Perspectives

Today was a great day!  We had a lot of fun working, praying, visiting and playing with several different families and friends.  We began with a visit to our friend Cesar.  Cesar is man who has touched many lives and some of you reading may even know his story.  Cesar has been bed ridden for years and has a degenerative bone disease which is very painful.  Today as he shared with us he shared about several times when he has almost died.  He has terrible pain almost constantly and yet this man is full of nothing but praise for Jesus!

We sat there as he quoted verse after verse from memory sharing encouragement and hope for us and for the young men from the carpentry school that our friends Carl and Danae had brought to with them to glean some wisdom and encouragement.  One particular verse stuck out to me as he shared today it was from 2 Corinthians 4:17-18 which says "¹⁷ For our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever! ¹⁸ So we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever."

It would be so easy for someone in Cesars place to get focused on the pain and suffering and have a "woe is me" attitude, but instead Cesar has used this time in his life as an opportunity to minister to the many people who come through his doors.  I have never met a more encouraging person so full of the Spirit of God! 

The Lord has been teaching me a lot over the last 4 months that we have lived here and one of them is about perspective.  Not necesarily perspectives of living in Guatemala versus living in America, but more about eternal perspective.  We often live and make life all about things we can see, touch and smell instead of about unseen eternal things.

We make life about what we can get, eat and do.  We make it about having fun and living the American dream.  When the Lord reminds us that those things whether good or bad won't last forever.  In fact they won't last very long at all in comparison to eternity.  James reminds us that our lives are but a vapor here one day and gone the next.

So let us spend our days, hours and minutes living for things that will last forever.  Living to be the husbands, wives, mothers, fathers, sons and daughters and friends we are called to be.  Living to make a difference for eternity in all the relationships we have.  Living to invest our money in places that will make a difference for eternity.  Lets use our lives together to make a differnce for eternity!