An excerpt Encouraging
Words For The First 100 Days: A Guidebook For New Believers,
AMG Publishers
Trust in the Lords Leading
"Trust in the
Lord with all your heart; do not depend on your own
understanding. Seek
his will in all you do and he will direct your paths."
Proverbs 3:5-6
I love to cut pictures out
of the local newspaper.
In Saturday's paper, I found a very special one,
depicting a high school freshman as she prepares for a track
meet. With
shoulder length brown hair, she looks like most runners her
age, thin, focused, intent on the race ahead. Undistracted,
her face turned downward, she holds one hand at her right
ear. In her
other hand, she carries a tiny radio attached to a fanny
pack. Nearby
her father, Matt McCarthy, speaks into a small transmitter.
Natalie
McCarthy, the ordinary looking girl in the picture sprints
both the 100 and 200 meter dashes for her Steilacoom High
School track team. It
is her almost total blindness that makes her most
extraordinary.
So, how does
she do it? How
does she line up with a group of healthy, sighted teens and
dash for a finish line she cannot see?
By radio. Natalie runs with a
single earpiece in her right ear. With her father's
voice coming through the tiny transmitter, she hears the
course corrections he gives her from the sidelines. With nothing more
than trust, and her father's verbal directions, Natalie runs
at full speed toward a goal she cannot see, with competitors
she can only hear, over obstacles she can only imagine.
It is a perfect
picture of our race with Christ. For us, the Holy
Spirit directs our race.
We face challenges we cannot see. We race for a goal
we can only imagine. Though
we don't hear our coach through a radio earpiece, the Lord
promises over and over that he will guide us in our race for
the finish line. He
will direct us. We will hear our heavenly father's voice. We must trust, as
blindly as Natalie does, the whispering in our spiritual
ears. We
must trust and respond.
Change course. Run
the race. Your
father is whispering in your ear!
Prayer: Father, let us
hear your course corrections.
Keep us quiet enough to listen. Fill us with trust
to respond. Today,
Lord, may we hear your voice and follow you.
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