’t closed the doors to my wife’s car after I cleaned the seats.  I left the doors open for a bit to air out the car and totally forgot to close the doors before heading to bed.  It’s embarrassing.  I’m not going to lie.  That said, after my wife and I finished blame shifting and I owned that the mistake was completely my fault and the $500+ in value of things in the glove box now out of our hands…  Once all of that passed over, I was able to ask Carrie for forgiveness for the honest mistake but much more for my selfishness and my blame-shifting attitude about it all.

As we prayed and discussed it, a thought came to my mind I believe from the Lord as I read His Word this morning in the Psalms.  God has become my salvation!  God is my strength!  God is my song!  Joy came to me as I realized that my GoPro camera with my favorite ride in my life thus far documented will burn at the end of time.  My JOY however… They can’t take my JOY away from me!  They may have taken our gift cards valued pretty high altogether, but they can’t take our JOY away from us!  Carrie and I have Jesus Christ, the LORD over all, the maker of the heavens, the stars, the earth, and our souls; we have this Jesus as our Redeemer!  We have been ransomed by His blood!  Why would we go on any longer in sorrow over a small loss compared to the Father’s loss of His Son so that we can all be sons and daughters of the King, raised together with Jesus to newness of eternal life!

Another thought has been bothering me a lot lately.  I’ve heard of terrible decisions leaders in certain churches have made, decisions to have affairs, dip into the giving funds to ridiculous degrees, and so on.  It makes me think of Judas or even Satan himself.  Money and stuff.  It’s just money and stuff, and yet we seek and scrape for it to the destruction of our very souls.  May God judge us and break us and bring us to a place of humility in His presence before our souls are brought before His judgment seat.  May this judgment happen while we are still here and breathing instead of after our deaths.  May we encounter the Living God in our prayers and behaviors and repent, turn from our idols, our sinful obsessions.  May Jesus be our RESTING PLACE.  May Jesus be our SONG OF DELIVERANCE.  May JESUS be all we ever need, our truest and most real satisfaction.

A friend of mine and I went to the hospital this morning to hear from his doctor the results of a second set of exams.  He thought and thereby we thought that this was going to be a very bad news trip.  Instead it turned out to be a very refreshing trip, as the doctor shared that my friend is in relatively good health.  My friend had thought he was going to hear that he only had a couple of months to live.  Glory to God!  We were so encouraged, especially because I truly believe God has a call on this man to share the Good News of Jesus with this hurting world.  He and I have really enjoyed our friendship and look forward to reaching the lost together with the hope of the Gospel of Jesus Christ!  Praises are springing from my very soul today as I think of my good and relatively new friend and companion in ministry being alive and well for Lord-willing decades more, to encounter together the hurting, dying, and needy in the name of Jesus here in Merced County and beyond.

In the JOY of Jesus Christ,

– Torrey