life. Now if you miss that, you miss it all. The dried-up brook is usually a sign of God’s acceptance of us, not His judgment. Right at the height of his career, when he was becoming known as a great man of God, Abraham was told by the Lord, “Take Isaac and put him on the altar and kill him.” I would say that qualifies as Abraham’s brook drying up, wouldn’t you? Yet God was intensely pleased with His servant Abraham. Right in the middle of Paul’s remarkably successful first missionary journey, he was