Of Kings and Kingdoms

The state of our nation is in the worst state economically and socially since the Depression.
Reading the headlines is depressing if not overwhelming. The unemployment rate that was reported today is just a number to some people fortunate enough to still be employed but to those that are not, it is an insurmountable reality every time they fill out a job application knowing that for one job, there are hundreds if not thousands applying for that same job.
The savings rate is up, people are starting to stash away their money in any place they can find a decent interest rate, and even in places they can’t.
Wage freezes are becoming common, and if you are lucky enough to have a job where you get a regular paycheck, even if they freeze your wages with no hope of a raise, you feel lucky.

I get A LOT of e-mails from people laying the blame of our nation’s problems on a variety of different reasons. But as I was reading in the book of Samuel the other day, I was struck by the prophet’s words to the nation of Israel when they wanted a king to rule over them just like all the nations around them. They wanted to be like everyone else, they wanted to fit in, and have “someone” to run to with their troubles. They wanted government instead of God.
God was not happy, but this is one of those times that He allowed them to have what they wanted. He was laying the groundwork for Jesus to be King of Kings and Lord of Lords, but at this time He knew how it would turn out, he even warned them, and here is what He says to Samuel when Samuel seeks the Lord as to what to do:

And the LORD said to Samuel, “Heed the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected Me, that I should not reign over them. 8According to all the works which they have done since the day that I brought them up out of Egypt, even to this day—with which they have forsaken Me and served other gods—so they are doing to you also. 9Now therefore, heed their voice. However, you shall solemnly forewarn them, and show them the behavior of the king who will reign over them.”

God knew what the outcome of this decision would be, when man doesn’t rely on God, and turns to the things of man, or man himself, the outcome is seldom what they want.
So Samuel followed God’s instructions and agreed to find and anoint a king for them, but not before he tried to warn them, as God had told him to, just what having an earthly king would do.

“This will be the behavior of the king who will reign over you: He will take your sons and appoint them for his own chariots and to be his horsemen, and some will run before his chariots. 12He will appoint captains over his thousands and captains over his fifties will set some to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and some to make his weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. 13He will take your daughters to be perfumers, cooks, and bakers. 14And he will take the best of your fields, your vineyards, and your olive groves, and give them to his servants. 15He will take a tenth of your grain and your vintage, and give it to his officers and servants. 16And he will take your male servants, your female servants, your finest £young men, and your donkeys, and put them to his work. 17He will take a tenth of your sheep. And you will be his servants. 18And you will cry out in that day because of your king whom you have chosen for yourselves and the LORD will not hear you in that day.”

Interesting, even back in those days, people thought that government would solve their problems, that other men would be the solution to the dilemma’s they found themselves in. They were willing to continue on a dangerous downhill sloop even when a prophet who they had listened to, and believed, and heeded his word before, warned them. As usual, God in his mercy used Samuel to show the people that even right after they had anointed a king, who they thought would be the solution to all their problems, He was greater, and mightier, and able to do more than any mere man could do; he sent rain during a time of year that it NEVER rained.
Upon seeing this, the Bible said “the people greatly feared”, and admitted their sin in rejecting God.

“Then Samuel said to the people, “Do not fear. You have done all this wickedness: yet do not turn aside from following the Lord, but serve the Lord with all your heart. And do not turn aside: for then you would go after empty things which cannot profit or deliver, for they are nothing. For the Lord, will not forsake His people, for His great name’s sake, because it has pleased the Lord to make you His people. Moreover, as for me, far be it from me that I should sin against the Lord in ceasing to pray for you; but I will teach you the good and right way. Only fear the Lord, and serve Him in truth with all your heart, for consider what great things He has done for you. But if you still do wickedly, you shall be swept away, both you and your king.”

Our nation has rejected God in so many ways, that it sounded more than familiar to me.
We have spent our time and money on “empty things, which cannot profit or deliver”.
Our government has turned out to demand more of us than we are willing to give, and even to the point of servitude where we spend the first 5 months of the year working to earn enough just to pay our taxes. What will it take for us to “greatly fear” the Lord, and admit our sin of rejecting God, and pushing Him out of our society and our lives?

