When Mondays Are Difficult--"God is Already in Your Tomorrow"

"Everything you need for this week you will find in Christ."
I read that in one of my favorite blogs a couple days ago.

I know this is Tuesday, but it's after one of those Mondays.
You know, the kind that leaves you ready to hang up a sign like this one at a cabin Jonathan and I were allowed to spend a night at last week, before estimating remodel work. 

I had taken along a magazine from the library to perhaps read an exciting story to Jonathan as we drove,  in between the hours of him being on the phone with business issues and us working together on putting together a list of names and phone numbers to call for the next Mission Helps trips. 

But the story ended up being about a man getting mauled by a bear and surviving, 

so gory that as I skimmed through it, I was going weak, and decided not to read it aloud.

And then when we got to the cabin, it was called, "Bear Claw Cabin."
Great thought just before going to bed for the night. 

Also the name I'd like to call our house on some Mondays when the kids are tired -

and Mom is drained from the tough day Sunday 

and the house is full of dirty laundry and bedding sprawling in the living room from the kids' night out on the deck, and there is no end of little messes needing dealt with

and you really need to start school at 9:00.

So on Monday afternoon when I discovered this little blogpost by Christy Fitzwater about Monday mornings, I could really relate.

***'

She wrote, "My momma says it’s like the weeks after Christmas, when all the hoopla is over and you feel the letdown.  For two weeks I have had this feeling, along with trouble getting out of bed and working up the fortitude to get dressed and keep moving.

When we feel low, the temptation is to curl up in a ball somewhere, but as followers of Christ we are required to work when we are depressed, to pray and read the Bible and seek God.

So I did the work.  And now I must tell you the happy ending.

"Today my step is once again light, and I declare that God is a rewarder of those who seek Him.

From every direction last week God spoke to me of the gospel of Christ.  In my Bible reading, in my reading of other literature, in sermons I listened to, and in song God clearly said, What you need is the power of the cross.

The gospel seems rudimentary, and so we tend to receive it, feel that we have graduated from it, and can move on to “greater” truths, but this is wrong.

"Elisabeth Elliot writes, in Keep a Quiet Heart, 'In difficulties of all kinds I’ve been wonderfully helped by taking time to look at them in the light of Christ Himself. ..He calls us to give up all right to ourselves, take up the cross, and follow.  This hard place in which you perhaps find yourself, so painful and bewildering, is the very place in which God is giving you the opportunity to look only to Him, to travail in prayer, and to learn long-suffering, gentleness, meekness –in short, to learn the depths of love that  Christ Himself has poured out on all of us.'

..".You tell me –how is it that a woman who has walked with God these thirty-six years [just one year less than I!] needs to have the good news preached to her?  Why do I need to hear again that...I have no power to pull myself up out of the pit of despair –that only Christ can do this?

On a Monday morning, then, when we feel the weight of current difficulties and the inevitable trials of a new week coming, what we need most is the good news of Christ.  Jesus loves us.  He died to take the punishment for our sins, and by the power of God he was raised back to life.  So we can live in that power, too.."

That's what Christy wrote.
Strange that I had just read John 1 and 2 on Sunday, and was supposed to read John 3 Monday--
and wondering what I was going to get out of it--
it's just about being born again.

Just about being born again.

 Rudimentary, of course, when we think we need something besides the gospel,
or the cross,
something that will help us in our trials and troubles and overwhelm and issues....

But really, 
what we need, down underneath everything,
is the good news of Jesus Christ.
"He must increase, but I must decrease."
So if in the flesh we decrease and decrease and decrease,
it's so the power of God may rest upon us.
And isn't that good news?

While you’re reading this, God is already in your tomorrow. -Fitzwater.

http://www.christyfitzwater.com/joy/monday-needs-good-news/