PR 410

Over the last several years I must confess that the car I drive has “reminder license plates” attached to them.  Most people refer to them as vanity plates, but for me I choose to utilize them as reminders.

 The first time I bought a pair of reminder plates was in 1998.  The plates simply read “JM 8987.”  I had several people ask me what the plates stood for and I only shared the meaning with those closest to me.  Since I’ve opened my life to the world on my blog, I can tell you that 8-9-87 is my sobriety date and 8-7-98 (same numbers with a different sequence) is the day my business partner and I sold our business.  Although these numbers were meaningless to everyone around me, they were quite significant for me.  Over an 11 year stretch I found how amazing life can be when God is running the show.  

I don’t want you to think that once you turn your life over to God, everything becomes a bed of roses.  There were many challenges for me and my family in that 11 year span.  I faced felony drug theft charges as well as expulsion from my profession.  I could not work full time for almost two years and we had to sell off rental properties as well as my coin collection and then turned to credit card debt in order to stay afloat.  My wife had 2 major surgeries, my developmentally disabled son became very ill with mycoplasma pneumonia and my daughter had a severe bout of rheumatic fever.  Couple all of this with my personal battle with anxiety and depression and no longer medicating it with drugs and alcohol; and you can see we had some challenges.  But the challenges were much easier to bear when we had faith that God was somewhere in the middle of it all.

My “reminder plate” today is PR 410.  Some people think that is my personal record for a marathon…actually that is 3:52.  PR 410 stands for Proverbs 4:10 “Listen my son, accept what I say, and the years of your life will be many.” 

Everytime I see my license plate I think “Amen and Amen.” 

If you are looking for more direction and peace in your life, try spending some time listening and accepting what God has to say and turn your life over to God a day at a time.  Life will not be a bed of roses but somehow you’ll spend more time enoying the roses and less time feeling the pain from the thorns that protect the roses.

 This blog thought came to me this morning during my “listening and accepting time” as I was reading the Proverb for the day…Proverb 4.

As a side note…when Solomon says “the years of your life will be many,” he is including our years in eternity...

P.E.A.C.E.

jay@eaglelaunch.com