Moments

  "With the dawn redeeming grace"   Christmas isn't about a child only but the birth of a child who came to be our way to redeeming grace.  He didn't come as Christ our child in the manager but as "Christ the Lord.  "Jesus, Lord at thy birth."   He was already Lord, already our Saviour.  There is much more going on here at Christmas than a simple birthday party for Jesus.  It is something  of a birthday party for us as well because now, because of the Christ child, we can be born again unto newness of life. Merry Christmas because Christ the Saviour is born and, in a sense so are we.

  Things get more different every year with Christmas.  As sanctification goes on over the years, things don't change, but I do.  Christmas is less fanfare but more real each year.  Christmas is the first step to the cross and the angels celebrated His coming.  Do you suppose the angels knew the "rest of the story"  when they announced the birth of the Christ child? He came first to the marginalized: the shepherds, who were  "in the same country."  "We three kings came from a ways off and had to follow a star to get there. And didn't Jesus later say that  "The last shall be first and the first last?"   And then there is the lowly carpenter stepfather Joseph who didn't want to put Mary away when she came up pregnant.  This same Joseph,  angels visited in dreams, and he believed and obeyed.  He must have been a pretty great guy to begin with because God chose him for this task.  He must have been close to God alrea...

  There is a risk in telling a joke. You could look like a fool and no one gets it or they get it but don't see the humor. Based on their life situations past and present, some can't see much joy, happiness, or humor in much of anything. It's easy to fall into that trap.  I've been there before. It is easier and less risky personally, to be negative, and pessimistic about everything. Bah- Humbug is a piece of cake which is why most of us fall into that hole from time to time.  It takes guts, it takes God to find joy in this fallen world.  We may have been beaten up so much in the past, and the future doesn't look that great either.  So consequently, people are afraid to trust happiness, to take the risk to laugh, to smile, to say something is good, and to have the courage not to be turned aside because of the probability that there will be some who will think they are crazy.    Live long enough and we'll find that happiness and joy leave us vulnerable....

  Sometimes it takes a swallow hard and accept but a lot of people are not going to take God as seriously as you.  Not that I am better but that God seems to excite me more than I see others excited by God.   But, I've had my down times and I've had my times when God felt far away.  Is it they are having those periods of distance, or is it a pattern of practice, a tattoo they can't remove, and life with God has become ho-hum and distant.  Could it be that all that is left is the shell of the relationship they once had?  Or, could it be they have never felt the richness I have been blessed to feel in the special place close to God?    I don't have any answers and it is not my calling to judge anyone on this.  Perhaps they have found their way quietly to the feet of Jesus and are content with who and where they are?  God bless them. God bless us all. 

The last six months it has rained challenges, and hardships.  In the same six months, it has also rained blessings. God has seen to shelter me from the falling rain.  I know there will be some hardships in the future I will have to go through but the same God who sheltered me from the rain will be with me in the storm. Each time a new challenge came up, we just took it to prayer. We asked for deliverance but accepted "nevertheless thy will" too. Each time God delivered us - sometimes almost miraculously.  Sometimes the timing or circumstance that affected deliverance seemed much  more than coincidence.  Yesterday contained a series of deliverances, so today I just gotten go public with my gratitude.  Praise God for all He has done.  Praise God for all He has saved me from, and all I know He will carry me through in this world and into the next. AMEN

 I've been called a good listener, but I am not so sure when it comes to listening to God.  In prayer, I seem to have the notion that I need to do  steady, non-stop talking about what I want God to do and then it is Amen time.   Sometimes I think I treat God like He is my personal genie in a bottle.  In looking at that more closely, I can see that I do not honor Him enough in prayer. I do not give thanks and praise nearly enough.  I don't be still and let the Spirit work on me without words nearly enough   During my exercise program, there is the spot right after push-ups where I am face down on the floor and I use that interval for a short prayer time.  The beauty of it is that sometimes it evolves into something much more than a short prayer time.  In my perfunctory mindset, I list all my concerns about the people and things I want to pray for.  But in the best of times, I can't say Amen.  Sometimes, after exhausting all...

