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Meditations
When Things Shouldn't Go Wrong
Fearing we have somehow blown it with God
August 02, 2006

We get excited about a personal relationship with God and in our passionate pursuit, we fall prey to the illusion that our lives will blissfully flow forward while we dutifully love and serve God. Before we know it, our ocean liner has turned into a leaky rowboat and we are left betrayed and defeated.

Fearing we have somehow blown it and all our efforts have been rejected by God, we are in serious jeopardy if we do not take real time to get with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. There are many reasons why things go wrong and our sin is only one of the reasons. If we are truly open to Him, in his own time He will reveal to us the cause of our Utopia collapsing.

We are all aware God has a master game, but we are prone to forget about sacrificing a pawn to crown a king in that game. Ponder the case of Joseph in the Old Testament, beginning in Genesis 37. Joseph was the privileged child. He had not seen clouds on his horizon and was taken by surprise when his brothers turned on him, dumped him into the well and left him for dead. When he was rescued and taken to Egypt as a slave, did the possibility this was God's master plan cross his mind? Doubtful. If God had reassured Joseph that all was well at this point, Joseph could very easily have taken a prideful attitude and blown the whole plan.

As the story progresses in Genesis 39, we find a matured Joseph walking with God and growing in position within the elite among the Egyptians. Can we even imagine the devastation Joseph felt when he was wrongly accused of a sex crime and thrown in jail to rot? Joseph was doing everything right and still, this betrayal had happened. Did he think God had turned on him?

Did he wonder, How had he blown it?

As we continue reading the successive chapters of Joseph's story, we see the unfolding of a masterful strategy to accomplish God's perfect plan. So much had been accomplished through Joseph's sufferings. His sin? hard to say. His reward? unimaginable.

"To be certain of God means that we are uncertain in all our ways, we do not know what a day may bring forth. This is generally said with a sigh of sadness, it should be rather an expression of breathless expectation. We are uncertain of the next step, but we are certain of God. Immediately we abandon to God, and do the duty that lies nearest, He packs our life with surprises all the time." --Oswald Chambers

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Musings
A Life Lived in a Soap Opera
It is hard to look at her smile and imagine a life filled with great pain, yet without a trace of bitterness
August 05, 2006

She's the best kind of neighbor: the kind who is always looking for ways to do a favor, or cook something special when you are sick, or look after your place when you are out of town. She shines when she speaks of her Jesus: her eyes full of love, her face alight with a glow from deep within. To be so at peace, she must have had a really good life, one thinks. The answer is 'no'.

It is hard to look at her smile and imagine a life filled with great pain, yet without a trace of bitterness; but birth into an ethnically-mixed family living on the wrong side of the tracks is starting with a strike against you. A pretty little girl with a lost father and a stepfather who is overly fond of little girls is a second strike. For her the rough times were there before her earliest memories, nevertheless she grew up wanting to care for her babies and give her family the loving home she'd never known.

When times were good she knew who to thank. She loved her Jesus.

More often than not, times were not good. The financial struggles that most young families encounter were exasperated by relatives with drug dependencies. She gives example after example of lives destroyed, family killing and being killed in the chaotic nightmare that is life in the drug world. She tells of the struggles to maintain her own family's stability when so many relatives were desperate to get money any way they could. Still she stands in the midst of the chaos. Her children are hanging in there. So are her grandchildren. Somehow amidst all the confusion, her immediate family remains intact.

A long life spent in a soap opera takes its toll. She is tired now. She has decided to let go of everything, sit down, pick up her Bible, and thank her Jesus. Thus she will finish her days with the tranquility which for so long has eluded her.

Ecclesiastes 3:6
...A right time to hold on and another to let go,

Hebrews 6:18
God can't break his word. And because his word cannot change, the promise is likewise unchangeable. We who have run for our very lives to God have every reason to grab the promised hope with both hands and never let go.

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Musings
Realizing Life's Lessons are Taught by God
If God is the teacher, He's always available to guide us through the situations we find ourselves in
August 08, 2006

In the Book of Job one of the friends consoling Job remarked, ""Do you have any idea how powerful God is? Have you ever heard of a teacher like him?" Job 36:22 (The Message). Yes, we who have faith in The Great Teacher have heard of a teacher like Him. We have vivid memories of those times our lives were spinning out of control and a power greater than we somehow made it all work out. As we looked back later, we learned the real lessons: the lessons on letting go and letting God. I remember a time when I was a young fifth-grade teacher and had no complaints about life until I suddenly developed a severe case of homesickness. Since I was "home" it was a thoroughly puzzling predicament and it just kept on and kept on until I was actually losing weight over it. One hot summer day a call came from my father and as I picked up the phone the homesick feeling disappeared. He said my mother was sick and had been taken to the hospital, he would be following the ambulance. I put down the phone, turned to my husband and said, "My mother is dead". When my father reached the hospital, he learned she had died in the ambulance.

