I was sorely in need of comfort this morning and got up in the wee hours to spend time with the Lord...I am amazed and so grateful that I don't serve a concept but a true heavenly Father...The way He takes you in his arms, like a parent comforting a small child...Words of love and strength - mind-clearing words of life...Context and truth and reality...Away with the little, man-made world that I create, where all is loss and confusion!...And how, in view of all this, can any parent bring up their child with an Ezzo philosophy?...I am not God's adversary and He is not mine....Emmanuel...God WITH me!

I was thinking about the words of the Twenty-Third Psalm..."Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil"....Until recently, I had thought of these as hypothetical, God will be with us in our worst case scenarios, but have come to see them as a present reality, tying right in with God's own analysis of life as we live it day by day...ALTHOUGH we walk through the valley of the shadow of death... Luke 1:78-79..."...whereby the sunrise shall visit us from on high to give light to those who are in darkness and in the shadow of death to guide our feet into the way of peace..."...Nothing easy about this life, about our perpetual calling as soldiers...We LIVE in the valley of the shadow of death, though with peace and even victory because of the One who conquered death...

I am off to work today as took my usual Monday off to be with Rick and Susanna - am making up some of the hours...May God be with me, indeed Emmanuel, as I seek to show sin-ravaged kids that Comfort with which I was comforted this morning.
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