Aren’t you glad God isn’t like the stock market?  What a ride this week is turning out to be for investors the world over!  The unraveling mortgage crisis here in the U.S. and the ensuing credit crunch, coupled with volatility in the global oil markets and the threat of recession prompted the President last week to announce a $150 billion tax cut bailout for American taxpayers.  But the world markets apparently were not impressed on Monday, as one by one from Japan to Hong Kong to India to Europe markets plunged over investor jitters.  And had the Federal Reserve not stepped in with its ¾ point interest rate reduction early Tuesday morning, who knows if the sky would’ve fallen on Wall Street! And where does all of this leave us?  On the precarious edge of economic recession, perhaps.  But nevertheless, secure in the care and keeping of the God whose compassionate commitment to his earth children is unwavering.  “For I am the LORD, I do not change” (Malachi 3:6).  No volatility, no gyrating, no roller coaster plunges with the Lord of the universe.  “Because His compassions fail not.  They are new every morning.  Great is Your faithfulness” (Lamentations 3:22, 23).  Did you catch that?  Unfailing, unchanging—that is the God who stands beside us at every dawn and offers again to walk the new day and night through with us.  When the immensity of that assurance sinks into our consciousness, surely it can birth an unshakeable confidence in him, can’t it?  What a God to call our Friend!  As for the future of our national and global economy, who can say?  There is a thought I keep tucked away in the back of my mind.  “For when they say, ‘Peace and safety!’ then sudden destruction comes upon them” (I Thessalonians 5:3).  I.e., neither predictions of economic security nor pronouncements of financial doom are going to determine earth’s outcome.  If the story of Noah teaches us anything, it is surely that when the sun is shining in all its glory and life seems most secure and promising, earth’s history can radically reverse itself, all prognostications to the contrary.  Which being interpreted must mean that our deepest security will always lie in the nail-scarred hands of the Savior of this world.  After all the sun may be shining and the markets rising on the day Christ returns to earth.  “As the days of Noah were,” he once intoned, “so also will the coming of the Son of Man be” (Matthew 24:37).  Which is reason enough for you and me to place our lives, our 401Ks, and all our plans, dreams and ambitions for the future in trust with the one God who will not change though the heavens fall.  Because when the sky does fall, I want to be rising with him, don’t you?