When my husband and I married, we became a family in possession of two Honda vehicles. We upsized one to a Honda van just before our second child, and I told myself that we were a Honda family, and we would remain so.
Have you looked at the used car market lately? Within the past year, we replaced my husband’s Honda with a van of a different make, but I stuck to the old van myself: I liked its handling and its visibility and, in short, I was going to drive a Honda.
And then the Lord totaled it. (No one was hurt.) The salvage yard is coming to take it away today, and odds are, we’re about to be a family without any Hondas at all.
It’s a silly story. A story of a family which has never lacked transportation, and will not lack transportation. I didn’t realize I had any snobbishness about car brands until now.
But I tell it because it’s part of a longer story. In my childhood I entertained prejudices against the names of both Saxon math curriculum and Alfred piano curriculum, congratulating myself that in my superiority I used neither. As if it were a point of virtue.
Within a few years I was using both, my gracious Father gently dealing with my folly. God is opposed to the proud — even little girls who are proud about textbook names — but gives grace to the humble.
He upends my certainties, making naught of the things in which I privately boast. But His grace to me is certain as the sun; it exceeds any boast I could make about it.
There is only one Name in which I may boast, only one Name by which I must be saved. I belong to Him by no merit of mine, and cannot boast in my remaining with Him. But He who died and rose again keeps me, and, I am persuaded, will keep me.
Thanks be to Him.
©️Stacy Crouch 2023
Between Blue Rocks 