First of all, I need to ask forgiveness from all my relatives who live in snow country: Colorado, Utah, Kansas, Missouri … and all of those in the northern Midwest who have just endured one of the most severe winter storms in recent history My recent foray with snow is probably nothing compared with what you deal with seasonally. However, for us it was unexpected, disruptive, and destructive.

I live at the northern end of the Sacramento Valley, right where three mountain ranges come together: the Coastal, the Klamath Mountains, and the Cascades. Because of this location, we get the extreme heat of the valley in the summer but also some rather severe and cold storms in the winter, but only occasionally with snow.

Last week, however, the weatherman got it right. We had snow. Our worst since 1968. It started at about seven in the evening but it was wet and wasn’t sticking. By the time I went to bed it was more slush than snow. When I woke up … well, that was a different story. Over a foot of snow, downed trees everywhere (four plus years of drought had made them pretty brittle), and no power.

Gas stove tops were ignited, camp stoves pulled out, generators fired up, and battery blocks located. Then the texts and phone calls began in earnest. Everyone checking on everyone else, making sure friends and family were safe and had a warm place to be.

My mother gave me an Amish perpetual calendar a year ago, and I have been enjoying the pictures and sayings that accompany each day. This last snowstorm and the subsequent concern and help by neighbors and friends reminded me of the quote for January 20th which showed a barn and house amidst a beautiful snowscape. It read: “A snowflake is one of God’s most fragile creations, but look what they can do when they stick together.”

Aint't that the truth, Bubba.

A quote I recently read by C.S. Lewis instantly transported me back to my high school days of playing tennis. We had good teams, primarily because we had a good coach. But a lot of our wins didn’t come from the two hours of practicing our strokes; they came from that last half hour. The conditioning half hour.

We always knew it was coming, and we never really looked forward to it because we knew one thing: it would be painful. But we never doubted our coach because we also knew one other thing. It was worth it. It gave us an advantage over our competition. We knew that the extra strength, the extra stamina, was often the deciding point between winning and losing.

C.S. Lewis wrote “We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.”

Isn’t that true? As much as we might want God’s best, we don’t want to hurt. We want to stay where it is comfortable. We want to stay in the known. We don’t want to leave the people we love. We don’t want to give up the people and things we want to keep. Yet we know that when our will and desires clash with God’s, that His plan is always better. And we know it’s probably going to hurt; we just don’t know how much.

One further complication is that as much as we don’t want to experience pain, we also don’t want to be the source of pain for someone else, and sometimes our willful decisions involve others, and fully surrendering to God’s best for us can cause them pain as well.

But if we want to experience God’s Best then that calls for a full surrender, not a partial one. And we must always remember: God is the Master: Master Designer, Master Healer, Master Comforter.

If you are not dying to watch that television sitcom or Netflix movie tonight, I would urge you to watch the following link.

Michael Ramsden, part of the Ravi Zacharias ministries, spoke at our church a few weeks ago. His message was both fascinating and hugely timely. He began with the following quote by Alexander Fraser Tytler (late 1700s):

A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.

The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:

    From bondage to spiritual faith;
    From spiritual faith to great courage;
    From courage to liberty;
    From liberty to abundance;
    From abundance to complacency;
    From complacency to apathy;
    From apathy to dependence;
    From dependence back into bondage.

Ramsden is British and speaks a bit fast and, unfortunately, the volume is a bit low, but if you persevere, you will not be disappointed. I would love to know what you think.

I am a huge, Huge, HUGE Jan Karon fan. Karon is the author of the popular Mitford series (At Home in Mitford, A Light in the Window, and twelve more books). I like to call them “gentle” books as they are a joy to read and very calming, though that might be a bit of a misnomer as they do have action and mystery, but mainly they are books about faith and the human heart.

The main character is an overweight, diabetic, sixty-year-old bachelor who is an Episcopalian priest. Now if that doesn’t make you want to dive into the book, I don’t know what will. HOWEVER, Father Tim is us. In every sense. He has fears he knows he shouldn’t have.  He fights depression. He bemoans his own “stuck-in-the-mud” aka “ love of routine” life, but then doesn’t know what to do when his world gets rocked when a beautiful woman moves in next door.

One of the most beautiful parts of Karon’s books are Father Tim’s prayers, and Karon writes “he drove me to prayer of my own … when he needed to pray in a critical situation and I had to configure that prayer. I never took his job lightly, nor did he” (8).

I have always enjoyed those prayers, but in the context of the novel as a whole, I hadn’t remembered many of them. It wasn’t until I bought her newest book Bathed in Prayer that I was able to appreciate them. This book takes all the prayers from the series, and then reprints them within the context of the situation. So you have small snippets of the novels and the prayers from all her books with a bit of introductory explanatory material if needed.

It was here that I saw, again and again, Father Tim mentioning the “prayer that never fails” and the more I read it, the more I had to agree. These four words are indeed the prayer that is always answered. And if this is truly the prayer of our heart, and we have a willingness to submit to His answer, then it is also the most freeing of all prayers as it lays everything at His feet and leaves nothing to worry.

The Prayer that Never Fails:   “Thy Will Be Done.”

Karon, Jan. Bathed in Prayer. G.P. Putnam's Sons: New York. 2018.