Tag: GraceForToday

Finding Peace in the Right Now

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 Woman Who Was Waiting for Tomorrow

There is a particular kind of tired that has nothing to do with sleep. Addy knew it well. She sat at her desk one afternoon with a spreadsheet glowing in front of her, numbers lined up neat as tombstones, and she could not have told you a single figure on it. Her mind had wandered off somewhere down the road, chasing a life that had not happened yet.

She ran the list the way folks do when they are dissatisfied and do not quite know why. The job paid too little and asked too much. The apartment had grown smaller every year without changing size. The savings account looked thin under the light. Friends who used to know her secrets now only knew her weather, fine, busy, hanging in there. And the man she loved, the one whose coffee she still made every morning, had gone quiet on the subject of forever.

She had a sentence she repeated to herself so often it had worn smooth, like a stone carried in a pocket. If I could just get the promotion. If we could just move somewhere better. If he would just ask me to marry him. When I finish my MBA. Then I could be happy.

Happiness kept its address just around the next corner. It always does, for people like Addy. For people like most of us.

The Cross-Stitch on Grandma’s Wall

One evening she drove out to see her grandmother, the way she did every few weeks out of duty more than desire, if she was honest. The house smelled the way it always had, coffee and cedar and something like the past. On the wall hung an old cross-stitch, the fabric gone the color of weak tea, the thread soft with fifty years of dust. The words had not faded, though. Words like that rarely do.

Her grandmother had lived in that same small house through every kind of weather life can throw at a person. She had buried a husband. She had counted out grocery money at the end of hard months. She had outlived most of the friends who once sat at her table. And yet there was something steady in her, something Addy had been hunting for in all the wrong corners of the future. A quiet joy that did not depend on the circumstances lining up right.

Her grandmother’s life had never been perfect. Her peace had never asked it to be.

Addy sat with that a long while, longer than she meant to. She began to see that she had spent years chasing a mirage, waiting for her circumstances to get good enough before she would allow herself to feel grateful. While she kept her eyes fixed on some better tomorrow, she had been walking right past the mercies God had already laid at her feet today.

Contentment, she came to understand, was not a place you finally arrive at once every piece falls into line. It was a choice you make in the room you are standing in right now.

God may still change things. He may open doors nobody expected, mend what has been broken, or carry a person into a whole new season. But we are not required to put our peace in storage until He does. We can trust Him with the waiting and still live wide awake in the present.

What Scripture Says

Paul wrote from a prison cell, of all places, when he said:

“Not that I speak in respect of want:

for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.”

Philippians 4:11, KJV

A man in chains, teaching the rest of us about freedom.

Three Things Worth Carrying With You

Contentment is learned, not handed to you. Paul did not say he was born easy in his own skin. He said he learned it. Contentment is not a lucky temperament some people are dealt at birth like a good hand of cards. It is a discipline, built one day at a time by trusting God through whatever season you happen to be standing in. You practice it the way you practice anything, by noticing His goodness on purpose, by saying thank you before you feel like it, and by refusing to let what is missing drown out what has already been given.

Your circumstances do not get to run the show. Real contentment is not pretending the hard things do not hurt. It is refusing to hand those hard things the keys to your peace. Whether the season is full or lean, whether you are surrounded or you are lonesome, the deepest kind of joy does not come from how things are going. It comes from knowing whose you are.

The word “next” will wear you out if you let it. The next promotion. The next relationship. The next move, the next milestone, the next answered prayer, and then, finally, you tell yourself, you will be happy. But there is always another next waiting behind the one you just reached. That road does not end. Peace begins the day you quit postponing your life and plant your feet in the ground you are standing on right now.

You may not have everything you are asking God for. But He has not left the room. His grace has not run dry. His goodness has not clocked out for the day.

Do not miss today while you are busy waiting on tomorrow.

A Prayer for Contentment

Dear Lord,

I confess I have been restless more often than I would like to admit, dissatisfied with the very ground You have set me on. I have let worries about my work, my money, my relationships, and my future steal a peace that was never theirs to take.

Forgive me for keeping such a careful count of what I lack, and such a poor one of what You have already given.

