My husband says it all the time, “the Bible is our instruction manual for living”.

For living.  Living is not always easy, and we are all beginners really.  There are certain people in my life that I look to, who are older than I, and further along in the journey.  They seem to have such wisdom.  There is a peace that comes with time and experience in knowing you can trust God.

It’s not that these people don’t face trials and hardships, it’s just that in the context of a whole life, they’ve seen similar circumstances before and they know that the God who saw them through the last ordeal is there with them in the current one.

I’m so glad we have people to follow as well as the instructions.  God didn’t just say, “Now Go!  Find your purpose!  Live your destiny!”  But He actually told us how to do it, and through other people we can see how to do it.

Last night in our Modern Girl’s Guide To Bible Study class, we looked at how our spiritual nature coincides with our physical beings, in that no matter how full we get, there comes a time when we are hungry again.  For some of us that’s only a couple of hours.  Hunger is common to all men, no matter how old we get.  Feeling dissatisfied keeps us looking for more from God.  I don’t ever want to outgrow that.

Christine Caine puts it this way: “We cannot stop or settle where we are.  God wants us to keep pursuing Him and the dreams He has for us.  As long as we’re alive, God has a purpose for our lives.”  (from A Life Unleashed).

I think of my friends Margaret and Jean.  They are both superb examples of women who walk through life with grace and wisdom, yet they are constantly looking for more from God at the same time.  They are willing to stretch and grow and try new things – even though they are in their 70’s and 80’s. It seems a tightrope to me, while I’m in my 40’s, to find the balance between satisfied experience and continual hunger. But while it is a precarious position to be in, they show me how it’s done.  These women make others stand in awe and ask the question, “How do you do it?”

Oprah Winfrey said in the September 2009 issue of her magazine, “Fulfilling your purpose, with meaning, is what gives you electrifying “juice” and makes people stand in wonder at how you do it.”

We all have someone who is watching us.  We have younger women searching for an example, scanning the horizon of the known, for something to hold on to when passing through the unknown.  God, help us to be that kind of example that makes them ask, “how do you do it?”.