The verses on my "living ready" cards....
1 Samuel 3:18
So Samuel told him everything, hiding nothing from him. Then Eli said, "He is the LORD; let him do what is good in his eyes."
Deuteronomy 32:39
"See now that I myself am He! There is no god besides me. I put to death and I bring to life, I have wounded and I will heal, and no one can deliver out of my hand.
Job 42:2
"I know that you can do all things; no plan of yours can be thwarted."
John 11:25
Jesus said to her, "I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.Do you believe this?"
2 Corinthians 4:16
Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen.For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
I can't remember the exact words he used, but I know where I was on the gravel road into town when he said it, how the morning sun was slanting across the fields. How his words, now nearly a decade past, grabbed me, shook me awake... have kept me awake.
A radio clip, with Chuck Swindoll in his southern baritone, said something to the effect, (and he said it far better)
"...no one warns which days will forever change our lives. No one wakes us that morning and says, 'This day will require you have an unwavering trust in the sovereignty of God. This day you'll need to be prepared with all truth.' There is no one sounding the alarm before the storm descends.We have to live ready."
When I drove those gravel roads home, those words reverberated still. That night I wrote verses on cue cards. I needed to memorize verses to make me ready, prepare me for the days that would come with no warning.
Just yesterday, gracious Tonia quoted Aimee, whose husband survived the plane crash on the Hudson River, as being gripped with the same realization:
"... I have been seeing I really need to have God's Word ready in my memory for when the hard times hit....especially when it comes so unexpectedly."
My "living ready" memory cards, the verses I'll want to remember when deaths and accidents and pain come (and they are guaranteed to come for everyone of flesh and sod) are worn now, ten years later. But I still have copies by the sink, in pockets of my bags, by my bed, in my Bible.
What is known by heart is what the heart knows.
In the face of death and grief and a hurt humanity, I want to know granite reality: that God gives only good and I am always loved. I want my heart to be ready with truth.
That, I need to remember.
Lord God, storms will rise on the horizon.
Do I know who You are?
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