Blessed To Be A Blessing

The Lord and said to Abram, "Leave your country, your people and your father's household and go to the land I will show you. "I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you."
Genesis 12:1-3

Many of us have heard the saying "we are blessed in order to be a blessing." I have seen that recently in my life. Both of our vehicles broke down in the same week, but thankfully we have a man in our church that owns an auto repair shop. He drove with my wife's father almost an hour away to help her when the belt on the van broke. And he wanted us to bring it to his shop a few days later so he could do a more permanent fix. He also replaced the water pump on my car the week before. And in both cases he let us do this with minimal payment, knowing that we would pay him back in the upcoming months. Because of him, we now have safe, driveable vehicles when we don't have the ability to immediately pay for repairs. He truly blessed us by his actions.

Today a woman in our church came up to me and told me that she had discovered a lump on her dog's neck, but they barely have the money to keep a roof over their heads (for those who don't know or haven't read my profile, I am a veterinarian). Tearfully she asked if I could take a look at him for her. Remembering Brian's blessing to us, I realized that God was allowing me to give back, and I quickly agreed to come over to her house tomorrow to look at her dog and see if it is something that needs to be taken care of right away or if it could wait a while.

God helps us become who and what we are. He gives us desires and abilities that others may not have. I have no particularly great skill with cars, despite the fact that my father used to be a mechanic and worked for Volvo as a regional sales manager. Yet I have skill with medicine and animals. I'm definitely a capitalist and believe in free market enterprise, and don't think that these views are incompatible with Christianity. But I also think that we should be examples of God's blessings, especially to other Christians. God gives us these skills so that we can be a light in the world, and an example of what His love is like.

In your own lives you have knowledge and abilities that others don't. Look at how you can use those to further God's Kingdom, and how you might be a blessing to others. God gave this to you to use for Him and for others, not merely for yourself. And He will bless you when you are generous with His gifts.

Satan Fights Back

Do you know how you can tell when you're doing God's will? When Satan starts attacking you hard.

Dragon*Con is coming up soon and our group, Fans For Christ, is participating. My family's money is in large part being saved so we can afford to do this ministry. We're also paying to have our church's web site professionally redesigned from the ground up. That's out of our pocket, not the church's. Our church is also getting ready to grand open a new and larger building, and we're very involved in that.

So what happens? A few days ago I started to notice a coolant leak in my car. It's now to the point where I can fill up the water in the morning and by the evening it's empty. And I can't find the leak. My wife's van had the air conditioning go out on it today. Any extra money for basically the rest of the year has been committed to various ministries we're involved with. We're not sorry about that in the least, but it means that we really don't have the money to get our vehicles fixed anytime soon.

We find it interesting that all of this happens right as we're getting ready to do big things for God. And that convinces us that Satan is pretty unhappy with us right now and is fighting hard to bring us down and take our money away. So that must mean that we're doing something right! If we weren't supporting Christ's works, then there would be no reason why Satan would be worried about us. And we figure he's pretty worried the way he's fighting against us.

In the end, we know that God will win. That doesn't mean that we're not a little frustrated, but we know that God is going to help us. That's the comforting thing about being a Christian. Even when we know that times are tough, we know that God's on our side and wants us to succeed.