Category: Writing

Come and Rest

Posted in @jimmiekepler, Ancient Wisdom for Today, Bible, Blog, Christian Living, Christian Writers, Jim Kepler, Jimmie A. Kepler, Jimmie Aaron Kepler, Jimmie Kepler, jimmiekepler.com, Poet, Poet's Life, Poets, Writer's Life, WritingLeave a comment

Come and Rest

I know a man who used to fall asleep sitting up in his recliner, television going, boots still on, and wake up three hours later more tired than when he sat down. He’d tell me about it like it was a mystery he couldn’t crack. “I slept,” he’d say, “but I didn’t rest.” There’s a difference, and most of us have lived inside that difference longer than we’d like to admit.

You can lie down in a quiet house and still hear the noise. Bills stacked on the counter. A diagnosis you haven’t told anybody about yet. A grown child who won’t call back. The mind keeps working the night shift even after the body’s clocked out. I’ve laid there myself, staring at a ceiling fan going around and around, doing the math on troubles that don’t add up no matter how many times you run the numbers.

Jesus knew about that kind of tired. Not the kind a vacation fixes.

He said it plain, in Matthew 11:28:

“Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”
Matthew 11:28

He didn’t say straighten up first. He didn’t say solve it, then come. He just said come, the way you’d call a dog in from the rain, not caring how muddy he is.

An Invitation, Not a Chore List

There’s something almost scandalous about how simple that invitation is. We’re used to being told to earn our rest, to work ourselves into deserving it. But Jesus doesn’t hand out a checklist. He doesn’t ask what you’ve done to deserve the load being lifted. He just opens the door and says come as you are.

That’s personal. Not a philosophy, not good advice from a wise teacher. He’s not selling a technique. He’s offering Himself, the way an old friend offers his shoulder without asking you to explain the whole story first.

Whatever you’re hauling around, the health scare, the money that won’t stretch far enough, the decision you keep circling like a buzzard that won’t land, the grief that shows up uninvited at strange hours, He’s not asking you to set it down somewhere else before you walk toward Him. Bring it. Bring all of it.

Rest That Doesn’t Wait for the Problem to Leave

Now here’s the part folks get wrong sometimes. They think rest means the trouble disappears, poof, like a magic trick. Sometimes it does. More often, in my experience, it doesn’t work quite like that. His rest shows up as peace sitting right in the middle of the unresolved thing. It shows up as just enough strength for the next step, not the whole staircase. It shows up as a quiet knowing, somewhere down in your chest, that you’re not hauling this alone anymore, even if the load itself hasn’t gotten lighter yet.

I think of a fella carrying a heavy suitcase through an airport, and somebody comes alongside and takes the other handle. The suitcase weighs the same. But it doesn’t feel the same. That’s closer to what this rest is. You don’t have to pretend you’re strong today. You don’t have to fix your face before you come. You just have to come.

Takeaways

  1. Come to Jesus as you are. Don’t wait until you’ve got yourself sorted out. Bring the weariness, the confusion, the fear, the questions nobody’s answered yet, straight to Him, muddy boots and all.
  2. Release what you were never built to carry alone. Some weights belong in God’s hands, not balanced on your own back. Prayer is where we let go of the handle and trust Him with where the road leads.
  3. Receive His rest one day at a time. He may not show you the whole map. But He’ll give you enough light for today’s stretch of road, and that’s usually all a tired traveler really needs.

Prayer

Heavenly Father,

I come to You today weary from the load I’ve been carrying. You already know every worry, every fear, every duty, every quiet ache tucked down in my heart where nobody else can see it.

Forgive me for trying to shoulder it all myself. Help me let go of what I was never meant to control, and trust You with what I can’t understand.

Lord Jesus, still my racing thoughts and fill that space with Your peace instead. Give rest to my mind, strength to my tired body, and new hope to my worn-down spirit. Remind me I’m not walking this road by myself, and that Your grace is enough for whatever I’m facing.

