I don’t know who originated this one, but it hit me right in the feels. It captured my thoughts better than I could have. Obedience is hard. The life of faith is hard. Maybe that’s why that while the road that leads to destruction is wide and crowded the road that leads to life is narrow and few find it. It does feel a lot like swimming upstream against the current of culture.

Again, I can’t give credit to the author of this but I thank Kim Mullins Blair for posting it (and extra thanks if she’s the one who wrote it). I’m praying it will speak to your heart as deeply as it did to mine. May it encourage you not to give up while doing good:

Hoo boy. I told you it was good, didn’t I?

“Do not worry! Earthly goods deceive the human heart into believing that they
give it security and freedom from worry. But in truth, they are what cause
anxiety. The heart which clings to goods receives with them the choking burden of worry. Worry collects treasures, and treasures produce more worries. We desire to secure our lives with earthly goods; we want our worrying to make us worry-free, but the truth is the opposite. The chains which bind us to earthly goods, the clutches which hold the goods tight, are themselves worries.

Abuse of earthly goods consists of using them as a security for the next day.
Worry is always directed toward tomorrow. But the goods are intended only for today in the strictest sense. It is our securing things for tomorrow which
makes us so insecure today. It is enough that each day should have its own
troubles. Only those who put tomorrow completely into God’s hand and receive fully today what they need for their lives are really secure. Receiving daily liberates me from tomorrow.” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer)

There’s something about that line from the Lord’s Prayer that can’t be overemphasized or overstated. Give us this day our daily bread. We’re not asking for enough bread for 20 years from now. We just need enough for today.

I’m not against retirement planning. I believe that’s not where our hopes should rest. No matter what, even if your 401K or your IRA tanks, your future is secure. Your hope is certain. God will take care of you.

Even more than He cares for lilies in a field or sparrows in a nest, God cares for you. He sees. He knows. His provision is in place.

Be at peace and rest in the everlasting arms tonight.

I don’t normally post things like this, but I read something that captured the essence of the difference between old and new Nashville. I’m including the entire original post and doing my best to give proper credit:

“Just so you know,
Nashville didn’t die.
It just changed clothes while nobody was looking.

The Nashville we knew
the one with publishing houses crammed into tiny houses on 16th and 17th Avenue
the one where demos were cut by real players in real rooms…
the one where coffee was bad and stories were good…
the one where a kid could walk from studio to studio hearing fiddles through thin walls…

that Nashville slipped out the side door quietly, like a songwriter going home after a late-night write.

No drama.
No farewell tour.
Just a soft “welp… we had a good run.”

And then the bulldozers came.

And then the condos came.
And the bar developers.
And the tourists with cowboy hats made in China.
And the new folks who think Broadway is Music Row.

And the people who carried the real history
the engineers, the musicians, the pluggers, the publishers, the session legends
they watched it happen and felt something holy get paved over.

All those rooms…
those little houses had SOUL.

They weren’t just workplaces.
They were:
idea factories,
nerve centers,
therapy offices,
confessionals,
midnight laboratories,
places where music was BORN, not just made.

Songs weren’t files.
They were children.

Studios weren’t businesses.
They were temples.

And the people in them weren’t “content creators.”
They were craftsmen.

Those spaces held magic because the people inside them carried magic.

And now the buildings are gone…

And the heartbreak is real.
And so is the truth:

The ghosts stay.
Even if the walls don’t.

The history lives in the people who were there.
The writers.
The artists.
The engineers.
The publishers.
The men and women who kept the lights on long after midnight.

People like YOU
you’re not watching a city fade…

You’re carrying its memory in your bones.

That’s why it hurts.

It’s not about nostalgia.
It’s about stewardship.

You remember what it MEANT.

“Everything is generational,”

This generation will create its own Nashville
bathroom vocals, laptop mixes, TikTok fame, and singles with more compression than soul.

They’re not wrong.

