My Directed Path

"Trust in the Lord with all your heart" Proverbs 3:5

A good friend passed away suddenly yesterday.  He and his wife were visiting his sister in West Virginia when he had a massive heart attack.  The paramedics tried to revive him but within minutes he was gone.  With no warning his family was devastated by grief and sadness, mourning the loss of their husband, their brother, their son, their father and their uncle.  I am still in shock and will miss my friend terribly.

As I type these sentences I am reminded that we all have an expiration date.  The medical problems that I have been whining about for the past few weeks are now put into perspective as I grieve the loss of my friend.  Nobody but God Almighty knows the number of our days. In Job 14:15 he writes “A person’s days are determined; you have decreed the number of his months and have set limits he cannot exceed.”

Pastor and author, Paul Tripp, writes a weekly devotional called Wednesday’s Word and today’s letter is entitled “3 Ways To Live By Faith When Life Makes No Sense At all”.  Mr. Tripp gave three principals that apply to us all:

1. We are being strengthened. “God will send difficult, unexpected and unwanted trials into our lives to produce in us what could have never been produced otherwise.”

2. We Aren’t Supposed To Figure Life Out. “When God sends confusing trials into our lives or asks us to obey mystifying commands, he won’t always tell us why.”

3. We Need To Rely On Promises And Commands. “When life doesn’t make any sense at all, these two things are enough for us to live by faith.”

You can download his app by searching Paul Tripp on your smartphone.

Whether I have two years or twenty left on this earth, I must live every day I have left to its fullest. In James 4:14 the brother of Jesus said “Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.”  Every one of us squanders time doing things that don’t generate value in our lives or to the lives of the people around us.  Do you agree and if so, what will you do about it?  As for myself, I have surrendered my life to the Lord and will spend what time I have left glorifying Him.