Sherri is probably coming home tomorrow. It looks like she is healing up from her battle with pneumonia and sepsis. It has only been a week since she went into emergency and was so sick that it looked like she could die. It seems like at least a month with all the emotions, tensions, worry, and fear, and then all the prayer times, late nights, and conversations about what the doctors were saying. It will be so nice when this is behind us, and Sherri is back to running the Children’s Ministry at JBC and also our home. It will be so comfortable when life is normal again. But what will be next? When Sherri was a baby and crawling, she crawled to the open basement door and proceeded to crawl down the steps, fell eight feet and landed on the back of her head on a cement floor. I remember that sound like a watermelon hitting the floor. She didn’t make a sound, just a limp body that I scooped up, and we drove to the hospital with. I knew she was dead, but she wasn’t. We had her in the emergency room at the hospital three or four more times before she was four years old, with severe reactions to food allergies and asthma coming very close on several occasions to her dying. When she was six, she fell eight feet down the stairwell of our house and landed on her face on the bottom step. Again, we drove her to the emergency, thinking she would probably die. I remember holding her in my arms with her face all back and swoll up in the waiting room and seeing a poster on the wall that had a picture of a little kid with a black and blue face with the caption, “Be Sure and Report Child Abuse.”

Life happens, and trials are as much a part of life as breathing. It isn’t a question of if; it is a question of when. Sometimes the story ends well, but sometimes it doesn’t. We will all die, sooner or later, some in their sleep at 100 years of age, others at 40 from cancer, and some at 18 in an automobile crash. We would like to choose how our life would go, like a meal on a menu at McDonald’s, but we can’t. But we can trust our heavenly Father to orchestrate our lives the way He wants and not tell Him what is best. He knows what is best and what our length of days are. Our responsibility is to grow to be like Jesus in character as fast and as much as possible in whatever time we have. Our responsibility is to bear as much fruit for Him as possible in the years we have.

I am almost 76 years old. I don’t know how many years or days I have left, but I am determined to live them well so that when I step into glory, I hear Jesus say, “Well done, good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of your heavenly Father.”