This last week has been all about reward & repair for me. I’ve spent almost every morning reading, journaling, reflecting, and embracing the beauty of the outdoors. When it gets too hot to sit outside, my husband Pressley and I have enjoyed spending time together talking, laughing, and enjoying good food and favorite shows.
Last Monday, as I sat on my porch enjoying the morning reading and reflecting, I realized how pretty our patio would look with a few globe lights. I did a little research, talked to my husband, and decided to order a 100 ft. strand of lights to string in our yard. Now, a week later, we have our lights up, and I love it! It will look even better at night :). Plus, it gives us a little spot to sit at night and enjoy a glass of iced tea, and take a little bit of the sabbatical life into everyday life.
We also welcomed two new little babies into our lives this week. We got a couple of baby chicks to add to our backyard flock to ramp up egg production. These two will be blue egg layers, our favorites!
In the mornings, we’ve been reading through our Bible reading plan as usual. Every morning, we listen to three chapters from the New Testament on our YouVersion Bible app. We’ve read through the Bible several times together during our marriage, which has been absolutely transformative. For the last few months, we’ve read through the New Testament 2 times, and we just started our third round. I’ve also been reading the Book of Mysteries that Kris gave us. Wow, there are some good nuggets in that book. It’s given me a lot to chew on and think about during my reflection time.
For my sabbatical reading, I chose to read A Life God Rewards: Why Everything You Do Today Matters Forever by Bruce Wilkinson, author of The Prayer of Jabez.
It was a quick read, but on a very important topic. His whole point was that what we believe determines where we will spend our eternal life; what we do with our lives determines the degree of reward or comparative suffering that we experience in that life. If you imagine your entire eternal existence as a long, never-ending line, our lives on earth are the very first dot on that line. While our lives are short, they determine the direction that line will go for the rest of our existence! Our lives on earth set the trajectory for our lives in heaven, or the rewards that we will enjoy.
Jesus spoke a lot about rewards in heaven because He wants us to enjoy His good pleasure when we meet again. What’s amazing is that our Father is constantly watching and recording the good things we do so that He can reward us in heaven. Even giving a drink of water to someone in His name (Matthew 10:42) or a prayer spoken from the secret places of the heart (Matthew 6:6) is deserving of a reward in the Lord’s eyes.
I think that many times, the enemy tries to tell us that God is only watching us to see where we mess up. But if you read Hebrews 11, the hall of faith, you see that God doesn’t keep a record of wrongs. (Because God is love, 1 Corinthians 13 is a perfect description of His love toward us!) Hebrews 11 shares the stories of the champions of faith from heaven’s perspective. While we know from the Old Testament that each of these were flawed human beings, the Hebrews account is a record of how God sees them once their sin has been removed as far as the east is from the west. Beautiful, isn’t it? God is not watching us to see how we mess up. He’s watching us to see what we get right, and he is carefully recording the best version of our stories to be retold again and again in Heaven for His own glory.
I’ve been encouraged and strengthened from these moments of reflection this week, and I’m continually laboring to enter His rest. My struggle is that I keep trying to take up my burdens and carry them instead of giving them over to Him. My burdens and worries and cares have no solutions. But He said His yoke is easy and His burden is light. And He always has something much better for me in return if I open my hands and release my burdens to Him. He exchanges a crown of beauty for ashes, oil of joy for mourning, and a garment of praise for despair (Isaiah 61:3). He always has something much better in store for us if we only have the courage to cast our cares upon Him. He loves us so much!