Greetings!  I hope your week is off to a good start.  This has been an emotional and difficult week for our family.  Last Tuesday evening we put our daughter, Karen, her husband, and our two grandsons on the plane back to Armenia.  We had a great three weeks spoiling and enjoying our boys.  Then on Wednesday afternoon we received word that Rosemary’s 82 year old father, Jack Meador, had been involved in an accident and was badly burned.  [In case you didn’t hear, he was putting gas in a hot lawn mower and it exploded back over him burning over 40% of his body].  He is stable and in the burn unit of UVA.  His spirits are good, but he is facing a long and difficult process of recovery.  The potential for complications is quite high at his age.  We appreciate all of your prayers and concern.  Rosemary and her sister Lisa are both Daddy’s girls and are struggling to deal with all of this.

             Needless to say we are learning much about the burn recovery process [let me just say the burn unit at UVA is phenomenal].  One of the things we are learning that relates to this devotional thought is that before the healing can begin and new skin can grow, all of the dead skin has to be removed.  The first painful surgeries and extensive procedures Jack has endured have been efforts to debreed or remove all the dead skin.  Before new skin can be grafted on, the old must be removed.  The same is true in our spiritual lives as  well.  Listen to these words from the Apostle Paul in Ephesians 4: 17-19; 21-24 “And so I insist—and God backs me up on this—that there be no going along with the crowd, the empty-headed, mindless crowd.  They’ve refused for so long to deal with God that they’ve lost touch not only with God but with reality itself.  They can’t think straight anymore.  Feeling no pain, they let themselves go in sexual obsession, addicted to every sort of perversion.  Since, then, we do not have the excuse of ignorance, everything —and I do mean everything —connected  with that old way of life has to go.  It’s rotten through and through.  Get rid of it!  And then take on an entirely new way of life—a God-fashioned life, a life renewed from the inside and working itself into your conduct as God accurately reproduces his character in you”—The Message.

             In the rest of the chapter he describes what this new life in Christ should look like.  We are to be truthful, self-controlled, honest, hard-working and generous.  We are to relate to one another in love, encouraging one another, being kind and showing compassion.  We are to forgive, just as Christ forgives us.

             The question I’ve been asking myself is this: are there pockets of greed, or deception, or lust, or impure thoughts, or dishonesty that are hindering my growth?  As painful as it might be, are the dead places in my life that the Master Surgeon needs to cut out, so that I can begin to grow into the new person Christ wants me to become?  May all of us have the courage to endure with patience the removal of the old to make way for the new.

             Through the prophet Ezekiel, God promises that …”I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.”  (Ezekiel 36:26)That day has come.  Ask God to remove the dead, unresponsive parts of your heart and replace them with a new heart intent upon following Him!

             Have a good week and remember to reach out to someone this week who is hurting.  Our congregation seems to be under attack and we need to stand together and encourage one another.
 


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