Which of the following are similar to the ways you've served Christ in your family? [check all that apply]
• Taught your kids to see God's glory in nature
• Washed the dishes without being asked
• Played a board game with your kids
• Encouraged your wife to finish her master's degree
• Attended a child's open house at school
• Worked fewer hours to be with your family
• Set an example of a godly prayer life for your children
• Held a crying child
• Swung on the tire swing with your daughter
• Told your wife why you're still in love with her
• Told your son he's got what it takes
• Coached soccer
• Let you child correct you now and then
• Fixed the vacuum cleaner
• Taught your sons to ride a bike
• Listened patiently to a complaint of your wife
• Taped your child's artwork to your office wall
• Admitted to your kids that you were wrong
• Told your children how Christ entered your life
• Cleaned up vomit
• Taught your children to love books
• Been romantic without expecting sex
• Told your daughter she's smart/beautiful
• Set standards for your kids and stuck to them
• Dealt graciously with a busybody neighbor
• Peeled carrots
• Watched movies together
Square Bamboo Theme of the Week: Strategic Struggle Thursday, August 12, 2004
1 of 1
ADVERTISEMENT
Men of IntegrityJuly/August 2004Square BambooTheme of the Week: Strategic StruggleThursday, August 1274
Key Bible Verse: These trials … test your faith, to show that it is strong … as fire tests and purifies gold (1 Peter 1:7a). Bonus Reading:1 Peter 1:7b; 4:12—13; 5:9—11
Most bamboo is round, inexpensive, and used for construction or basic tools. But in Japan, square bamboo is expensive, and highly prized for interior decorating.
To produce square bamboo, a farmer clamps two L-shaped pieces of wood tightly around the young stalks he chooses. As it sprouts to its full height with nowhere else to expand, the bamboo presses into the mold, experiencing a painful limitation of what it would naturally be.
What's more, to give the surface of the bamboo an unusual, irregular design, the farmer places a mixture of acid and mud inside the mold before clamping it around the bamboo. If that suffering bamboo could talk, how bitterly it would complain about the farmer's method as it compares itself to the free-growing bamboo around it! But when the process is finished and the bamboo is cut down, it has turned into a beautiful, valuable surprise.
How God is working in your life right now may seem unnatural and painful. But the God of surprises is creating something ultimately beautiful and precious in your life. Trust Him with the outcome.
—Nelson Annan in Interest magazineAdapted from Interest magazine (9/92) by permission.
My Response: Instead of whining about being singled out to suffer, I'll thank God for the outcome He has in mind.
Thought to Apply: I owe more to the fire and hammer and the file than to anything else in my Lord's workshop.
If you decide you want to keep Men of Integrity coming, honor your invoice for just $19.95 and receive five more issues, a full year in all. If not, simply write "cancel" across the invoice and return it. The trial issue is yours to keep, regardless.
1 of 1