Teach me to walk through this day beside You, one step, one mile marker, at a time.

In Jesus’ name, amen.

 

The Brother I Never Had to Ask For

Posted in @jimmiekepler, Ancient Wisdom for Today, Bible, Blog, Christian Living, Christian Writers, Jim Kepler, Jimmie A. Kepler, Jimmie Aaron Kepler, Jimmie Kepler, jimmiekepler.com, Poet, Poet's Life, Poets, Writer's Life, WritingLeave a comment
From left to right Julia Hall, Jimmie Kepler, Les Hall, Benita Kepler. Photo taken by Shahrzad Bacon at JGs Old Fashioned Hamburgers, Dallas, Texas, USA in 2012.

The Brother I Never Had to Ask For

There’s a kind of friend the Bible calls a brother, not by blood, but by the miles he’s willing to walk beside you. I had one like that. Still do.

Where It Began

I met Les Hall back in the late 1990s, two middle-aged men fixing other people’s computer trouble on the same IT support desk, the kind of job that teaches you patience whether you want it or not. We started eating lunch together most every day, nothing fancy, just two men trading stories over a plate lunch. That’s usually how the real friendships start. Not with some grand gesture. Just showing up, day after day, until one day you look up and realize this fellow has become family.

“A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.” Proverbs 17:17 KJV

Proverbs wrote that a long time before Les and I ever sat down at a lunch counter, but it might as well have been written about him.

When It Mattered Most

When my father passed, Les was there. When my wife got sick with the cancer that would eventually take her, through the surgeries, through the long slow grief of caregiving, he stood beside me. He was at both funerals. He didn’t send a card and disappear. He stayed.

He was there through my own share of hospital hallways too. A stroke landed me in coronary care back in 2000, and a bad heart brought me right back in 2003 and 2004. When I went in for a heart catheterization, Les stayed with my wife while she waited on word. He was there when they took out my gall bladder, there for both hernia repairs, there again for the rotator cuff surgery. A man doesn’t sign up for that kind of loyalty. He just gives it, quietly, because that’s who he is.

When my daughter and her family needed to move into my house for what turned into five years, Les didn’t just wish me luck getting the place ready. He showed up in his work clothes and got to work.

When his own wife passed, I got to return the favor, just being there, the way he’d been there for me. That’s what real friendship is. It isn’t a one-way debt. It’s two men taking turns carrying what’s too heavy to carry alone.

What Endures

These days Les still helps me around the house, almost every Wednesday. Every fall when I head out on a month long or longer vacation, he watches the place like it’s his own, house sitting for me. 

We’ve traveled together, laughed together, and sat with each other through more hospital waiting rooms and funeral homes than either of us would have chosen. 

Started on an IT help desk. Turned into one of the finest gifts God ever handed me.

If you’ve got a friend like that, a Les Hall in your life, don’t wait for a funeral to tell him what he means to you. Tell him today, over lunch, the way it started.

Three Take Aways

  1. Show up, don’t just say sorry. Words of comfort matter, but presence is what people remember. Sit in the waiting room. Stand at the graveside. Let your body say what your words can’t.
  2. Keep no ledger. A friendship built on keeping score won’t last through the hard seasons. Give what you can when you can, and trust that the giving and the receiving will even out over a lifetime.
  3. Say the thank you now. Don’t wait for a eulogy to tell a faithful friend what he means to you. Tell him over a plate lunch, while he can still hear it and you can still say it.

A Prayer

Heavenly Father, thank You for the gift of a faithful friend. Thank You for the ones who show up in the hospital hallway, who sit with a grieving spouse, who show up in work clothes ready to carry a load without being asked.

Thank You for Les, for every surgery and every funeral and every ordinary Wednesday lunch that built a friendship strong enough to hold both our sorrows. Teach me to be that kind of friend to someone else. Remind me to say thank you while there’s still time to say it.

In Jesus’ name, 
Amen.

The photo is of Les and his later wife Julia, me when my hair was still workplace short and my late wife Miss Benita. The wives are seated across from us to help you recognize who’s whose.

The Truck on Blocks

Posted in @jimmiekepler, Ancient Wisdom for Today, Bible, Blog, Christian Living, Christian Writers, Jim Kepler, Jimmie A. Kepler, Jimmie Aaron Kepler, Jimmie Kepler, jimmiekepler.com, Poet, Poet's Life, Poets, Writer's Life, Writing2 Comments

The Truck on Blocks

There’s a truck I know that sat up on blocks for the better part of a year. Engine out, primer gray, hood propped open like a mouth caught mid sentence. It looked less like a vehicle and more like a promise somebody forgot to keep.

The fella who owned it would walk out to the shop some evenings after supper, hands in his pockets, and just stand there. Not working. Not fixing anything. Just looking at all that unfinished business like it was looking back at him, waiting on an answer he didn’t have yet.

I think about that truck more than I probably should. Because most of us have got one. A dream, a marriage, a calling, a season of life, something we started with all the shine still on it, and now we’re standing in the shop at dusk wondering if we bit off more than the good Lord meant for us to chew.

The Trouble With Beginnings

Beginnings are easy to love. There’s a shine on them. A new job smells like fresh paint. A new relationship feels like the whole world just got its colors turned up. A new dream is Christmas morning before anybody’s torn the wrapping paper.

But every one of us who’s lived long enough knows what comes after the wrapping paper gets swept up and thrown in the trash. The middle comes. That long, gray stretch where the excitement wears thin as an old work shirt and the thing you started just becomes work. Slow work. Quiet work. The kind that doesn’t feel like it’s going anywhere at all.

Progress stalls. Prayers seem to bounce off the ceiling and land back in your lap unanswered. What felt like adventure starts to feel like exhaustion, and somewhere in there you start asking yourself if you ought to just let the whole thing sit up on blocks and rust.

What Solomon Knew

There’s an old preacher named Solomon who wrote something I keep coming back to, from a book called Ecclesiastes, chapter seven, verse eight, out of the King James:

“Better is the end of a thing than the beginning thereof:

and the patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit.”

Solomon had built kingdoms and buried them, chased after every kind of pleasure and found the bottom of every cup, and what he came back to, after all that living, was patience. Not excitement. Not big beginnings. Patience.

Pride wants the engine running today. Pride says, “I need this finished, I need this answered, I need to see the whole plan laid out on the table before I’ll trust another step of it.” Pride can’t stand the sight of a truck up on blocks.

Patience is a different animal altogether. Patience says, “God knows what He’s doing, even when I can’t see the shape of it yet.” Patience doesn’t mean doing nothing. It means you keep showing up to the work without demanding the Lord follow your timetable.

Where the Real Work Happens

Here’s what I’ve come to believe, and it took me longer to learn than I’d like to admit. The finest carpentry God ever does, He does in that unglamorous middle that nobody takes pictures of. Not at the launch. Not at the ribbon cutting. Not at the wedding or the grand opening or the day you finally get the diagnosis you were praying for.

He does His deepest work in the waiting. That’s where He teaches you to trust Him blind. That’s where character gets built, the kind that can’t be built any other way, the kind that only comes from sitting in the not knowing and choosing to stay faithful anyhow.

If you are in that stretch today, if the shine has worn clean off whatever you started and you are just plain tired of waiting on it to come together, I want you to hear this. Your frustration is a chapter. It is not the whole book. The One who started this work in you has not wandered off and forgotten where He left it. He is still out in the shop somewhere, hands dirty, working on something you will be grateful for later, even if you cannot see it from where you are standing tonight.

The Truck Runs Now

That old truck runs today. Runs beautiful, actually. Smooth as anything, like it never spent a day of its life up on blocks.

But you should have seen it back then. You should have seen how long it sat there looking like nothing was ever going to come of it.

