Sometimes your life reaches a period…..and you were praying it could have been a comma. Where do you go from there? How do you get to the next step? What can you give to God when something significant to you comes to an end? Beloved, go to the Author, get words of wisdom, and give your periods to God.
Recall that God the Content-Maker has full control of how He will fill and fulfill the contents of your life. Every chapter has been considerably planned out. Each paragraph completely prepared with prayer. All sentences carefully purposed for a reason. Every period, comma, semi-colon, hyphen, parenthesis, and quote has been divinely placed. Even the open spaces where there should have been something, when you felt alone and empty in those places, God had a vision of what He wanted to do in your life.
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In Genesis 37:18-36, we find a boy who faces a period he never could have foreseen. Joseph is sold by his brothers to traders who are passing by. These Midianites take Joseph to Egypt where he is sold a second time into slavery. Joseph’s departure from his home and family is a devastating “period.” Joseph never returns to the familiarity he loves and longs for. The life he knows dies the day the traders drag him off. How often did Joseph pray that God would bring him home? How often did Joseph beg God to intercede and intervene for him?
On that lonely road, with his hands tied up and surrounded by hostile strangers, Joseph sits on perhaps a camel or mule, and asks God to make a miracle….to turn this nightmare into a comma. But the comma never happens. Instead, what Joseph has to live with is the reality of a “period,” a defining turning point in his young life.
How many of us have been there? When we wanted to break down because we’ve arrived at this fork of the road that is an ugly “period.” God, if there’s a story behind this “period,” why aren’t you revealing it and rescuing me from this? Like a shroud over our eyes, periods hold no light as to its assignment. We may never understand or know the why and why me part for the existence of the periods in our life. But we know that God never forgets nor forsakes his children before, during, and after a “period.” “For God has said, ‘I will never leave you. I will never abandon you.” (Hebrew 13:5)
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Beloved, whenever God inserts a “period,” it’s done because He has a greater storyline, often dramatically different from the one we would have mapped for ourselves. The character of God is to guide us in a path where His goodness and glory supersedes any raw deal or radical wrong done to us. The “period” may feel like it has pulverized us. Yet how we move on from that period is crucial to the destination we hope to end up.
Ultimately, the “period” has provisions to guide us from chasing down the wrong path and choosing an inferior future apart from Him, provisions that God sets aside for us in His grace.
Joseph believes God has a plan for his life and will provide for Him no matter the placement of the “period,” in pain, in prison, or in Pharaoh’s palace. In the heavy and the hardest, we can, like Joseph, entrust our faith and future into God’s hands, knowing God is sovereign despite what the periods can inflict.
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Beloved, trust today that your life history has this one goal. When facing an unexpected “period,” you can respond to God wholeheartedly: “Not my heart’s desire, Lord, but your will be accomplished because I trust You. I absolutely all-out, all-in, all-of-my-heart trust You.”
•That You know more than I do how the pages of my life will turn.
•That every surprise twister of a “period” which throws me off guard isn’t a surprise to you.
•That you continue to add more chapters with a better narrative than I could come up with myself.
•That you create a heavenly epilogue for me which lasts beyond my story on earth.
•That You love me so much You were willing to send your son, Jesus, to die on the cross for me so that every “period” has eternal meaning.
God, when I struggle to handle the periods in front of me, I can hand them into Your hands. Every “period” in my life is not a dead end or ending without purpose. But they are a place and platform for the launch of a new beginning in You. God, I know this is the Real Truth. Period.
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©️Breathe Truth