  Now, to Become   Now, To become more determined; more focused, disciplined to say no to enterprises wherein I am not an asset and the battle is not worthy of my weapons.   Now, To become more disciplined in thought and spirit discerning God’s true intent of His love acting upon this earth.   Now,   To become disciplined in food and drink.   Giving glory to God for this temple called the body by guarded vigilance to what enters it.   Now, To become more disciplined so as not to be duped by the “leaners” of this world.   Giving glory to God for discernment between the “pearls and the swine.”   Now.   to become more disciplined and determined and focused on areas of growth-through reading, classes, meditation, praising God for that opportunity   Now, To become more disciplined to write more.  Plan to leave more rather than consume more. To be a light in the world's darkness.   Now the h...

    Self-sufficiency comes with a price.   Several people we have had to come work on the place say that we have what everyone wants; a quiet place in the country.  However, nothing stops anyone from having it except a deep down "want it."  Out here in the country, you have to put out a lot of work and be able to figure things out. There is a lot to be done on your own and there are a lot of downsides to it. Most want the benefits of country living without paying the full price.  It is like the story of the husband listening to his wife playing the piano.  He remarks how beautifully she plays and he says he wished he could play like that.  She replies. "well obviously, not enough to practice at it." Most people don't truly pursue what they say they wish for. Most don't even try. I say all that to say this:  I count myself among those "I wishers." I say I am a triathlete but I haven't done one in years.  I say I want to do an ironman...

  The world seems in such a mess. People are so lost.  They are often sterile and uncaring, barely noticing those around them or anyone else's pain. What happened to humanity that caused her to sink so low? How can I love these people like God says I am supposed to?  These folks are not easy to love. How do I look aside at who they are and what they do and love them?   Then John 3:16 hits me;  "For God so loved----."   The world that Jesus came into was no Sunday School picnic either.  People were just people then too and that's why He came.  He came for those who crucified Him.  He came for the empty hearts of today.  We have all sinned and fall short of the Glory of God.  We have all disappointed God.  In some way, we have all betrayed Him.  And the Bible is full of people who did those things during those times when Jesus walked on the earth.  These times are not much different than the world Jesus came i...

  I am too old and impatient to live my remaining days in Laodician moments (Ref 3:14-16)  I will be 81 soon and I am either going to live for Jesus or be dead cold in the grave …I don’t have time or energy for a lukewarm faith.  If this an older life is HO-Hum station, then I am not getting off here.  Speed on down the tracks; wreck, crash, or burn, but live out life living for Jesus.  I wrote the below while waiting for the cardiologist to come in the room and tell me how my tests came out.  Safe in His Arms   Hold me, Jesus. Well, I’m safe in his arms. I’m safe in His arms. Though the winds  howl and   blow, I’ll   trust, and I’ll know That I’m safe in His arms When   storm winds are blowing, I'll rest in the knowing When there seems no relief, I'll  rest in belief There peace to the last breath,  because  He conquered death Yes, I’m safe in His arm s . Hold me Jesus

  We often use a location app that helps us follow family follows when they travel. Often when the app is first accessed, the view is close up.  It is hard to determine where the family member is, where they are going, or where they have been.  Consequently, we have to zoom out to take in the full map.  Then we can see how our family member fits into the full map, the big picture, not the small little circle we first saw them in. I find  this true in the Christian experience as well.  We can lose the sense of our true place and time and feel our little circle is the world and sometimes we think we are the center of it.  Our problems, our responsibilities, and our little issues and our importance become all there is.   There doesn't seem to be any big picture. We get so lost in ourselves and our little worlds that, like the blown-up locator view, we don't really know where we are, where we are going, or where we have been.  And to make it...

