Brown's Daily Word 5-25-10

Praise the Lord. It is going to balmy and brilliant today. The Rhododendrons in front the Parsonage are in full bloom. They are colorful, brilliant, and beautiful. I saw two deer frolicking around the back yard of parsonage yesterday. They looked carefree and unhurried, jubilant, and welcoming summer-like days.
I have been reading From Joel. Here we read about locusts, which are destroyers and a delicacy. God sent them as the eighth plague of Egypt, but they were the mainstay of John the Baptist’s diet, for they are an excellent source of protein. Locusts are destructive creatures. A swarm may have a population numbering in the billions. Wherever they go they devour and destroy all vegetation. We remember the account of the Plague of Locusts in Exodus 10: “And the LORD said to Moses, 'Stretch out your hand over Egypt so that locusts will swarm over the land and devour everything growing in the fields, everything left by the hail.'”
Locusts are also speedy creatures, which appear suddenly and disappear just as quickly. A swarm can travel over long distances and have found as far as 1,200 miles out to sea. One swarm of desert locusts that crossed the Red Sea in 1899 was said to cover an area of over 1,930 square miles. As the Biblical account in Exodus 10 relates, swarms are usually brought in by the wind. When the locusts come they literally block out the sun, giving the appearance of darkness.
Egypt has not been the only nation to experience the painful results of locusts that “devoured everything growing in the fields and the fruit on the trees so that nothing green remained in all the land of Egypt.” Even America has experienced the blight of locusts from time to time. Crops in New England were destroyed in 1797 and in Minnesota’s Red River Valley in 1818. In 1848 the Mormon pilgrims in Utah were plagued by locusts. Our daughters loved to read the books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. In her book, On the Banks of Plum Creek she titled one chapter “The Glittering Cloud”, in which she revealed what it was like to have the swarms of grasshoppers or locusts devour their homestead.
Often our lives, both as individuals and as families, seem to be devastated from years of destruction the locusts have consumed. What have locusts consumed, eaten, or otherwise destroyed in your life over the years? What hurts and pains have you continued to carry over a long period of time? We all have experienced disappointments; we all have regrets; we all have made mistakes and experienced neglected opportunities; each of us has made wrong decisions that can not be reversed; and perhaps there is even sin that has remained un-confessed. Whatever the locusts have destroyed, God is able to restore. The past cannot be reversed, but in Christ we all can have a new beginning. None of us can “turn back the clock” and reverse the errors of our past.
I appreciate Nicky Gumbel’s observation in one of his awesome Alpha talks. He reminds us that we all wish we could have a dress rehearsal for life. In a dress rehearsal you can make all the mistakes possible, but you then have the opportunity to “get it all right” in the actual performance. Nicky says, “Unfortunately that is not possible; from the moment we are born, we are all on stage.” We cannot reverse the mistakes of our past, but Jesus promises us a new beginning, “I will restore the years the locust have devoured.”
Oswald Chambers once said, “Our yesterdays hold broken and irreversible things for us. It is true that we have lost opportunities that will never return, but God can transform this destructive anxiety into a constructive thoughtfulness for the future. Let the past rest, but let it rest in the sweet embrace of Christ. Leave the broken, irreversible past in His hands, and step out into the invincible future with Him.”
That is our Lord's invitation to each one of us this day. Let us “leave our broken, irreversible past in His hands, and step out into the invincible future with Him.” He is able to “restore our years the locusts have eaten.”

Thank you Jesus.
In Him,
Brown

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8lO8c7fypM