Faith Through the Journey

Last night I was reading through all of the blog entries I’ve posted since I started writing on March 1 of last year. I wanted to make copies of them, mainly to be able to leave them behind for my children and grandchildren. A song written a number of years ago best expresses this: “Oh, may all who come behind us find us faithful! May the fire of our devotion light their way. May the footprints that we leave lead them to believe, and the lives we live inspire them to obey.” I will not leave my family much in the way of worldly goods, but I do have the opportunity to leave them something far more important and lasting: a legacy of faith that points them to Christ.

As I read through each of the entries, I realized that, while they were not all profound in terms of what was said, the whole body of work pointed to one main theme: God’s faithfulness through a number of life’s challenges. Beginning with the most recent journey through my health issues, through political ups and downs, and then through a family tragedy, God has been there through all of them. Sometimes when we’re going through hard or challenging times, we may not be able to see God’s hand in the midst of everyday life. But when we stop long enough to look back on those seasons, we see that God has truly given us our “daily bread”,  just what we needed to go through each and every day.

Along with His daily provisions, however, He also gives us specific events to mark points in our lives He wants us to remember. These “milestones” are as necessary to our lives as our daily bread. Joshua marked the crossing of the Jordan River by the nation of Israel by having each tribe pick up a stone taken from the middle of the river and putting them together as a memorial to God’s faithfulness when they reached the other side safely. He did it specifically for future generations so the men and women would recount to their children how God parted the waters of the river so they could cross through it on dry land. As we finish the different seasons God brings us through, there are those “milestone moments”, those specific events to which we can point as the place where God kept His promises to us. 

We can’t eat stones, nor can we build memorials out of bread. Yet each are necessary for us, in their turn, to give us provision to live our daily lives and to remember those significant events when we saw God’s hand move in miraculous ways.