Mercy Like Morning: A 7-Day DevotionalSample

Find the Trail-Markers

It had been nine years of waiting when God started repeating three words:

Womb. Watch. Wait.

They showed up everywhere - in a quiet time or a word study or a cross-reference or on social media. It was a promise God kept repeating. But I thought I was making it all up.

I was afraid that I was twisting Scripture to fit what I wanted God to say.

Frustrated, I stopped my morning digging and reading my Bible altogether. To quit the near-obsession I had in tracking those three words, I needed a break from the promises. You’re so loud in speaking, I prayed, when will You start doing?

A couple of weeks later, I finally decided to pick up my Bible where I had left off, pulling at the bookmark in Nehemiah 9, and I began to read.

The Israelites had gotten off track. They refused to obey God’s commands or remember the past miracles He had performed. They had sinned in so many ways, but Nehemiah remembered God’s gracious and merciful character.

And then these two brown eyes laid onto a two-word morning phrase that stopped me in my quiet-time tracks: “In His manifold mercies He did not forsake them” (Nehemiah 9:19, my paraphrase).

I started to think about those manifold mercies. The ones that are more numerous than the 3442 days I had spent waiting for our family. The ones that are abundant and enough and abundantly enough. The ones that are made up of a million tiny, seemingly inconsequential parts and pieces. But together, they form the trail-markers of His mercy.

Then I did what I had deliberately stopped doing for weeks: I dug into His new-morning-mercy. And God picked up the conversation where I abruptly had cut it off. When I was tired of following a trail of seemingly made-up words, He pounded the trail-marker-post into the dirt. And it sat waiting there for me whenever I was ready to start digging again.

And the very first definition for the Hebrew word that was used for “mercies” in Nehemiah 9:19? It was womb.

Do you feel like you’re questioning God’s promise? Like you’re suddenly lost down an obedience-path that you had previously not questioned? Don’t give up. Dig into Scripture and keep track of those repeated trail-markers as they come up. Because here’s the thing about His Word: it never comes back void.