On the episode of the I Love Lucy Show when Lucy has Little Ricky they all practice going to the hospital with Lucy and Ricky announces they're starting practice with the phrase, "The time has come!" Well this morning the time came for me, to turn 30 that is, not have a baby. So this morning at 8:13 am the precise time I was born I sleepily greeted 30. It is going to take some getting used to but I am excited about my thirties. I don't know what to expect and I think it will be a constant shock when I have to write my age or birth date and realize that I am 30, no longer a twenty something at all, whole new level! But you know God is good and He knows exactly what you need when you need it. Today's devotions were about things that I needed to hear going into this next age, stage and phase of my life. I had a devotion from Oswald Chambers talking about giving back to God the best of what He has given to you. He was talking about the spiritual blessings that we get from the Lord not being only for us but to bless others as well. He talked about the importance of having daily time with God and spending time in worship with Him. Then I read the story of Lot in the Bible and also the story of the fulfillment of God's promise to Abraham that he would be the father of many nations but he didn't have a child for 25 years after God gave him the promise. From the story of Lot I learned about not clinging to the past. My devotion talked about letting go of the familiar and not turning back to mourn what's behind in the way that Lot's wife did. I think my familiar place is not seeing a breakthrough or change. I've come to expect that things won't happen because I have lived with disappointment and failure over the last several years. But I have to get motivated to start expecting things to happen in my life again. All the hurt, pain, shame, disappointment, failure and depression has to go and I have to leave it behind in 2011 and declare that that was the last year for living without expecting anything good to happen to me. In the story of Abraham and Sarah and their wait for Isaac I was reminded how God does not fail to deliver on His promises. He just fulfills them at the time when He means to. There was a verse in Genesis 18:14 that said, "14Is any thing too hard for the LORD? At the time appointed I will return unto thee, according to the time of life, and Sarah shall have a son." (KJV) Sarah had just laughed and God asked her why she laughed. She lied and said she hadn't laughed. But in God's reply He assures her He isn't joking and that what He said will happen. I like the part where He tells her that "at the appointed time" He will return and she will have a son. I read a book last year by Priscilla Shirer called He Speaks to Me about the ways in which to hear God demonstrated through Samuel. In it she wrote about the appointed time. She said that the Hebrew word for the appointed time means sacred season. A sacred season is a time set aside for a special spiritual event. Something that is sacred is set apart to bring God glory. God demonstrated His glory and ability by giving a 100 year old man and a 99 year old woman a baby. That's a pretty special spiritual event and it happened in a season of their lives when they considered their bodies as good as dead. But even though the circumstances were less than desirable and didn't make sense to Abraham and Sarah God still kept His promise and made it happen. There's good news: God can still make it [whatever you need] happen when it seems like the time for it has come and gone. That was definitely the right encouragement that I needed today. Then I read a little further into Chapter 19 of Genesis. In Chapter 19 verses 1-26, God tells Abraham to go to the mountain of Moriah and sacrifice his son, his only son. Abraham doesn't beg or plead or question but he obeys. But he also shows great faith in believing that God is in control of the situation. He tells his servant when they get to the mountain that he and the boy are going up the mountain to worship but they will return together. Then he answers Isaac's question about where the sacrifice is by saying the God will provide it. So they go up the mountain together and Abraham ties Isaac up and places him on the altar and is getting ready to kill him with a knife when the angel of the Lord steps in and tells him to stop, whew! The angel tells him that he has proven that he fears the Lord because he was willing to give the Lord his one and only son. Abraham receives Isaac back from the dead, so to speak, and God provides a ram for their sacrifice. This reminded me of two things I heard last year along the same lines. One was from Pastor Gayle at my church in New Jersey. She prayed a prayer that God would resurrect dead hopes and dreams for people. She said that sometimes our dreams die and fade because of situations and circumstances but God is able to bring them back to life and make them better. Then I read in a Marilyn Hickey book about how God may demand of us a sacrifice, for a time, of our dreams, hopes and plans but she wrote that if we are able to give those things to God that not only will He resurrect them but He will make them better and more pleasing than before. I drew a lot of encouragement from these things today and I don't believe that it was by mistake that those were my devotions for today because I really believe that this is going to be a different year for me and that my dreams that have "died" are going to be resurrected again and that they are going to be better than before. I also believe that this will be a sacred season or appointed time in my life for certain things to happen to me that I have prayed and believed for and the Lord has told me of as well. This morning I also read a devotion in Joyce Meyer's The Confident Woman, based on Esther 4:14. In it her uncle Mordecai tells her that she may have been placed in a position of royalty "for such a time as this." It may have all seemed like chance or happenstance but there was a clear purpose for Esther's life and her position, which was to save the Jewish people from destruction. So I felt like that was just one more assurance from God that He is looking out for me and He knows exactly what He's doing. He knows it looks crazy to me and those around me but what He wants to happen will happen when the time has come.
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