1. God's presence lived in a tent (an elaborate one, for sure, but still a portable house), surrounded by whiny, frequently disobedient people. I need to quit complaining about living in a fifty-year-old Jim Walter home in the 'hood.
2. The older I get, the scarier it gets. Unless I remember to keep my eyes on the goal. The goal is Heaven and being with Jesus.
3. Being busy is not necessarily a good thing. I sort of "mapped out" my retirement days, semester by semester. For a year and a half I home schooled my niece. When she graduated, I asked God what He wanted me to sign up for next, thinking I needed to stay busy. I felt He responded with: keep some mornings during the week open for Me, don't sign up for a lot of things, and just concentrate on ministering in the neighborhood. So I've gone from teaching Hamlet and Macbeth, apologetics, and global issues to sitting in my recliner most mornings, reading scripture, journaling, and trying to discern His will for the unscheduled hours in my day. This has led me to visits with neighbors of various ages and backgrounds, helping friends and family from time to time, some prayer walking, and basically filling in the calender each week as impromptu things crop up. I am finding that I love this. But I also find myself wondering, seriously, what my life would have been like had my days been ordered this way when I was younger. Maybe we have retirement all backwards. Not sure about that...
4. I am sure about this. Lack of forgiveness can forge a bond that is insidious, hard to recognize, and even harder to break. Learning to forgive is the same as learning to trust. If I trust God to handle my affairs, including wrongs that have been done to me or my loved ones, I can forgive. Maybe not immediately when the hurt is fresh but soon enough that it doesn't become an inverse sort of shackle that was never meant to be. From my vantage point of sixty years, I feel I can look back and see a little better (ironically) regarding some spiritual issues that caught me by surprise in my younger years - like spiritual quagmires that were on me before I knew what was happening.
Sooo... basically the things I now value are: having "radar" tuned (hopefully) to waiting on God day by day, having a sin detector that is fine tuned to sniffing out pockets of bitterness and eradicating them via forgiveness, and, last but not least, having a travel map always before me with my destination clearly marked: Heaven. Oh, and not being whiny or discontent as I live (temporarily) in the 'hood while I remember that Almighty God was willing to live in a tent in the desert with malcontents. Basically don't want to have to have a brass serpent hanging on a pole in my neighborhood b/c I've been grumbling, complaining, and whining...
And, yes, I've been reading in the Tanakh lately... Does it show??
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