Tag: Love Story

Are You Lonely?

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 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

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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. 

Come and Rest

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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