Today's Devotional
August 17, 2006
Subject: It's Pursuing Me
Psalms 23:6 - "Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever."
If you are a believer with Jesus Christ as Lord, you'll see that the scripture above is always true. I thought about it recently in light of my own life in several different ways. Here are just a few of them.
I had lots of trees to cut down, land to clear and dirt that needed to be put down to start a pasture for the horses. On three separate occasions, as people stopped by that I didn't even know, they offered themselves as free assistance to help with the work. That seemed like a lot of goodness happening.
Next one: With skyrocketing gas prices around the country, I happen to live right down the street from two corner stores that are having a gas-war, as we call it. The warring stations sell gas for about $0.30 less a gallon than other area stations. When you're driving a mini-van, that's substantial. When I first moved in, the gas price at the stations was about the same as other stations in the area. Once again, I think God's goodness is following me.
A final one: When I began as a teacher at Willowridge High School in Houston, Texas, it was a school in trouble. Rated as "unacceptable" they were on the verge of being taken over by the state. As I implored my "Big3" group to pray for them, things have "amazingly" changed. The school recently received their test scores back and have been upgraded to acceptable, improving in almost every category and with huge improvements in the English department, going from a 30% pass rate to an 80% pass rate. In addition to that, the school district just got an across-the-board, $4,500/year pay raise. Did I just happen to take the right job at the right time or is that more of God's goodness following me? You know what I think.
None of this means that everything goes the way that I want it. It simply shows that in the midst of whatever else is happening, God's goodness and mercy is pursuing us if we are truly pursuing Him. See it today in your own lives.
