Thought to Ponder

“The wind blows. Jesus said, the wind blows. And you don’t know where it comes from or where it goes. You only know the wind blows.” (One Voice and Easter Production)

Where is the wind/breath/Spirit of God blowing you? Are you willing to follow that direction? Are you willing to trust the direction of the wind even though it looks like it leads in the opposite direction of the calling God has placed in your life?

We are constantly being led/sent through twisting turns on our path so that we can be changed into the likeness of Christ. Each person has unique gifts and talents, and, therefore, has unique tasks and obstacles to overcome. Don’t be discouraged; he never gives us anything we cannot handle through his strength. He doesn’t want us to fail. Are you willing to trust?

Thought to Ponder

Just some lyrics to think about today:

“Colors of Forgiveness” by FourGiven

“You didn’t have to touch the sky with softness, Mold the mountains in your hand, Weave the tapestry of life with love of family and friends, Change the beauty of each season, Or send the waves upon the sand. We would have never know (any difference).”

Isn’t it wonderful that God made all of the little things that make our lives that much more special? Sometimes it’s good to focus on the small things because it makes what he did for us that much more important.

I’ll tell ya why

In the last month or so, quite a few people have pestered me, people back home saying, “why don’t he write?” Yesterday, it reached a new peak. I was bluntly informed that I had an extra day off and that I ought to put it to good use. What on earth was I doing?

My response is simply this: The good Lord ordained that, one day out of every seven, you should rest. Furthermore, He insisted that every seventh year be a year of rest. Even beyond that, he said that every fiftieth year should contain an additional year of no work whatsoever. This means that fully 14% of each year should be spent doing no work. Beyond that, out of every fifty years of your life, a little more than ¼ of it should be spent accomplishing absolutely nothing whatsoever. And that’s not including getting enough sleep at night.

God is very serious about this. Jeremiah said that the Babylonian captivity would last 70 years to make up for the period of 450 years or so previously where nobody took a break. That is to say, God is serious about this resting thing, even if we aren’t. And if you don’t rest of your own accord, He’ll find a way to make you rest, and you probably won’t like it. I prefer to take the “fall on the rock and be broken” method, rather than waiting ‘till the rock falls on me.

All that to say, what have I been doing the last few months? Well, the first part I was being run ragged by work and school and church all demanding more from me that I was fully prepared to give. The second part was spent recovering therefrom.

First the news: I finished my application, including the marvelously abridged 2-page spiritual autobiography, which will be posted as soon as a get a round tuit that lets me do some tweaking for the web. I got accepted to school (miraculously, since it was within days of the first session of the last possible classes I could enroll to).

I also got inducted to teaching the jr. and sr. high Sunday school at church. I want to say induced, but nobody will let me. Either way, as Dr. McCoy says, “They drafted me.” I didn’t really want to, but then I prayed about it and got told to go ahead, and it has been quite the roller coaster ride ever since. I gave up on using the official (kind of stupid) Sunday school lesson book after about the 3rd week. I think it was the lesson that included “the only true prophets of God are 100% accurate all the time. Everybody else is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, attempting to drag your soul to hell,” that pushed me over the edge. I can quote scriptures that disprove that. I read the lesson 30 minutes before I was supposed to teach, and said, “I can’t say that. I don’t even believe that!” So I gave them the world’s shortest evangelism message ever taught instead. I had their attention for a full 30 minutes (still my greatest record yet). Since then, I’ve been making my own lessons up, and I’ve been much more successful. I haven’t quite got the hang of teaching yet—one day I’ll aim too high, the next, too low, the third day I manage to hit the left fielder who is actually standing behind me—but I’m getting there.

At work, we’ve gone through probably three crises since I last wrote. Business has bottomed out for the mortgage industry… people have been fired, people who probably should have been fired haven’t been… I almost got hired (but then people who probably should have been fired weren’t)… My boss had jury duty and I had to manage the whole dang office while she was gone (all this while not actually being hired, mind you). So, lots of over time (which is good), and little rest (which is bad), and no real job (which is really really annoying).

