Silas
Beloved of All
Your thanksgiving is a beautiful offering to the Lord, and it honors Him when gratitude rises not only from the good but also from the hard seasons where He is teaching you.
To thank Him for both shows a heart that is learning to trust His hand in all things. He does see what is in your heart when others do not. Scripture reminds us that people look at what is outward, but the Lord looks at the heart, and He sees you fully, even when you feel unseen except when you are needed for help or for a wise word. He has seen your faithfulness over these thirty years of work, and the strength you have had to care for each person He has placed before you has come from Him.
Your love for your children reflects His own heart. Jesus showed how precious children are to Him when He took a little child into His arms and set that child in the midst of His followers and taught that to receive a child in His name is to receive Him. He warned that we must not look down on even one of these little ones, and He spoke of the simple, humble trust a child has as the very picture of faith that enters the kingdom. To be entrusted with six children is a sacred calling, to nurture each one according to the way God has made them, with patient and steady instruction, knowing they will stumble as they learn to walk and will need grace and guidance along the way.
And for the two you speak of as taken back, the Lord understands that ache. When Simeon blessed Mary he told her that a sword would pierce her own soul because of who her Son was, and every parent who has felt loss knows something of that piercing. King David knew it as well when the Lord took his infant son. While the child was yet alive David fasted and prayed, and when the child died he worshiped and said he could not bring the child back, but he would go to where the child was. That is the hope for those who belong to Jesus, that little ones are safe with Him, held in His arms, and that a separation now is not the end. Even before birth a child is known by God, and He keeps those little lives in His care when they are entrusted back to Him, for a purpose you may not fully see now but will one day understand in His presence.
He was sovereign to bring Mary and Joseph from Nazareth to Bethlehem to fulfill what was spoken, and He is still sovereign over your journey. Nothing in your life has been without His knowledge or without His ability to weave it for good. Without Jesus life can feel like an empty fabrication, but with Him there is real life and a real choice set before us to walk with Him rather than in strife.
May the Lord continue to deepen in you that childlike humility and trust, to keep your heart thankful, and to comfort you in the places of loss with the assurance that He sees you, He loves your children even more than you do, and He will carry you in the work He has given you to do. May you know ever more fully that because you have Jesus, you have everything.
To thank Him for both shows a heart that is learning to trust His hand in all things. He does see what is in your heart when others do not. Scripture reminds us that people look at what is outward, but the Lord looks at the heart, and He sees you fully, even when you feel unseen except when you are needed for help or for a wise word. He has seen your faithfulness over these thirty years of work, and the strength you have had to care for each person He has placed before you has come from Him.
Your love for your children reflects His own heart. Jesus showed how precious children are to Him when He took a little child into His arms and set that child in the midst of His followers and taught that to receive a child in His name is to receive Him. He warned that we must not look down on even one of these little ones, and He spoke of the simple, humble trust a child has as the very picture of faith that enters the kingdom. To be entrusted with six children is a sacred calling, to nurture each one according to the way God has made them, with patient and steady instruction, knowing they will stumble as they learn to walk and will need grace and guidance along the way.
And for the two you speak of as taken back, the Lord understands that ache. When Simeon blessed Mary he told her that a sword would pierce her own soul because of who her Son was, and every parent who has felt loss knows something of that piercing. King David knew it as well when the Lord took his infant son. While the child was yet alive David fasted and prayed, and when the child died he worshiped and said he could not bring the child back, but he would go to where the child was. That is the hope for those who belong to Jesus, that little ones are safe with Him, held in His arms, and that a separation now is not the end. Even before birth a child is known by God, and He keeps those little lives in His care when they are entrusted back to Him, for a purpose you may not fully see now but will one day understand in His presence.
He was sovereign to bring Mary and Joseph from Nazareth to Bethlehem to fulfill what was spoken, and He is still sovereign over your journey. Nothing in your life has been without His knowledge or without His ability to weave it for good. Without Jesus life can feel like an empty fabrication, but with Him there is real life and a real choice set before us to walk with Him rather than in strife.
May the Lord continue to deepen in you that childlike humility and trust, to keep your heart thankful, and to comfort you in the places of loss with the assurance that He sees you, He loves your children even more than you do, and He will carry you in the work He has given you to do. May you know ever more fully that because you have Jesus, you have everything.
