Category: treasure

Treasure: To Hold or Keep as Precious; Cherish

Who is a God like you . . .?
(Micah 7:18a NIV)

Children are precious. We treasure their tender hearts and we learn from their curious minds. Their laughter is contagious. Their quiet moments are rare, but when they are still, we usually find them nestled in their parent’s arms or curled up under the covers sleeping sweet dreams.

Jesus celebrates and welcomes the little ones. He encourages a childlike faith. In your quiet moments do you ever act childish? I don’t mean those spiritual tantrums, I am thinking about approaching God with wonder. When is the last time you got out a box of crayons and colored a Bible story? Or gathered some scissors, old magazines and a glue stick to make a collage?

Coloring and pasting appeal to my curious nature. I like to see what comes together with the images and colors. And often, I discover a topic that God wants to dialogue with me about. Like in the above collage, I sensed God asking me and possibly you: 

What do you treasure? 

And the reason I know this is a question God may be asking is that the Bible also speaks of this topic. (See Luke 12:34)

In 30 Ways to Wake Up Your Quiet Time, Pam Farrel suggests, we approach our time with God like a child, literally. She suggests reading a children’s Bible, or reciting a child’s prayer or coloring a Sunday School paper or even having a quiet time with a child.

Here is what happened when she took her own advice:

 . . .one Sunday morning, I asked our eight-year-old son what he learned from Daddy’s sermon. Waiting for the typical, “Jesus loves me” answer, I was pleasantly surprised when he said, “You shouldn’t make up excuses not to obey God.” Wow! 

©Pam Farrel from 30 Ways to Wake Up Your Quiet Time (IVP). For more devotional books by Pam www.Love-wise.com


What youthful activity will you incorporate 
into your quiet moments today?


Posted on by kelrohlf 3

Key: Important, Fundamental {Intuition Diaries}

He will be the sure foundation for your times,
a rich store of salvation and wisdom and knowledge;
the fear of the LORD is the key to this treasure. 
Isaiah 33:6 NIV

Why, the question often asked when there is no evident reason for a particular event. Why did this happen to me? Why did it happen now? Questioning of this nature can become an exercise in frustration. Possibly a better, more important question would be how I can respond to such and such situation.

When I go on a vacation, my expectations are at full throttle. My objective is to get to the destination, so we can relax. Leave behind the cares of daily, routine life. Take a break from asking why all the time. Just rest and take in the new landscape. 

My husband and I left early Monday morning for our long awaited trip to the Erie Canal. We made it to Cleveland with our boat and belongings towing smoothly behind our truck.

Tuesday morning, we got a little lost getting out of Cleveland, but once we got back on track, we were on schedule to be at the marina in Buffalo that evening. We had squeezed through the construction zones, talking about the day ahead and just watching the road pass behind us, when we heard a ka-thump. Les slowed us down and pulled off onto the wide shoulder. I said, what happened. He said, I think we lost a tire.

He carefully climbed out of the driver’s seat to inspect the damage. The report: one of the dual axles was bent and a tire was stripped of its tread. We called a towing agency. But our boat was too tall to put on a truck. They gave us a number for a nearby repair place, twenty miles away. Our options were not looking good. Les removed the tire and we hoped there might be a repair place at a marina in the next town a few miles ahead.

Amazingly, we remained fairly calm through the whole ordeal. (As you can imagine, in these types of situations tempers tend to flare.) We needed some other tools that were locked in the boat. So I went to get the boat keys out of the truck. Um…Les, did you put the keys somewhere else.  Um…no.  I…think we left them at home. Why would we do such a stupid thing? When packing for a big trip we live by checklists, but apparently neither of us thought to put the keys on the list.

We could have spent all day asking why did this happen, but instead for some reason I started thanking God for the things that were good: for the wide shoulder, because we had just left a constricted construction zone, for our son being available to overnight the keys to us and for the nearby marina having a repair shop so we didn’t have to drive twenty miles on a broken trailer. Our plans are delayed, but as the repair guy said, “It could have been worse.”

When I was telling my mom about our adventure, she said God was with you. And then I realized that this particular day was not like any other day in life. Things happen. We don’t really know why, but God is with us. He provides what we need in each situation.

This post is the first in a series, I will be calling the Intuition Diaries, where I will confess our blunders and share our adventures on the Erie Canal. (At the end of the day, I jokingly told my husband the reason for our hardship was my fault, because I wanted something interesting to post on the blog . . . *smile*)

picture of the Intuition from a previous adventure

Posted on by kelrohlf 11