workplace-ministry.com

You are my help and my deliverer; O my God, do not delay.” Psalm 40:17 NIV

The above verse is in my perpetual calendar today. For the past 3 or 4 days I’ve been a bit down in the dumps. That’s not normal for me and on the outside I’ve been normal to almost everyone I’ve chatted to - face-to-face, on the phone and via email. But someone said something to me a few days ago that upset me, and try as I might, I couldn’t get myself out of that sense of discouragement. Something I’d been doing to help others has been misread or taken out of context and that is upsetting at any time.

Add to that the disappointment of a weekend planned - my husband and I were going away for the weekend and really looking forward to it. But a chance phone call on Friday afternoon to advise the venue we’d be running late revealed they didn’t have our booking. The owner couldn’t explain it - she remembered our phone conversation and discussing the dates, she even received my email of confirmation, but for some reason it never went into her system and just this past week she booked the cottage to someone else.

I guess what made it worse was that it was a gift from our children last Christmas - we were cashing in a gift voucher for the B&B and so we’d not paid any money - it had been paid before Christmas. So that means she didn’t have our payment or a receipt there to prompt her about the booking. A new date has now been set but that’s two months away and we’ll have to wait.

The perpetual calendar with this reading goes on to say ‘Discouragement, depression, personal loss, a sense of hopelessness - they’re the universal experience of people. Take time today to call up a friend you sense may be ‘in the pits’ and share David’s testimony from Psalm 40.

The day is drawing to a close and I’ve been at my computer most of the day, reading blogs, visiting blog networks I’d not seen before, chatting with a few people via a forum and just taking the day quietly. Within the space of an hour, the last hour actually, I’d received two emails of encouragement from people I’d helped. It was around that time I realised I hadn’t yet turned the page of my calendar and here was this message.

Psalm 40:17 was in front of me and two people reached out without knowing my need but God did and He supplied. It lifts my heart, and my Spirit, to know that He cares enough to reach out to me, to time the contact from others with my reading of His Word so that I would understand what He had done for me. I fear too often we do not understand how much He does for us. How very goodHe is. KMT

discouragement, depression, hopelessness, disappointment, Psalm 40, deliverer