It Is Already Written

Lozanne and I were married forty-one years ago this summer. When we sat down for our first dinner together all those years ago in our tiny one bedroom apartment there were just two of us. I was astounded recently, when planning to accommodate all of our children and their families that one table would not hold the eighteen chairs required. From two to eighteen is a fairly hefty percentage increase in family size! I recalled the line from Proverbs which reads, “Children‘s children are the crown of old men…( Pr 17:6). The Lord has deemed that we should be blessed in the increase of our family. I must admit it sure was quieter when there were two!

As the years are passing by during our child rearing years and especially when we are raising teenagers and educating young adults in middle age, we probably do not sense the hand of God upon us as we should. Everything moves so quickly and it is all we can do to keep up with His plan for us. As I become a senior citizen, and indeed I am just becoming and not quite there, we have the luxury of time and the peace of mind to look back at the miraculous interwoven blessings as mastered by God Himself. How He guides it all from beginning to end! The words in Psalm 139 have always been a revelation to me, but only now am I really beginning to understand their full import. Psalm 139:16 reads:

16 Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed. And in Your book they all were written, The days fashioned for me, When as yet there were none of them.

Each and every day of our lives has been laid out even before our birth by a gracious and loving God. The beginning and of course the end is carefully planned. We will not live five minutes more or less than the Lord has allotted for our lives. The hand of the Lord is upon us according to the same schedule. If we become believers and our faith increases, He will make His presence in our lives ever more noticeable to us until we get to the point where we recognize not our own efforts but His and not our own wise use of resources but His. Every achievement and every blessing, material and spiritual, we owe to a loving and devoted God. We arrive in this world owning nothing and that is just how we will leave it. I will consider myself blessed to leave this world with the promise of heaven having been written in God’s book long before my birth. The last line of Psalm 139 asks the Lord to “lead me in the way everlasting” and indeed I know He will.

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