"DO IT NOW!"

No one knows what tomorrow may bring. The good that we would do must be done while we have the strength and the presence of mind to do it. Putting it off till later can easily become forgetting it altogether.

Such procrastination not only affects our own happiness but the ones we might potentially bless. Others might be sorely needing our kind words or kind deeds, which the Lord is prompting us to say and do. Not all urges to do good things may be His leading. But if we are listening to Him as He listened to His Father, we will probably hear Him saying more often than not, “Do it now.”

Write that letter or text now, make that phone call now, plan to visit a lonely person today. Don't wait for your bedtime prayers to pray for someone. When they come to mind, it may be Jesus letting you know they need your prayer of blessing right now.

Procrastinating actually assumes too much. The reality is that time is fleeting and stops for no one. Doing things we think of now is logically informed by the words in the above cartoon: “Today is seldom too early; tomorrow is usually too late.”

The following poem from my book Poems Between Here and Beyond tries to express the need to be aware of the good we can do while we have the time. It's a good way to wrap up these few thoughts on the exhortation to "do it now."

     CARING

This world around us surges—
   duties vie
      for all our time,
      our energies,
      our care. 

But greater Duty urges,
   “Don’t pass by
      a hurting heart
      with burdens hard
      to bear!” 

Routine is not our master,
   nor is fear,
      or vanity,
      or trivia,
      or show.... 

Amid a day’s disaster,
   let’s live here
      to lighten loads
      and griefs, before
      we go. 

— David L. Hatton, 2/23/2016

"Do it now!" And the Lord bless you in it!

THE HEALING POWER OF LOVE

The sister of former President Jimmy Carter, Ruth Carter Stapleton, was a well known speaker and facilitator of spiritual inner healing, often called “healing of memories.” Her 1st book, The Gift of Inner Healing, describes her own experience of emotional healing and the ministry into which it launched her.

After reading the following story in her 2nd book, The Experience of Inner Healing, I immediately felt led to share it, to reinforce to young moms and dads the importance of parental love and perhaps to help older adults seek inner healing for repressed wounding from deficits of that love. This is quoted from her chapter on “The Healing Power of Self-Acceptance,” p. 95-97:

From the moment we become conscious in our mother’s womb, immense emotional and spiritual forces emanating from our mother and, to a much lesser degree, our father begin to mold our pliable sensitive emotions which will one day be the adult self. People have tended to ignore the significance of that first nine months in our mother’s womb. Every new parent ought to be instructed that what they think and feel is more important in the care of an unborn baby than how they care for themselves physically.

The mother of a two-month-old baby boy had to rush him to the hospital. For no clinically explainable reason he was feverish, dehydrated and starving to death. Intravenous feeding did nothing to stabilize his condition which continued to deteriorate. Visiting in the home of a Christian friend while her son was hospitalized, the mother met a man who, after hearing her story, said, “I think it’s important for you to know that I’m a Christian doctor. Christ has shown me the absolute importance of love.” Possibly, he informed her, the baby was in its serious condition because it didn’t feel loved.

The mother broke in tears. “You’re probably right,” she said. “I don’t love the baby and I don’t love his father. I never wanted to have the child in the first place and I’m divorcing my husband as soon as I can.”

When the doctor asked if he could pray for her, she consented, and with deep tenderness he asked Christ to heal her broken spirit. As he spoke, she felt enveloped in a terrible shroud of bitterness that, over the years of antagonism, she had woven into her marital relationship. She realized she was killing herself with hate because of her own problems and was starving that innocent baby to death in the process.

After the prayer the doctor instructed her to go to the hospital, take her son’s face in her hands, look straight into his eyes, calling him by name, and say, “I love you.”

When she got to her son’s crib in the pediatric ward, she saw her little boy more dead than alive. Suddenly she was filled with a new sense of tender love for him. Reaching down she gently held the baby’s face in her hands and told him, “Michael, I love you. O Michael, my baby, I love you.”

At that moment the hospital doctor came into the room and asked her what she was doing. She told him the whole story.

He looked straight into her eyes. “I believe everything you say,” he told her. “I believe your baby is dying because he has no will to live. What you’ve just done may possibly save his life.”

It did.

The next day the fever broke. The child began to assimilate nourishment and fluids. A week later a loving mother brought her nearly recovered baby son home from the hospital.

 “God is love,” says the Bible in 1 John 4:8. When we think, speak or show love, we serve as channels for the eternal love of the Triune God. Whether expressed through an attitude of gratitude, a pronouncement of blessing, and extension of forgiveness, or an act of kindness, this divine love has healing power.

LET’S FINISH THE SONG

In my devotional time a few weeks ago, I felt the urge to put some thoughts into a short rhyme:

"Adore the Designer of all things real.
Enjoy these beauties, but hurry along. . . .
Resist temptations to linger or kneel.
Our journey is brief; let's finish the Song."

Feeling the body’s approaching need for retirement stimulates thoughts about mortality. Health issues and aging both tend to fix our gaze on the sand that keeps trickling through the hourglass of life. To contemplate departing from this world isn’t necessarily unhealthy. Ancient Christian monks made it a spiritual discipline to meditate on the day of their death, to help them focus on living each day well. Our concern should not be about how much sand is left to fall, but on the way we live while it’s falling.

Saying this reminds me of writing similar thoughts some years ago in a short essay called “It’s a Short Trip.” Although what I shared then is related, my little poem points toward another facet of concern: the finish.

I love the Lord, and I love the beauties of His creation.  As long as that former love includes loving my neighbor, it is entirely safe. But that latter love of the beauty God has created can be distractive.

I’ve spent hours collecting photo references off the Internet for art compositions that I want to paint someday. Some of that time could have been better invested in painting a few of them. It would have produced more tangible forms of appreciation to our Creator than my own personal delight in collecting them. If painting is part of the “song” God is calling me to sing, then lingering long among creation’s attractions is procrastination.

No one knows what tomorrow may bring. The good that we wish to do, whether by creating things to share with others or by showing love in word and deed, must be performed while we have the opportunity and the strength. Procrastination not only affects our own happiness. Others wait for our kind communications or helpful actions. If the Lord is prompting us to be a blessing to those around us, let’s not put it off till an unknown tomorrow. Today, let’s send that gift, write that email, give that phone call, make that visit. As the cartoon above says, "Do it now!"