Our theme for this month: “You Gotta Keep Dancing”
Our Bible verse for today: “Now go! I will help you speak and I will teach you what to say.” Exodus 4:12 (CSB)
Our thought for today: “Just walk it out day-by-day”
Those of you who have been reading these daily devotionals for a long time have probably heard me say before that each day these devotionals are about me first and about everyone else second. More than eight years ago I started writing these little daily messages as part of my personal quiet time with the Lord. Writing helps me to clarify my thinking. So each day I would write about an issue the Lord was helping me to work through. It was about me and it was for me. It was only later that I felt led to begin sharing them with others who might be interested in reading them too. Little did I realize that eight years later there would be hundreds of faithful daily readers through emails, Facebook, and the church website.
Today will be the last message in our series “You Gotta Keep Dancing”. I have extended it one day into the new month because tomorrow I leave for a one week mission trip to build and renovate houses in a poor section of Appalachia in Eastern Kentucky. A group from our church will be meeting-up with another group coming down from Maryland and together we will spend the week working with the Christian Appalachian Project (CAP) to serve impoverished families in that region. So this will be the last devotional message you will receive until Saturday June 8th. I want to ask you to hang on it and use it as a reminder to pray for our team each day that we are gone.
What does that have to do with our theme of “You Gotta Keep Dancing”? Just that God has used the issue of mission trips to teach this lesson of “keep dancing” to me in a personal and powerful way. Back in March of 2007, when my wife Linda had her stroke and brain surgeries, I was serving as the Vice-President of Operations for an international humanitarian relief agency. My job was to plan and lead humanitarian relief missions around the world. I also traveled around the USA to speak in churches and to attend mission conferences as I promoted our organization and recruited team members.
But when Linda became disabled it seemed as if my traveling days were over. I left the humanitarian relief agency and returned to being a Pastor instead. It looked like I probably wouldn’t be going on any more mission trips. But Linda and I both sensed the Lord telling us to just take it one mission trip at a time and to trust Him for how it would work out. So I continued to help with the missions, one trip at a time.
Amazingly, over the 12+ years since Linda’s stroke, I have somehow been able to plan and lead 19 international mission trips to Romania, Haiti, Mexico, the Andes Mountains of Peru, and the Amazon Jungle. There have also been numerous shorter missions to Appalachia here in the USA.
How has that been possible? God. That’s it, just God. Somehow in each case, with the help of family members, neighbors, church family, and Linda’s own great attitude and determined spirit, the details at home just worked out and I have been able to go – over and over and over again. We just had to keep dancing and God made it possible.
That’s true for you too. Regardless of what your issue or challenge is the answer is to just keep dancing. Just take it one day at a time, one event at a time, and just keep moving forward.
Oak Hill Baptist Church