Get up.
Let the dog out (and Chip is not a morning dog).
Get coffee.
Read a devotion (well, most of the time). I am currently enjoying Glimpses of Grace by Madeleine L'Engle, a gift from a friend.
Check CNN app to see what happened overnight in the world.
Look at email.
Ah, email...there they are, waiting like old friends, those emails you get on a routine basis. Some of them you can't get rid of. I once ordered a subscription to Golf Digest for Dad and it took me forever to get them to STOP! Some of them are coupons - 95% of which you care nothing about, but you don't want to stop them just in case you miss an outstanding sale.
One of my daily emails comes from K-Love, which if you don't know is a Christian Radio Station. I get their "verse of the day" each morning and I do like it. Some days it's just nice, but some days it really strikes a cord. This is one of those days.
This verse - familiar from Psalm 23 (the Good Shepherd Psalm). - was the verse of the day.
I grew up on the King James version which reads Surely good and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. Now I usually use the New Revised Standard which reads nearly the same. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the LORD my whole life long.
Which is nice. Amazing and wonderful, really. But follow is not the same as pursue. Is it?
Then I looked the verse up in The Message, another favorite translation of mine. It reads,
Your beauty and love chase after me every day of my life. I'm back home in the house of God for the rest of my life. How awesome is that?
So, just for fun, I looked up the verse in some commentaries and found that it's one of those words that can be translated either as follow or pursue.
Being humans, I know for a fact that sometimes we need to be pursued. We need to be chased after, found and rescued. It can be scary out there in the world and it's nice to know that we are safe.
