The Olive Branch

I picked for my devotions this year to spend “A Year with C.S. Lewis” and

“Morning and Evening” with Charles Spurgeon. It’s proving to be a good choice.

Spurgeon wrote an entry about the dove that brought an olive branch back to the ark. He called the olive branch “the memorial of the past day, and a prophecy of the future.”

In the instance of the olive branch, the dove returned to Noah a souvenir of its day. Just as we shop carefully on our travels for a memento to bring back to a friend to give her a sense of what we have experienced, so the olive branch recalled an encounter that pleased the dove. The branch represented firm ground and life-giving bounty to the hand that reached out from the sea-tossed vessel to receive it.

Spurgeon challenges his readers to bring home pleasing records that pledge loving kindness. He suggests that we present to our Lord grateful acknowledgements of tender mercies which we experience as new every morning and fresh every evening.

What a lovely thought. I will look for the olive branches in each day that remind me that God loves and cares for me, memorials that testify to His Presence and His promise to sustain me. Like the dove, I will bring my daily souvenirs before my Lord. We will admire them together.