March 14: THE SCRATCHY PEN

I’m going to reveal my age group to you now. When I was a child, people still wrote with ink pens. I could never do it smoothly. It was really bad when you got a scratchy pen, one with a point where the ink did not flow evenly or became snagged in the paper. The end product would be very rough and uneven.
I recently read about Hannah Moore, a 19th century Christian. She wrote about her spiritual penmanship, a source of discouragement for her. She had a low opinion of her spiritual effectiveness. In one of her self-appraisals she wrote: “God is sometimes pleased to work with most unworthy instruments. It always gives me the idea of a great author writing with a very bad pen.”
Some of you readers have never used a pen but I am sure you have used a ball-point pen that skips and blots, not attractive either. Christian life stories are written like that; some days the prose is smooth and descriptive but on other days the sentences are disjointed. Some days our poetry just won’t rhyme.
What kind of story is God writing with you today? The main question is legibility. Is it readable? You see, even if a pen didn’t write smoothly it would still be legible. The message was readable.
The Bible instructs us “let your conduct be worthy of the gospel of Christ.” (Philemon 1:27 (NIV). Titus 1:15 (NIV) says “to the pure all things are pure.” When your inner heart and mind are kept pure, the life message you write will be clear and consistent. An occasional misspelled word will not betray the whole body of the message.
Even a dirty face can’t hide a pure heart. Daily submit your life to the Lord and ask Him to write someone a love letter through you. His hand is not shaky, the writing will be legible.

“God, someone said you could draw a straight line with a crooked
stick. If that is still true, Forgiving Lord, use my life today. Amen”