Renewed and Ready

7/27 - Patricia Garey

By: Pacific Press Author

Do you love gifts? Not only those pretty gifts your sister gives you wrapped in hand-printed parchment paper and tied with an organza ribbon. Pencil holders wrapped in crayoned butcher paper and heart-shaped pins still in the discount-store bag - do you love those too? There is something so spirit-lifting about receiving a gift.

I think we're all suckers for gifts. Which gifts make your list of top-ten gifts of all time? Mine includes a pewter belt buckle from my kid brother, left unwrapped in my college mailbox after a weekend visit, a puppy, a poem, a trash bag full of trinkets, a crayon-marker portrait, and a potted violet from my eleven-year-od son. The list could go on, but the thread that weaves through each memory is the unexpectedness of the gift, the total surprise, the complete lack of occasion. It feels like love.

Sometimes I wonder how God feels about the gifts He so lavishly bestows upon us day after day, year after year. I wonder whether it bothers Him that we don't notice. I wonder how many more gifts our loving heavenly Father is waiting to pour out if we would just be willing to accept them?

If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him! (Matthew 7:11).


From a Time to Grow by Patricia Garey, p 148

For more information on this book:
http://www.adventistbookcenter.com/Detail.tpl?sku=0816319618

By: Ginger

What a great exercise to remember the memoriable gifts we have received over a lifetime. I think we can also go over some of the special presents that we have given. Then, when we begin to make the list of our top ten gifts from God, it will be an almost impossible list to make.