Breathe. Pray. Keep walking. The God who was with you when this all began is not going anywhere before the end. And one day, further down the road than you can see from here, you are going to look back over the whole stretch of it and recognize just how faithfully He carried you through every uncertain step.

Keep going. He’s not finished with you yet.

If this stirred something in you today, I would love to hear about it. Leave a comment below, and if you know somebody sitting in their own middle season right now, wondering if the truck’s ever coming off those blocks, go ahead and send this their way.

The Greatest Love Story Ever Told

Posted in @jimmiekepler, Ancient Wisdom for Today, Bible, Blog, Christian Living, Christian Writers, Jim Kepler, Jimmie A. Kepler, Jimmie Aaron Kepler, Jimmie Kepler, jimmiekepler.com, Poet, Poet's Life, Poets, Writer's Life, WritingLeave a comment

The Greatest Love Story Ever Told

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” John 3:16 (KJV)

I’ve heard that verse so many times it could slide right past a man without leaving a mark. That’s the danger of familiar things. You stop looking at them close. But sit with it a while, out on the porch where the crickets are loud enough to drown out your own noise, and it starts to work on you different. That’s not a Bible verse. That’s a love story. The realest one there ever was.

A Love That Came Near

God looked down at a world that was broken in about every way a thing can break, and He didn’t turn His face from it. He didn’t stay up in the clean and distant places where trouble can’t reach. He came down into the mud with the rest of us.

He gave the one thing that cost Him everything. His Son.

Jesus didn’t get sent like a telegram from somewhere safe. He walked into the middle of our suffering on purpose, and He gave His life so the rest of us could be forgiven and set loose from what was holding us down. The cross isn’t a symbol. It’s proof. Love that only talks is cheap. Love that bleeds is the kind that means something.
A Gift for Whoever

There’s a word in that verse that’ll stop you if you let it. Whosoever.

No fine print behind that word. No list of who qualifies. Doesn’t matter if you’re rich or ruined, churched or never been inside one, smart as a whip or barely scraping by. The invitation doesn’t check your record first.

You don’t have to clean yourself up before you knock on that door. You don’t earn your way in. Grace was never a wage. It’s a gift, and gifts don’t ask what you did to deserve them.

Anybody can walk up. Anybody can believe. Anybody can be given a life that doesn’t run out.

A Promise With No Expiration

Everything else wears down eventually. Trucks rust. Friendships fade. The body gets tired quicker than it used to, and the years go by faster than a man wants to admit. Nothing you can hold onto stays the same forever.

But what Jesus hands you doesn’t come with a shelf life.

Eternal life isn’t just some far-off promise about what happens when the dirt closes over you. It starts right now, in whatever kitchen or truck cab or hospital room you’re sitting in tonight. Forgiveness. Peace. A reason to keep going. The quiet certainty that death doesn’t get the last word, no matter how loud it talks.

You Are Not as Alone as You Feel

There are stretches of road that get heavy. Sickness, losing somebody, disappointment that won’t let go, nights so lonesome you can hear your own heartbeat. In those stretches, this old verse says something your circumstances can’t take back.

You are loved. Not loved in some general way that gets handed out to the whole crowd. Loved by name.

God knows what you’re carrying even when you can’t find the words for it. He saw the gift cost Him His Son, and He paid it anyway, so you could trust He’s not going anywhere now.

His love stays when everybody else has packed up and gone. It finds you in the dark places. It holds on through every hard season you walk through.

Something to Carry With You Today

Just take a minute today and let that verse sit with you a while.

You haven’t been forgotten. You’re not too far gone for grace to reach. You don’t have to earn what’s already been given.

The gift’s already on the table. Jesus came so you could be forgiven, brought back, and given a life that never runs dry. Believe it. Rest in it. Walk through today knowing you’re seen, known, and held.

A Prayer

Heavenly Father, thank You for a love big enough to give up Your only Son for me. Thank You that the door’s open to anybody who’ll believe. Help me take hold of that love, trust the promise, and remember I’m never walking this alone. When the road gets heavy, remind me I’m seen, known, forgiven, and held close in Your hands. In Jesus’ name, amen.

