"It was just yesterday."

Our family traveled to Missouri for the holidays, where we joyfully reunited with family and old friends.  What a great holiday gift! Early one morning our loving friends welcomed us into their family home for coffee.  After 7 long years, we joined to catch up.  Upon greeting us with warm hugs and kind words, I commented to my friend, "It seems like just yesterday,"  to which he immediately replied, "It was just yesterday, because in God, there is no time.  In the God, it was just yesterday."  Both our families had many ups and downs over the years, but the common thread to our stories was God's faithful love manifested to us.  We worshiped the Lord in our fellowship, honoring God's presence as we honored and celebrated each other.  I know God was smiling as we validate each others journey.  It was a wonderful benchmark moment in my life.  
    These friends who are treasures to me, worship the Lord in a totally different stream.  I witness their heart's true holiness, but decline to judge their means of expression.  Their relationship with God is personally private.  As they share with us their faith's expression, I guard this trust from self-righteous analysis.  I don't want to participate in self-righteous judgements.  I don't really have any righteousness in myself.  My rightness before God was provided to my by Jesus when He died for my sins, and arose from the grave.  John 3:16 starts with, "For God so loved the world, that He gave his only begotten Son...".  "For God so loved the world" was the motivation for the following action.  God's love is all inclusive.  The love of God changed man's destiny.  If I want to leave any positive impression on this world, then my definitions of love need to align with God's.  
  Diversion of style does not mandate opposition.  Insecurity won't tolerate diversion.  Insecurity misinterprets diversion as perversion.
     Tom, my husband, likes old things.  Old knives, old tools, old trucks are still good and useful!  Sometimes I think as we age, we want our usefulness in this world validated.  We may be old, but we are still good!  In a society that values production, we forget the value of presence.  Anyway, Tom's love for the old knives conflicts with my love for the new ones!  I use the new bread knife, while he uses an old second hand knife I picked up 6 years ago.  Two knives next to the bread board made me smile.  We have conflicting opinions, but because we have learned to respect the right of each to his own opinion, we live happily.  As a young Christian wife, I thought we had to agree on everything for there to be unity!  In time, we learned to make room for each others opinions.  In Gwen's grade school, they called it "respecting each other".  We share our discoveries with each other, and if one of us doesn't understand a discovery, well, that's okay.  We make room for our individuality.