If only to keep my mouth shut!

When we moved to Atlanta and into our first real home, my mother took a big cardboard box and put a nice cloth over to serve as a coffee table in the living room. We bought a nice looking albeit very cheap, lace tablecloth at JC Penny and put it over an old hand-me-down table in the dining-room.  One evening a very prestigious lady came to visit and we served coffee on that table on which we had placed the lace cloth. The lady fingered the edge of the cloth and said to her equally snobbish friend, “I can always tell good lace when I see it, this came straight from France!” You talk about having to fight the urge to laugh out loud, and to speak up, but knowing my punishment would be severe, I exhibited perfect self-control and kept my sixteen-year-old mouth shut!

I really admire someone who can put things together well and my mother was the best at it. She could take nothing and make it look like it came from France after all! The talent to do things like that must be from our “Dad’s” gene pool, after all He designed all the world!

Genesis 1: 1-2 First this: God created the Heavens and Earth—all you see, all you don’t see. Earth was a soup of nothingness, a bottomless emptiness, an inky blackness. God’s Spirit brooded like a bird above the watery abyss. He didn’t stop there he made a beautiful garden and filled it with all types of colorful plants and flowers, trees, animals and finally a type of Himself, Man. He designed us perfectly! We have blood, cells, organs that work together, skin that stretches and contracts, bones that support us, and, when we cut our self or break a bone, we HEAL! I looked up this evening, the sky was so beautiful I wanted to stop traffic and look. The pink streaks, clouds, the dark clouds on the other side with the sun shining from behind giving the most beautiful silver lining! Have you ever seen a rainbow? It is only the reflection of light on water drops, yet He chose this beautiful work of art as a sign to us!

So when I see humans putting together colors and swatches of material, making a beautiful room from something un-beautiful, I see the Father in them.

Psalm 8 God, brilliant Lord, yours is a household name. Nursing infants gurgle choruses about you; toddlers shout the songs that drown out enemy talk, and silence atheist babble. I look up at your macro-skies, dark and enormous, your handmade sky-jewelry, Moon and stars mounted in their settings. Then I look at my micro-self and wonder,

Why do you bother with us?

Why take a second look our way?

 Yet we’ve so narrowly missed being gods, bright with Eden’s dawn light. You put us in charge of your handcrafted world, repeated to us your Genesis-charge, Made us lords of sheep and cattle, even animals out in the wild, Birds flying and fish swimming, whales singing in the ocean deeps. God, brilliant Lord, your name echoes around the world. Oh Lord, MY Lord, how excellent is Your name in ALL the earth!

If there is anything good in me, any talent to sing, play an instrument, or simply know when to keep my mouth shut at the right time, praise to Him, my “Dad”!