3-24-25

This past weekend was awesome……some of ya’ll caught that last week I had a

birthday and Saturday morning, unbeknownst to me, Charlene had cooked up a

plan where my grown up kids and my perfect grandkids all showed up at the

house!......it was awesome!.....the weather was perfect, we played cornhole in the

backyard, grilled steaks, and just had a wonderful day…….there are days when life

can seem to wear on you……the trick is remembering what’s important……there

are things that happen all around us every day and we can get so caught up in the

minutiae of details, and bills to pay, and work to do, and this and that and the

other…….all of that pales in comparison to what is real……the trick is

remembering what’s important…..the Bible calls it “encouraging yourself in the

Lord”……there is a passage in 1 Samuel 30 where David returns to his village to

find that the enemy has ransacked it and all of the women and children had been

hauled away as slaves…..including his own wife…..David’s men turned on him and

accused him of allowing the tragedy……but we’re told that despite being

personally despondent over everything around him…..which no one could blame

him for because it was an outright tragedy……David sat down and “encouraged

himself in the Lord”…….I have seen that described as David taking a deep breath

and remembering that he had already been through so much before that

day…..that God had done so much in his life already……and he drew from those

blessings to give him strength……and then he stood up, consulted God on his next

steps, and went into battle and saved every one of them…..including his own

family…..it’s an absolute fact that in this life we will have hard times…..we just

will…..the trick is getting into the middle of it and remembering the blessings….

So having said all of that, and as long as I’m being wistful here for a minute, I’ve

got to tell you about one of the greatest gifts that was ever given to me…..it was

one that I totally didn’t expect…..did not see it coming….Charlene and I have been

blessed with a full and wonderful life…..we have never gone without, but we have

had many years where we had no excess…..we were the epitome of poor

newlyweds who married for love and not money…..we had kids early…..married at

21, and a Dad by 23…..and absolutely no regrets……but we made some decisions

about our calling early on…..we were real committed to Charlene being home

with the kids when they were young……it meant that we sacrificed some income

but we gained incredibly in the way our kids turned out…..but we were also

committed to working with a ministry called YoungLife….for the first ten years out

of college I felt like my daily calling was working with teenagers in ministry and

counseling……in many ways YoungLife is still the best job I ever had…..but it was a

low paying job to say the least…..but we were in it and so we just made do…..at

one point I was doing janitorial work from 5-8 in the mornings, working my full-

time job from 8:30-5, delivering for steak express at night, and National Guard on

the weekends…..and God always put food on the table and our kids never knew

that we lived modestly because Charlene made everything stretch just right……

But back to that gift that someone gave me……at the end of ten years I felt like my

calling had changed…..I was supposed to go to law school…..law school in your

30’s ain’t normal…..but then neither am I apparently…..the whole law school thing

is a story in itself and I’m still not sure how we got that done……but I turned in my

notice to YoungLife and began working my way out of a job that I loved……it had

been a long, but good decade……and part of me wondered what I had

accomplished…..had I made a difference…..were there things that I could point

to…..it certainly wasn’t my savings account that was for sure…..at the end of ten

years I had very little pay, no benefits and no retirement…….I was working and

working and working…….but I had forgotten the blessing……I was measuring my

success against my bank account, which is not always a good plan……but

unbeknownst to me there were others who weren’t going to let me forget the

actual blessing……Charlene and one of my coworkers cooked up a scheme…..they

came up with some ruse why we had to go somewhere…..but when we got there

the room was filled with a massive amount of people who had walked with us

through that time……there were faces that I hadn’t seen in a while who came

back for the gathering…..it was more than I could have asked…..it was ten years

packed into one room…….but then there was the gift…..

You see, Charlene and I had lived very modestly…..like VERY modestly…..and

sometimes we were able to do things but didn’t feel like we could do

others……one of those was taking pictures of life…..of kids…..of events…..of family

and friends…..it was old school days so for those of you in the modern generation

we had this thing called film…..you had to buy it….and you had to buy the camera

for it….and when you were done you had to take the film somewhere and pay

them to develop it so that you could see whether they came out right or

not……and when you have no money that gets expensive……many was the time

that we felt like we could buy the film but we couldn’t pay to get it

developed……so we took all the pictures of the kids when they had their first

birthdays, and played little kid sports…..we took photos of family gatherings,

Christmases, and school events……but over time I realized that I had used film

cannisters in drawers, boxes and closets all over the house…..so one day I got a

gallon Ziploc bag and I gathered up every single film cannister I could find…..42

rolls of film containing memories…..and I told Charlene that one day I was going

to get them all developed……but by then we would be talking about nearly 500

dollars worth of development!......but my friend found out about it……and at my

party they presented me with a box containing every last photo from every single

one of those film cannisters!......it was the most amazing gift…..suddenly the

blessings came rushing back……because you don’t take pictures of the hard

times…..you don’t take pictures of the bills you struggle to pay…..or the tired

feeling you get at the end of another 60-hour week…..no one preserves the

images of the lackluster, or the anger, or the defeat……that box of photos, man, it

was a box full of smiles, and growth, and gatherings, and outright blessings……I

spent hours going through that box, remembering, and laughing, and

remembering some more…..gone were the feelings of whether it had been worth

it……All I had to do was look in that box and know that it was……I just had to

remember the blessings…….

The question is not whether you will have hard times…..you will…..the question is:

what do you do with those hard times?…..how do you acquit yourself in the

process…..life gets overwhelming……you can wonder how you got to this place, or

that place, or why me(?), or what could’ve been…..I know I have…..but just this

morning I was reading in Proverbs 24 and saw that at some time in the past I had

marked verse 16……it says “for a righteous man falls seven times and rises again,

but the wicked stumble in time of calamity”……what is your foundation? What is

at your core? Because in that same chapter it also says in verse 10…..”If you fall

apart in a crisis there was not much to you in the first place”……

Part of the overcoming for me is the example I get from David…..I have to sit

down, take a breath, and remember those blessings……and then pray, and then

go to war……It’s a conscious decision…..and I don’t always do it well, but I try

to…..I will be in a rough go, a hard spot, a time of need, or a crisis of some kind,

and I’ll talk to God and say, “yeah, but Lord I remember that time when you did

something in my life and it got me through”…..or I saw what you did that day, or

in my family, or that time I could not explain it but you gave me strength, so since

you’ve done it before and I know it then I’m going to walk in that again today…..

That’s the thing ya’ll…..it is easy to forget to remember……Norman Vincent Peale

once said that we need to ask the Lord to fill us daily because we leak!....true

words…..Encourage yourself in the Lord…..remember those blessings……then pray

and get back in the fight

And that’s a wrap for the Rightside Way