Thank You

Often times when I am a guest speaker at a church or other kind of meeting where I am teaching, I begin by saying, "The opinions expressed by this speaker are not necessarly those of the staff or management of this church." As noted in an earlier post, I can be a smart aleck in virtually any situation. However, I do not really say that to be a smark aleck. If you are a regular reader of this blog, you already know I do not teach the same things the same way a lot of other people do. That may even be why you are still reading.

We know there are people who will attempt to make this whole exercise sound like some sort of vendetta or grudge session saying it is sardonic, sarcastic, or insincere. We do expect a lot of what is written here to rankle some people, but that is not the reason we are writing it. In fact it took all those experiences to bring us to the place of understanding where the real battle in the Santa Maria valley lies. This is really a thank you to all those people. There is not a perfect person among us, but God manages to use us all in spite of that--or maybe because of it. We will feel free to cast stones when we have arrived at perfection ourselves. At this point we do not even see any reason to begin to limber up our arms.

Every once in awhile it is nice to remember people who do nice or kind things to help us along our way. Above and beyond that, it is a good thing to have what has often been called "an attitude of gratitude" for what we have. From a Biblical perspective, regardless of what things come into our lives, they have all come through the hand of God. He weighs and measures the things that come into each of our lives so we never have to deal with anything beyond our ability. We actually came to believe that through the constant teaching of a former pastor. That seemed to be one area we were never quite able to come to grips with--why do things sometimes seem to work against us when we think we are doing the best we can. We now realize those trials only come to show us there is still room for some improvement in our lives. God is still taking care of everything that concerns us. However, when we do things we should not, or do not do things we should, we give the devil legal authority to do whatever he wants in our lives--and that is never in our best interests. He only comes to "...steal, kill, and destroy." (John 10:10)

We have been very careful not to mention people by name for the most part whether what they have done could be considered to be positive or negative. This is intentional and the basic reason for that deserves a little explanation with regard to our topic of thanks. Because nothing comes into our lives without God's permission, nothing that has come should be considered bad per se. Obviously, each of us can point to things in our lives we wish had worked out differently than they did. Most often those things seem to be results of our own bad actions or decisions--try as we might to make them someone else's fault. There have been times in our lives when other people could have done something to help us and did not. There have been other times when some people doing nothing would have worked out better for us. Yet, regardless of what anyone else did or did not do, God had our back as is said in the current vernacular. That is the modern term for what God promised through Isaiah, "...For the Lord will go before you, And the God of Israel will be your rear guard." (Isaiah 52:12) God has your back. God has had our back throughout the course of our years and so to those who sought to do us evil or simply did not do the good you could have, thank you. Your actions have made us what we are and have brought us to the place we are now. Never before have we felt so confident were are exactly where we should be in our lives, doing exactly what we should be doing.

There is a large and growing group of people out there who are cheering our efforts here. Some of you have become followers of the blog, some have made comments on the blog, via email, on the phone or in person. To each and everyone of you a great big THANK YOU! Of course we have no real idea of who all might be reading the blog, but please consider this a thank you to you as well for your interest in what we are doing. God bless.