What Matters?

   When we come right down to it, what really matters?

   God matters

   People matter

   I matter (not in an egotistical way, but I matter to God, and the things that I do are a matter, to Him, to others, and they should be to me.)

   Last week I got off on music in the church in a blog. The very next day, I had to confess that a lot of my rant was out of line as God showed me that this was not the big deal that I thought it was, that other things were much more important. Then yesterday, and this morning, I realized the further evidence that I needed to get back on base.

   Yesterday was youth Sunday in church, and featured testimonies by 4 young people, testimonies of what God is has done and is doing in their lives. Now I did not even know personally, these 4, but they had been impacted by God, and they shared their joys, struggles and victories. As I listened I thought:

   This is what I would like to hear from my own kids and grandkids.

   This is what church and youth ministry is all about.

   I'll bet their music preferences are not similar to mine either.

   So I am reminded, by God again, that my personal preferences are not that important. He is, and those youth are, and I am privileged to be in on it.

   This morning I saw three members of the bird flock. An osprey on the lookout for his morning repast, a heron enjoying his on the bank, and a cardinal, seeming to be well satisfied on a branch near the path. What do they have to do with all of this?

   I remember those verses about God taking care of his birds of the air and flowers of the field, and I see the evidence, right before me, of how much God cares.

   I pray that God will help me to stay awake to Him first, and to those others out there that He puts on my path..

   Just as He continues to do with these white herons I photographed the other morning.

A Reminder from a Spider

   There is a prayer at the end of the Moravian Daily Reading, this one for today:

"O Holy Spirit, you are our light during the day and at night. We thank you for this day. Help us to make the most of it. Help us to let our light shine so that others may see you in us in work or at play. Amen"

   I don't think too much on the unseen world that is out there. I give lip service to the idea, deep down I know that there is more to life than what I can see, but I don't dwell on it. There is a lot that happens that I can't see either with my eyes, or with my mind or even with my heart.

   The Bible talks about spirits, about angels, about demons What am I to make of all that other realm?

   The 3rd person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit fits in here. I did not consciously think about this during my walk this morning. Nor did I consider those other parts of the unseen world, I just walked with my eyes open and looked at what I could see.

   It was not until I got back to the condo and ran my hand across my head, that I realized that I had walked through a spider web that had been spun over the path that I had walked on. I did not see it at the time but there it was, clinging to my hair. How many other things had I not seen, even on this short time outside?

   Just as I do not see the things of the Spirit as they are taking place around me, and not even a physical thing such as the spider web, so it is that my eyes and mind and heart are not even open to things that I do see and just don't recognize.

   As I have prayed many times, God, let me see with my eyes and heart, those things and people that will come into my life, even today, and let me see where I fit into those situations and lives.

   There are reasons as to why those people and things will be in my life today, not just coincidences, and I need to have the heart and will to respond in the way that honors God.

   Help me not to just write all this and then promptly forget it, help it to stick.

   Maybe I should not try so hard to get all that spider's work out of my life, but let it be a reminder of that world that is unseen but real, and to see God's hand in it all.

New Song

   The song that is running through my mind this morning is:

"I Am So Glad That Jesus Loves Me"

   Even as I rush out the door to get in an early morning golf date, that should be enough to keep me thinking for the rest of the day.

   Maybe someone else also.

Look on the Other Side of that Cloud

   I woke up this morning with a feeling of "I goofed", and as I read the Gospel reading for today, whose words in John 1 seemed to be for me:

 "Philip said to him, “Come and see.”

   God seemed to say, "yesterday you did not look at the whole picture. You spoke out of conviction, but there was more. You need to look farther."

  As I walked and thought and looked at the world around me, one thing caught my eye.

   I looked to the east and saw the dark clouds on the horizon, but behind them the sun was rising and the sky was a beautiful shade of blue. As I got my eyes off the low clouds and looked higher, it looked like a more positive beginning to this new day.

   Thoughts of other times and other skies came to my mind. Times when Mayre and I were flying somewhere. The skies above us, as we waited to take off, might have been dark and cloudy, but when we broke above those low lying clouds, the sky was bright, and those same clouds shone with a great light, just because we were looking at them from the other side.

   So, as I considered what I had written yesterday. I knew my personal preferences had come through again. The message from our pastor had been about the glory of God. One of his main points was that this whole life was not about me it was about Him, and there I was writing about "me".

   I was invited by the Scripture verse to "come and see". There was much more to be gotten out of that service than my perceived idea that it could have been better.

   People were there..

   People heard The Word preached with power..

   The were opportunities for lives to be forever changed..

   I don't want my negative reaction to some music take away the more important positives. After all it is my preferences that rose to the top, and as the pastor said "it is not about me".

 "Nathanael said to him, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Philip said to him, “Come and see.”

   I need to be a Phillip and not a Nathanael.

I Like to Sing, Why Can't I?

   Our Bible study leader this morning taught from a few verses in Revelation 16, where the verses speak of the wrath of God poured out on the earth:

"Then I heard a loud voice from the temple, saying to the seven angels, “Go and pour out on the earth the seven bowls of the wrath of God.”

   But this is not a blog about wrath, even though it is an attribute of God's character, along with mercy, grace, love and justice, this is about music, and we got to it in that session like this.
 
