Sunday, June 5, 2022
Is this Your Lost Camper?
What’s It Doing In My Yard?
The VIN of the Lost/Stolen/Misplaced and Unlicensed Motor Home
Psalm 73:26
My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever.
Romans 8:23-24
Not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen?
Words of Grace For Today
There is every cause to groan at the developments of the previous days …
besides the reasons of every day: death is a’coming as our bodies give up life; we may be adopted and redeemed, but our bodies still have so many demands and limits and … well life, as one gets older and older, does not seem to get better, in fact, quite the opposite. Our bodies are not the only things that wear out. Machines that we rely on do as well. While our bodies are covered under the provincial health care plan, and we may have supplementary insurance, our machines cost lots of money to have someone qualified fix them.
So our machines get cobbled back together again and again, and pretty soon it’s a marvel that they work at all.
Our bodies get health care, such as it is, if a doctor will even care at all about you. All of that costs lots of money that comes out of our pockets as taxes, supposedly more if we have and make more money, though it seems not to work out that way. Even with the best health care, though, our bodies still slowly and sometimes quite quickly decay as if pulled back to be dust.
We can rejoice that with all this decay, God is our strength and portion forever, and that even our bodies will be adopted fully and redeemed fully and renewed, better than in our first life. We wait. We wait for God to keep the promise that our bodies will be redeemed and renewed. There is no proof available that this redemption and renewal will happen. So much of what we observe and experience points in exactly the opposite direction. So we are given hope. Hope alone. Hope in what is not obvious or not seen or sometimes apparently simply not possible.
Hope is hope when it anticipates what is not seen or proven or provable.
God gives us plenty, even when in the previous days someone parks a 40 foot old motor home in my yard from across our campers where I live. This motor home has no license plate, is a mess inside as much as is obvious through the door’s window. It has all the signs of being stolen and dumped here, out of sight and in my way. The yard is used as a dumping ground.
Now that stupidity is a cause for so much groaning. When will it stop!
God gives us hope that even things like this will be resolved, since redeemed is a bit much to hope for.