Today's Daily Lesson comes from Jeremiah chapter 29 verses 4 through 9:
4 “Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: 5 Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. 6 Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. 7 But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. 8 For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Do not let your prophets and your diviners who are among you deceive you, and do not listen to the dreams that they dream, 9 for it is a lie that they are prophesying to you in my name; I did not send them, declares the Lord.
Sometimes we have to simply make peace with where we are in life.
Acceptance is a part of life. Not everything can be fixed. Rescue is not always imminent. One generation may simply have to quit waiting for supernatural rescue and instead learn to do its best in the here and now. Sometimes the Deus Ex Machina isn't a part of the script. The script exile and the script calls for us to make the best of a bad situation -- to build gardens and plant trees right where we are and not wherever else it is that we thought we should be.
The old Serenity Prayer asks for God to "grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change and the courage to change the things we can."
What we cannot change may very well be our circumstances; but what we can change is how we deal with them.
"Bloom where you're planted," the saying goes; and out here in blustery West Texas we might say, take root wherever the wind has blown you -- even if it's sand soil.
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