   There is evidently a controversy going on in the Presbyterian Church USA, concerning a new hymn that is not to be included in the new hymnal, because of the mention of this wrath. The hymn written by Keith Getty and Stuart Townend contains the verse:

In Christ alone! who took on flesh
Fulness of God in helpless babe!
This gift of love and righteousness
Scorned by the ones he came to save:
Till on that cross as Jesus died,
The wrath of God was satisfied -
For every sin on Him was laid;
Here in the death of Christ I live.

   If anyone wants to listen to it sung by Keith Getty's wife, Kristen, here it is:

http://www.gettymusic.com/hymns-inchristalone.aspx

   But I don't want to get into that debate, suffice to say that I love the hymn and think the words are accurate to Scripture, as I thought about hymns and music in general inside the church's worship, a different group of thoughts ran through my mind, brought on by a quote in a newspaper article:

Hawn said what one person thinks is a great hymn might be seen as less than desirable by another. He said a good hymn must be well written, well chosen for the occasion and well sung.

“Take away any of those and it’s not a good hymn,” he said. The song might have beautiful music and lyrics but “If a congregation can’t sing it, it’s not a good hymn.”

Hawn said the health of a congregation can be seen in its music.

“I’m not talking about if they sing beautifully ... but when one walks into a congregation for worship and people participate and sing, you tend to come to the conclusion there is some vitality here,” he said. “It’s about people feeling like they really have a voice.”

   So many of the songs that are used in our current day church are new, and, while they may have a lot of Scripture, and be theologically correct, I don't know them and can't sing them. For me, part of worship is singing in unison with the congregation, but to do that, I need to know the song. Just listening to the praise team sing it, no matter how they do it, seems to make it more of a performance and less of a congregational part of worship.

   I like to "make a joyful noise", and I confess that I do not sing well, but I also like to hear the voices of people singing around me. I don't like to stand, not participating in the music, watching others around me doing the same, and just listening to the stage. It may be a generational thing, but I don't just want to be led in worship, I want to actually do it.

   Music has so much power. There is power in listening to a song or hymn, but, for me, there is more in being able to sing it in conjunction with others and feel the commonality of purpose in worship and praise.

   I know there is so much of personal preference contained in any discussion of music, and I definitely have mine. Just so you know.

Generational Responsibility

   It is easy, when you are in the prime of life and everything seems to be going well, to think of what you have accomplished. After all, you worked hard for those degrees, you put the time and effort into a job, you deserved the raises and the praise for a job well done, and you still had time to raise a family and keep them fed and clothed.

   I know, and I have been there. I have looked at my family, seen them happy, enjoying life and doing well in all they do. When I was caught up in all of that, I thought I was performing the role of the good Christian father, doing and saying all the right things. One of our goals as parents was to raise our kids so that they might be independent and able to take their places in the world and prosper, and not just monetarily, but in service to others and to God.

   I read these verses in Psalm 78 this morning:

"He established a testimony in Jacob
and appointed a law in Israel,
which he commanded our fathers
to teach to their children,
6 that the next generation might know them,
the children yet unborn,
and arise and tell them to their children,
7 so that they should set their hope in God
and not forget the works of God,
but keep his commandments;"

   I'm sure that those Israelite parents wanted to raise their kids and give them the best that they could, but God says that they did not do enough, because they did not live in such a way that their children knew where the blessings came from, that God was behind it all, blessing their family whether it was deserving or not. Oft times, we as parents give lip service to those Scriptural precepts, but live out the lie that we have done it by ourselves.

   The generations that follow us need to know what God says and what is important, but they also need to see us living it. Then they will know it is really important.

   I would pray that God would give us parents, and grand parents, too, the ability and the want-to, to live the life of gratitude and obedience, that we should, in God's eyes.

Called Back to Remember Why..

   Several thoughts ran through my mind this morning as I walked along the path. I thought of some things that related to our last trip, of sights, of places, of people, of thoughts. I thought about things that I may have missed by hurrying through the places, items that I could have learned and people that I could have interacted with, if I had given the proper time.

   I thought about things that I could write about when I sat back down, things that fit in to how I felt my life needed to be lived in light of what God had put in my path. I realized that all these things were not happenstance, but road signs that I needed to heed, to live as I should.

   All of this was good, but then I understood that a lot of times I had been putting these experiences and thoughts ahead of what God might have been trying to say to me. My priorities were somewhat mixed up.

   When I started this blog, some time back, it was an attempt to see what God was saying to me through the Scriptures that I read each morning. I believe that He can, and wants to, speak in this way to each of us if we will take the time to listen.

   I also feel that He speaks to us through our experiences, and the combination of the two, experiences and reading His Word, form the backdrop for learning the hows and whys of living.

   But I found myself taking my experiences and trying to shoe horn them into the Scriptures that I read. Some days I used the happenings by themselves, without any thought of verses that might have shed some light on them.

   Three times in Psalm 80 this morning the psalmist says:

" Restore us, O Lord God of hosts!
Let your face shine, that we may be saved!

   Or the translation in The Message:

"God, come back!
    Smile your blessing smile:
    That will be our salvation.

   This seemed to be God's Word to me today. Put things in their proper order. Put Me first, and then see how your experiences tie into that, not the other way around.

   I believe that God has been there to show me lots of things through the people and events that He has put into my life, but I also believe that there could have been more if I had used the correct order.

   The difference between good and better, and the possibility that the right combination of the two could be the best.

   It is not all about me, though sometimes I want to make it that way.

   God help me to put You first and get it right.