In Which I Muse About Assurance ⋆ A Delightful Glow

Assurance could look like a signed contract. It might be in the number of place value holders stamped on our bank statement. Assurance may feel like meal plans or lesson plans, vacation plans or run-away-from-Nineveh-plans. Assurance sometimes disdainfully and smugly plants itself in the territory of how-right-I-am.

Perhaps assurance comes in the form of a handshake, a headnod, or a mama hug. A tight squeeze of hands or meeting of eyes across the dinner table.

Assurance may be the comfort of air conditioner hum, tractor growl, or a daily commute. Routines and rhythms are unnoticed assurances in our days. Mondays are the assurance of clean laundry once again. Work weeks and daily life and cycles.

June and July are generally the certainty of summer; August and September the returning of school rhythms.

What happens when many of our normal assurances are rocked or ripped away? When uncertainty seems to be the new certainty? Perhaps we’ve slowly been lulled into thinking life was a guarantee and we alone are the guardians.

Sometimes it takes a shaking to remind us of the Rock grounding our true security. To nudge us from mercenary to mercy. To turn us from comeuppance to compassion. To pivot from abrasiveness to grace. To pull us away from panic and into peace.

{Find print at Gracelaced}

Till we are left with the only True Assurance of all.

Jesus is mine. I am loved by Him.
I am chosen and redeemed.
Poured over with His mercy, grace, and deep, unending love.

This could come by spending three days in the belly of a whale. For most of us, that won’t be the story. Our stories will read another way. So, fill in the blank of your own narrative.

Jesus has shown me and assured me of ____________ in my circumstances of ____________.

🎶”Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine!”🎶

Romans 8:26-27 “In the same way the Spirit also helps us in our weakness, because we do not know what to pray for as we should, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with unspoken groanings. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because he intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.”