Monday, September 19, 2011

The God of All Comfort!!

I just want to brag on my Heavenly Father today.  I hope you know Him and will brag on Him today too!!  Don't miss out on noticing His intervention, His comfort in your life on a moment by moment basis!

This has been quite a weekend for my husband and me.  Actually it was quite a week!  I am in the process of having some fairly major dental work.  It is causing me an enormous amount of pain.  My body totally rejects pain medicine.  Even 1/2 a tablet of something will send me vomiting for an entire day.  I must therefore endure the pain, but at times the pain also makes me vomit.  Last Wednesday we started the process that will last over the next 2 months.....ouch!

Toward the end of the week we realized, as you may have read in my previous entry, we had to have our cat put to sleep.  We did this Saturday morning.  It was so painful for us.  We held him as the doctor gave him the medicine.  I am so thankful that the last words he heard were from our lips thanking him for the joy he has brought us and the love we have for him.  It was peaceful for him.  I am still hurting as I will start to look for him or think about feeding him and he is not there, he is not coming back.  It makes me cry even as I write this.  My husband has had this cat for 15 1/2 years.  My husband didn't ask for him.  One rainy night he appeared at my husbands apartment door, scratching at the door.  My husband lived on the second floor.  This cat climbed the stairs and walked around the corner choosing my husband's door to scratch on.  My husband tells of how he was so filthy dirty that you would have never guessed he was a snow white cat.  That cat was a gift from God to my husband as evidenced by a story that only he can tell- so you just have to trust me.  But his mission came to an end on Saturday.  I don't know if animals go to heaven but I wouldn't be surprised to see him up there one day!

Our weekend ended with a scare.  In our bedroom I have a metal and crystal ball that holds a tea light.  It hangs from our ceiling. I often put a small tea light in there in the evening and leave it burning in there as I do other things around the house.  Last night I had put a candle in there and was in the bedroom talking with my husband.  About 10-15 minutes after I lit the candle the thing somehow caught fire.  Our backs were to all that was going on and so we didn't see it at first.  All of a sudden I turned around and flames were flying from this thing.  I was speechless, all I could say was baby, baby baby or something like that.  My husband so calmly took care of it.  We sat there amazed at how this thing could possibly catch fire.  I have been burning a tea light in that thing for around 2 1/2 years now. Since we often light it and then do something else downstairs or in another room, we were so thankful that we were in the room when this happened.  It could have brought a lot of damage to our place.

I will end on a funny note.  My husband has this pair of jean shorts that are relatively new.  He accidentally had a pen in the side pocket not that long ago and it left a huge blue ink blot.  A few weeks have passed since that ink stain and I think we had just decided that those jean shorts would now be the shorts you wear around the house only.  I have been on the look out for a new pair like those but had not yet found a pair.

Last night my husband was doing some laundry and he came up stairs and said "Am I missing something?"  I didn't get it....he said "the ink spot.....it's gone!"  I looked up and down those shorts looking for even a hint of the ink stain, yet no where to be found!  Since when has  that ever happened?  This was not ink from a small pen, this was ink  from more like a gel ink pen, not a ball point pen!

Well, why do I share all this with you?  I want you to know that we have a God of all comfort.  God is in it all.  Have you ever had a problem with a company and tried to reach the manager or owner of that company?Good Luck!  You have to go through hoops and tell your story to other folks hoping they will relay your story to the boss who hopefully will call you back.  Yet, so often, that phone call never comes.  After all, the "big guy" of the company has much more important things to deal with than your "little problems"

NOT SO WITH GOD!  Everything I shared with you in these stories are relatively small problems in comparison to all that God has to deal with in this world.  Let's face it, just read the front page of the newspaper and you will see that a dental surgery, the death of a cat, and an ink stain just wouldn't make it to the front page.  Yet God was there for it all!

God was concerned about my dental pain and He was there to help me cope and eventually heal that horrible pain.

God was there in the vet's office as our hearts broke. I could sense God's arms around me.  It was as if God was sad about our sick cat.  He gave us peace as we gave Donipon peace, an end to his suffering.  I know God saw every tear that fell.  I know, just as His Word says, He caught each tear and placed them in His bottle.
 Psalm 56:8. 
 "Thou tellest my wanderings: put Thou my tears into Thy bottle:  Are they not in Thy Book."
 My tears matter to God....Your tears matter to God!

God protected our bedroom from a fire Sunday evening by keeping us in the bedroom which allowed us to quickly intervene and put the fire out.

Then there's the jean shorts.  This cheap pair of jean shorts with an ink stain- without any effort of our own, God removed the stain.

This past weekend God has brought to my attention to His ability to completely remove stains.  My husband and I were talking a little about this.  The first was with our cat.  This cat that arrived at Jim's door was filthy and as my husband tells the story, he stunk to high heaven!  My husband bathed him only to find hiding under this dirty dirty cat was fur as white as snow!  It's what God does with us.  Just as Doniphon (our cat) could not bathe himself and make himself clean, so we cannot make ourselves clean.  Doniphon needed my husband to bathe him.  We need God to bathe us.  My husband tells how Doniphon hated this bath!  He was yelling loudly as the water ran over him.( It was so loud that my husband let his neighbors know that no one was getting hurt, he was just bathing the cat!) Yet, if my husband was going to welcome this stray dirty stinky cat into his home, the cat had to get the bath!

So it is with us.  We don't always like a "bath" from God.  It can be painful and we may fight it, just as our cat did. But if we want to be welcomed into God's family, we have to allow God to bathe us.  God says he can take our dirty, stinky lives and make us white as snow.....just like our cat.
   Isaiah 1:18- "Come now and let us reason together saith the Lord, though your sins be as scarlet, they can be as white as snow. Though they be red like crimson, they can be as wool."

The other reminder of our Heavenly Father and His ability to remove stains was with the shorts and the ink stain.  We thought the shorts were doomed to the "around the house" shorts.  Certainly he couldn't wear them out in public.  The stain was big and noticeable.  We didn't even make any extra effort to remove the stain.  We had just given up as far as the shorts being very useful. They were to be just another piece of laundry to be washed.  Yet, the stain was removed- not by our own efforts!

Isn't that our lives at times?  We see the stain on our lives as permanent.  Oh we may be good for "around the house" things- but the stain is too big to be used of God in any "big ways".  We give up and just accept the stain.

NOT GOD!  God can take what we call a "permanent" stain and completely remove it.  He can use us in great and mighty ways.  But it has to be God who removes the stain.  Any effort on our part will prove futile.

God....Yes God, He is the God of all comfort and He is involved in every area in the lives of His children.  Yes, the God who hangs the stars out, who causes the sun to rise and set, He who tells the oceans they can only come so far, the One who keeps this ball called earth rotating on its axis from the beginning of time is also the God who cares about dental pain, death of our animals and even stains in a cheap pair of shorts.  The same God who feeds the sparrows and clothes the lilies of the field is crazy about you and me.  I'm so glad, aren't you!?

To God be the glory!