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The Lord is My Portion

The Lord is My Portion

Sometimes we forget that God is the center of all life and is present in every moment and in every day.  Sometimes we forget Him and His love for us and this “forgetfulness” reaches all the way back to the Garden of Eden in Genesis 3 when Adam and Eve chose to do life on their own.  But God is present in our everyday life, often in moments where and when we least expect Him.

In reflection today I was reminded of a “pandemic moment” from back in the spring of 2020. On this day I had gone outside to take out the trash and recycling.  When I went out into my front yard I noticed the birds chirping and the stillness and freshness of the morning air.  When I came back into the house I was struck by the harsh contrast of my son’s teacher talking on his device as I walked through the living room, mixing and then drowned out by my daughter’s class conversation on her device as I moved into the kitchen. Both my children were schooling online at the time.  I grabbed the recycling and headed back outside, first through one mass of sound, then another, then once I was again outside the contrast was palpable.  The quietness. The beauty of the moment.  Bringing to mind for me in that moment Isaiah 30:15 “In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength.”  I sat on the porch for a few moments reveling in God, who He is, and the beauty of all that He has made.

After a few moments the stillness was broken as our dog pushed through the front door.  Full of energy, pacing back and forth across the porch, up and down the stairs beside me.  Don’t I often live life like my springer spaniel?  Frantically going, doing, checking all the tick boxes yet forgetting that true life, peace and rest are found in God, in the small, simple moments, where for a moment or a few, the world stands still and I can see a glimpse of God in the ordinary of life. God is my portion. My hope is in Him.

Moments like this can happen anywhere.  God often reveals Himself in the quiet, but also in the hustle, and too in the mundane.  Making dinner, talking to a neighbour, being caught in traffic, caring for a loved one.  If we let our awareness wander and wonder even briefly, we often catch glimpses of the unexpected, even in something as mundane as taking out the trash.

As we learn to wait on God, we experience His goodness in ways that we may not have otherwise seen or experienced.  As we seek Him, He will begin to reveal Himself in places that we had never thought to look.  That is the Spirit of God at work in our lives.

“I say to myself ‘The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.’ The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him.” (Lamentations 3:24-25)

We can rest our hope in this: that the Lord is our portion.  He is in those precious moments when we feel at our end, and He is in those moments when we are filled with joy and expectation.  God completes us.  It is Him who fills our cup, it is in Him that our hope is found.

Jennifer Heidinga

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