So I finally came to this quiet open place and I said “I’m sorry. This sheep is munching right here until the shepherd moves me on. My experience has been, consistently, that when I try to accomplish something out of a sense of impending doom, the work is shoddy, half-done, and generally worthless. However, if I am already rested, I find that it is already within me to accomplish something, and the work gets done with surprising ease. That is to say, almost always, it’s better to go ahead and rest before attempting to meet that line.

Yesterday was a great boon to me. It allowed me to finally get caught up on my rest, so that today I’m finally ready to accomplish something. I know this because at work today, around three o’clock, my entire Sunday school lesson popped into my head. (Hopefully you’ll see that tomorrow, since the news here is already getting kind of long.) Already, sitting in my place of rest, I can see another line looming on the horizon: I have two 6-page informal papers due in two weeks, and I haven’t done anything but the preliminary reading. But, I know my deliverer is coming (yes, my deliverer draweth nigh…), and He will be sure to carry me, as long as I lean on Him.

Blessings everybody! (and don’t complain so much. Gee…)
KB

Thought to Ponder

Many people are familiar with the song “As the Deer” which comes from Psalms 42:1-2. The song is very nice but misses the full meaning of the song that is written in Psalm 42-43.
One of the first things to recognize is that this song is a maskil, which means it is a teaching song. Another thing to recognize is that this song says so much more than the first two verses. Now I’m not saying that the first two verses don’t paint a powerful picture, I am saying that they don’t encompass the entirety of what we need to learn from this song.

The refrain of this particular teaching song sums up what the sons of Korah were wanting to impart:

“Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, For I will yet praise him, My savior and my God.”

When read with the rest of the verses of the song, this command becomes extremely potent. When it seems like our “tears have been (our) food day and night” and our “bones summer mortal agony as (our) foes taunt (us),” we can rejoice as we remember that He is our Savior and our God.

So, let not your heart and soul be downcast by the weight of the world and all the evil things in it, but “put your hope in God” who is the wellspring of life that we should pant for.

Thought to Ponder

“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.” –Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936)

Isn’t it sad that this statement is just as true today as it was then? We are doing a study on what it means to be a Christian in my Sunday School class, and while I might complain a bit now and then that I feel like I’m being fed information below the level that I’m at, there are still some pearls of wisdom to be gained even if something is taken to a simplified level.

We forget that just because we’re Christians it doesn’t mean that life gets any easier. In fact, it probably gets harder because Satan is now focused on messing up out testimony and trying his hardest to make us feel so completely inadequate that we become paralyzed when it comes to doing God’s work.

We live in a society of convenience and want our relationship with Christ to be as easy to form as it is to microwave a meal. We’ve got to remember that it takes time to learn what God wants us to do. It requires time, patience and willingness to read and listen to what he’s saying. We can’t instantly understand what we’re told, in fact, sometimes we never “get it” and simply have to go on our faith that God is seeing the “big picture” for us. But it doesn’t stop there; John G. Miller said that “learning is not attending, listening or reading. Nor is it merely gaining knowledge. Learning is really about translating knowing what to do into doing what we know. It’s about changing.” How can we accomplish that change if we insist on having a fast-food relationship?

Thought to Ponder

I found out the other day that another of my friends/study partners/people I come in contact with rather frequently is homosexual. She asked me if I hated her because I had recently told her of my faith and that I was Southern Baptist. I told her that I didn’t hate her.

I couldn’t help being reminded later that we are called to “hate the sin and love the sinner.” I couldn’t think of a truer command. What is the point of having a belief based on love, when you can’t see the person behind the sin? And yet, I still hesitate in loving sometimes. It’s very hard to be slapped in the face by reality sometimes and find out that what you think isn’t necessarily what is real. My nature says, “hate and distrust” things and people who are not like me, but the Jesus in me says, love anyway like your father loves you. I never realized how difficult that could be until high school and now another layer has been added to what happened then. I know what I’m supposed to do, it’s just complicated sometimes.

