The other day I was walking through an unfamiliar grocery store, browsing though the many aisles where there is a selection I cannot find at the stores near home.

I soon found myself in the Christmas candy aisle, gazing at all the many treats to be found there, when my eyes landed on a tin covered with a photo of brightly colored candies.

In an instant, my mind went back to Christmases of yesteryear, where this candy always had a place. Ribbon candy, the hard candy with the flower in the center, the straws and squares filled with chocolate or mint…

I could almost taste it.

I don’t normally buy candy (I am not its biggest fan) but that drew me in—despite it’s rather expensive price—and I picked up the box and put it in my cart.

When I got home, I opened that box and picked out a piece. I savored it and enjoyed it and…haven’t touched the box since. It was good but not as good as I remember and I am still not much of a candy fan. I will enjoy it throughout the season, I am sure. If I don’t, my husband will, as he is a big fan of candy.

Memories are funny things, aren’t they? They can trick us into forming opinions. Sometimes those opinions are accurate and sometimes they just aren’t.

I was thinking about this as I realized over the past few weeks that I have formed opinions about a few people based on one thing they may have said in the past or one thing that happened.

Is this even fair?

Is my memory even correct about what was said or what I “remember” happening? Or did it become exaggerated? Was it “mis-remembered”?

As I was reflecting on this, my heart sank, realizing that people were probably still judging me on one of the many stupid things I have said in the past. One of the biggest crosses to bear if you are a “talker” is this. Many times we aren’t even aware that we offended or hurt someone and it was never our intention to do so.

I don’t think I talk without thinking like I used to, although I am sure it still happens sometimes. I have started praying as soon as I leave a conversation that has made me worry about offending someone. O, Lord, please let them know my heart. Please let them know I didn’t mean to offend them. O, please help them to forgive me if I said something with the wrong tone or in a sinful way.

I don’t know if He has answered that prayer. And I cannot control how someone else responds. I can only continue to work on making sure anything that leaves my mouth is said with love and humility. It will be a lifelong struggle for someone like me. But it is truly my desire to please the Lord in all I say.

But as I was thinking about my struggle in this area and the grace I long to receive from others, I realized I was not extending the same grace.

And so now I am going to choose to extend grace. I am going to stop judging someone based on a past offhand comment that my imperfect memory has contrived to give motive or purpose to.

Life is short. Relationships are hard enough without imperfect memories crowding our minds and adding dark shadows to our relationships.

That candy was good but it wasn’t as good as I remembered. The joy of that candy was in the memory of it.

It was a good reminder that my memory is not perfect. Sometimes it remembers things in an exaggerated good way and sometimes it remembers things in an exaggerated bad way. And many times it doesn’t remember anything at all! Isn’t it amazing how much we don’t remember from the past? But that’s another subject altogether, isn’t it?

I am sharing this today in hopes that it may encourage us all to extend grace to others and to not rely on our memories that really cannot be relied upon.

And if someone did say something hurtful or awkward or stupid, then let’s make the choice today to forgive them and wipe the slate clean.

Because life is just too short to base our relationships on the past.

**PLEASE NOTE: This post is NOT referring to serious things that have happened in the past. I am not referring to abuse or to habitual actions and words that have caused much pain. I am referring here only to the off-hand comments or actions that are said or done (often unintentionally) and which we tend to exaggerate in our minds.

Prayer is so critical to the Christian life. And we believers know that there is so much more to a godly prayer life than simply supplication (requests) BUT…regarding prayer requests: I believe most of us would admit that we have no idea how to organize the many prayer requests that come our way each week.

We have to decide if we are going to pray for them once. Or weekly. Or daily. Sometimes we forget to pray for a request at all, despite our best intentions. I have to admit that I find it hard sometimes to keep track of all the many requests that come my way. We want to pray for our families, friends, and co-workers; for those we know who are lost; for the situations that come to our ears every day through friends or church or emails.

And then there are our families and many other loved ones. How do we pray for them intentionally and in a way that doesn’t sound like a broken record? How do we remember the many answered prayers that come our way each year? Or do we take the time to intentionally thank God for His work in our lives or for a particular blessing?

I’ve been thinking about all of these things. Prayer has been challenging for me. I have struggled to be organized in how I approach prayer, often just praying for things as they come to mind. But the problem with this is that then there are so many things that are forgotten. Things I should be praying for–that I want to pray for–that simply slip my mind during prayer time.

It is with this in mind that I decided to create a prayer journal for my own use. As I was creating it, I had the thought that perhaps some of you might appreciate it, as well, and so I made it available on Amazon.