It was no comfort to me to know that I had been prewarned in such a way that I was not allowed the opportunity to change anything. I saw no purpose in the lesson and if there was no purpose, why three months of homesickness? Life has now taught me to never question whether there is a purpose for God's lessons. There always is and I was to learn the purpose six years later.

After the birth of my second child, the doctor said there must be no more children. Surgical precautions were taken. Four months later I was pregnant and the doctor was angry. He told me to go home, tell my husband and pack my bag; he was scheduling the abortion for first thing the next morning. As I crossed over the Wabash River driving home, in the same place close to my heart where I had experienced the dreadful homesickness, I began to feel the most wonderful, warm comfort. It felt as though the car and I were enveloped in a fluffy cloud of love and lifted up. In my dazed condition, I somehow related the pain of losing my mother to the pain of relinquishing my unborn child. By the time I arrived home I was firm in my determination to NOT return to the hospital. I was convinced all would be well and all was well. That same experience of supreme comfort happened again on this child's twenty-fourth birthday, marking the beginning of the rest of my life.

King David recognizes God as the ultimate teacher in Psalm 119:98-100 (The Message)

Your commands give me an edge on my enemies;
they never become obsolete.
I've even become smarter than my teachers
since I've pondered and absorbed your counsel.
I've become wiser than the wise old sages
simply by doing what you tell me.

There's a big difference between lessons taught in the classroom and the lessons taught by God. He doesn't conclude the lesson with a grade. He offers permanent rewards for lessons learned. We may forget facts and formulas learned in the classroom, but if God is the teacher, He's always available to guide us through the situations we find ourselves in--whether we can figure it out or not. In fact, He doesn't even expect us to understand, He just asks us to have faith in Him and He will carry us through.

Learning to lean on the teacher, never worrying about whether we're smart enough, or knowledgable enough, is a lovely way to pass a test.

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Meditation
Communion with God Empowers Effective Living
Right prayer is not escape from action, it is equipment for action
August 11, 2006

We need to consider carefully what we are asking God to do for us. Visions of winning the lottery while asking God to bless us financially may not get the results we are wishing to achieve. "Right prayer is not escape from action, it is equipment for action", says Albert E. Day.

Our lives are hectic. We cannot effectively accomplish all that has been laid before us. We have to prioritize, making painful decisions about what will be tackled and what will be put off. There are times we find ourselves later regretting the unfinished task wishing we had given it a higher priority. We sigh, "If only I had known", feeling sapped as the sense of powerlessness comes over us. These hectic times are the times we most need to stop everything and listen to God.

My day's schedule today needs about 72 hours. I really feel the pressure as I am writing this. Perhaps that's why God put it before me now and wanted the article written first. I am doing it while feeling the pressure. If past experiences hold true, the relief from the pressure will arrive momentarily and at the end of the day those tasks which should have been put first will somehow have been completed.

"Right prayer is not escape from action, it is equipment for action. It is not idle luxury, it is no luxury at all. . . . It is not a waste of time. The hours spent in communion with God make better, more effective, the hours spent in action. It is not an effort to get God to do what we ought to do, but to let God equip us for the doing, and help us in the doing and finally to do only what we alone cannot do." --Albert E. Day

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Teachings
Truth: Unchanging and Timeless
Facing the truth about ourselves can be hard and it can hurt
August 14, 2006

I do not always willingly accept that which deep within I know is true. Truth, especially about ourselves, can be most inconvenient and can hinder the progress toward thefulfillment of our personal agenda. The truth can be hard and it can hurt. But it is what it is and it is not changing with time. Searching for deeper understandings of life continually reaffirms this basis law:

Truth Never Changes

I am moving the source of the following quote far down the page and I hope you will estimate the period when it was written before looking.

"Cleanse your own heart, cast out from your mind: pain, fear, envy, ill-will, avarice, cowardice, passion uncontrolled. These things you cannot cast out unless you look to God alone; on him alone set your thoughts, and consecrate yourself to his commands. If you wish for anything else, with groaning and sorrow you will follow what is stronger than you, ever seeking peace outside you, and never able to be at peace; for you seek it where it is not, and refuse to seek it where it is."

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Epictetus, born about 60 A.D. Greek philosopher.
Discourses and Manual of Epictetus. Trans. R.E. Matheson.

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Meditations
Divine Goodness
Only through understanding how each separate journey meshes with all others to fulfill God's divine plan can we be at peace with whatever comes our way
August 17, 2006

"Two men look out through the same bars: one sees mud, and one the stars" --Frederick Langbridge.

Our lives are so diverse yet so intricately interwoven. One person's life is harmonious--protected--while the life of another is an ongoing shipwreck. Only through understanding how each separate journey meshes with all others to fulfill God's divine plan can we be at peace with whatever comes our way. The following excerpts from Virginia's Journey vividly describe how one woman looked through the bars and saw mud first--and then stars.

"...I'd stand in the frigid ocean water and concentrate on the pain in my feet; eventually, they'd go numb and wouldn't hurt anymore. I wondered why there was nothing in the world that would numb my heart. I put on a lot of miles that summer, and I saw how beautiful the world still was. That just made me more bitter at first. How dare it be so beautiful, when life could be so ugly. I thought it was a cruel joke -- that it could be so beautiful and yet so terrible here at the same time. I hated a great deal then. Just about everybody and everything was abhorrent to me.

"...I found God here. I don't know what his or her name is, and I don't really care. I only know that there is a magnificent presence in our universe and in the next one and the next after that. My life has a purpose now. It's to serve and to experience pleasure - it"s to grow, and to learn and to rest and to work and to play. Each day is a gift to me, and I enjoy them all (some certainly less than others) in the company of people whom I've come to love at times, and at other times in solitude. I recall a verse I read somewhere. It says, �Two men look out through the same bars: one sees mud, and one the stars.� I choose to gaze at the stars now, and I see them everywhere, not only in the darkness but in the daylight too. I threw out the pills that I was going to use to do myself in long ago. They'd turned all powdery anyway. I will live as long and as well as I am permitted to, and I will be thankful for every moment I am on this earth." --Tammie Byram Fowles

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"Because the divine goodness could not be adequately represented by one creature alone, God produced many and diverse creatures, that what was wanting in one in the representation of the divine goodness might be supplied by another. For goodness, which in God is simple and uniform, in creatures is manifold and divided. Thus the whole universe together participates in the divine goodness more perfectly and represents it better than any single creature." --St. Thomas Aquinas

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Musings
Unworldly Guidance
Is it really possible for the spirit to communicate instructions to our mind
August 20, 2006

Is it really possible for the spirit to communicate instructions to our mind? It took me many years to understand this could happen and to learn how to interpret the messages from the Holy Spirit so that I might be able to follow instructions. I still miss them many times because I have too much cluttering my ability to listen. But those times when I am hearing and following directions, I really do appreciate the results:

I went to Cook's Glass & Mirror today. I found them in the yellow pages and wrote down the address and directions and promptly left them at home.

I could remember it was near the intersection of Washington and Morris, so I headed west figuring on having to do some exploring when I got to the intersection. As I sat at a red light too far away to see what street I was approaching, I looked to my left and there was Cook's Glass & Mirror. I really had to pause and thank God for making it so unbelievably easy by placing a long wait at a red light in my way!!

When I entered Cook's, I noticed all the Better Business Bureau plaques on the wall saying Cook's had been complaint free for the year. I could see they had one for each of the last 4 years. Had their counter been free of customers, I'd not have had the opportunity to read the plaques.

When the young lady started figuring the estimate, she had to gently move an enormous cat off her calculator. Then someone called to a customer to be careful not to let the dog out the door. We know God loves the animals--they are a part of His creation.

Now I figure that's three confirmations God thinks this is a good place to do business. With confidence that I am at the right place, I will dismiss the need to spend time AND gas getting further estimates.

Thank you for your advice and assistance, Lord.

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Praise
Abandoned to God
A real relationship with this Holy, Living God is the only thing worth pursuing
August 23, 2006

There are times when we feel as though we are the orphan baby left on a doorstep. We do not know what to expect in the next moment, let alone the future. These are times when words fail to come; times when words are inadequate for expressing what our spirit wishes to convey. As long as one has vivid memories of these black days, the days when one is totally alone and being blown about like a leaf fluttering in the icy, cold wind, we become so accustomed to the emptiness that the possibility of good times can be incomprehensible. We cannot grasp the idea that we can walk in the light; that we are worthy of love.

Yet, a time comes when we are aware of love, of beauty, of being surrounded by a great power. Grabbing hold of these moments and hanging on tightly to the source of this love is the only action to which our spirit can relate. Asking the Heavenly Father to bring us in off the doorstep and make us part of the family is to exchange the orphan status for that of the beloved child.

