Dear Ezra, Thoughts about God's providence in my devotions...

Job 1:5  

And it was so, when the days of their feasting were gone about, that Job sent and sanctified them, and rose up early in the morning, and offered burnt offerings according to the number of them all: for Job said, It may be that my sons have sinned, and cursed God in their hearts. Thus did Job continually.

My Dearest “son of my Vows”,

what a bright and resourceful young man you have become.   I feel that I can share more with you now because you have struggled some in this COVID time.  I feel so much in common with you, although I am eldest child in my family and you the youngest.   So much struggle has made you very sensitive and careful as a communicator and as a peacelover in the family.  I love to watch you carefully tread through the minefield of personalities that it is your providence to endure.

This morning, it was the providence of God for me to begin the book of Job.  I really think this is my least favorite book in the bible and yet perhaps the most endearing to me.  I put on the seatbelts of my mind, every time that I get to this reading.  I prayed to God to give me strength in the form of a very deep sigh! and I pressed on.  

Lord,  this is Christmas season and you know how this book will carry me through seasons of memories that are difficult for me to get up from.  Yes I was this impertinent to the Lord, all the while knowing that He can carry me if I fall from this Christmas meditation.   “You need this right now”. I felt that His silence and comfort confirmed this and I pressed on.   Of course I can choose to wriggle free from this providence and go on to a happier book.  A less personal book, etc.

We were in the book of Job as a family in devotions, when Baby Benjamin passed away.   It always carries me right back to the last day that I held him in my lap and cradled his tiny head in my hands adoringly.

I considered rushing through the book seeing that it is 42 chapters long I thought perhaps if I read 6 books a day I can get through it in 7 days instead of dragging this all through the Christmas season.  I knew in my heart that this wasn’t going to edify my soul to rush through this difficult and blessed expression of God’s heart to me.  So I am trudging through it and I intend to drink every lesson from God as He holds my hand and walks me through the many years of Job’s life and the many years of my life where there are questions and lets me see His sovereignty, even here on earth, before I face Him in the true judgment.   I trust Him to settle my soul.  I will be 59 this year and I trust that God will renew my strength in this reading as He has so many times before.  

I ask for your prayers and hope that you will grow to know and love the Lord and see Him working in your life in His wonderful and sometimes scary ways!  Love, Mom

Thinking about the most easily entreated one. God

missing Stanley:

 God created everything and He redeemed us and the more we get to know Him the temptation is to leave off entreaties.  It seems like that in my meditations about the blessedness of knowing God in the pardon of my sins.

I am still in awe of this truth, this many years after discovering it.  What I fall out of awe in is how to beg God.  

Abraham’s relationship awes me.  He was begging for a sinful nation and a sinful cousin who had argued with Him and his entreaties to God were plentiful and undoubting.  I am sure that this is not the only time he did this with God.

I partly imagine that many people saw their prayers answered because of Abraham’s real relationship with God and how He entreated God.

Please, Please, Please God help us to entreat you rightly for the healing of the nations and ourselves.

Would you exalt your name in the midst of this horrible pandemic and not allow the gainsayers to throw their weight around in our gathering and prayer.  

Meet us, when we gather and teach us how very easily entreated you are!

Ain't too proud to beg… 

wasn’t just a song in the 60s it was line of demarkation from the big “ish” who have access  to all privilege and advantages and everybody else struggling to make ends meet.

When those boys sang that song last thanksgiving it reminded me of the difference between then and now.  They nailed it from stem to stern.  They sang it as though it were a reality in their life.  But it isn’t.  Everybody from the lowest to the highest of the entertainment field is able to access things that they need to deliver a good performance.  That wasn’t so in the 60s.   You had to be scrappy and put things together to get things done.

We today, think of certain people as educated to form an argument and because of their legal education they are able to argue our case and make us look guilty or innocent.   I take a real offense to this concept when it comes to worship and prayer.  We are not making our case before God to make ourselves look innocent when we are guilty.  We are all poor wretched and blind and yet we are entreating the dearest and only hope of our souls.

We are inept and we are entreating the adept one!   How should we come to Him?

What do I want from God?

 The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want

Lord, I want to be a better person! Lord, I want to live with a grateful heart.

Wanting to become a person who is given to seeking the heart of Jesus in your every endeavor. What could that mean..?

Jesus wants us to be more like him than we want to be like him

I shall not want : I will do all that I can to keep people who are around me

From being in want.  That is real governing.  Not putting people on a hamster wheel, but teaching people to live well in the relationships that they are blessed with.  We can be duped into believing that our goal is to create new nooses for people to hang themselves.   Plowshares grow the things that nourish people and give people purposes in making something out of nothing.  Not in creating new slave relationships.   God is able to give us the reigns of our own lives

…Sympathy and empathy and loving leadership is a gift from God and not an automatic thing. Some people make it seem so easy. They are always talking to others with a sympathetic kindness.

I don't have that gift. It kind of reminds me of when Ezzy took my racquet thinking that it would make him hit the ball better. He said your racquet looks magic mommy. Practice has made it look like anybody can place the ball wherever. It took years and love of the sport and emulation of many others to get there.

The same is probably true of sympathy and empathy. Watching and emulating is the first step and after that there is probably an anointing that God grants to make it your own. Praying for the heart of a pastor and the life that grants a sense of peace to those who are enduring hardships. God can do it! I pray that for all of my sons who desire the heart of love toward God's people!

HE'LL DO IT

My Faith looks up to Thee!

Rev 18

Bartering in the “souls of men”?

Wasnt that one of the most horrific challenges of the Babylonian era of history?  People, Nebuchadnezzar and the presidents and governors putting a value on people in their usefulness and in their value to men and to God was horrific.  That is the beauty of the enlightenment of Revelation 18 is that men have come to realize that this is not right.  Jesus came to deliver us from the  tyranny of a value system that is not God’s.

I am seeing children come to their maturity of self valuation and looking into the eyes of teachers and parents and peers for their value.  Confident and pretty children from secure backgrounds are walking with great strides and expectations for themselves.  They throw around their authority and lift or  drop other souls around them at a glance.  You are great and necessary for my comfort and you are not, they seem to say in their play.

It is very unstable for a generation to be raised to think that they create their own value system.  If we don’t take them by the hand and give them the BOOK  of God’s  truth and value system they will become monsters.  Feudalism and every man doing what is right in their own  eyes will create a barbarism that we haven’t yet seen in history.

People with money and people with beauty making the decisions of life for everyone else.  We are very close to this.  But the ugliness of this battle we are preparing our children for is closely animated in the battles with the orcs in Hobbit.   I believe it can get worse.  God can make it better, but we must plan for the reimplementing of  real education  shared with rich and poor alike?