by Jake Thomsen

Zephaniah 3:17

The Lord your God is with you,
the Mighty Warrior who saves.
He will take great delight in you;
in his love he will no longer rebuke you,
but will rejoice over you with singing.”

This verse has been meaningful for me in different areas of my life, for different seasons of my life. The thought, the creator of all things is so excited to know us and to be with us that he rejoices with singing. He just almost can't contain himself or even the fact that he delights over us, with just some my own bents and background of the rest. It's not really easy to believe that God loves me. Sometimes I have a hard time thinking he likes me, right? But no, he loves us and he likes us. He delights over us. So that's been meaningful for me. 

 Yesterday I dropped my kids off at their Halloween parade. They're 3.5-Year-old-twins, they were kind of scared. They're asking all these questions, do I march and how do I go about it? And it was really cute. But also as a father, you know that I want to protect them. And so I got them off and my wife's out of town. So I'm out there. And because of the days of social distancing, they're in a class of ten. They're only doing one class parade per day. So you had like seven parents sitting there on the stairs on this dreary day in North Carolina. And these kids like walking by. And beforehand, I was just thinking, man, my kids are a little bit scared of this. I want them to just enjoy it and feel love. And that verse just came to me and I thought, you know, I'm just going to rejoice over my kids at this moment. I'm going to hopefully have them lay the groundwork to experiencing that kind of love of God through that love of their earthly father. So I felt so dumb. But, man, when they came around the corner, just like throwing my hands in the air, just cheering for him, clapping all the other, I had a mask on, so not everybody recognized me a little bit easier. But that was a moment that that verse came back to me and that's just meaningful and now I'm kind of meditating on it all over again.