Grace and Mittens.

Well, I'm in the middle of my first week working with World Orphans and I’m already scheduled to go to a conference in Waco [the World Mandate Conference… looks amazing] and I’ll be heading to Colorado the next week. The Colorado trip means that I’ll be able to meet the staff [which is scary and exciting all in one little ball of emotion] and it’s also a time for the staff to regroup and discuss what God has in store for 2009. I’ve never been to Colorado… any pointers other than coats, gloves and mittens [oh my!]?

Those of you that know me, know that I'm an avid quote and verse collector. I have many pages of favorite quotes, lyrics and scripture, and I assure you - the majority of those will make an appearance on this blog at one time or another [actually, look up and you’ll see a portion of my favorite prayer of St. Francis].

A few weeks okay, I was reading in 2 Corinthians and these scriptures stuck out to me… especially the bold.

“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows. If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance of the same sufferings we suffer.
And our hope for you is firm, because we know that just as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our comfort. We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about the hardships we suffered in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired even of life. Indeed, in our hearts we felt the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead. He has delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will continue to deliver us.” 2 Corinthians 1:3-10

Wow! Why should we worry about the day to day tasks of living? God has already delivered us and the amazing thing about His grace is that He will CONTINUE to deliver us. How humbling and amazing it is to realize that His grace meets us where we are, but it doesn’t leave us where it found us!