The images won’t leave me. Houses, folding and crumbling, drifting along on churning waters. Cars and boats and busses bobbing like toys in a bathtub. Entire neighborhoods collapsing, breaking into pieces and floating away.
I watched the videos of scenes in Japan as the tsunami hit its shores, sweeping away the lives of thousands of people. These were people’s homes, their neighborhoods, their towns, life as they knew it … all washed away in minutes.
How quickly things can crumble and disappear — the things we cling to, the security we try to create, the earthly “structures” into which we have poured our lives. Very few of us have lost everything to an earthquake or a tsunami, but perhaps you have watched your home eaten by flames or a livelihood dwindle to nothing or a marriage shipwrecked and dismantled.
If you’ve never suffered through any such disaster, spend some time today trying to imagine what any one of these calamities would do to your life as you know it now.
Then do two things:
*thank God for what you do have, and
*ask the Spirit to give you a glimpse of the hope to which you have been
called, the fact that your life is not only what happens in these few years
here on earth.
Your life, child of God, goes far beyond houses and bank accounts and jobs and even human relationships.
Isaiah quotes the one who formed you, who says this:
I have called you by name; you are mine.
When you go through deep waters,
I will be with you.
When you go through rivers of difficulty,
you will not drown.
When you walk through the fire of oppression,
you will not be burned up;
the flames will not consume you.”
More, next time.
Scripture: Isaiah 43:1-2 (NLT)
Living with great expectation ... 
Well said!