A stone of remembrance

It is such a blessing that God does not wait for us to get everything together before He works through us. "It is His delight to make straight lines with crooked sticks." (RC Sproul Jr)
My dear life-long friend Martha is going through a very tough time. As I write this, she is in the University of Washington Medical Center with her son Sam (30 years old.) Sam's liver is failing, and he is waiting to be admitted to the liver transplant active list. A few weeks ago as I was reading in Isaiah, God impressed me with a few verses from chapter 58 for Martha and Sam. I knew I should write an email to her, but due to busy hectic days and an unwillingness to sound trite or overly spiritual I put it off. Finally, I knuckled down and wrote, admitting that there were no words I could say that could fit her pain and situation, but sending her God's words..'sent from God's heart, through me, to her and Sam'. Martha's sister has been sending out email up-dates for the last two months, and I sent the email to her to get to the hospital. Due to Sam's severe health situation they do not go in to visit every day. She wrote back that she had printed it out, and would get it up there when they could.
Sunday was Mother's day, so the whole family went for visits. It was not a good day for Sam, so they mostly visited with Martha. She received several emails, and started crying, the first tears they had seen her shed. She told them they were 'good tears', and explained that she and Sam had read those same verses in Isaiah THAT MORNING! She was totally awestruck that those same verses came to her again that afternoon 'from God's heart'! In spite of my busyness and procrastination, in spite of the human delays in getting the email to them, God orchestrated it perfectly to be on the very day He ordained. Here are the verses:

Isaiah 58: 8-12
"Then your light will rise in darkness, and your gloom will become as the mid-day. And the Lord will continually guide you, and satisfy your soul in scorched places, and give strength to your bones; and you will be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water whose waters do not fail. Then your light will break forth like the dawn, and your recovery will speedily spring forth; and your righteousness will go before you, the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard. Then you will call and the Lord will answer; you will cry and He will say, 'Here I am'."

Whenever we see God's hand working actively in a moment of time, it is good to mark it with an 'Ebenezer Stone', or a stone marker along the path of life. We are too prone to forget, to let it slip away. This post this morning is my 'stone of remembrance', my marker to remember God's faithfulness, God's mercy and everlasting goodness to His people and to me. HIS beauty is the greatest beauty we could ever write about on this blog dedicated to beauty...God's design in each of us.