Five Minute Friday: Encouragement

Some Fridays, when you need encouragement, you find that you aren’t able to write it. So you wait until Saturday.

Last night, I read in Genesis the story of Lot. A sordid tale in many of its parts — the townsmen, the back-looking wife, the desperate-for-babies daughters — yet a picture, all the same of God’s faithfulness.

I was struck, in this reading, by one verse. The men — angels? — sent to rescue Lot urge him to get up and get out of the city, lest he be swept away by the destruction God had ordained. “But,” Genesis says, “[Lot] lingered. So the men seized him and his wife and his two daughters by the hand, the LORD being merciful to him, and they brought him out and set him outside the city” (Genesis 19:16).

This is mercy: a violent wrench away from where Lot thought he wanted to be, away from his forecasted future, his future sons-in-law, his home, all that was familiar. It is no less mercy for having been painful.

And in this view of God’s mercies, I take encouragement.

Use the button above to read more post’s on this Friday’s prompt, “Encouragement,” or two join in the writing yourself.

©2014 by Stacy Nott