Edward’s QT

Moses continues to repeat the same message of loving God with our heart and soul and obeying his commands because by doing so the Lord will continue to send the rain but if we turn aside, he will shut the heavens. We are to teach our children the faith in the Lord. When Israel walks in obedience and holds onto the Lord, then he will drive out their enemies and allow them to possess the promised land.

Questions: Has the ground of my life ever gone dry? How well did I teach the faith to my children? What is the land I’m being asked to step onto in faith?

Twenty-five years ago, the ground of my life dried up with an affair, the death of my first wife, my job loss in the US, and the rejection by the woman I had hoped to marry and make a new family with our little daughter.

God had been preparing me for this season of dryness with the loss of my pension during the IMF crisis as well as with my ongoing family disharmony caused mostly by my steadfast blindness to my wife’s alcoholism, which I finally acknowledged just before her death. With no money, a temporary job, and no family around me, I lived alone for many years, unhappy, and feeling that God was persecuting me rather than caring for me. I was failing utterly to interpret my life through his love and holy word.

I taught my children faith in God’s goodness and mercy by taking them to church every Sunday for all the years they lived with me. Through church worship they learned about Jesus, but they didn’t see me living a Christian life of interpreting my life through God’s word and repenting. I did not actively teach them how to live with God.

 The result is that only one of them attends church regularly but in a church that embraces homosexuality and transgenderism.

In bringing me to Korea and Wooridle Church, God brought me to a repentance I never imagined and a growing and living knowledge of God in my life. His goodness and mercy chases after me.

 I became a school principal for 12 years and now in retirement he’s leading me to step into the role of a volunteer English teacher at a Korean elementary school. As an educator with 40 years of experience, I was almost always the one telling others what to do. Now, as a volunteer, I am the one who will be told. I will learn the beauty of God’s constraints on my time and who I teach. I will step into this new land with faith in God and loving obedience to his word.

Application: Wait prayerfully for the school authorities to direct me and then obediently follow.

Prayer: Thank you, Lord, for this short dry time between my retirement and re-entering school life. Let me accept the directions given to me without thinking I know better.