Are you waiting for answers?
The promise of God does not always come fast. So don’t start doubting even if you have waited 10 or 20 years. He has His time.
Why do we become downcast and fearful when we have a God who loves us? When we have Faith in God and know He is God and He can and will deliver, why do we doubt?
James says that the doubters should expect to receive nothing from God.
But Jesus said ‘if you have faith the size of a mustard seed.’ So where is the cut off?
At what point does faith only the size of a mustard seed turn to doubt?
In the moment where you used to say ‘I know God can do this.’
And now you say, ‘God probably won’t do this.’
You aren’t doubting that God is real or that He is there, but you are doubting that He will answer you. I say this more to myself than anyone else because I have had too many of those moments.
(I have also had moments of complete doubt that God would answer and He did, probably because He knew that I needed to see Him do something because I was slipping. He is still good to us.)
His Word warns us that if we doubt who He is and what He will do that He won’t answer us. That’s not having only a little Faith when we pray. That’s having no Faith at all. We must believe or how else can we expect to see answers.
Now. There are times when we have Faith and still don’t see an answer. There were times like that all through the Bible. But our Faith cannot depend on what we see God doing, it has to depend on who God is. Our Faith is in God not in the works of God. We have to trust Him.
Category: True Joy
What will we teach them?
What did we teach them?
I saw recently a scene that made me think hard. An old man and a young man sat together, their shopping carts full of their lives on either side of them, the old man encouraging the young to do drugs. It was a raw moment and we passed by so quickly I had to thick about it to make sure I hadn’t been seeing things. It’s not an uncommon sight in many places, but it still made me sad. You don’t have a house or food, but you have drugs and have now encouraged another to do the same. We lived in the city long enough that I knew what I was seeing. But there’s where God said, “it’s what you teach them.” If that boy had been sitting next to my grandfather, he would have throw the drugs aside and heard a message of Faith and the truth of Jesus. He would have been taken for a hot meal and gotten in contact with a safe, Christian group that looked after housing kids from the street. Yet he sat next to a man who was just as lost as he was. And to my sorrow I wouldn’t have stopped even if there had been a place to, because I don’t know at all what I would have said to them or how I would have helped them. Be better than me. I’m not good at going and speaking with strangers and I need to work harder on that. But what I can do is teach the people I am given. I can teach my cousins love and gentlenss. I can teach my clients giving and charity. I can teach my fellow dog walkers respect and the power of a smile. Through my words and actions I can teach these things. And hopefully I will not be too afraid to speak the life giving truth of Jesus at every chance I get.
So. What will you teach them?
Are you as alone as you think? No. Never. Jesus is right there feeling your pain and holding onto you through it.
Up till now he had been looking at the lion’s great front feet and the huge claws on them. Now in despair, he looked up at his face. What he saw surprised him as much as anytjing in hiw whole life, for the great tawny face was bent near his own, and wonder of wonders, there were great tears shining in the lion’s eyes. They were such big bright tears compared with Digorie’s own that for a moment he felt as if the lion must really be sorrier about his mother than he was himself.
How like Digory are we? We have brokenness and heart ache and worries that we think God doesn’t see or understand. Then in a moment of wonder and fear we look up and see God looking back, smiling, big tears in His eyes. There’s an old Petra song that says, “you care so much more than I do.” We forget that. God cares more about our broken hearts, our loved ones who are slipping away, our forgotten dreams, our lost jobs, then we ever could. We feel we are the ones suffering, yet everytime we break, so does He. Jesus took all our pain on Him, past- present- future. He feels it too, and like the ragman, He comes to us saying, “let me take your old rags and I’ll give you my new. Let me take your pain and loss and I will give you my healing.” He loves us and feels what we feel. We must stop forgetting that. We are never alone in our grief, we have Him and He loves us.
Reflection
The moon has a dark side that is void of rhe sun’s light. But the sun has no dark side because it is the light. We have darkness in us because we have places that we don’t let Jesus into. These sides rise up and make the world doubt the goodness of Christ because His Christians aren’t perfect. But Jesus is the light and the good inside of us, He has no darkness or badness. We will always mess up no matter how hard we try to be like our Savior because we are flawed humans. But we are only a reflection of Jesus, not Jesus Himself and He does not possess our inclination toward sin. You can’t judge the sun’s warmth by standing in the dark, you have to feel it for yourself. You can’t judge Christ by Christians, we’re only a reflection and mess up, you have to experience Jesus for yourself to see how wonderful He truly is.