This journal will not work miracles. If you don’t make time for prayer it will not be helpful. But it is my hope that, for anyone who truly desires to have a stronger prayer life, this little book might be helpful in making that happen.

The book itself is broken into five different sections and is designed to be used for a year, although you could start at any point during the year to use it. You can click HERE for sample pages.

You can purchase the journal at THIS LINK. Thanks for your support. I surely do hope it is a blessing to some of you!

Years ago, we used to sing choruses at church on Sunday evenings using an overhead projector. The song leader would shuffle through the transparencies to find the song we would be singing and then lay it on the modern machine (at the time) that made it possible for us all to see the words on the screen in front of us.

One of the choruses we would often sing had this line in it—

God will make a way where there seems to be no way

That line has come to me often throughout my life. Can God make a way where there seems to be no way? Does He do this?

We believers know He most certainly does.

I was listening to a sermon the other day that my brother (Pastor Dean) had preached many years ago. In this sermon, he used an example I’ve been thinking about ever since. He said that as he was traveling one time, a mountain range suddenly rose ahead of him that looked quite impassable. From a distance, no road or way through or over it could be seen. But as he got closer, he saw the narrow road that led right through it. He reminded us that we can’t always see the way ahead of us but we know God will make one.

And then last night, of all things, I read a similar thing in a missionary biography I am currently reading.

The *story tells of three women who undertook the difficult task to get the Gospel out to northwest China and beyond. Their home base was the most inhabited town furthest west in China. But for eight months of the year they would travel, using the centuries old trade routes, to the villages and Gobi desert oases, in which resided hundreds of thousands who had never heard the Gospel.

As they traveled, they once came upon a mountain range that looked entirely impassable. But I’d rather share the author’s words (who is actually one of the women traveling)—

Suddenly, the road had turned up and led up to a towering range through which no outlet could be seen. They had trodden the rough stones of the foot-hills and nearly lost their way among the defiles [meaning: narrow passes or gorges], before the narrow opening of the mountain pass had come into sight. Now they suddenly emerged and saw all that lay behind in true perspective. The clearly marked road, which close at hand had been so hard to trace, was now quite unmistakable. Ahead, too, there was a way, though they could not quite see where it led. That matter nothing; the fiery, cloudy pillar had guided thus far and it was easy to rest in confidence for the future. *

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As I have been reflecting on these very similar accounts of facing what looks to be an impassable mountain, I’ve been thinking about three things especially.

First, from a distance, we so often can’t see the “way”. To our dim eyes, we cannot see how we could possibly get through the trial that looms in front of us. Or that issue that has no solution. And yet, we just take the next step. We do the next right thing. And, eventually, God reveals the path we couldn’t see from a distance.

Sometimes, we get to the other side and we look back, not even knowing each single step was slowly leading us through. We thought we were still on the other side and here we had traversed through the mountain to the other side.

Other times, every step we take is hard and laborious. It feels like it will never end. But we cannot look forward to what life will be like a hundred steps down the road but, rather, need to keep taking the single step that is right in front of us.

Life becomes overwhelming when we look too far down the road. As the author wrote: God had guided thus far and that gives us confidence for the future.

I can think of things like that in my life. I really wondered how I would get through. And yet I did get through. Thanks to the Lord, I did walk through some very deep valleys and difficult trials, one step at a time.

You have had your own deep valleys and difficult trials. I’d rather guess many of you have had harder days than I can even imagine. But, even then, God is faithful to comfort and guide. It is the testimony I hear over and over again from those who, in faith and in submission to His will, have turned to God in their troubles.

Second, we can tend to make the mountains ranges about US. If we aren’t careful, we become self-centered as we traverse through our trials and troubles, And while there will always be something for us to learn in any trial, we must remember that God’s purposes are so intertwined and interwoven that He will have purposes and plans for our trial that far exceed it’s impact on just our life.

It is hard to imagine how many souls will be in heaven because of the testimony of a dying Christian. Or how much spiritual growth has taken place because of a believer watching another believer humbly and faithfully walk with God through an unimaginable trial.

It is only when we can think outside ourselves, that we can move beyond the doubt and the discouragement that threatens to overwhelm us.

And, third, and finally, is the goodness of God. Can God possibly be good—even in our grief and pain? Our natural, fleshly response is to base our belief of His goodness on our experience. If things are going well, we will proclaim His goodness. But it is in loss, disappointment, betrayal, grief, and pain where this is so much harder.

And yet…

If we respond in trust and faith, it is in these difficult circumstances that we comprehend a goodness of God that goes beyond our circumstances. We begin to understand His promises in a way not possible before the trial. We experience the love of our brothers and sisters in Christ in a way that wasn’t possible or necessary before the trial.

