I’m very excited to have Janet Chester Bly as my guest writer today. She is the widow of award winning western author Stephen Bly. Together they authored and co-authored over 100 fiction and nonfiction books. Janet’s books include God Is Good All The Time, Hope Lives Here, Words To Live By For Women, Awakening Your Sense of Wonder, and The Heart of a Runaway. She and her 3 sons completed Stephen’s last novel, Stuart Brannon’s Final Shot, a Selah Award finalist.

THE GOD OF A THOUSAND AUTUMNS

Janet Chester Bly

We live on a very used earth. Armies have gutted it. Incessant storms and savage blizzards have ravaged it. Yet our planet still bursts with beauty, harmony, and the ability to withstand the course of human history.

Our earth functions as a fixer-upper home, with a view. For all the mess our world’s in, we can fetch good things out of it. Snow cakes ski runs in winter. Apple trees blossom in spring.

“The creation itself can hardly wait for what’s coming next.

Everything in creation is being more or less held back.

God reins it in until both creation and all the creatures are ready

and can be released at the same moment into the glorious times ahead.

Romans 8:19,20 The Message

This plagued soil of noxious weeds, sin sickness, and world wars needs a good God to keep functioning. Otherwise we’d become an endangered species. His goodness upholds us all, whether we admit it or not. And He alone can tell us what true goodness is. Immersed in our own monstrous drama of human cruelties, misunderstandings and sorrows, we don’t have the right perspective.

We dearly need a divine viewpoint. For each trauma. For every crisis.

Only God has witnessed thousands of autumns. In his goodness, he shares a few of them with us. In hopes we’ll see him through rustling red leaves. In a desire to speak to our souls in a brilliant orange sunset or blustery, breezy morn. So we hear his quiet, but urgent call.

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Lord God, only you are good. Yet we call our floods and earthquakes the ‘acts of God.’ We bring our disease-ridden bodies to you and hint that this is your mistake, your failure. We look at our world as a worthy experiment somehow gone wrong. But we also know in your mind, it was a good thing we were created. You gave us life, even though we have gone astray.

Thank you for my autumns, every one I have enjoyed. Help me recognize your goodness today. Allow me to be part of your purpose and plan. In Jesus’ name, amen.”

adapted from God Is Good All The Time

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Thanks, Janet for sharing your devoiton with us. Here’s how to contact Janet Chester Bly:

Website: http://www.blybooks.com/

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