I am a sinner, but I leave that all behind me and choose to follow the third man on the hill, the one the people call Jesus.
We are all the two thieves. We’ve either asked Jesus to remember us or we have mocked Him by not believing Him. The two thieves were a physical example of the two paths to take. A sinner set free by the blood of the Lamb – or a sinner still attached to his/her cross. You can choose to follow Jesus to Paradise or you can choose to stay the way you are. He leaves the decission up to you. But only one road leads to Heaven. Only one way takes you away from death eternal. Jesus is the only way- the choice is up to you.
I can smell it, life is returning
I can smell it coming, life is returning.
Walking through the grove of blue spruce trees in our yard I took a deep breath. The past several months of winter, the air burned and smelled like snow; today my senses were filled with warm scent of pine. It was faint, but it was there. Little by little the trees were coming back to life. I know pine trees don’t go fully dormant during the winter like Birch or Poplar, so they are usually the first you notice a difference in during Spring. Yet that doesn’t change the joy of having the trees start to show sign of winter ending.
Yesterday Jesus was killed and buried. Today He was busy preparing for tomorrow. His body lie in a stone tomb, yet His Spirit was working on the Father’s plan. He wasn’t up and walking about yet today, but there was something stirring, life was returning. Lewis would speak of it as the other world or realm and that is how I will speak of it also. We couldn’t see or hear anything happening here on Earth during the middle day of Holy Week weekend, yet in the other world- the one our souls belong to- there was a great awakening of souls who had lied in death for many years awaiting their savior to come and take the keys from the devil and bring them home. Jesus’s death and resurrection was always planned, God didn’t suddenly go, ‘oh no! The world is really bad I need to send someone to save them!’ He knew all along what would happen and was ready for it. Today was a busy day for Jesus, and though his body lay dead in the tomb, life was preparing to return to it.
Thank you for the nails, the lashes, the crown, the humiliation, the seperation, and the cross Lord Jesus. Thank you.
Thank you for the Easter presents.
We always do Easter baskets in our family, (which originated in Old Catholicism for those wondering, no it did not begin with a bouncy rabbit no matter how cute he is.) The adults receive fancy chocolates, sometimes books, sometimes crafts, sometimes games- you get the picture. Afterwards we always thank each other for our Easter gifts.
But what about the big gift in the basket? The one that Easter is truly all about, do we thank the giver for this gift?
What does Easter mean to you?
In truth the date doesn’t matter, it doesn’t have to be in April for this day to be important. Too many get caught up in the chronology and forget about the event. If it happened in June or October instead, the day of Jesus’s death would still be the most important day in history. He gave us His purity. His honor. His grace. His blamelessness. He gave us a place in Heaven. So let me refrase the question: what does Jesus’s death mean to you? Do we remember to thank Him? He gave us the greatest gift we have, don’t let Easter go by, more importantly don’t let your life go by without stopping and thanking Jesus for His gift. He didn’t have to do it. He chose to.
Beneath His feet
If I were the sandals beneath His feet.
If I were the sandals beneath His feet, oh the places I would go. I would step into the Temple and hear Him teach the crowd. I would walk along the Jordan and see fish fill a boat. I would come too close for comfort to lepers and not fear their disease. I would see the lame man walk and watch the blind man see. Would I undstand His parables? Would I question who He was? Or would I know just be being near Him that He was God’s only son? I would stand upon a hill top and see the devil face to face. I would hear Jesus refuse to bow to sin. I would be stained by the sweat of donkeys. I would taste the sweet dew of morning on garden grass. I would be made wet by His tears. I would hear Him pray for all of us left. I would stand on a platform and watch a crooked trial. I would be hit by His blood, and strain to hear His defense. I would weep when He said nothing to free Himself. I would be gambled for at the foot of a cross. I would be shaken as the Vail was torn. I would break deep down as I realized He was gone. Then I would be far away from Him. I would be stuck on the feet of a Roman soldier. Then I would spend a long night outside a tomb and be terrified as the big stone rolled away. I would cry for joy as I watched the feet I knew so well and loved so dear walk past me in a glow I could not explain. I would hear from the soldiers later that He had been seen around, appearing before those He loved. Then I would see Him no longer. But I had heard Him say that He would return someday. I long for that day. The day when at His feet I might remain.
