The Plumbline

Show me what you want me to do. You are my God. Let your good Spirit lead me over level ground. (Psalm 143:10) Sometimes we want level ground pathways in life, but they just don't seem to come. We find ourselves in all manner of 'uneven' paths, trying us from every angle spiritually, emotionally, financially, and even physically. They aren't meant to stop our forward progress with Jesus, but they certainly put a 'kink' in it at times! It is never a bad prayer to ask God to show us to that level ground in life. In fact, he'd relish the opportunity to take you from the 'unevenness' of life's challenges into the 'evenness' of his peace, presence, and purpose. You might find yourself there right now - facing challenges that you'd never thought you'd have to face. The more 'uneven' the path right now, the more you can count on God helping you navigate to 'even' ground once again. It might not seem like it, but that brut

When the Israelites saw Pharaoh and his army coming toward them, they were very frightened and cried to the Lord for help. They said to Moses, “Why did you bring us out of Egypt? Did you bring us out here in the desert to die? We could have died peacefully in Egypt; there were plenty of graves in Egypt. We told you this would happen! In Egypt we said, ‘Please don’t bother us. Let us stay and serve the Egyptians.’ It would have been better for us to stay and be slaves than to come out here and die in the desert.” But Moses answered, “Don’t be afraid! Don’t run away! Stand where you are and watch the Lord save you today. You will never see these Egyptians again. You will not have to do anything but stay calm. The Lord will do the fighting for you.” (Exodus 14:10-14) There are a lot of times God brings us to a certain point in our lives and all we do is 'stand there and watch', hoping for the Lord to do all the work. The very next verse is God's directive to MOVE. In other w

Be alert and think straight. Put all your hope in how kind God will be to you when Jesus Christ appears. Behave like obedient children . Don’t let your lives be controlled by your desires, as they used to be. Always live as God’s holy people should, because God is the one who chose you, and he is holy. That’s why the Scriptures say, “I am the holy God, and you must be holy too.” (I Peter 1:13-16 CEV) In medical assessment, a patient who is less alert than their baseline assessment had been at a previous point might be under the untoward influence of a sedative, or perhaps have suffered a life-altering event such as stroke or bleed into their brain. To be alert, one is to be fully awake and able to direct full attention toward something. If someone is awake, but drifts easily back to sleep, without being able to focus or concentrate on what you are asking them to do, we begin to look for causes of this "drift" in attentiveness and alertness. It is this "alertness"

Modern-day cell phones have those built-in 'public safety alerts'. Why? We want to avoid the harm associated with the warning or be on the look-out to help someone who is in danger themselves. The purpose of a warning is to give us sufficient notice to prepare or be 'alert'. Even when I take my car into the local auto shop to have them fill my tires with air and rotate them every 5000 miles or so, they check the tread and general condition of the tires. This simple practice is designed to alert me to the potential of uneven wear, possible sidewall damage from road hazards I did not recognize, or wearing tread that may result in the need for new tires. They are concerned about safety. They know I will come back when I recognize the need for new tires - sometimes even before I truthfully need them. I take their warnings seriously - because they are the experts! Why is it we don't take other warnings in our lives just as seriously? It isn't because they are

If people can’t see what God is doing, they stumble all over themselves; but when they attend to what he reveals, they are most blessed. (Proverbs 29:18) Seeing allows us to perceive many times, but that is not guaranteed. We could become alert to something happening through our other senses of hearing, touch, or smell, but seeing is what often "connects the dots" for us. Some call this being a "visual learner" - we can read all about some process, but once we see it done a couple of times, we've got it! Without seeing, we don't have the fullest perception. Yet, it is possible to "bypass" this element of perception - functioning pretty well, as a matter of fact - but we miss out on the splendor of color, the mystery of the twinkle in someone's eye, and the awing wonder of following the trail of a jet high up in the sky. We function okay, but we don't "get the full picture" when our seeing is not partnered with us perceiving.