Christmas X

 

Checkerboard Hill- South Saskatchewan River (Sylvia/Facebook)

1 Jn 3:1-6; Ps 98:1-2, 4-7; Jn 1:29-34 

All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth. 

People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return.  

Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.

By faith Abraham, when God tested him, offered Isaac as a sacrifice. He who had embraced the promises was about to sacrifice his one and only son, even though God had said to him, It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned. Abraham reasoned that God could even raise the dead, and so in a manner of speaking he did receive Isaac back from death.

 

By faith Isaac blessed Jacob and Esau in regard to their future.

 

By faith Jacob, when he was dying, blessed each of Joseph’s sons, and worshiped as he leaned on the top of his staff.

 

By faith Joseph, when his end was near, spoke about the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt and gave instructions concerning the burial of his bones.

Hebrews 11-13-22

 

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Four leaps of faith, actions based on an unknown future filled with promise, coloured perhaps by a disappointing past and present, even at the end.  

 

This, the tenth day of Christmas cites ten lords a-leaping. Ten leaps of faith? 

 

Today is the second day of my official retirement, December 31 being the end of a job in the company I have been with for almost 35 years, and a career I have had for almost 45. On the 2nd of January, I might sleep in, but on the 3rd and subsequent days, what is my future?  What is my purpose? It is unknown. 

 

I am acting on "a word" I received in April of 2024. I am acting in obedience, but this is indeed an act of faith, a leap of faith.

 

The photo of the checkerboard was taken at a place known as "Checkerboard Hill," a steep drop-off on the banks of the South Saskatchewan, near Leader. (It also might have been the spot where my father-in-law, as a youth, facilitated a car flying over the edge.) The top of the hill is typical prairie grassland, the bottom of the hill, verdant farmland. The middle, a landscape etched by an ancient receding river. If you look through the shot-out hole of the Checkerboard sign, you see only a part of what lies on the other side.

 

The Lord has sustained me all of my life, through joys and accomplishments, through deep sorrow and disappointments. Do I say What NOW in fear, or Now WHAT in joyful anticipation. As Rev. Femi reminded us, we may not know what lies ahead, but we know that God knows and goes with us.

 

I am sustained by the most powerful doxology Glory to God, whose power working in us can do infinitely more that we can ask or imagine. I pray for guidance, I pray for faith, I pray for peace.

 

Sylvia Besplug

 

 

 

By Faith  Keith and Kristyn Getty