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Happy Birthday, Transitions…

By February 17, 2022December 7th, 2022Devotional

This Saturday, February 19th, I will celebrate my 69th trip around the sun. For those who have been with me for years, you know that each year near my birthday, I go back and re-visit the origins of Transitions by The Book and the leading that I had to start this blog on my 58th birthday – 11 years ago this weekend. I guess you could say that Transitions celebrates its 11th birthday this weekend!

At the time, I had been thinking of writing a book for many years but I could just never wrap my brain around actually sitting down to do it. After writing my doctoral dissertations I just didn’t have it in me to think about compiling another 50,000 words or so which is what it would take to put together any semblance of a book. I kept thinking that I had things that I wanted to say about living a God-centered life, but I just didn’t know how to go about it – it seemed like a huge undertaking and I just felt paralyzed.

During this thought process, I was doing some housekeeping in my home office and decided to re-organize my Bibles. There, on the top of the stack, was a small New Testament, with the Psalms, that my paternal grandmother had given to me on my 10th birthday – February 19, 1963. I remembered that I never read that Bible after I received it. I guess I knew that there was some verse highlighted in the front as Grandma was always quoting some biblical passage in almost everything she did.

Grandma shared with me that she had read the entire Bible, cover to cover, more times that she could count. There was no denying that she knew her stuff. And each time a birthday or Christmas rolled around, you could be sure that there would be some reference to the Bible or God in these events. As a boy, I didn’t appreciate Grandma’s commitment to lead a God centered life. Even when Janet and I joined the church as teenagers after our respective confirmation classes at Trinity United Methodist Church, we didn’t grasp what it meant to really follow Christ.

All this went through my mind that day in my office as I approached my 58th birthday. I opened that old New Testament and, perhaps for the first time in 48 years, I looked up the verse and contemplated all the things that had occurred in my life since I received that gift from Grandma.

I was taken back to my early childhood and re-lived some of the divine interventions that I had witnessed during my life. When we were young, it was thought that I would be the one who would attend medical school and at one point, people actually mentioned that they thought my brother Doug would be a “preacher boy”. In reality, with all kinds of twists and turns in between, Doug became the well known doctor and I became the minister. Of course, that didn’t happen until near the end of my corporate career.

The day that I was organizing my Bibles, I finally understood the nature of the verse and the importance of recognizing that if God brings you to it, He will bring you through it. Of course, I am now seeing it from another perspective having lived a number of years.

So… our verse for tonight is the verse that is memorialized on the inside cover of that small Bible I received from Grandma. Since that fateful night when I wrote my first post, I have written more than 1,750,000 words in 1734 posts – far more words than I would have written had I decided on a book. We have readers in all 50 states and several countries around the world. It has been a very rewarding experience! And I still receive such joy from providing a chronicle of the lives of the Toussaint family as we acknowledge God’s everyday presence in our lives.

The verse for tonight comes from the author of the book of Hebrews. We are told, in Hebrews 13:20-21, “May the God of peace, who through the blood of the eternal covenant brought back from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep, equip you with everything good for doing his will, and may he work in us what is pleasing to him, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.”

My encouragement this evening is that God has a divine plan for each of us. As a ten year old, I didn’t understand that. Now I do… My prayer is that God will continue to do His work in each of us that will allow us to fulfill our divine destiny ordained for us in advance. Have a great day in the Lord, grace and peace…

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