Addicted

I am an addict. I am rather severely addicted to coffee. I have come to this realization, and I am now accepting it. For the past 2-3 months, I have refrained from drinking coffee drinks unless it was decaffeinated. I put my coffee pot into storage and have been very disciplined about not drinking anything with caffeine in it. Yesterday I broke. I could take it no longer. I pulled out my coffee pot, and for the first time in 2-3 months, I drank a cup of caffeinated coffee. I enjoyed it so much that I decided to drink another cup. And when that one was gone, I had another cup. I should have thought it out a bit better and started drinking the caffeine again gradually. However, I did not even consider gradually working into it until 3:30 this morning where I found myself lying in bed with eyes wide open without even a hint of sleepiness. 

The good thing about being awake at that time in the morning was the weather. I sincerely enjoy stormy weather. We are supposedly going through the worst storm this area has seen in the last five years. The wind was rushing through the trees with such force that it sounded like a jet flying just feet above us. It is a bit disconcerting being in a trailer in the middle of a forest with wind blowing like that. Thankfully, I did get to sleep, and when I awoke this morning, there were no trees in my living room! 

With the sun up, I could see the effects of the wind. Some branches had fallen. A lot of leaves and other debris had fallen or been scattered. The tops of the trees bowed with the wind, and from the look of them, I worried that they would fall over. However, looking at the base of the tree, you could see that the wind was not affecting them at all. 

It reminded me of Job. Looking at the tree tops, it seemed that there would be no way they could endure. It seemed they would fall. Yet they were so strongly and so deeply rooted in the earth that the wind was not really even budging them. When Job was tried and had nearly everything he loved taken from him, it would seem that he would have given up. It seemed that there was no way he could go on. He seemed defeated. Yet there was something within Job that held on. His foundation, his faith was rooted deeply in the Lord. Satan probably thought he was winning. He probably thought that at any moment Job would in fact, curse God and die. What Satan did not know, what only God could see was that Job's faith was not budging. It was unwavering. And just as the winds only bring strength to the trees, the trial that Job went through only strengthened him because he was rooted in the Lord.