Teach me the secret Paul knew from that cell. Help me trust Your timing instead of my own impatience. Help me see Your goodness even in the plain, unremarkable middle of an ordinary day. Let my satisfaction rest in You, not in whatever changes I am still hoping for. Give me the sense to keep working toward what is good without making my joy wait on the outcome.

Help me live grateful and faithful in the life You have actually given me. Not the one I keep imagining. This one, right here, right now.

In Jesus’ name,
Amen.

#ContentmentInChrist #PeaceInThePresent #TrustGodsTiming

Written by Jimmie Aaron Kepler, Ed.D. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. You are welcome to share or adapt it provided proper credit is given to the author.

Are You Lonely?

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

 Never Truly Alone

There’s a bench outside the old courthouse in a county seat town I won’t bother naming, because it could be any town, and you have probably passed one just like it. It sits under an oak that’s seen more funerals than weddings, and for years it was the busiest seat in the county. Four or five old boys would gather there most every afternoon. Coffee in paper cups. Complaints about the heat. Arguments settled that never needed settling in the first place. It was church without the steeple, and confession without the booth.

Then time did what time does. It took its cut.

One man moved off to live near his daughter. Another got sick and stopped coming, and then stopped altogether. A couple of them are buried now, out past the edge of town where the grass grows a little wilder. The rest got swallowed up by grandchildren and doctor’s appointments and the slow drift that happens to everybody sooner or later.

So there came a day when the last one of them sat on that bench by himself. Alone with the empty spaces where his friends used to be.

A young preacher walked by one afternoon and stopped, the way young preachers do when they see an old man sitting still. “Doesn’t it get lonely,” he asked, “sitting here by yourself?”

The old man looked down the bench at all that nobody sitting beside him. He took his time answering, the way a man does when he’s already made peace with the question.

“Some days it surely does,” he said. “But every morning before I leave the house, I ask the Lord to walk with me. Folks don’t always have the time to sit down next to an old man. But God has never once failed to show up.”

 The Promise Underneath the Silence

I keep coming back to that man on the bench, because I think most of us know exactly what that empty seat feels like.

Sometimes people leave all at once, with a slammed door or a hard word. More often they just fade, the way a radio station fades the further you drive from town. The calls get shorter. The invitations quit coming. A message sits there unanswered long enough that you stop expecting a reply. Folks who once swore they’d stand by you get busy standing somewhere else.

Scripture doesn’t dress this up or pretend it away. It just answers it plain. Hebrews 13:5 puts the promise in words simple enough for a child and deep enough to hold a grown man up: 

“I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.” Hebrews 13:5

God never promised us that people would stay. He never promised that every friendship would hold its shape or that every chair at the table would stay filled. What He promised was bigger than any of that. He promised Himself. Not the fair weather kind of presence, but the kind that sits down next to you in the empty places and doesn’t get up.

When the house goes quiet in a way it never used to, He’s there.

When the phone stops ringing the way it once did, He’s there.

When your own family looks at you like they can’t quite make sense of what you’re carrying, He’s there.

Loneliness has a voice, and it likes to whisper that nobody’s coming. But the old promise answers back quieter and steadier every time: “I am still here.”

You won’t always feel it. Feeling isn’t the measure of it. The same God who carried you through yesterday’s grief is the one waiting in today’s silence, and He’ll be the one walking you into tomorrow, whether you can feel His footsteps or not.

People come, and people go. That’s just the nature of a life lived among other broken folks doing their best. But God stays. That part never changes.

 Three Things Worth Carrying Home

  1. Your loneliness is not proof of abandonment. A quiet season isn’t the same as an empty one. God does some of His deepest work in the silence, teaching a man to listen for a presence he’d stopped noticing.
  2. People will fail you. God’s faithfulness won’t. Don’t let another person’s absence set the measure for God’s love. His word doesn’t bend just because a relationship did.
  3. Your lonely season might be somebody else’s answered prayer. Once you’ve sat on that bench by yourself, you start noticing who else is sitting there too. A phone call, a short message, an open seat at your table, these things carry more weight than we ever give them credit for.

