I was thinking of loyalty.
I was thinking of people who only contact you when they are in trouble or need prayer.
*a thought that I wouldn’t speak out loud*
(should that be considered as your own personal ministry…or is it a sign that you are boring or unattractive in any other scenario…or simply that a person knows you will honestly pray for them when maybe the people they normally hang with or listen to when things are going good represent just that… a good time?)
Sounds like there’s a little self-pity or bitterness in that, and did Jesus ever wonder that? Did he wonder why Peter would deny him to his face when he was being beaten and dragged off to a cross where he would die so that we could have eternal life? I doubt it, although he did ask the Father “Why have You forsaken me?”
Surely…surely…
To have a face-to-face denial by a man who had been so up close and personal with the Lord had to have been a terrible blow, especially after he had been betrayed by a man he had just fed bread to from his own hand and whose feet he had washed.
Unthinkable
I read a poem from Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, one passage in it stuck in my mind so deeply that I wanted to share it with you:
“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar: “
I closed my eyes and enjoyed the view and listened to the “sound of silence”.
So many people in trouble, homes being swept away by floods, ripped apart by tornadoes, sickness gripping so many… I pray for them as I sit quietly.
Then I turn on the reader in my YouVersion Bible and listen to Psalm 91 and there I receive the comfort and pleasure for which I seek in the pathless woods.
It begins,
“You who sit down in the High God’s presence,
spend the night in Shaddai’s shadow,
Say this: “God, you’re my refuge.
I trust in you and I’m safe!”
Harolene.com 