Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

God is not human, that he should lie, not a human being, that he should change his mind. Does he speak and then not act? Does he promise and not fulfill?

• Numbers 23:19

Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful.

• Hebrews 10:23

On the day I wrote this, I was feeling terrible.  Someone emailed me to ask me to do something that I had been doing the previous week.  I promised to continue to check my e-mail in case she was not quite done with being away from the keyboard.

Well, I was called by a third party, and this person was going to the hospital with her daughter.  She said that I might get a call to check my email, but I did not.

Did I need the call?  No, I promised already that I would check.

I checked later that day, but the surgery was not until the next day.

I got a reminder to check my email, but I was on the phone with the hospital, setting up an imaging appointment, a CT scan.

But the problem was that I had an email, and there was something that needed to be done.  I did not check.  By the time my appointment was set, I was thinking about a thousand other things, not my missed reminder.

And by the end of the day, I was well behind on my writing, and my emails were exploding in my inbox.  I could not think about checking the hundreds of emails.  So, without getting much done except for one imaging appointment, I went to bed.

The next morning, I saw the email and I also saw that she had taken care of the problem that I had caused.

But I had another problem.  I felt like a heal.  I let someone down in her time of need.  I sent an apology email, and she quickly sent back an acceptance to the apology and that no real harm was done being 24 hours delayed.

But I still felt like a heal.

Really, according to the verse from Numbers above, I felt like a human.

You know, no matter how hard we try to be like Jesus, we are still humans.  We make mistakes.

And what bothers me the most was my lack of productivity, but think about it.  Satan wanted me to feel guilty about not fulfilling a promise.  And he really had no desire for me to make progress in writing a Bible Study either.  What better way to distract me than to distract me with mundane, silly things that could wait until next month or wait forever since they were time wasters.

Satan doesn’t bother distracting the guy who has his feet propped up watching sports all day long.  Satan does his best to distract the hard worker that wants to glorify Jesus every day.

My friend forgave me.  God forgave me.  It is time for me to forgive me and tell Satan to take a hike.  In the end, no harm was done.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.