11 For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the LORD, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope.
~ Jeremiah 29:11 (NKJV)
By Bro. John L. Cash
One of the things that I hate worst in life is waiting.
I’m not talking about the kind of waiting that you do in a doctor’s office. That’s not quite as bad, because you can always work a crossword puzzle or read a book in the meantime. The kind of waiting I hate is when you’re in a situation where you don’t how it’s going to end up.
You’re either going to wind up with everything or nothing, and you don’t know which. And you won’t know until you find out. Until then you just have to wait.
Not too long ago, I had a friend who was in a “waiting” situation like that. It was a high-stakes situation—the kind that would have given me a stomach ulcer. But my friend (who is a devout and consecrated Christian) was remarkably calm and unruffled.
I asked him how he could be so very calm in the midst of such a fierce and fiery trial, and was encouraged by his reply. He said:
“Brother John, I learned a secret a long time ago. Everything that God has for me belongs to me. If God has something for me, there is no person and no thing that keep me from receiving it. If God has something for me, it won’t be given to anybody else, and nobody else can take it. So, if He doesn’t give it to me, than it wasn’t for me. But, this one thing I am sure of; Everything that God has for me belongs to me.”
Since I heard it, that statement has burned like a flame in my heart and mind. Some things can’t be improved upon. There’s nothing I can add to those words. We just need to remember them, and think about them, and believe.
Lift up your heart and be glad. And stop worrying about the future.
Everything God has for you belongs to you.
Dr. John L. Cash is the “Country Preacher Dad.” He was raised in Stuttgart, Arkansas, and has spent the last 29 years being a country preacher in the piney woods five miles south of the little town of Hickory, Mississippi. (On week days has a desk-job at a public school, where he used to teach Latin on closed-circuit-television.) He and his lovely wife, Susan, live in the parsonage next door to the Antioch Christian Church (where there were 173 people at church on Easter Sunday, which is not too shabby.) Their kids include Spencer (age 23), his wife Madeline (age 23), and Seth (age 20).
