Month: October 2016

There are 695 songs in the hymnal at my church.  I think there are approximately 230 of them that I have never sung or heard.  So it was no surprise last week when we started singing Wonderful Peace and my eyes drifted to a strange hymn on the opposing page.  I am sure I have never heard of it let alone sung it.  It is named, “Life Is Great! So Sing About It.”  What a great title.  So I read the words.  I particularly like the second stanza.   “Life is great! – whatever happens.  Snow or sunshine, joy or pain, hardship, grief or disillusion, suffering that I cannot explain – Life is great if someone loves me, holds my hand and calls my name.”  I wanted to say, “Right on” but I guess because I was in church I should have said, “Amen” – same thing.
 
It instantly reminded me of a popular song by Martina McBride entitled, “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden.  “I beg your pardon I never promised you a rose garden / Along with the sunshine there’s gotta be a little rain sometime / When you take you gotta give so live and let live and let go oh oh oh oh / I beg your pardon I never promised you a rose garden…”
 
What God does promise us is strength to endure and ultimate victory.  1 Peter 5:10 says, “And the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast.”  I wonder what other wonders I have missed in my hymnal?

There was a little guy in the grocery cart ahead of me.  He looked to be about twelve months old and I have to say this was not a good looking baby.  As I was trying to ascertain just what it was that was so unattractive someone walked by and said, “What a beautiful child!”  “Whoa,” I thought.  “They must be compensating to make the parent feel good.”   But, as we moved up to the register the clerk said, “What a handsome young man.”  Well, the adjective “young” disqualified me so she must have been talking about the baby. Now, I have to admit had the child been mine or one of my grandchildren, for sure I would have agreed with the other people. 
 
It just so happened there was also another similarly aged boy in the store.  I thought he was precious.  I wonder if the people who commented on the first child thought differently than I regarding the “precious” child.  Could it have been that the second child was good-looking because he looked like my boys at that age?  But I see many children that don’t look anything like my boys and I think they are really handsome.  No, I have to hold on to the fact that this first child was not well formed.
 
Now that I have made myself look like a biased old fool by telling you all this, I do have to say since we are God’s children, His bias toward us is extremely skewed.  Genesis tells us He made us in His image.  I have to conclude if we were born with our nose upside-down; God would still think we were the greatest thing since sliced bread. Yeah.  You really are!

When I think of Wells Fargo, I think of stage coaches rocking and bouncing their way over dusty roads only to arrive in town with pretty ladies getting out without a hair out of place nor having a speck of dust on their flowing dresses.  I think of horsemen with handkerchiefs over their faces robbing the stage and taking the strong box.  On a lighter note I think of a song from the musical “The Music Man”.  “Oh, the Wells Fargo wagon is a’coming down the street.  Oh, please let it be for me.” But now a new picture comes to mind.  It seems that Well Fargo has become the robber.  Alas, another childhood image dashed.   Don’t get me started on Columbus.
 
Psalm 146:3 wisely says, “Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.”  I can promise you the only person never to let you down, never to be dashed to pieces by revelations of immorality, never to be sullied with tales of misconduct is Jesus.  Guilt by association is the worst thing they could say about Him.  He did run around with an unsavory lot.  He would even have had dinner with you and me.  How about that?  It seems that God has no taste in people.  He loves all of us. 
 
Read the following from Hebrews 4:15 and be amazed. “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are–yet he did not sin.”  When He says, “Trust me” we really can.

Long yellowish pine needles have softened the forest floor.  As the afternoon sun splayed its angled rays through the deciduous trees that are still holding onto their precious leaves, the path glows yellow adding a golden tint to the air itself.  My prized lab and I moved quietly over the needle-cushioned trail ascending to our favorite overlook.  To my amazement there was a padded folding chair awaiting me.  Perched on the ridge I could sit and look down on a pair of red-tailed hawks floating about looking for an evening meal.  Whoever it was who carried the chair to the top I send an anonymous thank you.  It was very much appreciated.  The 62 degree breeze with the warming rays of the sun on my arms was an elixir beyond description.
 
