Happy New Year!

     I made this word cloud using words from the January 1st entry of My Utmost for His Highest, a classic devotional book by Oswald Chambers. A new year, a new house, a new baby, a new car, a "new" anything brings along its own set of dreams, hopes, expectations, fears, concerns, anxieties. People ask us how long we plan to stay in Lesotho.  We don't really know. Honestly, while on the one hand I believe we have been providentially placed here for this time and this purpose, another part of me questions whether we are being financially responsible. Charis hasn't completed college yet, Dakotah hasn't even started school yet, and we are in our fifties without a grand retirement plan to fall back on. This is where God speaks to me through the writings of Chambers:

"My determined purpose is to be my utmost for His highest--my best for His glory." To reach that level of determination is a matter of the will, not of debate or of reasoning. It is absolute and irrevocable surrender of the will at that point. An undue amount of thought and consideration for ourselves is what keeps us from making that decision, although we cover is up with the pretense that it is others we are considering. When we think seriously about what it will cost others if we obey the call of Jesus, we tell God He doesn't know what our obediance will  mean. Keep to the point--He does know. Shut out every other thought and keep yourself before God in this one thing only--my utmost for His highest. I am determined to be absolutely and entirely for Him and Him alone.   

     The Sunday before we left for Lesotho, we sang "I'll stand. With arms high and heart abandoned." What does that kind of life really look like? What could 2015 bring if we choose to live completely surrendered, abandoned to God's purposes? Let's pray for each other.