**But if not, He is still good
But if not, He is still kind
Though I may not understand Your purpose or Your plan
I will trust You, my Savior and my Friend

These lyrics, written by a heartbroken woman who longs to be a mama, are profound in their declaration.

Some treks through the mountain range last a long time and do not end in the way we hoped. Some trials seem to go on forever and when we get to the other side, another one looms right in front of us.

And yet, through it all, God is good.

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Life can be so hard. But God is good. For God’s dear redeemed child, His grace and mercy abound.

This life is not all there is. We have a hope that supersedes our earthly fears and worries. We have strength for today that comes from the One, True God. And we have the promise that God will never leave us or forsake us.

These aren’t pie-in-the-sky beliefs based on a helpless, manmade god. These are beliefs based on the only TRUE GOD who has given us the TRUTH, found in His inerrant, inspired Word.

*Something Happened by Mildred Cable and Francesca French. (Please note that this book has been out of print for years and the only place I could find to read it was on Internet Archive. Not the most convenient way to read a book, but I can attest to the fact that it is possible!)

**This beautiful song can be found here.

As I was reading Ezra 9 this morning, I was struck by the similarity of our Christian culture to the culture Ezra found himself in. Oh, perhaps the fruit of the compromise looks different all these years later, but compromise is compromise.

If we back up to the beginning of the Old Testament, we will remember that God wanted Israel to say separate from the idolatrous nations that surrounded them. They were not to have anything to do with them. Israel was to stand as a separated nation that looked different and stood out in their worship of the One, True God alone.

If we move to the New Testament, we will see that this is also the same desire God has for the Church. Many verses encourage us to purity, holiness, and separation from the world. God still wants this same thing for His people today.

But you will rarely hear this message.

And, in fact, many of those who are platformed rarely use the Bible. If they do, they often pull verses out of context. Generally, I have seen the Bible become something “unknowable”. So many have believed the lie that you cannot stand on scripture, because there is no one interpretation of any passage, often with the only exception being “the Gospel”.  

One has to wonder how the Gospel can have one single interpretation. Who gets to pick and choose what is true and what is up for any old interpration?

If we look back over recent history, we will see that this was the earnest goal of those who would take the church towards mysticism and a one world religion. And so step by step they have undermined the Bible and the historical belief that there is one interpretation and that we can know what that is.

You simply cannot have a people who believe the Bible is the authority for all of life and godliness if you want to succeed in moving a large group of people towards a one world religion. Not when it clearly opposes so much that would be in that movement.  

The plan to undermine scripture has succeeded gloriously. They have deceived so many Christians into believing that we can’t know the Bible with certainty and no one can speak with authority on what scripture says.

I find it fascinating that two thousand years of the true church believing some very basic doctrines found in scripture literally means nothing. Every scripture is up for grabs to many who would proclaim Christ…except the Gospel.

And if someone proclaims the Gospel, then they are given a pass. No matter what else they say, do or believe, as long as they have “preached the Gospel” all is okay. Apparently, it is ONLY the Gospel that matters now.

It is so important that we remember that ALL of scripture is God’s Word. We don’t get to pick and choose what is open to interpretation and what isn’t.

When I write a letter I have one meaning for each sentence. There are not multiple meanings. God’s Word is no different.

The problem probably comes down to this: we just do not always like the clear meaning of what is written.

I have been thinking a lot about 2 Thessalonians 2:10-11 these past few weeks. It says in these verses that people will be deceived by the antichrist because they did not love the truth.

This would appear to be a key to discerning in these difficult days.

Loving the truth will help us avoid being deceived. We need to cast our own likes and desires aside as we search for the truth in the Bible.

Of course, we all struggle with this, don’t we? We all have our idols. We have the things that mean more to us than the truth. So what do we do?

I have no suggestion other than to pray to God to remove our blinders. That He will help us desire the truth of His Word more than anything else. And to spend time in God’s Word, believing in its literal, inerrant, inspired truth.

Once again, I just want to go on record saying my opinion means less than nothing. I am a sinner, just like you. I am prone to deception, just like you. Let’s keep our hearts and minds on the Word of God.

We need to be careful not to follow celebrities. So many are deceived and some are purposely deceiving. Scripture tells us that there will be many false teachers in the last days and that they will look like sheep! We are told to keep watch and be on guard, testing all things by God’s Word. This is not a popular message and yet, here again, we must obey scripture over what is popular.

Ezra called Israel to put away their compromise and turn back to God. I have just a teeny tiny platform in this world, but I would call us all (myself included) to the same thing. May we cast off our compromise with the world and turn our whole hearts back to God.