Surprise! | Previous Challenge Entry

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TITLE: Surprise! | Previous Challenge Entry
By kay temple
09/12/07
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Surprise! Surprise? In yet the most everyday of events? Surprise! When at age sixteen you safely land your dad’s beautiful polished aluminum “tail-dragger” airplane for the first time, nothing in its way maimed. Surprise! When you gain entry to medical school after an interviewer scoffs “Well, we just don’t know how well a ‘hick from the sticks’ will do.” Surprise! When after a six-week courtship you are still married after fifteen years.

And, yes, “surprise!” too, when a physician calls with the description of the three large brain metastasis discovered in your father’s brain—and no primary tumor to accept the blame. Surprise! When weather conditions for three years cause crop failures and the family farm goes to the highest bidder—the farm of your five-generations-ago ancestors who came to the South Dakota prairie not to fail as homesteaders, but to become successful farmers. Surprise! When your husband’s “routine” testing with “routine” biopsies comes back with a cancer diagnosis. And, surprise…with the self-discovery you are sick and tired of taking care of the sick-and-tired.

But, “Dear friends, do not be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering, as though something strange was happening to you.” (NIV 1 Peter 4:12.) “When times are good, be happy; but when times are bad, consider God has made the one as well as the other. Therefore, a man cannot discover anything about his future.” (NIV Ecclesiastes 7:14.)

The future may just be God’s greatest surprise. He reveals our days second by second. Tick-tock. Sometimes good. Tick-tock. Sometimes sad. More a surprise is finally gaining the spiritual maturity to love the Lord despite the good and the sad.

Surprise! The sun rose this morning with such spectacular colors that not words, but only the mind’s eye could record. Surprise! Coffee still smells divine—and tastes less than. Surprise! The child’s sleepy-slurpy, just-wakin’-up love kiss provides the soul validation for the day. Surprise! An unexpected mental strength surfaces and pushes me back to the bedsides of the sick-and-tired.

Affirmation for the day: “I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do everything through him who gives me strength.” (NIV Phillipians 4: 12-13.)
The words of Paul on hearts and in hands. Second by second. Surprise after surprise.

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