She became one of those smiling, happy people, just like on the cover of the tract.

She had exhausted her worldly understanding.

She could find, it seemed, no peace, in all the worldly systems, and even turned to drugs and alcohol.  People talk about "rock bottom", and she had reached it.  She was sleeping in a friend's car at nights.  She didn't have access to a bathroom; she had to go to edge of the treeline and make her toilet as if she were a squirrel or a raccoon.

She despaired of life, and was just marking time for its own sake.

Until a trip to the library, where she used the public computers free of charge.

There was a tract, a pile of tracts on a counter.  

She took one.

Part of her was thinking that she could fall into the charity of that local ministry, let them take of her, but that wasn't the mainline of her thinking.  She had questions about the life of faith.  I mean, "what made them so different?"  Even on the cover of the tract, photos, the people were happy, seemingly captured in mid-laugh.

She found the word, and pretty soon thereafter, the pieces started falling into place.  It wasn't all at once, the change, but it came on slow, like one of those big heavy glaciers, slow-coming changes that would last and last in her life.  Her getting a source of income, becoming more the person she wanted to be, even taking up with her previously-abandoned children.

Soon enough, she was one of those happy people, like on the tract.

She thought to herself that having changed, she should dropped some of her fair-weather drug addicted friends, that she was a no creature in Christ, and she shouldn't associate with them anymore.

But she wanted them, too, to experience the hope and peace she felt.  Indeed, if she showed them the sunshine of hope and faith, it might have been the only sunshine that some of them saw in a given day.

She had indeed became a new creature in Christ, and thusly, she wanted to share the message.  She hadn't read through the passage of the Great Commission, but she was already following that teaching, without having ever heard it.  She was becoming a beacon for the Lord, of hope in Christ and faith in God, the healing powers of hope and faith.

And so it was.

a new and living way.

Hebrews 10:  "Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, BY A NEW AND LIVING WAY, which he hath consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say, his flesh; and having a high priest over the house of God;

let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water."

Honest faith availeth much, just as the leaven and the lump, such that so forth and so on, justified, content with such as is, when it is of love and faith, such that the love of God, and the faith in Christ is in the believer....

...made manifest.....

..."we have been awakened into a lively hope...."

we need only remember.

Anything that gets in the way, interferes or intervenes between you and God, must be, by default, from the enemy.  Truly, one must be damned eternally to even ponder getting in the middle of that relationship.

That said, even when ensnared, the believer need only remember God's promises and what has already been sacrificed.  This is our mercy, and we are assured of future deliverance, assured by the words to and of God's prophets.

"Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?  Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?.......

...i am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor pricipalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."

We need only remember God's mercy.

L.D. Oneal: "God Hasn't Forgotten You".

 

Psalm 42, "the health of my countenance".

"...why art thou disquieted within me? hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise Him, who is the health of my countenance; and my God." -Psalm 42.

To remember hope in God is the "health of my countenance", a sure way to elevate one's mood about worldly concerns.

one above all, a central point of demarcation for all of creation, past present and future.

"the abundance of grace and the gift of righteousness."

Be it fair weather or foul, as a television pastor in Texas says, we need to "remember what God did for us."

Science randomizes creation to an extent, even while trying to put fine points on particulars.  They look at life, often, as sort of an improbable accident of nature.

In this respect, we may look upon our science text to support our Christian apologetic.

*Life is a miracle.

Only God could set that wheel into motion, as varying theories coalesce to decide that it could very well be foreseen, that a spark at one point, has a clear line of sight to the creation of life billions of years later.  Knowing the variables, one could predict any number of reactions and states of matter many years either ahead or behind in the past.

God could know, even on the first of the six Creation Days, that the world would come to pass, and that life, at some point in the future, would bloom on that barren little world.

Even the ancients with their plurality of demi-gods believed in a singular force above all of them: a father figure.  He begat this one and that one, and so forth.  Aurelius was speaking from ancient Roman imperial era orthodoxy speaking of gods, but then reminding there was a chief among them, one most knowing and powerful.

*Mortal men were incapable of deceiving or defrauding that one top-most figure.

And then as the world is in the shadow of the Lord, "after death", the world is given a covenant promise from that central figure: good wishes and forgiveness for those that ask.

Those moments when the world's forces overshadow "what God did for us", those times can seem dark and hopeless, but immediately, a remembrance of heaven and the cross can draw us back into remembrance.