I received the following this morning via email, which means I did not write it.  I wish I had! I deem it so good I want to share it with you in follow up to this morning’s lesson.

Beauty for Ashes — trust Him with our ashes.  Do we go on day after day with regrets for our actions, guilt for our not acting when we should have, looking back and wishing that we had done this or that differently?  Do we continue in the same pattern, hating our life situation, hating our jobs, and being overall just plain miserable within ourselves?  What can we do?  We have a personal relationship with the Lord but we halfheartedly serve Him. (We go to church on Sunday [morning only], tithe, we don’t party and drink and do drugs and all that immoral stuff, but what do we actually DO?) We get up in the morning, drag off to work (dreading it all the way), get by until it’s time to leave again, go home, turn on the TV, eat and flop until time to go to bed and then we get up the next morning and start all over again, day after day after day. And we expect something to be different in our lives and we expect God to bless us and our family?  Why? We have to make changes to see changes.  Why would we expect to see anything different in our lives if we do not do something to make it happen?  As a well-known TV psychologist would ask, “How’s that working for you?”  NOT GOOD would have to be our answer.  We’re not children anymore where we can always know that our parents will step in and “fix” things for us.  We ARE the parents now and unless WE take the action, hummm, now what? So, let’s DO something different if we expect to see different results, okay?  Let’s give Him the ashes of our messed up, seemingly non-mendable lives and start making some changes immediately and then we can expect different results.  Or this time next year we’ll be right here feeling the same old downtrodden miserable way, experiencing the same old problems, still hating everything about ourselves and our lives, only we’ll be another year older.  The same psychologist would say, “The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.”  I want that statement to be FALSE in my life! Today is CHANGE day and it’s not just for today; it’s a lifetime change and only we can do it for ourselves!  Now is the time; not tomorrow or next week, or after this or that, but NOW is the time to relinquish those ashes and start experiencing the beauty of a changed life!