If only I were the sandals beneath His feet.
The enemy cannot win forever
Remember in the Two Towers? When Frodo and Sam are walking on the road of the old kings that had been taken by the enemy and they came across the statue of the great king. Violent hands had knocked off the king’s head and replaced it with a rock with a symbol of the enemy as a mockery to the king of old. Yet in the grass where the old king’s head lay, beard broken off and stone scarred, flowers of tiny gold and silver blossoms had encircled the kings head, crowning it once again, as if in honor to the old king, and Frodo said, “the enemy cannot win forever.”
I see in my mind an image of Jesus. People have marred it and the enemy set up something honoring himself and mocking Christ in the place of where Jesus’s earthly honor once stood. Yet there are still some who refuse to bow to the enemy, some who wish to be jewels in the true King’s crown. In a moment of sun in the dark world my heart cries out, “the enemy cannot win forever.” The true King will return in all His glory as He really is, not as how the enemy has made Him appear. He will vanquish all evil and we who honored Him still, even when it looked like He might be defeated, will sit at His feat in His throne room and be blessed by His presence. This will not last forever. Whatever darkness is getting inside your head, whatever fear you feel, whatever evil you see, it will all be destroyed when the King returns- when Jesus comes back to take us home. Long live the King!
What is meant to last?
Tea pot rock. The Hoodoos. Minter Gardens. Notre Dame. Black hills mustangs.
Just to name a very small few.
There are so many things that are either gone or are fading that we thought would last forever. Only two of the things listed can be rebuilt or reopened, the rest once gone will be gone for good. It makes you stop to consider, how much of what we care so much about and put so much energy into in this world, will be gone in the next hundred years? The mustangs still could be saved if people would stand up for them; but the rest there’s nothing you can do to help. God never intended for this world to be eternal, not after the fall that is. He plans on rolling it up and tossing it away. Which is so hard for us because this world is all we know. Yet to Him this world is just a short stop for His people before we go to Heaven. Then people start asking why God would do that? Why not just have in Heaven to begin with? We’ve all heard the questions and the answers, yet I feel that the reason God started us here was because it was His plan to start us here, He’s the one writing the story, He can do as He pleases. I heard about an algae living in a space under the ice on the sea floor of the Antarctic; life in an area where life shouldn’t be able to exist. All the scientists from all different science standpoints wanted to explain how it got there, and I just smiled and went, “you had fun with that didn’t you God?”
I get science. I was going into Marine Biology before God called me to a differnt path. Just saying that because I know how some people do the, ‘well people who don’t understand science are the ones who don’t try to explain it,’ thing. God is in control. That makes us feel very small and helpless so we try to come up with things that make it sound like we are in control. Like the latest one that says: God doesn’t actually have a plan or an agenda for your life, He’s just there for you if you need Him.
That’s wrong by the way. People who have read their Bible know that that’s not accurate, and those who believe this and have read their Bibles need to read their Bibles again.
Agenda is a bit of a contorted word these days, it’s one of the many words that have lost their original meaning, but basically it means that there is a plan for you, specifically, and every part of you life has been known and calculated since before you were conceived. You can deviate from that plan, but when you let Him, God will put you back on the right path. I know that that thought can feel scary because it’s a full acknowledgment of the greater power that God has compared to us. But he does have a greater power, an unbelievable power, and yes it is to be feared, but when it’s protecting you because you are one of His children, then it is something to be adored and respected. God sees you. As an open and bare soul. No part of you is hidden from Him. But instead of being terrified or trying to make God smaller so He doesn’t bother you so much, you should lean into His knowledge about you and feel safe knowing that He knows it all and is taking care of you.
God’s plan is for the eternal. For your soul. Even when the Hoodoos are flat and the grasslands (as sad as it will be) are bare, God’s plan for you will remain, because His plan for you ends in you running into His open arms at the end of your story and hearing Him say, “well done, good and faithful servant.”
Don’t leave His path. Don’t run from His plan. His plan is because He loves you and wants you with Him forever.
Carried in the cross 