I had an outrageous night last night, and I haven't quite recovered.
First, I'd been writing a new novelette as part of a creative writing project I'm doing with students from Pontotoc Middle School Ag classes. Writing in the first person of a thirteen-year old boy is quite an experience, and includes a fair amount of grossness.
When I went to bed last night, I was so keyed up I couldn't go to sleep for far too long. I turned the light off, tried to sleep, got up and read for a while, tried again. Twice.
I hadn't been asleep too long when the sound of gagging awakened me. Mamie (one of my dogs) was vomiting. On the bed. I got that cleaned up and went back to sleep.
I hadn't been asleep long when I awakened again because my foot was wet. Mamie had thrown up again. On my bed. On the clean sheets. Enough to soak through to my foot.
I went through the clean-up-my-foot-and-deal-with-vomit-sheets routine again and went back to sleep. It might not have been a good idea, but I let Mamie sleep with me. Again. I thought I needed to know if she kept vomiting.
Maggie chose to sleep on the floor. She was the smartest of us, because Mamie started gagging again.
I grabbed her and ran like the wind to the bathroom, where she successfully vomited in the toilet. This was especially good, because I was about out of clean sheets.
We all went back to bed again and slept until 6 am when I awakened and found that my swallower was a little broken because of a severe sore throat. I haven't had a sore throat since I was a child, so I felt particularly injured by this new finding.
When you have to spray your throat with Chloraseptic to numb it enough to drink coffee, that is not a good sign. It doesn't help the taste of coffee a bit, either.
And then, it was time for quiet time...
My topic this morning was the holiness of God, His absolutely perfect and complete purity and virtue. I read Isaiah 6 again. Those words always stab me right in my repenter, and they did again.
As you might imagine, I started quiet time with a good bit of grumbling about the night's activities. Then, I read these words...
"I saw the Lord sitting on His throne, lofty and exalted, with the train of His robe filling the temple... Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts... Then I said, 'Woe is me, for I am ruined! Because I am a man of unclean lips; For My eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts...'" (Isaiah 6:1,3,5)
I pondered that for a bit. The King. The Lord of Hosts. Commander of the entire angelic army.
I freely admit that my visual for the angelic warring angels comes from the writing of Frank Peretti. Those fighting angels don't fool around. They fight to win and they don't lose. Our God is the commander of all those warriors, and He's the king.
I started my quiet time with my mind focused on lost sleep and dirty sheets, but in less time than it took Mamie to puke, my focus had changed completely. I'm not just a servant of the King, I'm His beloved daughter and there is nothing I face that He can't handle. There's no enemy (including the evil one) that My King's army can't defeat. I am loved.
The song we used to sing as kids came to mind... "Turn your eyes upon Jesus. Look full in His wonderful face, and the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace..."
And they will... and they did.
Today, let's get our focus off our circumstances and put it on the One who reigns and rules forever. Our King and Lord of Hosts.
He has everything under control. Including the events of our lives. He's in charge, and He can handle it all.
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In case you missed it, here's the link to yesterday's post: When the Weeds Have to Go
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