Changes

I was just telling a friend that even my dog is different. I feel like we've been here so long, but it's only been a couple of weeks; it just feels like we're settled. At the same time, we are not. So I'm scoffing at our poor little Scoo and saying he's whiny and clingy... In the meantime I was reading something that I wrote from Smalltown USA six weeks ago, and frankly, I'm not the same. It's strange. I feel like myself, I think I look like myself- except that I'm awake during the day and I *usually* sleep at night. But somehow, I'm not myself. My writing is not the same. My responses are not the same. I am have not become completely acclimated to our new life here. It's understandable. It's so new.

But one thing is real. One thing is the same, it's still true. God is here. He is here, and He is very real. I can never escape His watchful eye. His thoughts of me are endless. And that, my friends, is quite reassuring. I have always had this sort of made up idea of what "freedom" is. We sing about being free and having freedom. In my studies I have discovered that freedom is soul regeneration from death to life and in that not carrying dead weight through this life. But more than that, freedom is in God's sovereignty. Freedom is in belonging to Someone. And in all of that, all He wants from me is me.

I read an article about this hurried mother and her children that brings this into perspective. She was dragging her little one in to the day care provider's home so that she could get to work, but the little girl insisted on picking up a rock to give to the mother and one for her pocket. Her mother thanked her and cast it aside as they rushed up on the porch and into the house. As they entered, the care taker was also given a rock which she gratefully accepted and pocketed. The mother apologized and offered to take it out with her as she left, but the woman refused and lead the mother to the back porch where she watched as the woman dropped the little rock into a tub full of other rocks. She explained that while children are young, everything they have is given to them. They are given all of their clothes, their food, even the papers they color on are given by adults. So in order to give something away with sincerity, they find things that no one owns and offer them as gifts. She said she never refused a gift from a child. The woman set in her heart to do the same from that day on.

On a grander scale, everything I have is God's and so to give Him me, while it's sometimes a meager offering of weakness and poverty, He receives gladly because it's all He wants from me. It takes all the pressure off; it's makes living peaceably and with sincerity a sweet offering to Him and from Him. My life is His, all that I have have is His, everything else is peripheral.

2 Corinthians 2:14 But thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumphal procession in Christ and through us spreads everywhere the fragrance of the knowledge of him.