PRAYING HANDS

There are hands that help and comfort,
Hands that plan and teach,
Hands that rest and hands that strive
For a goal just out of reach,
Hands that grasp and hands that give,
Hands that work and play,
Friendly hands and loving hands
That soothes life's cares away.
But praying hands are dearest
In the sight of God above
For in their sweet and earnest clasp
Are reverence and love.
No hands can do an unkind act
Nor cause another care
Nor sin against Our Father's love
When they are clasped in prayer.
Author Unknown

I guide you in the way of wisdom and lead you along straight paths. When you walk, your steps will not be hampered; when you run, you will not stumble,” says the Lord.
Proverbs 4:11 – 12

Today is a new day Lord, show me the way to walk it. Help me to walk step by step with you. Guide me, inspire me in the way I should go. Thank you for all the opportunities that will come my way. Help me to give love so generously that it becomes a part of who I am and a reflection of who I serve. Amen

Unknown, but not uncharted, tomorrow waits for our arrival – a day designed, a place prepared with tender care by the One who goes before us … Let us walk with faith behind him in the footprints of his love.
Psalm 37:23

Early in the twentieth century, Sir Ernest Shackleford made a voyage to Antarctica. He had a dream of crossing the 2,100 miles of the icy continent by dog sled. Shackleford’s ship, however, ran into an ice pack nearly two hundred miles from land, and sank.

He and his men trudged across drifting ice floes to reach land, and then continued on to the nearest outpost, nearly 1,200 miles away. They pulled the only supplies they were able to salvage from their sinking ship in a lifeboat – a ton of weight – behind them as they made their way on foot.

When they reached waters clear enough to navigate, they faced waves as high as ninety feet. They finally reached South Georgia Island and were told later that the expanse of water they crossed had never been crossed before.

Seven months after they set sail, the group finally reached their destination, the chosen point for beginning their trek across Antarctica. They were so bedraggled that their friends didn’t even recognize them.

When asked about the experience, each man said that he had felt the presence of One unseen, who had guided them. Each man had a sense that he was not alone and that he would survive.
Author Unknown

God is the hardest taskmaster I have known on this earth, and he tries you through and through. And when you find that your faith is failing or your body is failing you, and you are sinking, he comes to your assistance somehow or other and proves to you that you must not lose your faith and that he is always at your beck and call, but on his terms, not on your terms. So I have found. I cannot really recall a single instance when, at the eleventh hour, he has forsaken me.
Mahatma Gandhi

Do not pray for easy lives; pray to be stronger men. Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers; pray for powers equal to your tasks. Then the doing of your work shall be no miracle, but you shall be a miracle. Every day you shall wonder at yourself, at the richness of life which has come to you by the grace of God.
Phillips Brooks

To be courageous requires no exceptional qualifications, no magic formula, no special combination of time, place, and circumstance. It is an opportunity that sooner or later is presented to us all. Politics merely furnish one arena which imposes special tests of courage. In whatever arena of life one may meet the challenge of courage, whatever may be the sacrifices he faces if he follows his conscience – the loss of his friends, his fortune, his contentment, even the esteem of his fellow men – each man must decide for himself the course he will follow. The stories of past courage can define that ingredient – they can teach, they can offer hope, they can provide inspiration. But they cannot supply courage itself. For this each man must look into his own soul.
John F. Kennedy

Heavenly Father, grant me the faith to place myself completely in Your hands. Let me feel Your presence and guidance. As I extend my hand, let me feel Your reassuring grasp and abundant love. Amen

I see your hand, Lord, in everything around me, and in every aspect of my life. I seek your will. I see your plan, Lord, in all the years behind me, and in the days and years to come – I’ll trust you still.
Jeremiah 29:11

My message has been very simple. To live well we must have a faith fit to live with, and a work fit to live for – something to which we can give ourselves and thus get ourselves off our hands. We cannot tell what may happen to us in the strange medley of life. But we can decide what happens in us – how we can take it, what we do with it – and that is what really counts in the end. How to take the raw stuff of life and make it a thing of worth and beauty – that is the test of living. Life is an adventure of faith, if we are to be victors over it, not victims of it. Faith in the God above us, faith in the little infinite soul within us, faith in life and in our fellow souls – without faith, the plus quality, we cannot really live.
Joseph Fort Newton

Faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ.
Romans 10:17

Jesus said, “I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to here’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”
Matthew 17:20

Let there be no limit to what we take to God in prayer, so that there may be no limit to God’s reign and rule in all of life. It is far better to ask God for whatever we desire than to play God by deciding on our own what we ought to pray for. That would simply be pious magic all over again, wanting to control God by praying for the right things in a way that is sure to get results. God himself will be the judge; ours is the task of putting everything up to him.
Roger Hazelton

Irwin, a junior naval officer, was discharged from military service after he was diagnosed with cancer – standard military procedure at the time. The loss of his job was quite a blow, but he was determined to get back both his health and his job. With faith and dogged determination, he battled the disease that tried to take over his body. At one point, he was given only two weeks to live, but eventually, his cancer was brought under control.

