This We Can Count On…

Some things we cannot always count on. But the things we can count on are so great, so solid, so sweet and satisfying, that even a brief and incomplete inventory of them fills our hearts with an overflowing greatness of gratitude.

We can count on the ever-recurring seasons which come with wondrous regularity to bring each year a time for plowing and planting (if we will), and a time for harvest.

We can count on the heavens’ being kept in their course, as the Maker and Administer of all that is, “. . . hath given a law unto all things, by which they move in their time and their seasons.”

We can count on the purposefulness of life⎯for the father of us all, who made us in His image, has filled it full of everlasting promise and purpose.

We can count on justice. Sometimes we see much injustice, but “There is a law, irrevocably decreed in heaven . . . upon which all blessings are predicated”⎯a law of compensation which is inviolate, and while we sometimes become impatient and discouraged, and even maybe sometimes a bit bitter, yet judgment and justice and compensation are always and forever inevitable. This we can count on.

Some things are fleeting. There is nothing of this world’s tangibles that we can take with us. No one who ever owned an empire, and no one who ever owned a single acre, could count on keeping it beyond the quickly passing days we live within this life.

Of all the great and mighty, of all the humble and lowly, all they ever had claim to, has passed to someone else when they have passed, except what they are inside themselves, except their own personal permanence.

But as to ultimate judgment and justice, and love and mercy, and the peace that comes with sincere repentance, and the healing process of time, and the permanent perpetuation of personality and of limitless possibilities and provision that God has made that we may live forever with our loved ones⎯these we can count on.

And despite the uncertainties, despite the disappointments (despite all we wish we had, and all we wish we didn’t have)⎯our hearts are filled to overflowing for all that is ours, for all that God has given, for things that are and things that are to be⎯for the sweet and simple things of every day, and for the timeless and eternal things that we can count on.