  Church can be problematic.  I once told my wife that I had to stop going to church before I lost all my faith.  Many times, I have found the church to be  a regular insincerity center, where God is supposedly worshiped but worship gets seemingly lost in church promotion, and or self-promotion.  It's a business model for God so to speak.  What  about love?  Where does love fit into this business model?  I have been to big churches with big performances, and I've been to small churches and everything in between.    In big production churches folks praise and raise hands with their eyes closed like they are having a real experience with the Holy Spirit.  They sing the seven words of a song for the 11th time and the band makes loud music to enhance the full Christian experience.  But oftentimes when the "high" subsides and the service ends, I have seen these same praise and raise people close ranks and show little interest i...

    There was not a breath of air.   The humid stillness hanging in the silence of the forest   tense in its breathlessness. Amplified by the quiet, a loudness suddenly crashed about in the limbs of a large tree.   A large dead branch was tumbling noisily through the other branches to end its days above the earth.     What made the limb fall at this one moment.   Surely, not wind or gust or freeze.   Perhaps, it was just time, that’s all: just a time, the moment, the breaking point when decay had mitigated the limb’s strength that it could not support its own weight-----Yes, perhaps, it was time.   And in life there just sometimes comes a time, to shed off the dead and rotting in life and let it crash to the ground.   Sometimes it is time to give more wholly to God and the things rotting fall.  

        As a child I once got lost in the woods.    It is hard to remember it now but I do remember the fear upon realization that I was indeed lost.    Things looked differently.   Nothing seemed familiar.    Finally I came to a gate that I had never found before in my other adventures in these woods.   When I looked across the pasture past the gate, there was a strange old house.   In my young mind I wondered if it were a witches house.   Then the conflict:   I was lost and this was the only sign of civilization that   I had found in seemingly hours of wandering around in the woods.    I had to take the chance, but I would be ready to run back to the woods if things got bad at all.     As I left the gate and the woods and walked cautiously toward the old house.   Little by little it begin to come to me as.   As I began to come to myself I realized that the gate th...

 Jesus did some amazing things with storms.  He calmed the storm once and another time He came to His disciples walking on water at night "when the winds were contrary."   He wasn't intimidated by storms or bad weather.    Today, things just sort of piled on in life and I felt sort of overwhelmed by the storms and bad weather.  I could sense the tenseness in my body, mind, and soul.  I felt so tired from it all.   I went into the other room and after sitting in a recliner, I closed my eyes and tried to pray.   The words never started.  What did start was an awareness of supernatural realities, that I never expected.  Prayer became communion as I thought of how it will be when all this is over when I am in heaven with Jesus.   There was a sort of picture in my mind of that reality and with that vision came a peace washing over me.  I will be with Jesus soon.  This all will be over soon.  No mor...

 Luke 17:12-19 Ten lepers were desperate for healing.  All were healed but only one came back to praise and worship God for this miracle.  Sound familiar?  I knew a man with really bad cancer.  He was prayed over and prayed over and he knew it.  Miraculously, he went into remission.  In a celebratory dinner for this miracle, the man took credit for it, talking as if as if he had done it all himself out of his macho personal strength.  Cancer came back with a vengeance in short order and all the personal bravado couldn't save him.   The body is just the body and it is finite.  No matter how many times we have healing miracles, we will all die.  But healing  physically will not necessarily make  you whole.  Real healing is infinite. The leper who turned back, glorified God "with a loud voice."  He fell on his face and gave thanks. His life had been given back to him and He had been made whole.  He wasn't...

  Nothing is really wrong, but God  seems quiet.  The feeling is close enough but it is like I can't sense His leading.  Maybe it is that He is already given the instructions, and now it is up to me to perform, to do HIs will which I sought?   Don't we get like that sometimes? We ask for directions.  He says, "Go  here."  Then we just stand there on the corner waiting for the free ride to come along and take us there without effort. God is not a genie in a bottle to give us three wishes.  He is almighty God, whose "ways are past finding out," no matter how smart we think we are.  Jesus warned those who wanted to follow Him to first "count the cost." Discipleship will cost us something.  Discipleship is effort, and a privilege so far as we feel honored to give our all to Him.    So, we have a calling and cause.  Perhaps the greatest value in following this calling and cause is the experiences we will have alo...

