Isn’t great we are free to build sandboxes? No one is going to come along and tell us we cannot build one. No one is going to come knocking at our door and arrest us for building a wooden frame and filling it with sand so our children can play in it, making villages and roads, running their little cars over them, spending hours in their imaginary world.

We are truly blessed of God to be able to build sandboxes.

As I read Psalm 119:157 (I am again making my way through the Psalms) I realized I cannot say these words, like the Psalmist could honestly say them, “Many are my persecutors and my adversaries, yet I do not turn aside from your testimonies.” I do not have “many persecutors and adversaries”. Yes, I know we all have the supreme Adversary, Satan. But as to human adversaries coming against me personally, I am unaware of them. Occasionally one might rise up, but “many”? No. I am free to build a sandbox.

But I have been informed that there are many brothers and sisters in the faith of Jesus Christ who can truthfully say, “I have many persecutors and adversaries”. I hear that many are in prisons, many more under oppression in their daily lives, living in fear because they name the Name of Jesus Christ. You have heard of it too, I am certain. I pray for them to be able to say as well, “yet I do not turn aside from Your testimonies”. I pray Jesus come alongside them in their prison cells or homes fraught with fear, and standing with them, pour His strength and peace into them. And I pray for their deliverance from fear, oppression and persecution.

I also pray that should I come to the time when I can say with the Psalmist, “I have many persecutors and adversaries”, that I will also stand tall and say, “Yet I do not turn aside from Your testimonies”, come what may.

Thank God we are free to build sandboxes. But pray for those who are not. And let us live our lives “with them”, as though we were not free to build that sandbox, though we may do it, and prepare ourselves and our children to live strong and stand tall in Jesus, “not turning aside from His testimonies”, should we come to the time we are not free to build a sandbox.

Jacque