Provision in the loss

Your Provision for today, O Lord, is perfect and abundant.  I taste Your Manna for my day and it is like honey to the soul.  I am thankful.

(Provision gifts on the endless gift list!)

Sunshine

Coffee to enjoy

Clothes in which to dress

Food to nourish and sustain

Shelter and a refuge

Job and provision financially

Health

Youth

Laughter

Daily bread

Eternal life through the gift of Salvation: the death and Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ

Hope

Minds to remember her life and celebrate the good years

Breath of life

Love!

Purpose for a life: "to glorify Him and enjoy Him forever" (Westminster Chatechism)

Minds to believe

Tongues to proclaim

Eyes to see and be fully attentive to Beauty

Ears to hear and be fully attentive to the chorus of praise

Taste buds to taste the abundantly good life

Skin to touch tangible YOU

Nose to smell the sweet fragrances of Creation

It is easy to think that the Lord's perfect provision can only be tasted when in Paradise.  For how are we nourished when times are hard?  Yet isn't it so that the Lord provided Manna while our forefathers walked in the desert?  

And so, our family walks through a hard time, today, as my Mother's Mother passed away only last evening.  And how do we proclaim His provision when we have lost?

The provision is in the memories.  The provision is in the time.

For we look back and we remember those precious moments of togetherness.  And we once again give thanks for minds to remember: her beauty, her laugh, all those shades of lipstick she had that I loved to paint over my lips, and all those shades of nail polish too.  Her love of animals.  Her love of all things glamorous.  And we remember that the Lord provided for us time abundant with her.  69 years of marriage for her and my Grandfather.  4 children.  8 grandchildren.  5 great-grandchildren.  And isn't Time the most precious gift of provision?

But often loss makes us realize how we have waisted precious time.  Waisted perhaps in terms of complaining, living selfishly, living irritably and if we could just get those moments back...

But we can't.  And that is the mysteriously and wonderfully wise movement of God-ordained time.  Time requires us to live here, just now.  Those moments are lost.  But in their losing, if we could but slow, they show us and teach us the way to Time.  Here, now, as in those moments with our lost one, there is provision.  As the woman in the co-op said, the one with the bright elderly eyes and the delicate hands that measured out powdered mustard: "We have so much.  Often we have to endure a famine to realize what a feast we have."

It's the loss that makes us realize
                                    indeed just how much, for us, He has already provided.