My Times Are In Your Hands
Father, the discovery last week of this malignant tumour in my kidney has thrown me a curve like I have only experienced just twice before - the day I was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease 8 years ago and the day of my heart attack just over 4 years ago.
Lord, I'm still numbed by a sense of unreality. I thought I'd received my full allocation so far as a "cross to bear" is concerned. And now this?? My perspective on life is being re-aligned in an entirely new way. I can almost feel my value system changing as I awake to every new day. Yet, my attitude is struggling to retain some kind of balance.
Not only that but my whole belief system - all my theological convictions - has come under the ultimate test. It's one thing to believe and teach Biblical truth to others out of my head; it's quite another when I need to apply those same truths to my own situation. Lord, no one likes the "C" word - cancer. It brings the issues of life and death into sharp focus and it drives home the reality of our mortality.
All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. (Ps 139:16 NIV)
You have decided the length of our lives. You know how many months we will live, and we are not given a minute longer. (Job 14:5 NLT)
But, in the midst of all else that I feel just now, your sovereignty takes front and centre place on the stage of my life. If what David and Job expressed is actually true - that you have ordained the days of my life - then I can rest in the fact that the big "C" will not determine the length of my life.
You have already made that determination.
Lord Jesus, on a number of occasions You said, "My time has not yet come."But in the garden on the night of your betrayal You said, "The time has come". I pray for that kind of perspective - to see and understand the times and seasons of life as I seek to respond to this whole new experience.
How I thank you that my times are in your hands; the time of my coming into this world and the time of my departure. Yet such a realisation is anything but fatalism. It is faith in my Heavenly Father.
Amen
