Hello friends, welcome to In Bolden. I'm Chris Shatter, an ordinary Christian living with and learning about an extraordinary God. Earlier this year I did a study with my ESG's on Elijah, and as usual God is using all of my life to teach me about standing firm in my faith and stepping forward in trust. And as I prayed to God to reveal my next steps here in my series, I kept hearing the phrase lessons from Kieran.
You see, Elijah had to spend a lot of time alone facing his own trials before he was ready for the big show. In that time, some of which was in an area called Kieran. He had to choose to either trust God's eternal plan for him or not. He had to remove so many well-honed cultural and religious thoughts of, quote, the way things are supposed to be, end quote, and instead see how God works.
And he had to decide to stand out amongst the crowd. And although my Kieran didn't last for as long as Elijah's or even as long as Jesus is in the wilderness, I learned some valuable lessons while commuting with the Holy Spirit. And in these next weeks, I'd like to share some of them with you, to hopefully help us realign our lives to be Christian lives, lived out for all the world to see, for our friends and neighbors and coworkers to be spurred to ask why we seem different. Friends, we can't keep wandering through the wilderness of this earthly world living up to its standards.
It's time to take our hard learned lessons from those seasons and put them to work for the glory of God. Today's post comes from Ecclesiastes 3, 1 through 2. There is a time for everything and a season for every activity under the heavens, a time to be born and a time to die. As a kid living in Southern California, I had the opportunity to go to Disneyland a number of times.
And before each visit, my brother and I would plan out how to strategically use our tickets. That tells you how old I am. Yes, back then, we had ticket books for the Rides. That's where you might have heard the saying, it's an e-ticket ride comes from, meaning the best ones.
In the ticket book, there'd be loads of e-tickets for the kitty rides and shows, but only a few valuable e-tickets. I imagined how much fun I was going to have spinning around the teacups and traveling through the haunted mansion. But when I got to Disneyland, all I could think of was the next ride and the next. When we would leave, I felt a sense of disappointment, like I hadn't really been there at all.
So I'd look forward to the day we could go back and begin the process of yearning for something better around the next bend all over again. Proverb 27.1 says, do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring. And that's been a lifelong problem for me, always looking for tomorrow to bring me joy and peace. It also brought me a lot of worry.
And although God wants us to be good stewards of our life, planning and preparing, He doesn't want our hearts and minds to be absent from today, or worse, trapped in the past. During difficult seasons, we can so easily project our life to what we hope it to be, or catastrophize our life to what we are worried it will be. We often also wish we could just go back to the way things were, back home, back to a perceived better, or safer time. On my ride's home from the Magic Kingdom, I would wish I could go back, go back and relish each ride, each experience to its fullest.
And while I was doing that, I was probably missing out again on what was happening right then and there. Now, I can only imagine the Prophet Elijah, a quiet rugged mountain shepherd on day 50, or 100, or even 200, in the Kureth ravine, letting his mind wander back home to Gilead. You know, being just a man, he probably once or twice, longed for his old way of life, where kings and queens weren't threatening his life. Where he could just pick berries and drink fresh goat milk each day instead of relying on ravens for food.
But God needed him right there, right at that time, paying attention. In the book of James, chapter 4, 13 to 15, we hear this. Now listen, you who say, today or tomorrow we will go to this city or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money. Why, you don't even know what will happen tomorrow.
What is your life? You are a miss that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, if it is the Lord's will, we will live and do this or that. You know, that's a hard lesson when we are in pain, suffering through bad news or being persecuted.
We are admonished to trust in God for tomorrow and not yearned to go backwards to home. And yet in the midst of my Kureth, I found myself doing just that. Both my children had returned to their own homes after saying their final goodbyes to their beloved grandmother. My husband too had returned back to a job that needed his presence.
And that next day, after particularly hard few moments, and to be honest, watching my brother-in-law's little family gather so closely together, I needed to escape. I felt so alone and incapable of the task of helping shepherd my mother-in-law through her final days. I took my eyes off the Lord and placed them back on myself. A phone call home had me crying out to my husband.
I can't do this. I'm not strong enough. I want to go home right now. You see, I wanted to go back to before the cancer.
I wanted to envelop myself in my comfortable routine back home. Fear and loneliness wrapped around me like a heavy blanket. And then I remembered Elijah. I looked toward the majesty of the Colorado Rockies and remember God can do all things.
And he needed me right there, right now. Not longing for home or better times, not worrying about the future. Instead, paying attention to the beautiful moments in the lessons he had placed before me today. John 1622 tells us, so with you, now is your time of grief, but I will see you again.
You will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy. You know friends, I still battle looking for the next better thing around the corner, but the time between that search and remembering to enjoy this day has been reduced in your moments. As I pull my thoughts back to looking for Jesus right now, there is a time for everything. To prepare it to so to cry and to laugh.
To keep and throw away. To mourn and to dance. And when we step outside God's timing, we find ourselves at odds with his plan. But when we live in his moments, his seasons, we find ourselves in harmony.
That is God's promise piece. And that, my friends, is exactly where the joy is. Have a great day. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the A Bolden Podcast.
Be sure to follow along so you don't miss any episode. And check out my blog at embolden.net.