How Fortunate Infinite Wisdom Prevails!

I love, love, love Ruth Bell Graham's poetry... Mom introduced it to me in fourth grade when she gave me a copy of Ruth's book, "Sitting By My Laughing Fire" and told me to learn to write poetry. {I never did write anything worth saving.}

At the time, I thought her poetry was annoying and hard to understand.

Then I grew up a little and lived a little life and started to savor some of her Ruth's words.

And now, there are few things I like more than a Ruth Bell Graham poem. The realness just oozes from it... and her words say what my heart never managed to put into words.

I'll share one of my all-time favorites tonight.

Had I been Joseph's mother

I'd have prayed

protection from his brothers:

"God keep him safe;

he is so young,

so different from

the others."

Mercifully she never knew

there would be slavery

and prison, too.

Had I been Moses' mother

I'd have wept

to keep my little son;

praying she might forget

the babe drawn from the water

of the Nile,

had I not kept

him for her

nursing him the while?

Was he not mine

and she

but Pharaoh's daughter?

Had I been Daniel's mother

I should have pled

"Give victory!

This Babylonian horde-

godless and cruel -

don't let them take him captive

-- better dead,

Almighty Lord!"

Had I been Mary -

Oh, had I been she,

I would have cried

as never a mother cried,

"...Anything, O God,

anything...

but crucified!"

With such prayers

importunate

my finite wisdom

would assail

Infinite Wisdom;

God, how fortunate

Infinite Wisdom

should prevail!

-- RBG

Choose for us, God

Choose for us, God,

nor let our weak preferring

Cheat us of good

Thou hast for us designed

Choose for us, God;

Thy wisdom is unerring.

And we are fools and blind.

When I Don't Know What My Heart Needs

"God is beyond good to bless our lives with children!

When we don't know what our hearts need, He does!! All we have to do is let Him bless us. :-) "

-- The words of a long-time family friend,

a mommy of 14 children,

writing about her youngest child turning three.

"When we don't know what our hearts need, He does!!"

So true. So true.

2010 was a year of me not knowing what my heart needed, but God was kind enough to give me what my heart needed.

Lots of pain, lots of stretching, lots of disappointment... but He stirred up the stagnant places and the places that had grown hard and selfish and dead and just full of myself.

He broke my heart so I could be tender and compassionate instead of proud and "together".

He disappointed my fondest hopes so that I could learn to love Him more than life itself.

He led me through the fire so that I could learn what really matters and what doesn't matter at all in life - this one, and the one to come.

He gave me Himself, and His tenderness, and His nearness and compassion so that I could learn to love Him and Him alone. So that I could see that really nothing else matters much in comparison to clinging to Jesus.

He said, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall SEE GOD!"

That is one of my goals for this year. To have a pure heart. Not because I can make myself have a pure heart, or even see what is ugly and defiled in my heart (I'm so blind to my own sin so often).

But it is my goal to let the Lord Jesus form in me a pure heart - a heart with a single eye, a single master, a single vision, by yielding to His Hands in my life, even when they hurt. For He knows what my heart needs, even when I don't.

I love Him for that.