I have a problem.  I believe that life is a book and I am the hero of the story.  Everything anyone does is done with me in mind because I am the central character.  Any time I rub shoulders with another person in my daily life, that person did it solely because he wanted to hurt me, or inconvenience me, or insult me, or otherwise bother my life. 
            What is really happening is that person thinks his life is a book and he is the hero, and I am the one causing him trouble.  The things I often get so upset about are nothing more than an accidental crossing of paths or an idiosyncrasy that, in my own self-centeredness, I have decided to take as a personal offense when the other person was not directing it toward me at all.
            And in the same vein, I think everything is supposed to turn out wonderfully, a happily ever after for all my goodness and faithfulness, because I am the hero after all.  Admit it:  you have the same problem, and it can cost us our souls if we are not careful.
            I think of John the Baptist, a man whose birth was announced by the same angel who announced Jesus’ birth.  He gave up any semblance of a normal life to fulfill the mission God gave him.  If not for John’s preaching, what would have become of Christianity?  If it took several years for the men who actually walked with Jesus to figure things out, what of the masses if John had not worked so hard to prepare them for the coming of the kingdom?  The thought of 3000 being baptized on the Day of Pentecost would have been nothing more than a pipe dream.
            John also gave up what others might have expected in the way of glory.  He watched Jesus begin his ministry and gradually take away many of his own disciples.  For all his sacrifice this is the thanks he gets?  John did not look for thanks.  Indeed, as his ministry waned and an unjust death at about the age of 31 loomed, his remaining disciples came to him complaining about Jesus’ growing popularity as if it were an affront to John.  John answered and said, A man can receive nothing, except it have been given him from heaven. You yourselves bear me witness that I said, I am not the Christ, but, that I am sent before him. He that has the bride is the bridegroom: but the friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly because of the bridegroom's voice: this my joy therefore is made full. He must increase, but I must decrease. John 3:27-30.
            It may have been written many years after his death, but John understood the true meaning of to them that love God all things work together for good, Rom 8:28.  He understood because he recognized the part that we ignore:  according to his purpose. For whom he foreknew, he also foreordained to be conformed to the image of his Son that he might be the firstborn among many brethren: and whom he foreordained, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified, vv 29,30.  John knew he was not the hero of the story.  He knew that he need not expect this life to be a bed of roses with a happy ending. 
            He also knew that the purpose of God for which he worked was to give everyone the opportunity to be saved, and that was the good for which all things worked together.  If it took his not being able to have a family, if it took living a meager existence in the wilderness, if it took his murder, he was willing to bear it.
            If John could have that attitude, a man who lived a short, strange, sacrificial life and died a martyr by the hand of a ruthless woman and her weak husband, why can’t we who live relatively normal, happy, safe lives? 
            There will be trials.  There will be moments of grief.  The life we live here may not have the happy ending we always dreamed of, but the purpose of God will make it seem like a mere trifle if we just stop thinking everything is about us, and remember who the real Hero is. 
 
Therefore let us also, seeing we are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily besets us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising shame, and hath sat down at the right hand of the throne of God, Heb 12:1,2.
 