Trials have not ended. They may never end until our assignment on earth is completed, but each time we endure a trial where we feel the supportive care, followed by the powerful sensation of love, we find faith in our beloved child status gaining strength.

"The moment the soul comes closely under the influence of God, it forsakes all [else] so that it can be alone and rely on the guidance of God, which is, henceforth, the unique source of its holiness. It is in his hands....realizing that God alone knows what is right for it, and that if it relied on human guidance it would inevitably lose its way in that unknown land into which God conducts it. It is the will of God which guides souls along paths which it alone knows." --Abandonment to Divine Providence

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Musings
Lord, I'm sorry
Lord, I want to be in constant companionship with you
August 27, 2006

I am back home. I've been out in "the world" and there's nothing to be found which is worth the price to be paid for that portion which does glitter. While I was on this trip, I witnessed the destructive force of self-will. Listening to a mother and her young child push each other's hot buttons to the point of placing the child in protective custody made everything within me scream, "Mother, don't move in your own power! Mother, there's a God whose wisdom, understanding and power are available if we sincerely seek Him out."

Another time on my trip, I complimented a six year-old on her pretty new bike with the heart shapes in the spokes. She told me the bike was a gift from her boyfriend. He had found it in a trash bin with the price tag still attached. Recalling the "boyfriend's" father's protestations of innocence when his son was banned from neighborhood store after neighborhood store for stealing, everything within me cried, "Father, give up Saturday night at the tavern and come to church Sunday morning so your child can learn of Jesus' love--so your son can experience the guidance of real love."

So, Lord, I am sorry for every time I try to do something without consulting you first. Lord, I am sorry for taking you forgranted. Lord, I am sorry for failing to always put you first for I know how dark my world had become, I know how far into the light you've brought me.

Lord, I want to be in constant companionship with you for I have learned the truth of Emmet Fox's words, "A tragic mistake that is often made is to assume that the will of God is bound to be something very dull and uninviting, if not positively unpleasant. Consciously or not some persons look upon God as a hard taskmaster, or a severe parent. . . . The truth is that the will of God for us always means greater freedom, greater self-expression, newer and brighter experience, wider opportunity of service to others�life more abundant."

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Meditations
Holding onto our Faith
Common sense is not faith, and faith is not common sense
August 30, 2006

My Lord, the One, Living God, has brought me through so much I feel as though I've been on an unending trek through uncharted territories. Bible verses like John 11:40 where Jesus said to her, �Did I not say to you that if you would believe you would see the glory of God?� bring great assurances. I expect verses like this to continually re-enforce me in my weak moments as long as I remain upon this earth.

The Father is always with us, but rest assured there's another sneaking about in the shadows trying to tempt us just as he tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden. The fallen one has a job to do: he has to dissuade us from having faith in The Father for it is the only way he can expect to claim the world as his in the end of times. He does not always come to us as a crafty manipulator; he also comes in the form of common sense and other good human attributes. It's hard to hold on to our faith when it flies in the face of convention--these are the moments we are susceptible to Satan's persuasions.

"Every time you venture out in your life of faith, you will find something in your circumstances that, from a commonsense standpoint, will flatly contradict your faith. But common sense is not faith, and faith is not common sense. In fact, they are as different as the natural life and the spiritual. Can you trust Jesus Christ where your common sense cannot trust Him? Can you venture out with courage on the words of Jesus Christ, while the realities of your commonsense life continue to shout, "It�s all a lie"? When you are on the mountaintop, it�s easy to say, "Oh yes, I believe God can do it," but you have to come down from the mountain to the demon-possessed valley and face the realities that scoff at your Mount-of-Transfiguration belief (see Luke 9:28-42). Every time my theology becomes clear to my own mind, I encounter something that contradicts it. As soon as I say, "I believe �God shall supply all [my] need,� " the testing of my faith begins ( Philippians 4:19). When my strength runs dry and my vision is blinded, will I endure this trial of my faith victoriously or will I turn back in defeat?

"Faith must be tested, because it can only become your intimate possession through conflict. What is challenging your faith right now? The test will either prove your faith right, or it will kill it. Jesus said, "Blessed is he who is not offended because of Me" (Matthew 11:6). The ultimate thing is confidence in Jesus. "We have become partakers of Christ if we hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast to the end . . ." ( Hebrews 3:14). Believe steadfastly on Him and everything that challenges you will strengthen your faith. There is continual testing in the life of faith up to the point of our physical death, which is the last great test. Faith is absolute trust in God� trust that could never imagine that He would forsake us (see Hebrews 13:5-6). --Oswald Chambers for August 29

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