Day 11 - Wake up and recover your life!
Scripture focus: I have a lot more to say about this, but it is hard to get it across to you since you've picked up this bad habit of not listening. By this time you ought to be teachers yourselves, yet here I find you need someone to sit down with you and go over the basics on God again, starting from square one—baby's milk, when you should have been on solid food long ago! Milk is for beginners, inexperienced in God's ways; solid food is for the mature, who have some practice in telling right from wrong. Hebrews 5:11-14 (The Message)
I hung up the phone after another one of those calls people hate to make. The old song refrain "Another one bites the dust…" rings in my ears as yet one more story reminds me of our human frailty and our predisposition to start the race of faith with enthusiasm, only to stall along the way.
Years ago my husband, Pete, coached one of our children's tee-ball teams. A little girl on the team preferred daisy picking to shagging fly balls. Her parents weren't too helpful either. Often in the midst of the game, dad would run out with his video camera and film whatever his little princess was doing – picking flowers, waving into the lens, whatever. It was an inauspicious start to a career in sports.
Daniel too started slow. Who would have thought that his life would prove such a testament to the power of God and his willingness to use one man to change the world? Daniel could have used his captive state to abdicate his responsibility to listen to God. After all, he might have (wrongly) concluded that God had forgotten him.
And what about Esther? Esther, an orphan raised by her Jewish Uncle Mordecai, taken captive and put in the king's harem, didn't have it easy either. Intelligent and beautiful, she was assigned the job of preparing for pleasuring the king. It was like one long nightmare of beauty preparation – and for what? So that she was treated like a prostitute? But as we read, we realize that Esther changed the world. She didn't let her abandonment issues overcome God's call to learn how to listen to his voice.
If we're going to recover our life, it's not going to be enough to allow our false starts and missteps to define our future. We must discard our bad habit of not listening. We need practice in telling right from wrong.
Recommended reading: Daniel 1 - 3
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