Dene Ward

Croquet has a long and unsure history as a game.  The things we do know even seem to be in dispute.  Sometime in the early 1850s, a woman named Mary Workman-MacNaghten, whose father was a baronet in Ireland, went to a London toy maker named Isaac Spratt, and asked him to make a croquet set.  Her family had played the game long before she was born "by tradition," which means no written set of rules, using mallets made by local carpenters.  Her brother eventually wrote down the rules they used.  Spratt made some sets and printed out those rules.  He registered his creation with the Stationers' Company in 1856, but the copyright form gives the date as August 2, 1853, plenty of time for Lewis Carroll to make the game even more famous in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
            When our boys were in middle school we gave them a croquet set.  At first they seemed a little disappointed—croquet?  How boring.  Then we actually started playing and they discovered strategy, like whacking your opponent completely out of bounds with one of your free shots.  Now that was fun.
            We have settled down to annual games during the holidays whenever we get together.  It is the perfect way to let the turkey digest, and we usually wind up playing two or three times.  But that time of year means a less than clear playing field on what is already a rollercoaster lawn.  Our yard, you see, isn’t exactly a lawn.  It’s an old watermelon field, and though the rows have settled somewhat after thirty-odd years, we still have low spots, gopher holes, ant hills, and armadillo mounds.  But in the fall we also have sycamore leaves the size of paper plates, pine cones, piles of Spanish moss, and cast off twigs from the windy fronts that come through every few days between October and March.  You cannot keep it cleaned up if you want to do something besides yard work with your life.  So when you swing your mallet, no matter how carefully you have aimed, you never really know where your ball will end up.  We call it “ultimate croquet.”  Anyone who is used to a tabletop green lawn would be easy pickings for one of us—even me, the perennial loser.
            All those “hazards” make for an interesting game of croquet, but let me tell you something.  I have learned the hard way that an interesting life is not that great.  I have dug ditches in a flooding rainstorm, cowered over my children during a tornado, prayed all night during a hurricane, climbed out of a totaled car, followed an ambulance all the way to the hospital, hugged a seizing baby in my lap as we drove ninety down country roads to the doctor’s office, bandaged bullet wounds, hauled drinking water and bath water for a month, signed my life away before experimental surgeries—well, you get the picture. Give me dull and routine any day. 
            Dull and routine is exactly what Paul told Timothy to pray for.  I exhort therefore, first of all, that supplications, prayers, intercessions, thanksgivings, be made for all men; for kings and all that are in high place; that we may lead a tranquil and quiet life in all godliness and gravity. This is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior; who would have all men to be saved, and come to the knowledge of the truth, 1 Tim 2:1-5. 
            Did you catch that?  Pray that our leaders will do what is necessary for us to have a “tranquil and quiet life” so that all men can “come to a knowledge of the truth.”  God’s ministers cannot preach the gospel in a country where everyone is in hiding or running in terror from the enemy, where you never have enough security to sit down with a man and discuss something spiritual for an hour or so, where you wonder how you will feed your family that night, let alone the next day.  The Pax Romana was one of the reasons the gospel could spread—peace in the known world.  That along with the ease of travel because every country was part of the same empire and a worldwide language made the first century “the fullness of times” predicted in the prophets.
            I don’t have much sympathy for people who are easily bored, who seem to think that life must always be exciting or it isn’t worth living.  I am here to tell you that excitement isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.  And God gave us plenty to do during those dull, routine times.  It’s called serving others and spreading the Word.  If you want some excitement, try that.  It’s even better than Ultimate Croquet.
 
Now concerning brotherly love you have no need for anyone to write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love one another, for that indeed is what you are doing to all the brothers throughout Macedonia. But we urge you, brothers, to do this more and more, and to aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you, 1 Thes 4:9-11.
 
Dene Ward

For thousands of years, people have tried to accurately predict the weather.  Beginning at least as early as the Babylonians in 650 BC, they have used things like cloud patterns, astrology, the movement of the winds, lunar phases, and even the "signs of the times" as Jesus mentions in Matthew 16:2,3.  The invention of the telegraph in 1835 finally put us in the age of modern weather forecasting.  Word of coming weather could reach a town almost instantaneously.  However, even that was sometimes too late for people to prepare adequately.
            In the mid-1800s, Francis Beaufort and Robert FitzRoy are credited with developing weather forecasting (meteorology) as a science.  As Royal Navy officers in England, they had many contacts in both the Navy and government so even though the press ridiculed them, their work gained the credence it deserved in a short time.  The first ever daily weather forecasts began to be published in the London Times on August 1, 1861.  The methods may have been upgraded, but almost all weather forecasting today is based upon the work of Beaufort and FitzRoy.  Yet weathermen have one thing against them—one really big thing.
            A few years ago we had a rainy winter, and then a rainy spring.  The summer isn't such a problem because the subtropical sun boils the water out of the ground fairly quickly in spite of constant afternoon thunderstorms.  But on cool days, even with much lower humidity than summer, puddles and boggy ground last much longer.  Rivers and creeks overflow.  Sometimes country roads become impassable.  Farmers lament their inability to get into the fields where there is standing water here and there and miry bogs everywhere else, and know that even if they could plant, the seed would rot in the saturated soil instead of germinating.  And all that water can breed mosquitoes almost overnight.
            So on a weekend when we had already measured over three inches of rain and a 90% chance of "heavy rain" was predicted for two more days, we were a little concerned.  We prayed hard for God to send us clear skies and no more rain.  That is exactly what He did.  The puddles dried fairly quickly, and the dark, wet ground began to look like pale gray Florida sand again. 
            And that is the poor old weatherman's problem.  For a week he had predicted heavy rains those two days, and he turned out wrong.  Was he wrong because his science was wrong?  No, he was wrong because he is not the one in control.  We make fun of him all the time—"He never gets it right"—which is probably not accurate in itself.  He does get it right fairly often.  But think of what he has going against him.  Think of all the Christians out there praying that he will be wrong, and a Heavenly Father who listens to His children and often does what they ask.  The weatherman doesn't stand a chance.  That he gets anything right is a notable thing, and once again only due to a Father who has ordered the world to run in a certain way, on a certain timetable of seasons, fronts, and heat waves.
            Or do we believe that?  I think I have some brothers and sisters who don't.   Then why do you pray at all, may I ask?  Maybe we don't get what we ask for because we don't truly believe it is even possible to receive it.
            Who do you believe?  God or the poor, old weatherman?
 
And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him (1John 5:14-15).
 
Dene Ward