Good morning…
Taking our dogs outside in the middle of this night, all is calm, all is dark. Instinctively, I turn toward the south and lift prayers for the lives being ravaged in Florida by the drenching winds and the storm surge of Hurricane Milton.
Prayer. What does prayer do at a time like this? I lift prayers for God’s presence to be with family members of friends and the vulnerable people I will never meet. I align my thoughts with the protective power of our living LORD. I seek to fill my heart and my mind with what God values most.
“What does God value?” we read aloud in class yesterday from page 94 in Kay Warren’s Choose Joy. “God values character over comfort, faith over fear, mercy over judgement, justice over injustice, people over possessions, truth over falsehood, humility over pride, hope over despair, love over apathy. In other words, God values the things that will last. He has an eternal perspective. He invites us to view life from the same perspective, to believe that he is at work in history in ways that often remain mysterious to us, that he is redeeming what has been stolen and healing what has been broken.”
I do not really know exactly how prayer works, but well-wishes, hopeful thoughts, and “Please help, God,” these responses just naturally come out of me. I am reminded of the creative story shared by one of the women at the end of our class.
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The Coffee Cup Analogy
Your are holding a cup of coffee when someone goes along and bumps into you or shakes your arm, making you spill your coffee everywhere.
Why did you spill coffee?
“Because someone bumped into me!!!”
WRONG ANSWER
You spilled the coffee because there was coffee in your cup. Had there been tea in the cup, you would have spilled tea. Whatever is inside the cup is what will spill out.
Therefore, when life comes along and shakes you (which WILL happen), whatever is inside you will come out. It’s easy to fake it, until you get rattled. So we have to ask ourselves… “What’s in my cup?”
When life gets tough, what spills over? Joy, gratitude, peace and humility? Anger, bitterness, victim mentality and quitting tendencies?
Life provides the cup, YOU choose how to fill it. Today, let’s work towards filling our cups with gratitude, forgiveness, joy, words of affirmation, resilience, positivity, kindness, gentleness and love for others.
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Life is sometimes hard, really really hard. Under stress, our human nature is prone to anger, bitterness, victim mentality and quitting tendencies. But God’s Spirit causes us to live in a different way. We love other people. We are happy and we have peace in our minds. We are patient, kind and good. People can trust us to do what is right (Galatians 5:22, EASY).
Right now, for me, it feels right to remain in prayer for all of those treacherously impacted by two destructive hurricanes in just two weeks.
…Sue…
