New Year: Trusting God's Plans Over Our Own

Happy New Year!While a new year is here and many are making resolutions, don’t forget we need to always be sharing the name who has delivered us, Jesus. Just yesterday, as I was driving home, a young man who I’ve come to know over that last year called me and asked advice on some personal reflection and planning he was working on. The question was, “what would an 85 year old you tell a 25 year old you if you could go back in time?” (I’m not 85, but maybe I was close enough in his eyes…) Well, I will spare you the long talk we had, but in short, I told him I would tell myself not to get caught up in “the plans” I had for my life and put more trust in the plans God had for me. Meaning, don’t worry about the future, it wasn’t going to happen like I planned. That wasn’t the answer he thought I would give him and it engaged a longer talk about walking in a relationship with Christ. That was Jesus at work. Now is the time to reach out to a world that needs to feel the love of Christ. Now is the time to help people experience forgiveness and receive unconditional love! I believe it has been in God’s plan all along that we accompany love with action. Each one of us has a place in God’s master plan to touch the lives of others through good deeds. Each time we touch the life of another with a kind word, respond to a certain need, or just simply lend an kind ear to a hurting heart, we not only express our love, but God’s love for them through us.“Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”Philippians 2:5-11 Be Nice. Grace wins. FMJ