Returning to the bottom we crossed a dried creek that usually provided a place for my dog to quench her thirst.  I grew up watching westerns and remembered scenes of cowboys finding water after digging a hole in a wadi.  It was time to experiment.  So I dug and much to my delight about six inches down water began to seep from the edges of my excavation and soon I had a small drink for my lab. 
 
So it is true.  Sometimes there is value in looking below the surface.  I have discovered this to be true with people.  Often I find students that are brighter than they look.  It’s also true with Bible study.  There are memory verses I learned in Kindergarten.  Because of familiarity I rarely gave them much scholarly thought because I thought I knew all that mattered.  Might I suggest there are potential serendipities to be had by looking twice, three times or four times at a familiar verse.  We just might find meaning we didn’t know was there.  That’s a treat.

Researchers have shown time and again when people understand the significance of their work they are way more productive than workers given a task with little or no sense of the value of their task.  When asked what they are doing one person will say, “I collect trash.”  Another will answer, “I am making my city a clean and healthy place for my children.”   A person will say, “I teach history” while another will say, “I am teaching children to be better citizens because they understand the lessons of the past.”  Jesus could have said, “I am going to earth to die.”   Instead I’m sure He said, “I am going to earth that everyone who will come to me will live forever.”  
 
Having a vision and a clear sense of mission enhances our lives.  When I sit down at my computer each evening I can say, “I have to write 300 words before I go to bed.”  That is very laborious.   However, if I say, “Before I go to bed I have the opportunity to change someone’s life” then writing ceases to be a labor and becomes a challenging joy.
 
When we exchange “I have to” with “I get to” our health scores go up.  Because we are mentally fulfilled, our physical health responses with less stress, lower blood pressure and healing endorphins that flood our system.  I get to go to the dentist today so I’ll have better health is so much better than I have to go to the dentist.
 
How many things in our lives can we redefine?  Life is a matter of choices and attitudes.  Yes, rotten things do happen.  But they don’t last forever.  Christians should be the happiest, healthiest people in the world because we have a “get to” from out of this world.

Sometimes after we have discovered the sheer joy of salvation by grace we have a tendency to think the law, since it is not good for salvation, has become an unnecessary artifact of our past life.  But, not so fast.  The law is a glorious fence built on the edge of a cliff.  To violate God’s law is a very quick, very fatal (Can there be something not so fatal?) fall to the rocks below. 
 
Jeremiah 21:8 says, “This is what the LORD says: ‘See, I am setting before you the way of life and the way of death.’”  Just as a nation cannot exist without laws neither can individuals.  God’s laws are designed to safely guide us through menacing traps.  If we live by the sword we die by the sword.  (David was an exception.)  There are reasons why God, like every good parent, tells us not to do some things.  When a child is very young and asks, “Why?”,  it is proper to say, “Because I said so.”  But once a child begins to understand logical thought, “Because I said so” is a bad answer.  Just as God said to Isaiah, “Come now let us reason together.” We should take the “Why” opportunities to help both the child and ourselves to understand.  In most everything except the Ten Commandments if our child has good reasons for doing so, we should be open to change, giving them the lesson that talking about things is beneficial and works both ways.  
 
Secular laws are made for the benefit of citizens of our secular government and God’s laws are for the benefit of citizens of God’s government.  Good laws are the way to life.  Just because we are saved by grace is no reason to start doing stupid things and go down the road to death.  The law is a glorious fence.

I stopped at a Burger King yesterday (They have a great vegeburger.) and couldn’t miss a really big mural on the wall of five young, very handsome, beautiful and multiracial people all laughing and smiling as they were enjoying their fries and burgers.   Does something like that ever happen?   I looked around the room to notice a few ordinary looking people like me. (I’m being generous with myself.) 
 
It’s the same with commercials on television.  They are always populated with happy beautiful people. The casino ads are the worst.  They picture gorgeous people laughing as they rake in their imaginary jackpots.  Shampoo ads have women with silky, radiant hair being tossed about in the wind.  Where do they find these people?  I guess there really are Jennifer Anistons in the world but they don’t eat at my Burger King.
 
Isn’t it great that the first four books in the New Testament are called The Gospels – The Good News?  Here it is in a nutshell.  It is such good news.  God loves ordinary looking people. Heaven is going to be populated with ordinary looking people.  Of course we will all be beautiful there but that will be the norm.  Hooray. He even loves people who don’t quite measure up to ordinary and they too will be part of heaven’s norm.
 