As I read Samuel I was also reminded of the scripture in Isaiah 9:6-7 where the perfect King and government will reign and be established:

"For unto us a Child is born,
Unto us a Son is given;
And the government will be upon His shoulder.
And His name will be called
Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Of the increase of His government and peace there will be no end,
upon the throne of David and over His kingdom,
to order it and establish it with judgment and justice from that time forward, even forever.
The zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform this."

Easter is in a week. The celebration of the resurrection of the Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace! These days that we live in are the “birth pangs”, of the coming age of King Jesus, the perfect sovereign, and head of government. I’m going to try to be especially mindful as I approach the Easter Holiday this year that not only has He risen, but He reigns and will…..forever.

Perspective or a Miracle?

I look at things a little differently than most people. I spend quite a bit of time reading the Bible, studying it when I have questions, and marvel at the similarities that I see in things that happened centuries ago and things that are happening now.
History and archeology have proven many of the things in the Bible are true, and really happened. So when I read the Old Testament account of the miracles that God performed for the children of Israel to bring them out of Egypt I am amazed, and find it hard to imagine witnessing fire and hail falling from the same sky, or the Nile River (or any river) turning to blood. The idea that if I put blood from an unblemished lamb on my door frame, God will spare me a horrid consequence let alone part an entire sea, is still beyond me sometimes. However sometimes things do happen in our lives that if we are willing to admit and realize that from a spiritual perspective they are indeed miracles, we too can say that we have seen the Hand of God.
This past weekend was Angel Food distribution. Once again they threatened not only precipitation, but a blizzard, and ice storm. Many people contacted me on Fri. inquiring as to what was going to happen to their boxes of food if they weren’t there to pick them up; I had no idea.
The truck driver called, just as he was crossing the Texas line into Oklahoma also wondering if he DID make it to Emporia would we be able to unload the truck. I assured him that weather hadn’t stopped us yet, and we didn’t expect it to stop us this time. I promised him I’d pray for him.
When I visited with Anita Fri. morn, it had started snowing in the southern part of the state, and another friend who always drives in from the west, not an hour away, also said it had been snowing since morning. I prayed.
Sure enough, Fri. eve it began to rain. It froze on the grass, and the trees, but early Sat. morning, the rain had stopped and the pavement was dry, and when I arrived at the church, there sat our semi truck full of food.
We started unloading, and all went well, the truck driver commented that in all his driving for Angel Food, he had never had a truck unloaded so quickly; we got him on his way to Topeka, before the storm hit as he needed to get home to Missouri after that.
Distribution started, and not long into it, the sleet started, and then wet heavy snow. Car doors froze shut, the snow piled up on the slush of sleet underneath and the cars kept coming and picking up food.
By 11:00 we were done distributing with one box of food left, and it was an extra. People left and made it safely home but yes the storm was a bad one.
Wasn’t it just a weather phenomenon that the cloud didn’t really hit Emporia till Sat. morning AFTER we had unloaded the truck and the majority of the food had been picked up?
Wasn’t it just coincidence that the truck driver shared that as he drove through the heart of the storm and saw two vehicles, both with four-wheel drive, spin out right in front of him and go into the ditch, that HE DIDN’T?
Isn’t it just happenstance that EVERY box got picked up, and everyone who ordered, and even some who didn’t, received food?
I could say it was all those things, but it wasn’t.
You see, God did rain down fire and hail on Egypt, and send plagues of frogs, and locusts, and flies. He did turn the water in the Nile River to blood, and He parted the Red Sea for them to walk across on dry ground. He spared them from death through the blood of a perfect lamb smeared on their door frames. Later in the Bible He enables a little shepherd boy to kill a 9 foot man with a slingshot and a stone. The healings, deliverance from demons, resurrections from death, we call miracles.
So yes, I believe that God held back the cloud and the storm for us to distribute food to people who needed it. I believe that He heard my prayers, and many others for the safety of the driver and those that needed to come pick up. I know that He saw to it that every box that had a place to go got there.
In the Old Testament accounts of the Exodus, the explanation of the miracles and wonders of God were so that “Egypt would know there is a God in Israel and that God IS God.” I've never doubted that God is God, but it was exciting, encouraging, and awesome to witness a miracle first hand.
Next time you "witness" something strange, unexplainable, or odd, check your perspective, and marvel at "the Hand of God."

Mercy Street

For those of you who read my blog with any regularity and are familiar with the Rare Rocks, and Serenity Now blogs, let me introduce you to their mother, Kathy Nickerson and her blog Mercy Street. (featured in my side bar under Favorite Blogs)
Kathy and Wendell are friends of Roger from High School.
The first time I met them I was a guest in their home not a day or two after Kathy had come home from the hospital from bringing Serenity into the world, and Felicity was but 15 months old. I remember Kathy smiled all the time, she was gracious, generous, and welcoming. Not many months later they along with another couple from H.S. drove the 5 hours for our wedding.
Every 5 years we returned to Kirksville to those reunions, always staying with or at least spending the greater part of our time with the Nickerson’s. Not until I had children of my own did the reality of what Kathy had done on that first visit, welcoming someone she didn’t know into her home just days after giving birth, sink into my thick skull. (I learned then, that guys are not real aware when it comes to certain things!!) I learned through the years of visiting and staying with Wendell and Kathy that the reality of it is that Kathy is that gracious and welcoming, going with the flow and allowing life to wash over her every time I’ve ever been around her. I KNOW that is one of the reasons I am looking forward to reading what she posts on her blog. She has a perspective on things that I have always admired. How she sees the world and the people in it are a reflection of her heart, one that I feel was touched by God long before she was even aware of it.
Just a few months ago I was in a book store, perusing the magazines. I ran across Discipleship Journal, and its counterpart Pray magazine. I purchased them both, anticipating a good read, and a hot cup of tea upon returning home. As I thumbed through the Discipleship Journal I began reading an article about finding our family history in the pages of the Bible. As I finished the article, I noticed the author’s picture at the bottom of the page with a small quip about them. I looked twice, and sure enough smiling back at me was Kathy's familiar face, having just shared with me a small part of the encouragement that she finds in being a child of God.
I am anticipating her words, and hope you will too.

Living in Community

I have featured a book in my Amazon Widget call the Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris.
I have just finished this book, and know that I will be reading it again and again. I will be using it not only as a devotional but inspiration to remind me of so many things…………just one of them attending church, and being involved in the family of God.
I would go into great detail about Kathleen Norris, but I don’t want to bog down in information, the book jacket will tell you all that.

Norris, though a Protestant, went through a year of becoming an oblate in a monastery outside Lemmon South Dakota. The word “oblate” is from the Latin for “to offer,” and Jesus himself is often referred to as an “oblation” in the literature of the early church. It may well be translated as “associate”, and while that may seem to describe the relationship modern oblates have with monastic communities, it does not adequately convey the religious dimension of being an oblate. Substituting the word “associate” for “oblation” in reference to Jesus demonstrates this all too well; no longer an offering, Jesus becomes a junior partner in a law firm.

Her book is a recording of not just the events that took place, and the impact on herself during that time, but a spiritual journey that exposed the idea of community to me in a whole new way, and did not lightly admonish me in my views of “community”, in regard to my local and familiar body of fellow followers of Jesus Christ.

As I read about life in a monastery I was pricked in being reminded that there is a reason for “family” in our spiritual lives, as much as there is in our physical lives.

She bases and establishes the lessons learned from this ancient culture on the very fact that the idea of this community IS ancient. (the Romans lost everything to barbarian invaders. Ironically, it is another legacy of the fall of Rome, the Benedictine Monastery, that is still going strong fifteen hundred years later.) Yet she is quick to ease the readers mind in assuring them that these are not people who are cloistered away from the world, living their own prayerful lives, blissfully unaware of what goes on outside the walls of their “community”. Quite the opposite, not only do monastery’s welcome guests, entertain visitors, but many in the order will work in prisons, hospices, as counselors, teachers, nurses, and doctors, and establish AIDS homes.

But this is not a book of facts about monasteries, this is a journal, so to speak, of someone who spent a year of her life being immersed in the ritual, and practices of a community of believers who practice that belief on a level that made her want more of Jesus, and encouraged and strengthened her trust in God.

“When a Benedictine community is deciding whether or not to accept a candidate (not referring to oblate) questions that would be primary in the business world—what this person’s credentials and skills, what will they add to the organization’s efficiency and the productivity?—are secondary, if they’re raised at all. Even the question of “acceptability,” which is so often a mask for prejudice, is muted. People are simply asked to consider whether or not this person has a monastic vocation for that particular community. The fact that you might not like the person, certainly not enough to want to live with them the rest of your life, is not supposed to be a factor. The monastic value of not judging others, of giving them the benefit of the doubt, can become extremely painful at a time like this, because once a person becomes a part of the community, they are family.”

Like any family they too have their moments, and suffer their differences:
“differences between individuals will either be adsorbed when the community gathers to act as one, or these communal activities become battlegrounds. As one monk once said to me, “Go to the dining room and to prayers, and you’ll find out how a monastery is doing.””

In between the beginning and the end of the book she shares her lessons of the Saints of the Catholic church, who they were, how and why they were named as saints, and all in the context of being moved by their love and devotion to Jesus to the point of giving their lives in some way, usually physically, for that love.
The literagy, hearing the scriptures, especially the Psalms, being read out loud, during this time brought her to a new awareness and understanding of the ceremony, and ritual that we in the modern church seem to have so easily and quickly set aside.
“The goal of a monastic life is to let oneself be changed by community ritual, ceremony, and the repetition of the psalms, until, in the words of one hymn, our lives become a psalm in praise of the glory of God’s name.”
In that bent, the monastery is a place to focus on such depth of devotion to God in a communal setting that gives evidence that there will be in heaven, “the family of God”.
In her chapter on Augustine she writes of being questioned by a college student as to why she would continue to attend church, and be surrounded by all that “hypocrisy”. Her reply and explanation of it are evidence of her “conversion” to the idea of communal life in the light of God’s love.

“The only hypocrite I have to worry about on Sunday morning is myself.” Even when I find church boring, I try to hold this in mind as a possibility: like all the other fools who have dragged themselves to church on a Sunday morning, including the pastor, I am there because I need to be reminded that love can be at the center of all things, if we will only keep it there."

She then shares a story by Pastor Cecil Williams, the pastor of Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco:

"On Easter Sunday at Glide the pastor invites people to tell their own stories during the service. One year he said, “There’s an empty tomb somewhere in this room this morning. I invite you to come forward now.” And people got up to speak of living two year with AIDS, nine months free from drugs. Then a man came forward who, Williams says had a skittish look in his eyes, “ that told me he was still in the tomb…..still tied up in the grave clothes of crack cocaine.? The Man told the congregation that the drug counseling at the church had been enough to keep him off drugs for days at a time. He admitted that he had a little crack still in his system that morning, but he said, looking around the church, “I wasn’t gonna miss this!”
A healing straight out of the gospels, in which repentance and healing happen simultaneously, as in a lightning strike, in which the desire to worship is a step from death into life, and a cause for celebration in the body of Christ, who welcomes all who seek him. BLESSED BE THOSE WHO THROW THE CHURCH DOORS OPEN WIDE.” (emphasis mine)

This book reminded me that like the communal monastic life, the goal of the Christian walk is to allow oneself to be changed by the “family of God”, through the encounters, shared circumstances, rituals, celebrations, sorrows, and “life” to the point that we become a living testament to the God we love and worship, and our savior Jesus Christ. “….that the basis of community is not that we have all our personal needs met here, or that we find all our best friends in the monastery…….what we have to share and what we have to struggle for, and to preserve, is the shared vision of the why, why we live together. It’s a common meaning, reinforced in the scriptures, a shared vision of the coming reign of God.”

Winter Activities

Besides feeding birds, and cooking my brains out during the winter when I can't get outside to plant flowers and mow acres of grass, I make quilts. This fall and winter we have had four babies expected among our family and friends, so I have made 4 baby quilts, and 12 receiving blankets for all those wee ones. Some I tie, but the last one I hand quilted. It turned out really well. I embroderiered the blocks too. The receiving blankets are just flannel that I bind the edges somehow and finish, but EVERY girl I give them to comments on how much nicer they are than the boughten ones as they are larger, and swaddle better...such a nice compliment to know my efforts are making some tiny one warm and secure.