Tempest-tossed?

Sunday lunch was over, and the washing-up done.  James and Moira were sitting quietly in the lounge.  Moira was knitting; James … just sat.  Moira was used to this regular weekly scene.  It was a pattern that had developed gradually over thirty years of happy married life.  She asked James what he was thinking as he relaxed in the late spring sunshine streaming through the window.  Although not at all dissatisfied, she wondered whether there were something else they might do with their afternoon.

“Thinking?” he replied, drawing thoughtfully at his pipe.  “Yes, I suppose I was.  Do you know, that hadn’t occurred to me.”  He paused, as if the idea of actually doing something – even so simple as thinking – were quite alien to his frame of mind at that moment.  “I was just taking in the wonder of life: the garden planted, the children settled at last, we’ve no money worries ... there’s just the two of us, happy here together.” 

*  *  *

God was in His heaven, and all seemed right with the world.  That word picture might have been penned forty or fifty years ago; somehow it seems less likely that it’s a 21st-century situation.  Look with me at the ‘prologue’ to the story of Job in the Old Testament (Job 1:1-5).  Here is a word picture from another, distant, age but one that bears comparison to James and Moira. Like theirs, it couldn’t happen in Britain today.  A family of ten is rare in the first place, and what rich man today would count his wealth in terms of the number of animals he owned?  However, in his own time and culture, clearly Job had ‘made it’.  Little did he know what was to come.

Sitting in his lounge on a Sunday afternoon, James, too, was clearly mesmerised by the very successful tranquillity of their life.  But we know only too well what dreadful illnesses, what financial catastrophes, what human disasters can lie just around the corner from a peaceful life today.

In the hurly burly of modern life, we rarely have time to step back from life like James and Moira, and just take in its magnificence.  Like them, you might feel that some past trouble is now overcome and you can look forward to a time of ‘plain sailing’.  Or are you like Job, well aware of God’s part in your life.  He was fearful that his sons might have been sinful in their celebrations, and was anxious to make reparation to God on their behalf (v.5).

In the light of the New Testament, we know that we don’t have to pacify God.  That debt has been paid – once, for all – by Jesus’ death and resurrection.  But it is good to give God the credit for all that He has done in our lives.  Try, if you can, to sit quietly for a few moments, turn aside from those worries and pressing matters, and think instead of the many ways – ways we often taken for granted – in which God has blessed your life.

The name Johnson Oatman Jr. may not be known to you.  Born in New Jersey, USA in 1856, he was a Methodist minister and, like the famous Charles Wesley before him, he was a great hymn writer.  Before he died in 1922, he had given some 5,000 hymns and songs to the church.  Perhaps one of his best known is “When upon life’s billows”.  You can find it on the internet at www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/c/o/countyou.htm).  Look it up now, and ‘count your blessings’ this summertime.