Statistically the norm is two standard deviations on either side of the mean which means about 95 % of the population looks okay.  2.5% looks terrific and the other 2.5% we hope have beautiful personalities.   So the next time you look in the mirror remind yourself that God loves you with your big nose, crooked ears, baggy eyes and balding head.  So how in heaven will we ever get a distribution when everyone is part of the upper 2.5%?

In my child development class tonight we were discussing that blank memoryless time in our lives between birth and approximately 36 months.  We went around the room and each person shared their very first memory.  Most of the 28 students’ first memory was somehow connected to trauma.  They remembered the deaths of grandparents, falling down and seriously being injured or moving to a different home, a father going off to Viet Nam.  Two of them remembered a baby brother or sister joining the family.  Those last two were the only pleasant memories.
 
While listening to them I thought of God’s first memory of us and remembered Him saying to Jeremiah in chapter one, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”   That must have been a pretty heady experience for Jeremiah to hear that from God.  But he shouldn’t have been to taken with his own importance because what God said about Jeremiah to Jeremiah, He can say the same for you and me. 
 
We were not a surprise to God.  We are not the product of accidental collisions between sperms and eggs.  Each of us is a part of a huge cosmic plan.  We are designed to fit, like a piece of a puzzle into a massive panoramic universal mural depicting the final conquest of righteousness over evil.  Romans 11:29 is so exciting.  Paul wrote, “God’s gifts and his call are irrevocable.”  So just in case you think you have drifted away and God can no longer use you, think again.  He is like a relentless puzzle-putter-togetherer.  I love that last word because your space in the puzzle is so unique no one else can fit in.   If you aren’t in yet you will be.  He’s waiting.

Just now we had a hair-raising experience.  I mean one of those Yikes moments.  We were just finishing an evening walk in the forest when a siren went off down in our little city.  Almost instantly to our immediate right, a pack of coyotes, which we had not seen, responded to the siren with one of the loudest eeriest choruses I have ever heard.  Don’t ask me how many there were.  We did not stop to count.  Arriving at the car our lab did not have to be coaxed inside.  
 
If it had not been for the siren from the city we never would have known they were there.  So how many other times have they followed us?  Is that why sometimes our dog stops and stares into the trees?  There is so much that goes on around us without our knowledge.  We are conceited creatures and we think highly of our own intelligence, but really, we don’t know what we don’t know.
 
I Peter 5:8 says, “Be sober-minded and alert. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.”  Daily an unseen drama unfolds about us.  A war is waged over our souls.  Each victory for Satan is an eternal loss for our heavenly Father who has made each of us a one of a kind child.  Satan doesn’t care about us other than the fact that he can use us to rip out God’s heart.  Once done we will be discarded on his trash heap.  Just compare that with what we are offered in Ephesians 2.  He saves us “in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ.”

It would be difficult to find a greater transformation than Paul’s.  He was Jesus’ arch enemy and became Jesus’ greatest advocate.  Despite the extremes of who he was and what he became, it is doubtful that the change was personality.  Paul was Paul before and after being knocked off his horse. He was always super zealous for his cause, whether to stamp out Christianity or to be the world’s greatest definer and defender of Christianity.  He goes from organizing executions to himself being beheaded after various botched attempts to kill him.  No other wrote so eloquently regarding Jesus’ heavenly position.  Ephesians 1 and Colossians 1 are vivid portrayals of just who it was who died for us.  Brilliantly he uses his pharisaical background to explain what Jesus is now doing for us in the heavenly sanctuary.  Hebrews is a masterpiece extolling Jesus’ vulnerability to human weaknesses and the majestic perfection of Jesus as our high priest.
 
Paul was special.  But so are you.  Just as there was only one Paul there is in the entire universe only one you.  Just as God had a special task for Paul that only he could do, so God has prepared for each of us a special task.  If we don’t do it God will raise another to do it, but the problem for God is, no one can do it as well as you.  “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”  Ephesians 2.   This very day might be the day your special task arises.  Pray earnestly to be ready.  You might never know until heaven what it was.  But what joy you will have when you know you did it.