Irwin then focused his attention on his desire to become a naval officer. He discovered, however, that regulations forbade reinstatement of a person discharged with cancer. Everyone told Irwin, “Give up. It would take an act of Congress to get reinstated.” Their advice gave him an idea – he would pursue an act of Congress.”

President Harry S. Truman eventually signed into law a special bill that allowed Irwin W. Rosenberg to reenlist and become a rear admiral in the United States Seventh Fleet.
Author Unknown

I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.
Philippians 4:13

Thank you for the confidence you have given, Lord, that I can tell you what’s in my heart and know you will listen – that I can listen with an open heart and know you will speak.
1 Samuel 3:10

In Thee, O Lord, I have put my trust. Let me feel Your hand on my shoulder and awaken me to what I am and help me become the most I can be for You.
Open my heart so that Your love can be extended through me to others. Amen

For fifty-two years, Robert Adkins thought his best friend, Roy Stump, was dead. After all, hadn’t he cradled his dying friend’s head in his lap and then watched a medic remove his dog tags?

“Everyone in the platoon was sure Roy was dead,” Robert recalled one day in April 1996 as he chatted with a stranger in a waiting room at Lorain Community – St. Joseph Regional Health Center in Lorain, Ohio. Robert was waiting for his wife, Juanita, to return from cataract surgery. The stranger was waiting for his brother-in-law, also in surgery. Somehow, the conversation turned to World War II.

“We were stationed in Holland and were watching a buddy defuse an anti-tank mine when it blew up,” Adkins said. The man working on the mine was killed, and shrapnel struck Stump in the head, chest, and other parts of his body. The worst injury was the gaping head wound that Adkins tried to tend by applying pressure with his handkerchief, unmindful of a smaller wound in his own forehead.

As they continued to talk, Robert, now seventy-two years old, was astonished to learn that the stranger, like him, had served in the 787th Anti-Aircraft Battalion in 1944. Skeptical about the coincidence, they began grilling each other, as if in a test.

“Who was the platoon sergeant?” Robert asked the stranger.

The man answered correctly. “Was anyone killed in that battalion?” he shot back.

“I just told you, my best buddy, Roy D. Stump,” Robert replied.

The man smiled and said, “I hate to disappoint you, but I am very much alive.”

Robert sat stunned. “I thought he was going to have a heart attack,” Stump remembered. “I hadn’t recognized him at first, but I knew who he was as soon as he said his nickname was ‘Sloop.’ Mine was ‘Little Red.’ I had bright red hair then,” said Stump, stroking his gray crewcut.

To prove his identity, the seventy-one-year-old Stump produced a faded copy of his discharge papers and a driver’s license with his name on it. Then the two men hugged and “everybody in the waiting room thought we were crazy,” Robert said.

Stump had been critically injured, but he hadn’t died as the other platoon members had believed. An emergency operation in a field tent had saved his life, and he had been transferred to a hospital in Belgium, where he remained for eighteen months, recovering from forty-two wounds, including one that left him with a metal plate in his head.

By the time he got out of the hospital, the war was over and he had no idea where the rest of the platoon members were living. He often wondered what had happened to his buddy, Sloop.

He always credited his friend – along with an Army-issue combination Bible, almanac, and dictionary and a leather wallet he carried in his breast pocket – with saving his life. Shrapnel had torn through the wallet and Bible into his chest but had missed his heart.

In an odd twist of fate, both men moved to Lorain, Ohio, after the war and raised families there. For more than forty years, they lived only a few miles apart and never knew it. “I probably drove by his house three or four times a week and didn't even know he lived there," Roy Stump said.
Author Unknown

You go no where by accident.
Wherever you go, God is sending you.
Wherever you are, God has put you there.
He has a purpose in your being there.
Christ who dwells in you has something
He wants to do through you where you are.
Believe this and go in His grace and love and power.
Richard C. Halverson, Chaplain of the United States Senate

O God, help me to touch someone today with my eyes, my words,
my smile, my voice, my laughter, Your word.
Change my life, so I can make a difference.
Let my actions bring someone closer to you.
Help me to make Christmas last all year.
Help me to use my gifts for Jesus

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