Dear Lord; Happy Meditations Monday Father!<\/p>\n
This past weekend Lord, was absolutely wonderful.\u00a0 Friday night we enjoyed a tasty dinner with friends at our home, and got some much-appreciated assistance moving furniture around for the upcoming Small Group Study we\u2019re hosting which begins next week.\u00a0 Saturday we joined some friends at the Chesapeake Celtic Festival<\/a> in Snow Hill, Maryland.\u00a0 While it was a little on the chilly side (which I was just fine with), we had a fantastic time watching the demonstrations, perusing the crafters\u2019 displays and sampling some period food and drinks.\u00a0 Sunday began with a rousing church service at Ewell\u2019s St. Paul UMC<\/a>, followed by an afternoon of catching up on housework, schoolwork and finding time for some much-needed rest.\u00a0 All-in-all, it was a weekend filled with Your Blessings Father, and I thank You for that time.<\/p>\n As I\u2019ve mentioned Father, it\u2019s been getting progressively chillier here as we edge into Fall\u2019s grip; a very welcome change in my book, I must say.\u00a0 Well, this morning when I went to take the dogs out back for their morning run, I was greeted with a familiar sign of the season.\u00a0 As I exhaled, my vision was temporarily clouded as my breath hung in the air before me.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a lesson here…\u201d I heard You whisper.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cThere is?\u201d<\/em> I thought.\u00a0 Well Lord, for much of the remaining morning my brain got in the way as I diligently tried to work through what You wanted me to glean from condensing water vapor in the morning chill.\u00a0 I ran through passage after passage in my head, and finally resolved that You\u2019d let me know when You were ready.<\/p>\n Walking into my office this morning, You once again broke the silence with a simple message:<\/p>\n \u201cSeen, or unseen.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Ok, that was Scripture I recognized\u2026<\/p>\n \u201cTherefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.\u201d – 2 Corinthians 4:16-18 (NIV)<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Reading that Father, I understood exactly what you intended to get through to me this morning\u2026<\/p>\n Sometimes, what we can\u2019t see is far more important than what we can.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Your Holy Spirit is very much like the breath within me; I go through each day rarely considering the necessity of those gasses bringing vital oxygen to my lungs, but without them I would very quickly cease to function, and die.\u00a0 Unlike this morning, in most cases I can\u2019t see the air I breathe, but it\u2019s there sustaining me all the same.\u00a0 Along that same line of thought, without Your Holy Spirit within me, my connection to Your eternal presence would be severed, and death would truly be a final act.<\/p>\n It\u2019s absolutely no accident that the Hebrew word for spirit \u201cruach\u201d<\/em>, is also translated as \u201cwind\u201d<\/em>, or \u201cbreath\u201d<\/em>\u2026 Just like the cloud that escaped my mouth on this chilly October morning.<\/p>\n What a wonderful lesson to start my week Father.\u00a0 \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n In Jesus\u2019 Name we pray,<\/p>\n Amen.<\/p>\n ~Phather Phil<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dear Lord; Happy Meditations Monday Father! This past weekend Lord, was absolutely wonderful.\u00a0 Friday night we enjoyed a tasty dinner with friends at our home, and got some much-appreciated assistance moving furniture around for the upcoming Small Group Study we\u2019re hosting which begins next week.\u00a0 Saturday we joined some friends at the Chesapeake Celtic Festival […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1423,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[1444,75,505,921,168,419,12,1101,1918,219,1919,866,915,236,494,1240,561,1452,1291,1725,196,173,844,628,228,24,110,966,1920,444,731,140,592,159,1055,269,222,1451,206,1325,355,506,845,1525,648,887,1922,217,41,699,568,818,727,629,174,832,1358,265,1921,1917,117,469,631,114,668,272,240,481,49,378,379,348,138],"class_list":["post-1424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-emails-to-god","tag-2-corinthians","tag-accident","tag-afternoon","tag-appreciate","tag-bless","tag-blessing","tag-blessings","tag-breathe","tag-chesapeake-celtic-festival","tag-church","tag-church-service","tag-cloud","tag-dear-lord","tag-death","tag-diligently","tag-dog","tag-dogs","tag-eternal-glory","tag-ewells-st-paul-umc","tag-ewells-st-paul-united-methodist-church","tag-eyes","tag-father","tag-follow","tag-friday","tag-friend","tag-friends","tag-fun","tag-god","tag-gods-lessons","tag-happy","tag-head","tag-heart","tag-holy-spirit","tag-home","tag-housework","tag-jesus","tag-joy","tag-light-and-momentary","tag-meditation","tag-meditations-monday","tag-message","tag-morning","tag-need","tag-niv","tag-office","tag-passage","tag-pauls-second-epistle-to-the-corinthians","tag-pray","tag-presence","tag-recognize","tag-recognized","tag-renewed","tag-rest","tag-saturday","tag-school","tag-schoolwork","tag-scripture","tag-season","tag-seen-or-unseen","tag-small-group-study","tag-son","tag-sons","tag-sunday","tag-thank-you","tag-trouble","tag-troubles","tag-vision","tag-week","tag-weekend","tag-wonder","tag-wonderful","tag-word","tag-work"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/Eye-Closeup-1-Cropped.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p18mMc-mY","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1424"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1424\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1428,"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1424\/revisions\/1428"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1423"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}