A public school teacher in Illinois for 31 years, Bible school student, and graduate of a Christian Writers Guild course, Celia loves to teach and write on many subjects. However, having personally experienced the disappointing fruits of weak faith, religious striving, and minimal connection with God, she is particularly passionate about sharing life-changing insights into the fullness of Christ’s salvation.
You may find more of her writing at www.treastrove.blogspot.com and www.wlmlbooks.com and in Streams of Living Water, a daily Devotion book she co-authored with her father, retired missionary Bible teacher F. Burleigh Willard Sr. Celia enjoys gardening and traveling to visit her family.
This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate in it day and night (Joshua 1:8 NKJV).
But they delight in the law of the LORD, meditating on it day and night (Psalm 1:2 NLT).
In the vicinity of Nogales, Arizona, where my family moved when I was in high school, is a butte-like peak referred to as "Monkey Mountain." The front of it is a sheer vertical wall, so climbers have to hike around to the back of it. There, they can step from boulder to boulder, shimmy up crevices, pick their way gingerly along narrow ledges, and, finally, cross the narrow saddle connecting to the summit.
Even after my siblings and I grew up and moved to distant parts of the United States, we looked forward to making this climb when home for a visit. On one of the last such occasions, we parked the car at the Peña Blanca picnic grounds and began the trek toward Monkey Mountain. Although we were only a few hundred yards from the base of the mountain, our progress was slow because of the rocky ground and the trench-like depressions (probably dry arroyos, or stream beds) we had to cross. Amazingly, when down in the lowest part of these troughs, the view of the mountain was completely cut off. If one spent much time down there, one might even forget there was a mountain just a hundred yards away!
Problems always loom large. When we are sunk down in the middle of a challenging situation, these circumstances are all that we can see. God is much greater than our difficulty, but our view of him seems cut off. If we pray in that gloomy frame of mind, is that praying in faith? At such times, we have to purposely remind ourselves that God and his power, his love, and his solutions are still there—right over that pile of rocks.
Since our faith affects what will happen, let’s make a point of setting our expectations on God. Let's not allow ourselves to become trapped by faith in the wrong thing!