 A Prayer for the Quiet Places

Heavenly Father, 

Some days this loneliness sits heavier on me than I know how to carry. I confess I’ve let the silence of other people convince me I’d been forgotten.

Thank You for the promise that You will never leave me nor forsake me. Help me feel Your presence in the quiet rooms of my life. When friends or family drift further than I’d like, remind me that my worth was never tied to who stays and who walks away. Heal whatever’s been wounded in me by rejection and by disappointment.

Give me courage enough to reach toward somebody else. Give me the wisdom to build relationships that can bear real weight, and the eyes to notice the ones sitting alone on their own version of that bench. Walk with me today, Lord, close enough that even in the silence, I know You’re there.

In Jesus’ name, 
Amen.

Written by Jimmie Aaron Kepler, Ed.D. This original inspirational thought is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. You are welcome to share or adapt it for the purpose of spreading God’s message, provided proper credit is given to the author.

Keep Pressing Forward

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 Street She Didn’t Choose

She walked alone down a street slick with rain, the kind of evening where the whole city turns to glass. Storefronts bled gold and red into the puddles. A trolley wire hummed somewhere overhead, and a bus rolled by throwing light across the wet stone like a slow firework going off in reverse. She had her khaki colored raincoat pulled close, umbrella pointing into the wind and rain, not for the rain exactly, but because a woman walking through a city at dusk learns to hold herself like she means it.

Nobody watching her would have known what kind of day she’d had. The mistake she was still carrying. The habit she thought she’d broken again showing back up like an old debt. The conversation she’d rehearsed and still botched. From the outside she just looked like a woman walking. Inside, she was doing the harder thing. She was choosing, step by step, not to quit.

That is most of what faith looks like once you strip away the stained glass and the hymnals. It looks like putting one foot after the other on a street you didn’t choose, in weather you didn’t ask for, with no guarantee the next block will be any easier than the last.

What Paul Knew About Unfinished Roads

Paul knew that walk. He said flat out he hadn’t arrived yet. Man had seen visions, planted churches, been knocked off his horse by the Almighty Himself, and he still said, “I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it.” What he had, though, was a direction. Forgetting what’s behind. Reaching for what’s ahead. Not because the past didn’t happen, but because the past doesn’t get to drive.

That woman on the wet street isn’t pretending the day went well. She isn’t rewriting what happened. She’s just refusing to let it be the last word. There’s a difference between denial and forward motion, and most of us confuse the two until life teaches us better.

The Light Further Down the Block

Maybe today your progress feels like nothing more than a few damp footprints on a sidewalk nobody’s watching. A whispered prayer while you wait on a light to change. A kindness offered when you had every excuse not to. One temptation turned down in a moment you figured you’d fail. It doesn’t look like much from a distance. It rarely does.

But grace has a long memory for the small things. It counts what you can’t see yourself counting. The woman doesn’t need applause from the street. She needs only to keep walking toward the light further down, however far off it seems, however many blocks of rain stand between here and there.

Paul said it plain:

“Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal.” Philippians 3:13 to 14.

Paul hadn’t arrived either. He just refused to let yesterday drive.

Don’t measure tonight by how far the street still stretches. Measure it by how far grace has already walked you.

Three Takeaways

  1. Release the past. Say it out loud to God if you have to. Let it be forgiven, and let it stop steering.
  2. Recognize your progress. Name one place, however small, where you’re further along than you were.
  3. Take the next step. Pick one plain act of faith you can do before the day closes out.

Closing Prayer

Heavenly Father, thank You for walking with me through every mistake, delay, and disappointment. Forgive me for dwelling on the past and comparing my road to somebody else’s. Help me remember this journey is in Your hands, not mine to measure. Give me courage to rise when I stumble, patience when the going is slow, and faith enough to keep pressing toward the purpose You’ve set ahead of me. Fix my eyes on Jesus and steady my steps down whatever street You have me walking tonight. In Jesus’ name, amen.

Written by: This original inspirational thought written by Jimmie Aaron Kepler, Ed.D. is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. You are free to share and adapt it for the purpose of sharing God’s message, provided proper credit is given to the author.