Over the past few days, I have made every attempt to catch up on my reading and on my rest. For my sabbatical, I committed to reading In Pursuit of His Wisdom by Dr. R.T. Kendall and excerpts from The Patriot’s Library (writings by America’s most noted patriots). Needless to say, I’ve had trouble making time for reading, but I made some really good progress over the holiday weekend.
In The Patriot’s Library, I read “The Declaration of Independence,” “The Articles of Confederation,”The Constitution,” and “The Amendments to the Constitution.” Reading through these historical and vital documents made me realize that every U.S. citizen should read them once every year or two. Our founding fathers were incredibly thoughtful, insightful, and wise. Our Constitution is very clearly written, which makes me wonder why there are always legal battles over it.
In Pursuit of His Wisdom is a book that requires lots of introspective thinking. But as usual, Dr. Kendall diligently and beautifully takes complex matters and makes them simple to understand (and I need simplicity when it comes to the things of God!). Dr. Kendall says, “Wisdom is getting God’s opinion. For true wisdom is God’s opinion. God’s glory is His opinion. The root word of the Greek “doxa” (glory) means opinion. True wisdom, then, is God’s opinion…. He therefore should be consulted first when we are wanting to know the next step forward.”
It’s funny (peculiar, not ha-ha) how God brings things to light and provides what I would call “Godly coincidences” while on sabbatical. Yesterday, I got a text message from a friend; it said among other things, “I felt negative energy from you during our EOY week (referring to our company’s year-end meetings and events in December)…. If I hadn’t been reading your blog I would never have felt that I could share that with you….” I responded that more than likely what was perceived as “negative energy” was total fatigue – I was worn out from a very difficult year (is anyone else glad to see 2016 go?)! Then, today, I read this from In Pursuit of His Wisdom, “We should take full advantage of wise people God places in our paths. We all need good mentors. We also need friends who will lovingly but candidly tell us things we need to hear.” (emphasis added). I’m appreciative that a good friend would tell me, lovingly but candidly, what I needed to hear – and her/his perception of me was more accurate than I want to confess, judging from how tired I was.
My point is this, it’s amazing to see God work through our sabbatical plans!
Blessings, Kris