Guidelines For Living Devotional

Florence Allshorn was a missionary sent to Uganda by the Church Missionary Society long before the advent of jets that span oceans and continents before the sun rises and sets.  A number of missionaries had been there before Florence, but all of them had given up and come back home.  The problem wasn't the climate or the cockroaches.  Neither was it the headhunters or unfriendly natives to whom missionaries, especially female ones, were quite a novelty.  The real problem was the senior missionary who was a strong-willed woman with a will of iron who had single-handedly stopped the plague by burning down entire villages.

An amazing thing about the human body is that it tends to reject anything that is foreign to it.  Take a splinter, for instance, which has worked its way under your skin as a thorn did my thumb when I was pruning my roses.  Unable to dig it out with a needle, I said to myself, "I'll just let nature take care of it," and sure enough, it was sore for a few days and then the surface around the thorn toughened as the flesh began to isolate the foreign object.  In a few days, the thorn worked to the surface where I could get it with tweezers.

One of the marks of affluence in Russia today is the vast network of hastily constructed metal storage sheds which look like corrugated matchboxes just large enough to hold a car or protect building materials from greedy eyes.  With no windows and a large padlock, these storage sheds become a virtual prison for anyone unfortunate enough to be inside when the door closes.

Item #1:  A busload of Korean mourners gathers at the spot where the giant 747 crashed.  They sprinkle flowers on the barren, desolate ground and offer prayers. Item #2:   A father kneels by the grave of his 21-year-old son and cries, "I never got to tell you how proud of you I have been and how much I really loved you."    Item #3:  The family of a young woman whose daughter was abducted as she drove home late one night wants to watch the grim execution of the alleged murderer.

When a certain businessman bought an Italian sports car known as a Lamborghini, he phoned the local parish priest and asked him if he would bless the new vehicle, which was no small investment.  Hesitatingly the priest asked, "Just what is a Lamborghini?"  That was it!  "Well, if you don't know what one is, I don't think your blessing would amount to much," the man replied, and hung up.  Then he called a Baptist preacher and asked him if he would bless the sports car.  The pastor immediately responded: "A Lamborghini?  Wow!  That's great.  Zero to 60 in 5.3 seconds. Best engineered sports car in the world."  Then he hesitated and said, "You want me to bless it?  What's a blessing?"

Business journals and MBAs are convinced that strategic planning is important, a vital key to success; and no thinking person would deny the importance of knowing where you want to go and having a plan to get there.  But for the business person who takes the promises of God's Word at face value and is serious about making God his senior partner, is business success simply a matter of finding out what the need is and how you can fill it?  Where does the leadership of the Holy Spirit fit into the equation of success?

Years ago, an immigrant succeeded the hard way.  He worked long hours, made the customer feel important, and was sensitive to the needs of those who came to his shop.  All of his hard labor paid off, and determining to give his son more than he had, he saved and sent the youth off to college.

Amy Carmichael called it the "age-long minute," the period of time between when you pray, asking God to undertake, and the moment when His strong arm moves on your behalf.  The "age-long minute!"

"Ever since our mother died, my sister won't talk about it.  It seems that she wants to just seal that part of her life off and pretend it didn't happen," confided a friend, wondering what he could do to help his sister.

Frustration is no stranger to the child of God.  Believers live in a world of broken pieces, and buses that are late, and budgets which will not balance, just the same as the man who is an atheist.  Let's go back to the source of much of our frustration--goals that are not reached, accomplishments that are not realized, and expectations that are not met.  The result: frustration.