My mother-in-law Barbara Earheart is one amazing woman. She inspires me the way she cares for my father-in-law David and her mom Doris. Barbara is fresh on my mind because she called this morning to see if she could come wash her comforter in our washer. Our washer is bigger than hers, and they have a king size comforter. When she came over to the house we must have talked for over an hour, and my love for her grew even more. She is being Jesus to no end to the people around her, and her energy gives me hope beyond words because I know the Father is infusing her with that energy to do the amazing things she is doing. It reminds me of the passage in Acts my late friend Bonnie was fond of.

In Him we live and move and have our being.

Fighting through conflict, whether that’s illness or mental illness, is a must in every life. Illness can lead to mental illness, and I think that’s what many people experience when they suffer through chronic illness. Romans is clear that the Spirit intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express, and I cannot keep silent about factors of my faith that empower me to steer when the rubber meets the road. Years of training personally and professionally have shown me time and again through failure and success that His Word never leaves me at rock bottom. Whether that was through a typhoon in Guam or an anxiety attack early in the morning at a Nashville Walmart it doesn’t matter because His presence is a constant that He never lets go.

If this was the last sentence I was to ever write, and I was to leave you the last thing that I want you to remember it would be that our Father is real, and He grieves when you grieve, but He does not wallow in that grief because He’s always about setting us free from grief and dying. Each one of us has, is and will experience grief and death because a man and a woman named Adam and Eve made sure of that, but the ultimate blame is to be placed upon a serpent who has been tempting us all to be “like” God since that time. His protocol hasn’t changed since that time, so why would it since it’s worked so well. How that angelic being could reject the perfection of the Creator is beyond me, but please remember that he is desperate for destruction as he knows his days are numbered. I have no idea when that last day is because not even the Son knows. That day could be a million years, but it could be tomorrow. I don’t know. And that’s not the point. The point is that as we are in a relationship with the Father, Son and Spirit Who are fighting for us even as I type these words. Will we fail? Will we place our trust in things that do not endure? Will we commit sins of omission and commission? You know the answers to those questions. We don’t get up in the morning because we get life right. We get up in the morning because we were created in the image of the Father to bring glory to His name. The fact that my mother-in-law puts one foot in front of the other to care for her husband and mother is a sign that our Father loves every human being on the planet Earth.

One day the lion will lie down with the lamb, and the perfection God wanted to create in the Garden of Eden will transform our global village into a utopia where that will be possible, but until then we have to accept my faith that we have a Father Who is working out all of the brokenness to His glory. I don’t understand why the creation murders the creation except to say that Satan is a powerful force of evil who has rejected God.

I am not among those who reject God, and neither is my mother-in-law. She is a force of good whose love inspires me, and her unconditional love for people propels me into a future that can never perish, spoil or fade.

I love you dear ones.