Insurance

Insurance

We were traveling and chatting.  But I did happen to catch the words on the large billboard.  “It will never happen to us.”  The words were large and bold, but so too were the words underneath, “.... is NOT good insurance.”  Obviously, the words fit well for the ones offering health insurance, home insurance, car insurance, and probably some other insure-ers wanting to capture your rational thinking for just a moment.  Losing an infant to death in my mid-twenties was not something I had planned or prepared for.  My son never expected the Twin Towers to crumble when he stood in front of them on Monday, September 10, 2001.  Neither did you expect the child you loved and nurtured, to walk away from all you taught her.  Nor did you expect the divorce or the flagrant ugliness that followed.   Fires, tornadoes, earthquakes have stolen everything a family owns.  We don’t expect leadership to fail us.  Vacations have turned into horror stories – and the list could go on.  We weren’t ready, and in many ways, we can’t be fully ready.

There is another area too in which we can think, it will never happen.  But then it does.  We don’t plan to sin.  We don’t plan to go contrary to what God wants for us, contrary to what is best for us.  But, we do.  We forget what God has taught us.  We are drawn to things that seem easier, more appealing, less demanding.  We fail to influence others, and instead, we are influenced by the morals, practices, and beliefs, or lack of belief, of those around us.  God and His truth, His ways, become less and less important to us.  We make excuses, minimize, rationalize, fail to take responsibility.  We never intended to make those choices, but we did.  More and more, we give less and less, to God and to others.  And prayerfully, somewhere along the line, we ask ourselves, how did I get here?  Why did I do that?

And the answer to tragedy or to sin, is brokenness.  A brokenness before God that says, I can’t. God can. I will let Him.  A brokenness that faces the need, defines it before God, owns the emptiness and inadequacy, and lays it all at His feet.  We can think “it will never happen to me,” but life doesn’t hold that kind of guarantee, not even for the believer.  And brokenness in the need gives us an awareness of His presence and an outpouring of His grace and sufficiency.  And moment by moment, day by day, we stay with Him and draw from Him.  I love the verse where God speaks and says, “Open wide your mouth, and I will fill it.”   But, can we be more ready before the tragedy crashes into our life?  Can we create within ourselves a stronger capacity to know and resist sin, to say “no” before we go contrary to what God wants for us?  And the answer for both is once again the same.  Get to know God more fully for who He truly is.  Get to know the truth of His ways and His promises.  Walk with Him.  Practice God-dependence and God-saturated days.  Every day.  Moment by moment.  It’s the best insurance possible.

                                                                                             – Bev

(Related Bible reading:  Psalm 81:10; Psalm 9:9,10)