Merry Christmas!

Now for some glad tidings. Sara got all A’s again in her college subjects this semester. Hannah passed another CLEP exam on Monday, bringing her total college credits to 24. Martha is doing great in her writing, and Jonathan is proving to be our best math wizard. Folks have been generous to us this year; we have gifts under the tree.

I received a clean bill of health from my oncologist; no evidence of disease. It’s been over three and a half years since my cancer surgery and, while a chance of reoccurance still remains, my odds of staying cancer free are looking pretty good. I will have my general check up next week, but I’m expecting that to be routine.

David flies in on Thursday from Virginia and will stay until the 1st. We will be cherishing these days, knowing that it will likely be another Christmas before we are all back together again. Yet, we have learned to put our hope in the Lord, not in the future. Even if death were to come again, our hope steadfastly remains.

“If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things?” (Romans 8: 31-32).

In his book, Future Grace, John Piper says that this is his favorite verse. “Who can be successfully against us? What opposition could there ever be against us that almighty God could not transform into our benefit? And the answer is: none. This is what Paul means later when he says that in tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril and sword we ‘overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us’ (Romans 8:37). We overwhelmingly conquer not by escaping these terrible things, but by watching God turn these enemies of our joy into servants of our good.”