  It's been a challenging last few weeks. The rains, the storms, the floods. We had a pond on our road to cross to get out to the main road. I have caught big fish in shallower water in my time. The rest of that road was somewhere between bad and awful. We didn't go out much. If we did we had to take the chainsaw to cut the limbs that fell across our road. A tree fell across our house and uprooted our gray water line, then our AC went out, and then our well went out. I took a nice bath in my pond this morning. However, good people were in place, praise God. The tree folks came out quickly and got the tree off my roof. The roofing folks came out and did the roof. The AC repair was done speedily and today, yes on a Sunday afternoon, the well person came out and restored my well. If all these things had not happened, I would not have realized how blessed I am to have these good people in my life. I am so grateful. "I thank God for the mountains. I thank God...

"Jesus gave it all"   As His followers, are we asked anything less ?     When Jesus called His disciples He didn't say, "Come on, give it a try and see if you like it."  No, it was and is a "no turning back" decision.  As the song goes, "I have decided to follow Jesus, no turning back, no turning back."  Following Jesus surrender. You  give up who you are to get on  the path to who you can be, though Jesus Christ. We change and we change the roads we are on.  This is no easy life.  The road is full of muddy place and potholes.  often difficult and demanding.  It can be difficult and demanding But, what in life that is worthwhile isn't difficult and demanding?   The call is "If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me."  Carrying our cross on that difficult and demanding road is hard.  That cross is heavy.  We get tired. We get worn. But we move ...

  As I ponder whether or not to act my age and give up vigorous activities, I somehow think that if I just stop doing these things, then I will be safe from all that COULD happen to me.  It's an apple in the Garden of Eden.  It is a tempting thought to kick back risk nothing and wait to die on time.  But the apple is rotten.  Safety in this world doesn't exist.  It is an illusion. You can lock all the doors in your life, set your alarms, and still have a tragedy befall you.  And I think making yourself safe and depending on our conservative, noncommittal, and cautious approach is a departure from an abiding faith. Our Hope, our safety, is in Jesus Christ only.  "All other ground is sinking sand," the song goes.  We cannot find security in the natural and secular world.  We find security only in the arms of Jesus.   And yes, we can lose everything in a disaster and yes, we can get hurt or even killed out there trying in the worl...

 Early morning in the county and there is a peace wisped in with the thin fog. It is quiet, serenely quiet, and the feeling is of a massage of the soul.   The silence is slightly broken by coyotes howling close by.  The wildness in their cries is not an interruption but a different verse in the song of morning peace.  The coyotes howl again in defiance of the civilized world and now the neighbors' dogs bark back their excuses.   The faint smell from a fire built last night is coming through the open window with the cool air. My world is at peace.   Thank you, God, for being here. Praise God.

  God seemed like He lived across the country but now He seems to live next door.  I love the closeness.  But I know that  a large part of the vivid nature of the closeness is because of the former distance.  This is good - very, very good. So, good in fact that I don't seem to be able or have to pray like I used to.  The relationship is ongoing.  It is present in the moment.  I guess this the "praying without ceasing," talked about in the Bible. I had a good run in the rain and I was getting closer  but the difficulty I had with a nonbeliever ( previous post) took coming closer to high resolution.  The distance between here and heaven has closed as well.  Heaven is just a few steps next door.  It feels so liberating.  I am so grateful for the small pinch of heaven I've been blessed with to carry me through the tough times that will surely come before I move next door. 

  The other day someone started trying to tell me that, even though he knew I was religious and all that the heaven and hell and God thing was just a bunch of bull to make us feel better. I listened for a few moments.  He has expressed this before but never stayed on it so long, and finally, I did what I should have done all along, long before this.  I defended my faith. I expressed my surety of salvation, and my trust in God as Lord of my life and giver of life.   I told him he was wrong. He told me I was wrong. We departed company.  I  wondered if I could have witnessed better in a manner a little less challenging?  Perhaps, but at the same time though, any remaining doldrums of faith received a shock charge to increased vitality, as I firmly expressed my faith.   I closed any distance to God in a moment.  Sometimes I wonder if sometimes confrontation, even persecution is a tool to enable our faith to come out from hiding from the...

