Thought:

Blessings and promises, we look for them, we seek them.  When it comes time to ask your girlfriend to marry you, you ask the parents for their blessing.  When you want to borrow money, the bank asks you to promise to pay it back.  When you are about to go off on a trip and your son or daughter is upset about your leaving, "I promise I'll be back soon" can bring relief.  Blessing are what we hope for, while the promise is reassurance and hope that they will come.

Hear the Good News, Just as Abram was called and set apart by God to begin a new and decisive role in the world, to bring change to a broken and divided humanity, we to are called to be that instrument of God, reading and willing to be blessed by all that God would have for us.  Moreover, Abram is more like us than anyone, he is promise and blessed, but his life is not the easiest.  He is called to leave home, takes his nephew and meets up with problem after problem.  The Famine in Canaan, the Pharaoh taking his wife, conflict between Lot's people and his own.  When they divide the land between them, Lot grabs the choicest, most fertile land while Abram is stuck with the drier "hill country".  Lot runs into trouble in his new land, Sodom and Gomorrah.  And Abram is the one try to bail Lot and the cities out.  Abram is promised to be the father of a great nation, yet his wife, Sarai can not have children, so he looks to Lot as a son of sorts.  It continues to be complicated, really all of his life.  But, Abram, now Abraham, never loses faith.  The truth of the matter is that his life was a blessing and is a blessing for us even today.  His passion and love played out over and over, creating a better place for us today.  The promise God made never included the term easy. Ten generations removed from Noah and we have a new beginning.  Though we might get frustrated with our own life and the way it seems to be shaping up, we must not lose sight or focus of the larger picture.  Abram/Abraham had a number of "set-backs", yet he stayed on track, had faith that God would keep His promise, he believed.

Prayer: