Something About The Joy

This morning, before sitting down to watch (virtually) the last church service of 2020, I fix my breakfast.     My conscience tells me I need something better than the dessert cuisine I've been indulging in for the past four days, so I boil a couple of eggs and plunk the last two slices of an old loaf of bread into the toaster.     I suspect the sermon may tell me I need something better to feed my spirit as well--something more eternally significant than the Spider Solitaire games I've been playing while popping Christmas candy into my mouth all week.   I am too lazy to make a fresh pot of coffee so I go to the fridge, pull an old, nearly empty, carton of Costco Chai latte mix from the back of the top shelf, pour it into a cup, add milk, and zap it in the microwave.   The key word here is "old."   I stir my latte, un-shell my eggs, and butter my toast. But when I pick up my cup a minute later I notice three or f...

As I think about this past year and all the changes it has brought us, I keep hearing the word, 'longing' for some reason. This, for me, has been a season of longing.   When I look at this swelling emotion in my heart more closely, I feel it moves in three directions.   First, I've found my heart reaching out, more than ever, to Jesus. I've had more time this year to spend meditating on His character and His love for me. My mornings are often unscheduled. I can sit with the Bible as long as I like, without watching the clock. That freedom has opened my heart to receive the gift of His presence in a new way.    I long, more than ever, to be close to Him, to please Him in the way I live my life, to give back to Him a little of the love He has poured out on me.   Even as the world writhes in pain in this year of the pandemic, I am overwhelmed with gratitude for the many ways God has shown me His love.   He has cared for me thoroughl...

Mysteries in the Bible are intriguing. It makes sense that there would be some.  If the God the Bible teaches us about is as wise, as powerful and as BIG as all of the universe around us would seem to suggest, there are bound to be things about Him we cannot fathom with our relatively tiny little brains. Yet, we long to know things. I am beginning to suspect that there are some things we can't "know" logically or rationally--things our brains are not designed to discover by thinking.   Maybe some things we can only "know" by experience, and what we learn by experience is often hard to put into words. These "knowings" are not necessarily irrational.   They don't go against reason. Rather, they seem to go beyond reason, into realms we can begin to imagine, but we can't explain.   The practices of "fasting" and "keeping the Sabbath" are two of these mysteries. Here I share some thoughts on both, and how they might be relate...

I've been neglecting my front yard for way too long.  I knew the weeds were growing there, shooting up through the healthy grass and causing my lawn mower to groan, but I just didn't want to deal with the hard work, sweat and tears it would take to get rid of them.  I guess I just kept hoping the grass would take over eventually and choke the weeds out.  Or that maybe some friendly neighbor would jog by my house, notice how ugly the lawn looked, and stop to pull them out for me.  But, no.  It looks like I'm going to have to do this.  This is a good time to do it.  We've been pounded by rain this spring. We have had the storms, I'll say! Hitting us from every side. Dumping more water on us than we have known how to deal with at times.  It's caused damage. Devastating destruction in some cases.  But it's also made the soil easier to work with. So this morning I kneel here, in the dirt, digging and tu...

A couple of people have asked me lately about how I came to "find God."  That's interesting, because I feel like my coming to faith was actually a matter of God finding me, rather than me finding Him. My faith journey began very early on. I grew up with parents who were Christians and they taught me about God from my childhood. I decided when I was less than two years old that I wanted God, and so one day I just asked Jesus to come into my heart!  I was not much of a logical thinker then, of course!  At that time, the desire for God just seemed to tug at my heart and I responded, almost without thinking, in the same way that a child will instinctively run to their father's arms.  But in my teens, when I began to think about the process of "finding God," I questioned whether I had really been able to make that choice without understanding more about the process at the time. My mother's diary had recorded the decision, and it was obvious ...

At this stage of my life, I find that what seems just a slight bit of disobedience on my part puts a damper on my enjoyment of God's presence in my life. When that cloud passes between me and the Son, it's a sign that something is wrong, and it always eventually brings me back to the source of the problem.   Then I can acknowledge the thing that is in the way, ask God to forgive me, and immediately bask in the sense of his Presence again. He has promised never to leave me or forsake me, so I can count on it that he is present always, just like I can know that the sun always shines above the clouds on dark days. So when it feels like he has moved away, it's really only that there's a cloud between us.   And he is always standing by, ready and willing to blow it away.   He just waits for us to ask. David's 3000-year-old songs are universally true.   They are as useful to us today as they were to him back then. Create in me a pu...

Apparently, the keyword, "death," has been showing up in Google searches a lot recently. It's no wonder. Death has been pretty much in our faces over the last three months. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. When things are going well for us we tend to live in the moment, and living in the present is a good thing to do--as long as living in the present moment doesn't interfere with our making plans for a good future. It's funny that we are keen to plan for a happy retirement, but it doesn't occur to us to plan for a happy afterlife.   Death comes after retirement. And sometimes it takes us by surprise: for some of us, death will come before retirement. In any case, death is inevitable for all of us, and so it's worth doing some serious thinking about. It's good to enjoy the present, but it's also good to plan for the future, not just the near future, but also for our ultimate future. We probab...

Some years ago, Jerry Jenkins and Tim LeHaye released a series of books called Left Behind .   The movie eventually followed, and it scared the hell out of some people.   The movie portrays a world thrown into chaos by the instant disappearance of a large part of its population. The story works because it's intriguing to imagine the chaos that would occur if that many people, all over the world, instantly ceased to exist.   It's only a story, of course.   A preposterous one.   We shake our heads at the gullibility of movie-goers, but people who saw the movie were shaking in their boots. There have always been naysayers--those who question the-end-of-the-world-as we-know-it.   They say, "Where is this coming he promised? Ever since our fathers died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation."   II Peter 3:4 So far the questioners have been right.   The world has not ended.   Yes, there have been frightening ...

In times like these, I begin to think about the hard questions.  Like.... What is the worst thing that could happen to me with this virus? What am I most afraid of? The worst thing would be that I could die, or someone I love could die.              Death is the ultimate evil thing, right? So what would happen to me if I died?   Would I survive somewhere after death?  And would it be a happy place or a not so happy one?  If I were to survive death, and find myself standing before the Creator of the universe, what would I say to convince Him that I should be allowed into heaven?             I would probably tell Him that I have been a good person.  But what if He probed a bit.  What if He said, "How good were you?"             I could say, "Well, I...

The voices in your head hate you.  They hate you because God loves you, and they hate God.   The voices in your head want to destroy you.    That's why they tell you to destroy yourself. The lying voices in your head tell you that no one cares about you.   The Truth: You may cast all your cares upon God, because He cares about you.  The lying voices say that no one understands you.   The Truth: God searches out your heart and He knows you. The lying voices say you have no hope;  that life will not get better for you;  that it will only get worse. The Truth: God knows the plans that He has for you, and they are plans to prosper you and give you good things. Don't listen to the voices.    Tell them to go away.   Jesus has given you the right to do that.   Speak the name, Jesus, to the voices and they will leave.  Then look around you for a person who can help you overco...