God of Our Fathers by Jeff Cinquemani

My wife likes to go to graveyards. Not just graveyards where relatives may be buried, but any graveyard especially the very old ones, you know the ones that sit on the side of a hill along with those old country churches. She can walk around and read old epitaphs for hours imagining what life must have been like for them.

For me it’s old pictures. I had the opportunity to visit the little town in Sicily where my grandma and grandpa grew up. Here, where most of my relatives still live were hundreds of pictures, each with a story to go along with them. Unfortunately, my Italian was inadequate to ask anything but general questions. However, I couldn’t help but think as we were sitting there going over all the memories and stories, that I was looking into the eyes of myself, just placed in an earlier time and another part of the world.

In each of us there comes a time when we start to look back, not just on our own lives but on the lives of those who walked before us. The more we study and explore their histories the more we find a sense of unity with them, for we start to understand the strange similarities in all of our stories.

All down through history man has had one common thread that ties him or her to generations past, present and yes even future. It is the fact that God has and will be forever present in our lives at all times. Just as God was with those families during the plagues of Egypt so He is with us today in our present day "plagues".

In Deuteronomy 26, Moses is setting up a tradition for his people to remember the stories of their forefathers; stories of prosperity, stories of affliction, stories of failure and stories of victory. Yet, through them all God was with them and brought them to this promise. It was His leading in the past that would provided hope and assurance for their future. "He is the God of Our Fathers", if we trust in nothing more than that, let us move forward with the hope that He will finish what He started so long ago with those He called own.

Today God is still the God of our fathers and from that we can gain a unique sense of peace knowing that He saw our bloodline before we got here. He’s worked with people like us before. He’s not only ready to take our lives and mold us to His character, He has been waiting for this moment for a long time and you can bet He is excited about the possibilities.

encounter: What about your story? Explain where God was in your times of pain, times of joy.