Over the years, running has always had a spiritual aspect to it.  And, some of the most memorable runs were in less than desirable conditions.  I still remember the run my son and I had on a country road when a storm of sorts came in.  It wasn't lightning too bad but the wind was blowing fiercely and the rain was pouring down.  A driver just happened to come by and asked if we needed a ride.  It was very nice of him since we were soaking wet and would have gotten the interior of his vehicle wet.   But we were having fun; a strange kind of exhilaration that difficult situations can induce.  We thanked the man extensively, and with a small smile and shaking of his head, he rolled up his window and drove on.   I've had other great runs in the rain, but none lately.  The elder years find me more tame than I like to see myself.   However, like so many others my age, I seem to find a way to keep passion and risk at bay by doing ...

  Weeds.  What are the weeds that come between us and our vision of the cross and what it means in our lives?   This stump was fitted to have a cross put on it.  However, it was hard to mow close to the stump and weeds grew high around the cross.  In a way it was emblematic of the cross rising and protruding among the weeds of the world, standing higher to give us hope in a weedy world.  Sometimes our lives are a weed patch of our failings, our turning aside from our called purpose to yield to the way of the world.   Out of this weed patch  of a  world, the cross rises boldly proclaiming the Love of God and the eternal hope in the resurrection.   I need to see that cross clearly.  I need to clear the weeds between me and God to get the full impact of that Hope offered in the cross.   Jesus said, " I am the resurrection and the life; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. And whosoev...

  Ever had a bad patch with God?  Seems that here, right on the eve of Easter, I find God distant.  Looking for causes I wonder if it is because my athletic life went south, or that we have been sick for a month, or that the church has been a disappointment?  I am not sure.  I just know God and I are not as close as once were.   Funny thing though,  I don't believe in Him any the less.  I still love Him and know He loves me.  I will still celebrate the resurrection in a few days.  I believe.   Yes, I believe but I can't seem to touch Him and He touch me where it hurts.  So, I guess this is where faith comes into play; when we believe in the dark when we can't see or feel God; like Jesus on the cross - "my God why have you forsaken me?"   The feeling of being forsaken did not stop His obedience to God.   So there it is.  My calling- believe and obey in the dark.  The light will come. ...

 

    So much fuzzy emptiness at this age.  The older I get the more I realize I don't know.  Finally having wisdom enough to know that I don't know, faith comes much easier.  Earthly life seems like the train that left the station without me, leaving me holding on to my suitcase, watching a younger world clank away noisily down the tracks without me.   Oh, it isn't bad.  I have my suitcase of valuables, my friends, family, but supremely, my relationship with God.  And, that relationship grows more and more intimate watching the train that once was my life, disappearing down the tracks without me.   Of course, I often wish for what I once had and will never have again, Of course, I wish I had a little more life to live, a little more time on the train, though I am not sure why. It's natural, I guess. Sure, there are things I wish I had done, and things I wished I had done better, bu...

This cross is in a field very near my road to the house - easily seen by visitors.   A visitor once asked me who is the cross for.  It must have looked like sort of a makeshift graveyard.  I said the cross is for me.  Now there are several crosses on my place here just as visible.  And, all the crosses are for me.  Selfish behavior? Just a moment. The crosses are not some sort of ornaments celebrating my faith in Jesus, or my allegiance to the Gospel.  Those crosses are not to be as billboards to advertise what a great Christian I am.   No, the crosses are for me, because I am just a man, weak and fragile on my own.  I easily forget about Jesus and succumb to the world's temptations, of self-seeking, consumptive behavior.  I too often yield to the pride that could so easily destroy my witness.  I need Jesus.  I need the cross to get me through this gauntlet called life until He takes me home.   When I s...