Lord, help me to be your missionary of love by breaking my heart and showing me how to pour my love into the lives of others

Thought to Ponder

Will you be a people pleaser or a Father pleaser?” (Hagee, 27)

What is it about us that craves the attention of others instead of the attention of a loving God? He can be so much more attentive than we can ever dream of and yet we still try to find solace with others. We become content with “our lot” and don’t even realize that it’s not “our lot” at all. He wants us to be and do so much more than we are capable of and I think that scares most of us to petrification. We don’t die to what he wants to do in us, but we can become so rigid in our “normal” routines of going to church, volunteering with children and youth events, singing in the choir, etc. that we deny the fact that he wants more of us. We lie to ourselves saying, “I’m doing enough or I’m doing too much and no one else is helping.” It’s not about how much we feel is enough but about how much God wants us to do. Now don’t take that to mean that you should be doing everything at once either. We are not a one man band; we are a body and each part needs to work together in order to glorify God.

It isn’t quite

It isn’t quite your holiness,
And it isn’t quite your love
That consumes me when I first get up
On a well-rested morning.

It’s a little bit of both, I guess.
Like the dew of your tenderness,
It covers me so thoroughly,
And makes me want to run, laughing,
And also to sit still.

I don’t know how to explain
What I don’t quite yet understand—
The dreams I have that peel me open
Like a not quite blooming flower
Revealing every earthed and unearthed desire.

So painful to be ripped so gently open
And so grateful when it’s over
So broken, and so at peace;
So unsure of what I’ve just gone through
And so much wishing that it could have gone on forever.

News

I don’t know many things that I’m certain of, but of this one I’m sure: that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus. It has been an embarrassingly difficult past couple of months. Probably since the moment I decided I wanted to go to seminary, I have run into so many complications, necessary errands, emergencies, meetings, and general hoopla standing in the way of getting that application done that at times, I didn’t know whether to submit to God, or resist the devil. Am I supposed to go to seminary or not? Recently, though, I found out that my path has exactly two potential courses:

In the first one, I give up on going to seminary, or put it off for an indefinite amount of time, say until I feel like it. The second option is that I pray to the God of grace and mercy and He makes a way for me to get this application done before they decide it’s too late for me to get in this semester. The crisis comes because I’m poor, and my family doubly so: I discovered recently that they changed the grace period between when you get out of school and when you start paying your loans from 9 months to 6 months. This means that I start getting a bill for 250-some-odd dollars each month starting in November, instead of January, like I was expecting. The job I have now, and am likely to have in November doesn’t pay enough for me to make that kind of payment and buy food at the same time. There are exactly two alternatives to making that gigantic ferocious payment: The first one is that I get back in school, and pronto. The second is that I apply for some little thing called forbearance.

In plain English, forbearance means “to put up with.” In law, it means “the act of a creditor who refrains from enforcing a debt when it falls due.” In theology, it describes exactly the state of a person who is unrepentant of his sins and hasn’t gone to hell yet. As I see it, this means that I have either the option of going to seminary or requesting that the US government publicly proclaim me as an unconverted sinner. Gotta love those black-and-white scenarios.

Please pray for me. Today I will be finishing up my (quite tardy) seminary application. The fear of brimstone prods me on.

Nevertheless, I really feel that I’ve grown in the past few months. I think I’ve regained a lot of ground. I’m starting to act a whole heck of a lot more like myself. I’m remembering the callings that He put upon my heart a very long time ago, and I’m remembering that the God of all things will never let me go. He is stuborner than I am, so I am sure to fulfill everything that he has planned for me. So I will say it has been a very good (if gauntlet-like) time for me.

In other news, my sister is getting married in slightly less than two weeks. My friend is duly jealous. My parents are duly anxious. Ces and Jason aren’t telling what’s going on in their thick little noggins. Me? I’m broke. I had to buy two plane tickets and a wedding present.