#John316 #GreatestLoveStory #KJV #FaithJourney #Grace #EverlastingLife #GodsLove #DailyDevotional #ChristianFaith #WhosoeverBelieveth #HopeInChrist #FaithOverFear

When Your Soul Needs a Reason to Praise

Posted in @jimmiekepler, Ancient Wisdom for Today, Bible, Blog, Christian Living, Christian Writers, Jim Kepler, Jimmie A. Kepler, Jimmie Aaron Kepler, Jimmie Kepler, jimmiekepler.com, Poet, Poet's Life, Poets, Writer's Life, WritingLeave a comment

When Your Soul Needs a Reason to Praise

Some mornings the praise just comes on its own, easy as breathing. The coffee is hot, the light is coming in low and gold through the window, and a man doesn’t have to reach for gratitude, it just finds him.

Other mornings are not like that. You wake up and the weight is already sitting on your chest before your feet hit the floor, and praise is not a feeling waiting to happen. It is a decision you make on purpose, jaw set, before the day talks you out of it.

David knew both kinds of mornings. He was a man who had danced before the ark and also a man who had hidden in caves wondering if the next sunrise would be his last. In the middle of all that living, he sat down and had a talk with his own soul. He didn’t wait for someone else to preach him into praise. He preached to himself.

“Bless the Lord, O my soul: and all that is within me, bless his holy name.” Psalm 103:1 (KJV)

That is not a man offering God a tired little nod on his way out the door. That is a man calling every last piece of himself to the table, his heart, his memory, his aching muscles and his worried mind, and telling every piece of it to get in line and bless the Lord together.

There is something in that for anyone carrying a full plate right now, a hard season at work, a decision that won’t resolve, a future that will not hold still long enough to get a good look at it. Stop where you are and breathe. Set that worry down like a sack you have been hauling too long, and start remembering instead.

Remember the prayer that got answered when you had nearly quit praying it.

Remember the door that opened after you had already made peace with it staying shut.

Remember the strength that showed up right when yours ran out, strength that was not yours to begin with.

Praise is not a man pretending the trouble is not real. Praise is a man standing in the middle of real trouble and declaring, out loud if he has to, that the Lord is bigger than all of it.

So today, have that same talk David had. Tell your soul the truth. God is still good, His mercy has not run dry, and His love has not shifted an inch. And when you are done telling it, do not stop at a whisper of thanks. Give Him everything you’ve got.

Bless the Lord with all that is within you.

Today’s Reflection:

What is one thing God has done that you can praise Him for today?

When Hope Overflows

Posted in @jimmiekepler, Ancient Wisdom for Today, Bible, Blog, Christian Living, Christian Writers, Jim Kepler, Jimmie A. Kepler, Jimmie Aaron Kepler, Jimmie Kepler, jimmiekepler.com, Poet, Poet's Life, Poets, Writer's Life, WritingLeave a comment

My Story

There’s a particular kind of quiet that settles over a man in a waiting room, the kind where the magazines don’t matter and the clock on the wall seems to have forgotten how to move. I sat in that quiet not long ago. My geriatric doctor sent me to my urologist. He put me through a CT scan of the abdomen and pelvis, then a cystoscopy, hunting for bladder cancer. I won’t pretend the word cancer doesn’t carry its own weight, even before anybody’s said it about you out loud. It brings its own gravity into the room.

The tests came back clean. No cancer, just a few worn parts that come standard with a body that’s logged some miles. But here’s the part worth telling. In those days of not knowing, especially the hours before that cystoscopy when my mind had every reason to run wild, something in me stayed still. Not numb. Not brave in the way the movies show it. Just still. Peace had moved in and set up camp, and fear never did find the door. I had more clam than I thought possible.

“Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope, through the power of the Holy Ghost.” Romans 15:13 (KJV)

We spend a lot of our lives waiting on peace to show up after the trouble leaves. We tell ourselves we’ll breathe easy once the diagnosis changes, once the pain lets go, once the fog clears and we can see the road again. It’s a reasonable enough way to think. It’s also backward.

Romans 15:13 tells a different story. That peace isn’t rented out by our circumstances. It’s not something we earn by getting good news. It comes from a source, not a situation. Scripture doesn’t just say God gives hope like a man handing out spare change. It says He is the God of hope, the well itself, not just the bucket.

Long stretches of sickness or grief or waiting have a way of hollowing a man out. You reach for your own strength and one day you find the well’s gone dry. That’s not failure. That’s just where the road tends to lead. And it’s exactly where the Holy Spirit meets you, not with a lecture, but with water. As you hand Him your trust, He starts filling up those tired, empty rooms inside you with a joy the world never manufactured and can’t manufacture now.

Understand this too. God isn’t in the business of doling out just enough hope to get you through till Tuesday. He promises overflow. Your circumstances might not shift an inch. Your body might still ache, your questions might still hang in the air unanswered. But His presence has a way of steadying a man’s heart anyway, reminding him that grace runs deeper than whatever trouble he’s staring down.

You don’t have to manufacture hope today. Bring Him your empty heart, worn thin as it is, and let Him fill it.

Prayer

Heavenly Father, You are the God of hope, and I praise You because Your love and mercy never run dry, not even on the hardest days.

Forgive me for looking to my own circumstances, my own grit, for the peace only You can give. Today I lay my trust down at Your feet. I hand You my worries, my health, my unanswered questions, my fear of what’s still coming.

Holy Spirit, fill every worn and weary place in me. Trade my anxiety for Your peace. Trade my discouragement for Your joy. Trade my fear for a hope I didn’t build myself.

Let Your presence show up so plain in my life that hope spills over from me onto somebody else who’s struggling today. I rest easy knowing I belong to You, and that You’re the one holding on, not me.

In Jesus’ name, 
Amen.

Action Steps

When the worry starts creeping in, stop where you’re standing and take one slow breath.

As you breathe out, name whatever you’re hauling around and say, “Lord, I give You this burden.” In 1 Peter 5:7 it tells me to cast all my cares on You. Lord, I cast all my cares on You for You care for me.

As you breathe in, say, “Holy Spirit, fill me with Your joy and peace.” In Philippians 4:7 you say “And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”

Do that a few times over. It’s not a magic trick. It’s just a way of remembering you were never meant to carry the whole load by yourself.

Do You Have the Courage to Take a Hard Look at Yourself?

Posted in @jimmiekepler, Ancient Wisdom for Today, Bible, Blog, Christian Living, Christian Writers, Jim Kepler, Jimmie A. Kepler, Jimmie Aaron Kepler, Jimmie Kepler, jimmiekepler.com, Poet, Poet's Life, Poets, Writer's Life, Writing1 Comment

The Courage to Face the Mirror

There’s an old mirror hanging in my bedroom, the kind with spots along the edges where the silvering has worn thin. Most mornings I give it the quick glance, straighten my collar, check for something in my teeth, and head out the door. That kind of look gets you through the day fine. It never healed a man yet.

The deeper look is a different matter entirely. That’s the one where you stand still long enough for the light to find every corner, every wound you’ve been covering with a smile, every old habit that’s still got a grip on your collar like a debt collector who knows your address. It takes nerve to hold your own gaze that long. Most of us would rather talk about the weather, or the boss, or the people who did us wrong, anything but stand there and admit, this one’s mine, and it’s still bleeding some.

Where Old Habits Still Have a Grip

It is easier to blame circumstances. Easier to excuse the choices we made in the dark and call them survival. Easier still to hide the pain beneath a smile so practiced nobody thinks to ask if you’re all right.

But here’s the hard truth, plain as a nail through a board. We cannot heal what we refuse to acknowledge. We cannot change what we keep telling ourselves does not exist. A wound left unnamed just festers quiet, and it will collect its due one way or another, on its own schedule, not yours.

