Orange Moon Cafe "To Our Readers"

The Special of the Day… From the Orange Moon Cafe… 

          "To Our Readers"

    

   Today begins our 22nd year of sending out the Orange Moon devotionals.   I wrote most of this yesterday, sitting in a coffee shop while our car was being serviced at a nearby repair center.  This brought to mind how many different venues have served for the writing of 5,742 messages (this one is 5743, actually).  Most have been done at home, in my study.  However, hundreds of the devotionals have been written in places like the one where I presently tap on the keys of my Apple laptop.  Quite a few have also been written in towns or cities other than our own, and at least one originated at an altitude of 30,000 feet (with the help of an airplane!).  Being a very nostalgic person, the thought warms my heart and causes me to wish I had maintained a log of "Where?" as well as "How many?"

   The more important question is "Who?".  I believe that writing and sending these messages to you has been the Lord's will.  I love writing them, and can say with complete candor that never in 20 years has doing so seemed like a responsibility.  I never feel more completely at peace than working on an Orange Moon devotional (only preaching compares for the sense of the Lord's tranquillity).  It has been and remains a privilege, primarily because as I have shared with you before, I feel as if I write the messages to myself first (the same with preaching sermons).  If you read them, you're just peering over my shoulder to see what the Lord is attempting to do in the heart of His most problematic child!

   Regarding "Who?", writing the Orange Moon devotionals has also brought the gift of people to me in a measure for which even eternity will not allow for the complete expression of gratitude.  I first think of the correspondence of thousands upon thousands of emails I have received from readers.  The thought is overwhelming, especially since I have never been in the direct physical presence of so many of you to whom I feel extremely close in heart and fellowship.  Of course, we have been enormously blessed to meet and know some of you face to face.  Either way, whether by correspondence or direct contact, I shudder to think what my life would have been like without the light of Christ I have known in your words, your faces, and your lives.  Indeed, I would not have wanted to have lived without having been blessed with your fellowship.

   Thank you.  All of my heart dwells in those two words as I express them first to the Lord, and then to you.  He has loved me through allowing me to write the Orange Moon devotionals.  And He has loved me by your reading them, and giving to me your fellowship in Christ as one of most sublime blessings of my life.  For such a gift, I feel what King David must have felt when he wrote in the Psalms…

"I will give thanks unto Thee forever!"

(Psalm 30:12)

Weekly Memory Verse

      We give thanks unto God and our Father, praying always for you.

 (Colossians 1:3)

  

5743