Stressed and sick and tired …

What a happy title for a blog! 😉

But it accurate … I am stressed, sick, and tired.

Stressed because of something challenging that happened yesterday that our family has to keep addressing this morning. (Very hard!)

Sick because, well, apparently some little virus or bug is having a happy time inside of me–but it’s making all of the normal sick symptoms fuzz up my brain and knock my energy level down to zilch.

Which leads me right to TIRED.

Oh well! Every day isn’t like this, right?
Makes me appreciate the days I wake up before the alarm and happily head out the door to walk Lilikoi.

Hope you’re feeling better than me!
And that your day is a blessed one.

I’ll close with another thought from Ajith Fernando …

Blessings to you!
— Tara B.

PAIN DOES ITS WORK, AND GRACE TAKES OVER
Written by Ajith Fernando while traveling abroad

I left home on a trip abroad feeling very discouraged and hurt because of some problems. This is normal in the Christian life, and these are emotions I must not deny. Sorrow and pain must be permitted to do their work. They

– deepen our commitment and mould our character, especially teaching us patience;
– lead us to confess sin and show the fruit of repentance;
– prepare us to face greater suffering;
 – bring us closer to suffering humanity;
– make us more effective ministers; and
– increase our joy by causing us to depend more on God and his grace than on earthly things and ourselves.

But we cannot go on living life overwhelmed by our problems. Once discouragement and hurt have done their work we must return to the normal Christian life which I like to define as ‘being overwhelmed by grace.”

… One of the things which help us to return to the attitude of being overwhelmed by grace is exposure to the simple, but beautifully profound, truths of Christianity. God did that to me during my retreat through the book, Out of my Mind, by Joseph Bayly (Zondervan). He had a column by the same name in the now defunct Eternity Magazine. It was my favourite monthly reading in my early years in the ministry. Three of Bayly’s sons died aged four years, three weeks and eighteen years. Each of his other four children ended up in ministry. He was known as a prophet to our generation, but his writing oozes with the deep grace of God learned through suffering.

Bayly reminded me that, in the life made beautiful by grace, there are some things which are normal but which the world despises. We must accept these things as basic to the Christian life and not be overly upset by the more negative ones among them. Here are some of those things:

– a simple trust in Christ and an enjoyment of his love which causes us to be thrilled with life;
– sacrificial love for others including our family members;
– suffering for our principles;
– following the way of the cross even though the world sees it as going down on the status scale;
– proactively seeking to bring people to faith in Christ because that is their only hope for escaping eternal damnation and finding eternal salvation;
– accepting every disappointment and hurt as a means used by God to bless us;
– opposing wrong, however out of step we may seem with the rest of society;
– studying the challenges to Christian thinking in contemporary society and formulating responses to them so that Christians will be warned and armed to face them and non-Christians will be challenged to change their minds;
– refusing to allow the sham values of our superficial, media-dominated society to influence our values, lifestyle and methods.

… God made us humans with eternity in our hearts (Eccl. 3:11). We are too exalted to be satisfied with mere earthly honour. Only the joy and peace of the eternal God can truly satisfy our souls. John Wesley said, ‘O what a pearl of what great a price is the lowest degree of the peace of God.’ It is a treasure so valuable that it is worthwhile sacrificing everything in order to obtain it.