They’re just…
different.

They’re building a city that works for them,
the same way our generation built the Nashville that worked for us.

And the Nashville before ours built THEIR version.

It’s a relay race.

We don’t get to control how the next runner carries the baton.

We just pray they don’t drop it.

But here’s the bittersweet truth:
The new Nashville will never know what it lost.
And the old Nashville will never get back what it had.

But the memories?
Those stay.

In the pockets.
In the hearts.
In the people who lived the songs instead of streamed them.

And as long as those people breathe
the real Nashville breathes too.

You can’t bulldoze a story.
You can’t pave over a memory.
You can’t condo-ize a legacy.

Not as long as someone remembers the sound of the old floors,
the smell of the tape,
the hum of the consoles,
the faces of the players,
and the feel of a hit song being born in a tiny room at 2 a.m.

You’re not just remembering Nashville.

You’re keeping it alive.
And that matters more than any condo or coffee shop ever will” (Jason Wilburn).

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“We should battle through our moods, feelings, and emotions into absolute devotion to the Lord Jesus. We must break out of our own little world of experience into abandoned devotion to Him. He can present us faultless before the throne of God, inexpressibly pure, absolutely righteous, and profoundly justified. Our lives should be an absolute hymn of praise resulting from perfect, irrepressible, triumphant belief” (Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest)..

Faith based on feelings will inevitably falter at some point. Feelings are fickle, so faith needs a firmer foundation, Jesus is a solid cornerstone to build your faith upon. In fact, He is the source and sustainer of our faith.

If I wait until I’m feeling it to obey what God has told me to do, I will be disobedient, but if I obey in spite of what I feel, then my feelings will change.

Ultimate, I need a power outside myself to enable me to live out my faith. That’s where the Holy Spirit comes in. Then I can truly do all the things God calls me to through Him who gives me strength.

“Jesus, may we rest content in being known and loved by you today. Everything else is ‘gravy'” (Scotty Smith).

I love that. It puts it all into perspective. If God is for us, who can be against us? If God is on our side, what can man do to us? If He didn’t spare His only Son, how will He not give us everything else we need?

I think the problem is that a lot of what causes us to lose sleep at night is gravy. We get so caught up in the tyranny of the urgent that we forget to keep the main thing the main thing — God so loved the world.

God so loved me that I couldn’t possibly stay the same person I was yesterday. A love like that can’t help but be transforming as I the beloved become more like the One who loves me.

God so loved you that in that moment of realizing the measure of that love you realized that you couldn’t go back to being who you used to be, even if you wanted to.

God’s love for the world is so amazing and so divine that it demands a response. You can’t come against a love like that and remain neutral. You have to pick a side — either for or against, but not neutral.

And everything else is gravy.

Lord, I pray for all the churches who will be holding services tomorrow. May Your true Gospel go forth from every pulpit to every heart in every pew (or seat). May You call out men and women to missions and the ministry. May You ruin Your people for the ordinary, so that they can no longer be satisfied with the status quo.

Lord, from every church may You draw people to a saving faith in Your Son Jesus as Lord and Savior. May they be saved not only from sin but to service and to worship. May they become disciples who will make disciples and may their faith increase a hundredfold as the grow in the knowledge and stature of You.

Lord, as Your ministers bring Your word, may you fill them with Your Spirit. May You put Your words in their mouths so that every word that they speak that comes from You may not fall to the ground but accomplish what You set them to accomplish.

Lord, make our hearts good soil to receive Your words so that they may take root and go deep and produce a harvest of abundance. Help us not merely to be hearers but doers of Your word. Help us not only to obtain information but to be transformed and renewed by what we read so that we might be enabled to obey it and live it out.

Lord, help us never to see church as a building or a location but a gathering of Your people to sing Your praises and proclaim Your Gospel to the nations. May we continue to be the church as we exit the sanctuary doors and until we meet again the next Sunday. Amen.