The Light That Heals Instead of Shames

Ephesians 4:22 through 24 lays it out plain. Put away the old self, corrupted by deceitful desires. Be renewed in the spirit of your mind. Put on the new self, created after God in righteousness and true holiness.

That is not a courtroom verse. It is not God dragging you into the light to humiliate you in front of the neighbors. It is a good father checking a wound so he can clean it right and let it close the way it ought to. He does not shame the broken. He tends to them.

One Honest Prayer Is Enough to Start

You do not have to fix the whole man tonight. Nobody’s asking you to repair forty years of habit before breakfast. Just start where you are, with one honest prayer, spoken plain.

Lord, show me what needs to change, and give me the courage to follow where You lead.

The person in that mirror still carries yesterday’s scars. Grace does not erase them. It just means he is no longer chained to the man who earned them.

Face the truth. Release the old. Renew your mind. Then take the next faithful step toward the person God is still shaping you to become.

 

Step Into the Light

Posted in @jimmiekepler, Ancient Wisdom for Today, Bible, Blog, Christian Living, Christian Writers, Jim Kepler, Jimmie A. Kepler, Jimmie Aaron Kepler, Jimmie Kepler, jimmiekepler.com, Poet, Poet's Life, Poets, Writer's Life, WritingLeave a comment

There’s a stretch of highway I used to drive before sunup. I would see nothing but gray shapes and guesswork, mile markers swallowed whole by the dark.

You’d swear the road had disappeared. Then, so slow you almost missed it, a thin line of light would crack open the horizon. Not a flood. Not a flash. Just enough to see the next hundred yards.

Then I’d top a hill and there would be town. I was at my destination.

That’s the only kind of light God’s ever promised me.
I wanted the whole map once. Every turn, every mile laid out before I took the first step was what I wanted before starting my journey.

Took me a long while to understand that’s not how grace travels. It comes the way dawn comes: a little more light for the little more road you can see.

One prayer. One choice. One stubborn act of trust before the coffee’s even cooled.

Proverbs 4:18 says it plain, the path of the righteous is like the morning sun, shining ever brighter till the full light of day.

So if your beginning looks thin right now. Maybe it looks like a blank page, a quiet prayer, a faith you’re not sure will hold your weight. Don’t you dare despise it. Sunrise never apologizes for starting slow.

Look back five years, ten. You’ll find the dark doesn’t sit on you the way it used to. You haven’t arrived. But friend, you are not where you started.

Keep walking or driving forward. The light’s already coming.

Lord, when the road looks dim, help me trust the light You’ve already given, and walk it faithful, one step at a time. Amen.

#FaithJourney #MorningLight #Proverbs #WalkByFaith #Devotional #TrustTheProcess #SpiritualGrowth #DawnBreaking

Before You Get There, God Is There

Posted in @jimmiekepler, Ancient Wisdom for Today, Bible, Blog, Christian Living, Christian Writers, Jim Kepler, Jimmie A. Kepler, Jimmie Aaron Kepler, Jimmie Kepler, jimmiekepler.com, Poet, Poet's Life, Poets, Writer's Life, WritingLeave a comment

Some mornings you can see the road ahead.

Other mornings you cannot see past the next bend.

That is when Deuteronomy 31:8 becomes more than a verse to underline. It becomes a handrail for the heart:

“The Lord himself goes before you and will be with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you.”

Before you arrive at the doctor’s office, He is already there.

Before you face the hard conversation, He has already gone ahead.

Before the bill comes due, before the grief rises up, before the loneliness knocks on the door, before the news you did not want to hear finds its way into your day — the Lord is not surprised, delayed, distracted, or absent.

He goes before you.

That means the unknown is not unknown to Him.

And He will be with you.

That means you are not walking into tomorrow by yourself.

Fear tells us we are alone. Discouragement tells us nothing will change. Faith reminds us that God has already stepped into the place we are afraid to enter.

