Happy Monday! The first day of the last week of school has brought some wonderful news and a small inconvenience. First the amazing news: Burton Hill Elementary School has been named an Exemplary school due to our TAKS scores. We all gathered in the auditorium for this awesome announcement. We are so proud of our teachers and the students for all of their hard work. And then I returned to my classroom only to discover that the computer ate my grades. I had four sets of papers left to enter into the program and I was ready to send it to our clerk who collects this information. The good news is that I still had all of the papers and so I still have all of the grades and just have to re-enter them.

Psalm 69: 5 “God, You know what I have done wrong; I cannot hide my guilt from you.”

Have you ever had company call and say they would be over in about an hour and your house is a mess? Well, I certainly have. What do we do when company comes by and we are not quite ready? We start stashing stuff. We put out of sight the things we do not want our visitors to see and go on with the visit.

When we sin sometimes we try to hide the offense from God and go on about our daily lives without the process of confession, forgiveness and repentance. We try to stash what we don’t want God to see so we don’t have to deal with it until we have figured out how to rationalize and justify what we have done. But God (because He is God) knows our hearts, minds and souls. God knows not only what we have done, but when we did it and where we tried to stash the evidence. When we stash our trash it begins to eat away at our hearts and works its way into our minds. What we should do instead is confessing our sin, asking for forgiveness and walking the road to repentance. Ladies, how much do we hate going to the doctor because the first thing they do is weigh us? And how many of us make plans to do something about a few pounds prior to going to the doctor? And then how many of us don’t go to the doctor because of a few pounds? Just like we cannot hide those pounds from the scale, we cannot hide our sin from God. The difference is that the doctor will fuss at us. God will forgive us, continue to love us and show us how to walk the road of repentance and learn the lessons we need so perhaps we will not commit the same sin again.

Since God knows our every breath and movement it is silly not to confess and receive God’s perfect forgiveness. And even when we have to walk the road of repentance, the best part is that God walks the road with us cheering us on for he is our greatest fan.

So dear friends, we all sin and fall short of the glory of God. But God loves us so much and with the simple request of “please forgive me for _____(fill in your own blank),’ the task of forgiveness is done. The rest is up to us. We must turn away from our sin and not let it separate us from God.

Let us stay strong in our prayer life, continue to get to know the Father and remember how much He loves us.

Take joy in the journey. Love you, Bruce, Gaylene, Geni and Travis.

Gcapplenotes@aol.com

I am not moved by by what I see. I am not moved by what I feel. I am moved only by what I believe and I believe God.