Dear MLEPC Members and Friends:

 

For one week, last week, life was a beach.  Juli, Rob and I drove from Mt. Lebanon down to Holden Beach, North Carolina.  Along the way, we picked up our daughter Christy, who had flown in from Durango in southwest Colorado.  The second day of vacation, our son Jeff with his fiancée Brittany arrived from Chicago.  To top it all off, my brother and sister-in-law who live in the North Hills of Pittsburgh, along with their two children from South Bend, Indiana, and New York City, had rented another cottage nearby for the same week.  Every night the ten of us sat around a large circular table in our beach house sharing good food, interesting conversation, and lots of laughter.  Yes, for one week I could say that "life's a beach."  It reminded me of just how blessed we are to have the means to take a beach vacation.  It prompted me to be grateful to the Lord for family that wants to be together and is willing & able to go to great lengths to make that happen.  We take none of it for granted.  The week was a gift from God's good hand.

 

This week, however, we're back in Pittsburgh.  Our kids and their cousins have returned to Colorado, Chicago, South Bend, and New York.  We've all resumed work and our regular routines.  Like just about every other week, life this week is not a beach.  Am I nevertheless able to regard it as a gift from God's good hand every bit as much as was last week at Holden Beach?  Can we give thanks to the Lord during "normal time" in which we find ourselves experiencing good and bad, blessings and struggles, exciting moments and the mundane hum-drum?  Can we bless God particularly when instead of getting a beach, we get a hurricane?  The great leader Moses seemed to appreciate this challenge.  Moses wrote the first of the 150 Psalms in the Bible.  And in Psalm 90, verse 15, Moses says, "Make us glad for as many days as You have afflicted us, and for as many years as we have seen evil."  Writing 3,400 years ago (!), Moses seems to have appreciated the call to bless the Lord for the gift of the days given us that are anything but a beach.

 

How can this be so?  How can we possibly live each day as God's gift when perhaps many of our days are marred by trouble and pain?  My response is that we can do so when we know that God is with us and that He is enough.  And God is with us both when life's a beach and when it's a hurricane.  As Jesus said, "Behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the age" (Matthew 28:20).  He adds, "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest" (Matthew 11:28).  Paul reinforces this when writing, "Nothing shall be able to separate us from the love of God that is ours in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 8:30).  Since God is with us, the question then becomes, is He enough?  When He is enough, we begin to praise Him in the storms of life as well as the days of plenty and ease.

 

Jesus told a little story about a merchant who found a pearl of great price (Matthew 13:45-46).  To obtain it, the merchant sold all that he owned in order to buy it.  The value and precious nature of the pearl surpassed everything else.  Jesus is telling us that our God is the Pearl.  When we possess Him and He possesses us, He is more than enough-more than enough for life's beach weeks and life's normal weeks.  So this week whatever our circumstances may be, let us look to Him for all that we need as we return Him thanks.

 

Pastor Tim

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