So today, take the next step. Not because you know how everything will work out, but because you know Who is already ahead of you.

Do not be afraid.

Do not be discouraged.

The road may be uncertain, but the One who walks before you is faithful.

The Barefoot Boy and the Teacher Who Saw It First

Posted in @jimmiekepler, Ancient Wisdom for Today, Bible, Blog, Christian Living, Christian Writers, Jim Kepler, Jimmie A. Kepler, Jimmie Aaron Kepler, Jimmie Kepler, jimmiekepler.com, Writer's Life, WritingLeave a comment

The year was 1967, and I was just a kid in a Schertz, Texas high school when a teacher I didn’t even think much of at the time cracked something open in me that never quite closed back up.

Back then, English class wasn’t for reading poems quiet at your desk. You memorized them. Then you stood up in front of God and everybody and recited them, and every forgotten word felt like a small dying right there in front of your friends.

We were told to pick a poem, minimum ten or twelve lines. I don’t rightly recall which. Most kids picked something short and safe, something they could carry without breaking a sweat.

Not me. My choice was “The Barefoot Boy,” by John Greenleaf Whittier. The poem was better than a hundred lines, wall to wall. I’d first heard it a year before, up in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, from an eighth-grade teacher who read it like it mattered, and something in me latched onto it and never quite let go. The structure pulled me in. I loved the way it moved down the page like a boy actually walking, the story underneath it, barefoot and unbothered and free.

When she called my name, I walked to the front of the room and did something none of my classmates had thought to do. I gave my own introduction first, written and memorized same as the poem, laying out what the thing meant and why it mattered.

Then I let it go.

I wasn’t interested in just saying the words right. I wanted them breathing. My voice became an instrument. I focused on pace, pitch, silence, and I moved around the front of that classroom more like a preacher working a Sunday crowd than a high school boy trying to pass English, arms doing half the talking. I wanted that poem alive in the room the same way it had come alive in me. My dream was that everyone would feel the words like I felt them.

When I finished, the quiet didn’t last. The teacher was on her feet clapping. My classmates joined her, and a couple of the boys let out one of those low whistles teenage boys save for the things they’d never admit moved them.

That teacher didn’t ask me to join the University Interscholastic League poetry team, she told me I was joining, plain and simple. She said she’d never heard a student read poetry with that kind of fire and control, and she pushed me toward more of it. She had me doing more reading, more writing, more standing up and saying true things out loud.

Nearly sixty years gone now, and I still carry that afternoon like a coin in my pocket. I still remember the prettiest girl in the class coming over and hugging me and whispering in my ear, “You sure talk pretty. I’d love to have you read more poetry just to me.” 

Sometimes a teacher spots something in a kid before the kid even knows it’s there. Sometimes it’s a poem, or an assignment nobody wanted, or a burst of applause nobody saw coming, swinging open a door that was shut a moment before. A sign pointing in a direction to a destination never before considered.

Scripture says it plain, in Psalm 45:1, “My heart is stirred by a noble theme as I recite my verses for the king; my tongue is the pen of a skillful writer.” My English teacher quoted that verse to me saying memorizing verse (poetry) is a noble calling.

That old line from a Psalm in the Bible is a gift running both directions. One direction to the one who writes and the other direction to the one who reads, to the poet and the one telling the story, to whoever puts the words down and whoever’s brave enough to stand up and give them breath.

So here’s what I’d leave you with today.

Your creativity isn’t an accident. You’re a vessel, and what you write might end up part of a story bigger than you’ll ever see. Writing isn’t just spilling thoughts across a page; it’s shaping, it’s rhythm and cadence, it’s care taken on purpose. Whatever you’re putting down. Whether it be a poem, an essay, a devotional, a letter, a Bible study, or just some words on social media, do it like it matters.

Let your words carry light. May they hand out grace along the way. And let them land on somebody who’s still carrying them sixty years from now.