"When it is finished according to His will."

and

"The Lord is with me, I will not fear (be afraid)."

Queenie,

Don't miss the two things I posted in Hebrew or at least their English translations...

Imporatant to remember right know I think.

Mark

What I will do is crawl back under the covers and silence my head ... it truly dawned on me how much I have changed.

I have questions about what's going on over on WH's side and it's because I always have this deep NEED to understand things.

Queenie,

Remember my flashlight analogy?

Where you point the light is what you will focus on. If you point it into the woods you will not see much, what you do see will be difficult if not impossible to understand and you will also lose sight of the path ahead of you and lose your way.

An interesting thing about walking along a path by flashlight is that it only illuminates what you need to see right now. It doesn't show you what lies ahead 100 yards or 100 miles...It lights your way one step at a time.

What's around the bend? Who knows? Do you trust God to take care of that too? Then focus on the path immediately ahead, take another step where He is leading you and don't worry so much about what is happening outside of the circle of God's light. Even if you can't see, He can and already knows what He will do to handle it.

What happens in the wilderness is not what you need to worry about. You only need to worry about your path through the wilderness.

God will be done with your husband when He is done with him...

And He'll be done with you when He is done with you...

You stand on a hill overlooking the road to what God promised. Your husband is still back in Egypt, a slave to his own ways...

Keep going forward and don't try to turn back to look for him. Remember what happened to Lot's wife? For your husband to be where you are now he has to travel where you have been and he has to run faster to catch up. But the sooner you get to where God is leading you, the sooner YOU can rest and wait while God prods him along. Even if he gets lost in the wilderness by taking his eyes off the path again, YOU will be safe because God already brought you through it.

When Israel was wandering in the wilderness they weren't alone. God didn't SEND them to the Promised Land, He LED them there. His Presence was before them by day and stood watch over them by night. Everyone could see His Glory. As long as everyone stayed fixed on Him, they couldn't get lost. But some looked at their surroundings and their circumstances and lost sight of God and the goal. An entire generation died in the wilderness because they lost their focus on the One who was leading them and chose not to trust Him though they had already seen many miracles in their lives.

The Lord is with me; I'll not be afraid.

Mark

Might as well do something useful, like scrubbing the toilets.

There is no sense in trying to figure out what is going on in his mind or what he will do.

Did you ever go camping as a kid?

My father's idea of roughing it was to rent a fishing boat that had a manual start outboard...

But I was a Boy Scout. Really. I had a green uniform and everything.

I remember walking along a path in the woods in the middle of the night. The trees seemed to swallow up the surroundings and noises, some identifiable and others more sinister by the fact that I couldn't tell what they were all around me.

But I had this really cool flashlight and when I turned it on and could see where I was headed, it wasn't so scary after all. The light was just bright enough to illuminate my way and show me where I was going. As long as that light was pointed onto the path, I knew exactly where I was headed.

But if I swung the light off to the side, and pointed it into the woods, now it was really scary. Not only couldn't I see the path I needed to stay on but I could also see all sorts of things in the darkness of the woods. Some of them were merely shadows and not anything real at all, but when you're 9 or 10 you don't reason that well and it is the UNseen that holds the most terror.

The light shining into the trees didn't cast a beam very far and the woods seemed to swallow it up within a few scant yards so that it's power seemed to be lessened some how. And when it did strike something that was alive, it caused the animal's eyes to glow, usually an eerie red that seemed to be so evil in its very nature.

But when I turned the light back onto the path, all those things dimmed into memory very quickly and I could once more see where I was going and knew that I was still on the right path. As long as I kept that light pointed where I was headed and kept my gaze fixed onto its bright circle ahead of me, I knew everything would be alright.


Haggai 1 (NIV)
5 Now this is what the LORD Almighty says: "Give careful thought to your ways. 6 You have planted much, but have harvested little. You eat, but never have enough. You drink, but never have your fill. You put on clothes, but are not warm. You earn wages, only to put them in a purse with holes in it."

7 This is what the LORD Almighty says: "Give careful thought to your ways. 8 Go up into the mountains and bring down timber and build the house, so that I may take pleasure in it and be honored," says the LORD. 9 "You expected much, but see, it turned out to be little. What you brought home, I blew away. Why?" declares the LORD Almighty. "Because of my house, which remains a ruin, while each of you is busy with his own house.

When we focus on ourselves and our own circumstances or on our surroundings, our progress comes to a stop. We are afraid, unsure of where to go and what to do and become lost in our self pity. No matter what we think we can do to overcome our lot, we find that it is never enough. We think we're making progress but it is all an illusion.

When we focus on Him we know where we are headed and know that we are going down the right path. His ways first and our ways will be smooth and easy going.

Psalm 119: 105 & 106 (The Message)
By your words I can see where I'm going;
they throw a beam of light on my dark path.
I've committed myself and I'll never turn back
from living by your righteous order.

As long as we remain focused on His light and follow where He leads us, we can know that we are safe and that nothing can harm us, because we can see the light of God's words shining before us, showing us where we need to go.

so I have a bunch of 'em...