Seeking the Sabbath: Choices that Honor God

Today my thoughts have been drawn to the fact that God blesses my choices that are driven by a genuine desire to honor Him. When I make choices based on this desire alone, I have nothing holding me back. He will provide all I need to accomplish whatever task is set before me. I will give recent examples that have made me reflect on this.

First of all, you will be well aware of the fact that my desire to set Sundays aside for the Lord has been a recent focus for me by the recent posts titled Seeking the Sabbath. I shared this desire and my purpose in the first one of these posts. Well, my Target working husband is a retail employee. While I love his company and the wonderful employers that they are, we still have the odd hours to deal with. He has to work weekends. BUT...guess what? Since making the change in the layout and focus of our Sundays he has only had to work one so far! Little things have happened that have somehow given him this day with us. It could and would be considered a coincidence to many people, but I know that the credit goes to God here. He has blessed us in this choice to seek Him first. I know that he will have to work Sundays often, but I am also going to enjoy the gift from God and give Him credit and thanks when we get to have the man of our house home on this special day.

The other recent example of God's blessing our efforts to honor Him happened this weekend. I have been reading a book called Family Driven Faith. I have really appreciated many of the points that the author makes, as they are things that I have felt and desired, but haven't know exactly how to express them or specifically what was missing. It touched on many things that I want to be a part of our family. One of these is family worship. This includes worship in the musical sense and also prayer and study of scripture. I think that we have been doing pretty well with this for the ages of our children, but it hasn't been as intentional. We read from the children's bible nightly and also pray and sing songs about the Lord with our daughter before she goes to sleep at night. I decided that I want to make it more a part of our lives recently though, and with more intention. I have been playing more music quietly during the day for soft background noise that is with us through the day.

This weekend is a big sale weekend of course. I never pay attention to the ad's or anything. I don't like to focus on the material side of things during this season too much and have some major issues with the commercialization of a time that is meant to celebrate the birth of my Lord. (I am not against gifts, but I don't like them to be expensive and become the focus of the season. I am more into small and practical gifts.) Well, it just so happened that on Friday Tom was telling me that he didn't think it would be that busy at the new Target and if I wanted to go and get our shopping done I could. He would watch the kids (they were asleep). I thought I would go ahead and check the 2-day ad and see what the deals were. Strangely I came across an ad for a keyboard that was on sale. I would never have thought to get a keyboard, but have been wanting a piano (which we would not have room for anyway, so we wouldn't even pursue it if it was in our budget). It just clicked as something that I wanted to get for us. We paid a third of the normal price and it is something that is in my ability level...I think. It's one that teaches you the songs and you can download songs into it easily from the computer. None of us will be performing in front of anyone anytime soon, but it will be something that we can use for our family worship time. I also see this as a gift from the Lord. It was something that I would never have even considered looking for, and hopefully it will serve it's purpose well.

So, it seems that when I make choices to honor God with what I have, even if what I can offer isn't perfect, He will bless it and give me more means to honor Him. I just have to take the steps.