The Driving Force of "Lost"

How could it have happened? The shiny new cabinet door hardware we bought to upgrade the somewhat mousy cabinets in our 20-year-old house is no where to be found. Why can't we just be happy that we have found the other 99.99% of things we moved? Why is it that we are consumed with daily opening of boxes in the attic and garage, hoping that--just maybe--we will uncover the lost treasure and be at peace at last and the time of the search will have ended. Hmmm...wasn't there a story about the shepherd who couldn't rest until he found that missing sheep? We KNOW him! He's still looking for that sheep in the remotest mountains of Afghanistan and the tribes of Indonesia. The US Center for World Mission on Mt. Sequoyah gives a great vantage point for feeling the breeze of the Spirit as we stand by the cross looking out over the landscape. We long to be driven by the Heart of the Shepherd for those nameless faces of that lone "sheep" caught in thickets around the world. The Spirit in us drives us on.

If God Shopped at WalMart

I have been thinking about how, in it's simplest form, the message of our relationship with God is that we are containers for His glory. My mind ran to these wonderful clear boxes with blue lids that they sell at WalMart that we have chosen to organize our previously disorganized lives with. I'm embarrassed to tell you how many we have bought, but the number is not a lot unlike the stars in the sky that God promised Abraham He would fill.

If God shopped at WalMart--and I say this in total reverence to loosely illustrate my point--I think He would use boxes like these to store His Treasures. In His grace though, He has given us--the boxes--a will of their own. We are allowed to choose if we will let Him fill our storage capacity up with what He wants to put in, or will we--

* Never open the lid for Him?

* Be so concerned with having the prettiest decoration on the outside (rather than its storage purpose), making it impossible to see inside?

* Look at the box next to itself and wish it had what it has inside.

* Try to mislabel our box.

* Take on so many heavy things in our box that when the Owner tries to pick it up, it's so heavy the handle comes off and rather than using what He had stored, He has to stop and put the handle back on so He can carry it to where its needed. Or He has to sort out all the miscellaneous things that we containers have opened our lids to.

Of course, He never minds the sorting process and loves His boxes so much that He never minds sorting or fixing, but when the boxes cooperate, it makes Him happy. God knows exactly what He wants to store in our containers and they fit perfectly on His shelves. He has purchased them all, even though He knows the mischievous containers jump off shelves, throw useless stuff in, and graffiti the outside. "But this precious treasure, this light and power that now shine within us, is held in perishable containers, so everyone can see that our glorious power is from God and is not our own." II Cor. 4:7