Watch this video… and then watch it again. Three, even four times… it’s a lot to take in... 

 I have been made thankful for His persistence and constancy in my life.  Where I break promises, go back on commitments or become weary and easily distracted from Him, I know His patience with me still endures.  He still rises the sun for me.

We do not have to be alive in this world for long before we come to feel in us the drudgery that comes with a repeated chore or necessary habit:  go to bed each night, wash your hands, make your bed, brush your teeth, repeat your multiplication table, eat breakfast, lunch and dinner and then do it all again. God instilled in us from the beginning a beautiful rhythm of life and too quickly I am guilty of not seeing His presence in these things, too quickly I am tempted to justify giving up and cutting my losses.  But what if in the very things that we find most difficult to remain consistent in are the very things we must continue to battle with daily?  What if at that end we find ourselves most alive there? I feel the earth as it spins on its axis saying to us ‘Repeat, re-do, retry, do it again, over and over, for as long as it takes,’ This sentiment is found personally in the difficult nurturing of a fragile friendship, in the painful love I must give a lost family member, in continual forgiveness I must offer those who offend me each day and the prayer I must breathe each morning as I am forever offending the One who gave me everything.  The difficultly I find in loving someone just to be let down, and allowing myself to love again with no diminished capacity.  It’s in a daily bathing of a comatose patient who will soon pass away. It’s in the newborn baby who wakes up crying every 2 hours on the hour.  It’s in the cycle of budding flowers to dying leaves.  Summer skies to gray winter sunrises… and back to summer skies.  It’s in driving to work each morning to face the same frowning co-workers, it’s in telling the girl who thinks no one can love her that she is beautiful and she is good enough over and over until she believes it’s true.  It’s in doing my laundry more than once a month, and opening my black, cracked Bible each night to read when I’d rather just turn out the lights.  Do not let monotony be an idea to cringe at or fight against.  With your mind in eternity there can be no such thing as a senseless task.  Find joy in those small unassuming habits, for God is there.  And praise God that He is there, to remind us over and over and over and over again…

Then Peter asked “Lord, how often should I forgive someone who sins against me? Seven times?” “No, not seven times,” Jesus replied, “but seventy times seven! -Matt 18:21-22

© Stephanie Diaz-Schumm