Where God Starts and Where We Start… Good morning Hump Day readers. How did your week start out? like me, are you wondering if it started at all? Some days are like that, you get up and you have hope that this day is one that is productive, filled with just what you desire for the day to be…and alas, within a very short time, all those hopes are dashed and the “trudge to get through the day” is on.

I am reading Christine Caine’s book, How Did I Get Here. I resonate with her because I am also an adopted kid. I know nothing literally about my biological parents and I never will because I was adopted in Indiana which still practices sealed adoption. I must admit there are days that I probably just crawled out from under a rock. In fact, I know now that my adoption was even botched with a bunch of lies to my loving parents (who didn’t know and wouldn’t have cared anyway), as they took what they thought were twins, into their lives.

When I discovered this I had to ask myself, “Does it make any difference that we twins are not biologically related?”—nope. Family is not a blood-line, family is not biological, family is where God starts our lives through loving parents (parent, guardian, family member, etc.) so we can start every day to continue God’s plan for our lives.

Not every adoptee was as blessed as I was. Not only did I have loving parents, I had parents who loved God first. And that is the adventure they put me on and I don’t care what my birth records say, Roy and Betty Snyder are my real parents! They were God’s plan, God’s START for my life.

In 1 Corinthians 2:9-13 (MSG) the Apostle Paul writes about how God started us right from our very beginnings and how God continues to jump-start us when we need it! 

“6-10 We, of course, have plenty of wisdom to pass on to you once you get your feet on firm spiritual ground, but it’s not popular wisdom, the fashionable wisdom of high-priced experts that will be out-of-date in a year or so. God’s wisdom is something mysterious that goes deep into the interior of his purposes. You don’t find it lying around on the surface. It’s not the latest message, but more like the oldest—what God determined as the way to bring out his best in us, long before we ever arrived on the scene. The experts of our day haven’t a clue about what this eternal plan is. If they had, they wouldn’t have killed the Master of the God-designed life on a cross. That’s why we have this Scripture text: 

No one’s ever seen or heard anything like this, never so much as imagined anything quite like it—what God has arranged for those who love him. But you’ve seen and heard it because God by his Spirit has brought it all out into the open before you. 

10-13 The Spirit, not content to flit around on the surface, dives into the depths of God, and brings out what God planned all along. Whoever knows what you’re thinking and planning except you yourself? The same with God—except that he not only knows what he’s thinking, but he lets us in on it. God offers a full report on the gifts of life and salvation that he is giving us. We don’t have to rely on the world’s guesses and opinions. We didn’t learn this by reading books or going to school; we learned it from God, who taught us person-to-person through Jesus, and we’re passing it on to you in the same firsthand, personal way.”

Have you prayed for wonders and miracles—or as a friend of mine says, a ‘re-do’s? I think we all have, especially when facing odds that we realize there is nothing we, as humans, can do about it. We ask God “do something-do it now, I desperately need a re-do!” And within the next breath we are hesitant about our request, or worse yet, fearful that a step of faith on our part may be required for God to help us at all.

Who wouldn’t love life without any risk? In her book, Christine says “My husband Nick and I weren’t qualified to start an anti-trafficking organization 14 years ago. I don’t think anybody at the hospital where I was born thought an unnamed, unwanted baby girl would amount to much…BUT GOD…Impossible is where GOD starts.”

Don’t you just love that? We pray and then worry because the mountain in front of us seems impossible to move, yet that is where God will “re-start” for us again and again. If we look at the history of God’s Word, there is one thing that stands out like a neon light: Miracles are what God does…Miracles are what God loves to give his children. What a gift indeed! Yet we rarely expect them to the point we no longer see all the miracles God does in our lives every single day.

If you are needing a miracle, an awesome wonder like a re-do—a re-start in your life, look no further than the God who started your life by creating you, forming you in your mother’s womb, and then giving you all you need to start your life. God has performed that awesome wonder—that miracle of life just for you—what incredible love is that! So, the next time when life stops you in your tracks, will you remember that love, will you step out in faith and grab God’s “re-start” and start again? That choice God gives to us all, choose wisely.