Tuesday Oct 18

Middle of October, fully accepting the demise of summer, the days are getting shorter and shorter, the temperatures are dropping, and winter is sending her suggestions of chills to come.  
Life moves in cycles.  We humans have been on earth a very short time, total perhaps 7 million years from earliest hominids to us.  Our lives are just three score and ten, but now going into the eighties.  Still our lives are short.  The dinosaurs lived for hundreds of millions of years, other life forms have been here for billions of years.  We are a very young species.  But we seem to be able to do more damage to our environment and change it more than any other species.  We are truly God's best, penultimate work.  
So, we should be able to connect to God easily, right?  Not really.  Our pride and self congratulatory life style keeps us away.  
Come to God, on your knees to acknowledge His power and His Love.  Come to God and know His Grace and Love.  


Consider today's meditations by James Ryle:
October 18


Trying to Figure a Way Out?
"While he was trying to figure a way out, he had a dream." (Matthew 1:20, The Message).
The Bible tells us that Joseph, the Nazarene carpenter engaged to Mary, was a noble man. Chagrined by the shocking discovery that Mary was pregnant, he sought to handle the matter with discretion, so as not to bring shame to Mary, or her family. And while he was trying to figure a way out, he had a dream.
And that dream changed the world.
While the challenges you may be facing in these tumultuous days may not register on the same historic scale with Joseph's dilemma, nevertheless it is still true that God often speaks to troubled men in their dreams — showing them what to do.
The Book of Job tells us, "For God does speak—now one way, now another— though man may not perceive it. In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falls on men as they slumber in their beds, he may speak in their ears and terrify them with warnings, to turn man from wrongdoing and keep him from pride, to preserve his soul from the pit, his life from perishing by the sword" (Job 33:14-18, NIV).
Ask God to speak to you in a dream. Sometimes it's the only way He can get through all of our whirling thoughts and emotions, bypassing our natural disposition to debate what He is saying or doing in our waking lives.
Before you close your eyes in sleep tonight, pray the words of Solomon, "I sleep, but my heart is awake, listening for the voice of my Beloved!" (Song 5:2). You just might awake to a new day in the middle of the night!