Time is like a Tenderizer

Time is like a tenderizer, that makes the changes that will be served us easier to swallow.

One by One, my children are stepping out, learning to walk with God on their own.

Releasing them away from me, has come with mixed feelings.

I feel tenderized, and find myself REMEMBERING the past.


Remembering my own beginnings.
Mistakes that had Meaning,
and LOVE that would not give up.
HOPE that learned to always see the good.


Passion for truth that taught my children that our highest calling was to serve HIM, and not ourselves.

GO low, and you will see the Beauty of God from the ground UP, that you never would from on high.


Watching them learn, is like living it again, while I'm letting go, and still growing myself.


When we leave these seasons, to enter the next there is always something richer on the other side. The lessons that have gone deep into our lives, will be used to prepare us for what is to come.

In some ways it is not that we are totally leaving them, but taking the lessons that we have learned from them. I must be careful not to cling to closings when they come. They are His doings, leading us on.


WHAT channel needs our faith, except the eyes?
God leaves no spot of earth unglorified;
Profuse and wasteful, lovelinesses rise;
New beauties dawn before the old have died.


Trust thou thy joys in keeping of the Power
Who holds these changing shadows in his hand;
Believe and live, and know that hour by hour
Will ripple newer beauty to thy strand. ~T.W. Higginson


“I wondered over again for the hundredth time what could be the principle which, in the wildest, most lawless, fantastically chaotic, apparently capricious work of nature, always kept it beautiful. The beauty of holiness must be at the heart of it somehow, I thought. Because our God is so free from stain, so loving, so unselfish, so good, so altogether what He wants us to be, so holy — therefore all His works declare Him in beauty. His fingers can touch nothing but to mould it into loveliness. Even the play of His elements is in grace and tenderness of form. ~G. MacDonald

Above: Whitney and Daniel at Anna's birth.  She was only a few hours old at this picture.  Daniel will soon be holding his own son. 
Asa Alan Martin