Outdoor Truths

I don't fish as much as I did when I was a young adult. I enjoy going, but after a long deer season, I have a lot of catching up to do at home and at work. While my mind goes to walleye and crappie, my body goes to more normal things like emails, messages, lessons, learners, and of course, these weekly articles. That means this time of year is pretty uneventful when it comes to the outdoors. My plans until turkey season are a weekend hog hunt and one or two fishing trips. Again, uneventful. Not boring, but unless something weird happens, the next few weeks will be made up of nothing to write home about - or even to write to you about. I guess that's why am penning my thoughts right now. I have nothing to write to you that will cause you to set up and take notice. No monster buck, no ten-pound bass, and no stories of the ones that got away. But this is mostly my life. And I expect it is yours too. And while we long for greater stories, we need to realize that great stories are simply the culmination of not-so-great ones. For followers of Christ, I think we assume the stories of great accomplishments in the Bible were the normal routine for the men and womenGod used. We forget that while Noah had great faith, we only see it played out in only a brief period of his life. We read about the faith of Abraham, but it was mostly in a day-by-day trust and not in a miraculous abnormal life. We think about how Daniel was saved from the lions, but that only took about 24 hours. What about Elijah? We only have record of eight miracles in all of his life, and he probably didn't even begin his ministry until he was forty years old or older. And what did James say about Elijah? He said he was a normal man just like us. So, here's what we can learn from all of this. First of all, God can do great and miraculous things in all of our lives. Secondly, our life will not be full of great and miraculous things. It will be full of normal - even mundane things, sprinkled with great and miraculous things. Our faith will be weighed like Abrahams, a day at a time, as we trust him moment by moment. Does that mean we will not have something to write about, or that someone else will write about? No. It just means if we lived our whole life in one great and miraculous thing after another, great and miraculous would then become normal and mundane, and we would still be praying and longing for God to do something special in our lives. You see, the great and miraculous things have to be rare in order to keep them great and miraculous. But just know, every great and miraculous work of God, will always be birthed by the things we think are not so great and not so miraculous.