Well, it's Thanksgiving time again. Praise God from whom all blessings flow, praise him creatures here below.

I have to say that Thanksgiving is not my favorite time of year for some reason. I must try to figure out what in the world happened to make it so distasteful for me. I try now to isolate my feelings to the love that I have for God, my family and my children, and my church. However, there is something very wrong about the whole thing.

I love turkey and dressing and cranberry sauce. I love the relaxing and chilling out with the relaxing, calm, gentle, loving, gleeful, happy, joyful family. What I do not like is the stress of having to make it all happen so perfectly. The having to have it all come together "or else" by a certain time 1:00PM. Who says this stuff? By the way, whose family is that anyway. It wasn't mine.

Theologically, I know God is with me and that I do not go through any of this by myself. Yet, I must confess shopping at the store was some panicky this year. I wanted to ask God to just shop for me. I imagined I could just give God a list with all my needs on it. God would deliver and put it all away for me. By the way, God can you cook it too?

This year, I am not having the normal fifteen or so people to my home and yet I still took on the stress of the entire event as always. "I must clean the house, dust, vacuum, clean bathrooms oh so much work to do. I feel like the stepchild in the story Cinderella. I just want to be happy, go to the ball and dance all night long.

Oh well enough ranting and raving about the perfection of this holiday. Let me just sit with it this year. No pain, no thoughts, no worries, no cares. Let me just enjoy the time that I have with loved ones for this year. Thank you God for all I have. Thank you God for all you do. Thank you God for being you!

Monday Morning Changes

Well, it's Monday morning hello world. I feel like I am able to start anew today. It is so amazing how renewed and begin again I feel some Mondays. It's the same way I feel at certain times of the year. For me, there are several times that I feel as though I am beginning anew. A fresh new start at my work, my family, life, and so much more. For example, the change of seasons, a new year does that for me, or the birth of a new baby. I get excited again when school starts for all the children. Maybe it is from the change that I feel myself feel renewed.

I do love change. As a Christian, it seems that I am always in a change mode. Look at all of the things that made me who I am today many changes. For example, my Christan conversion. Many people grew up in the Church. They just know the church and have had a relationship with God forever as as long as they could remember. For me, it wasn't that way at all. I went through a conversion to become a Christian. It happened in some ways very fast and in others very slow. It was most definitely a "change".

It was all about change. It is the change that God was working in me. It began I suppose when I first enrolled my children in a small Christian school. God began God's work on me then. Through my children ever so slowly God molded me and reshaped me. One day I responded to all of that change going through me when I cried out for forgiveness and confessed to believing something or someone I had no real knowledge of Jesus Christ.

I suddenly felt a feeling of forgiveness that I will never fully be able to explain. God was continuing to change me as I responded to God's grace in repentance and faith. It's interesting that true repentance means change. A new direction for my life was on the horizon. Amen! I desperately needed it. Repentance and faith are the necessary responses to Jesus and His message of the kingdom.

I became gradually in ever way a changed person. Through my repentance and my childlike faith, the saving power and initiative of God was Immanuel to me. God is with us and with me specifically. God became part of my human experience. The rest is history as they say.

When I think today of change, the seasons, aging, time, children, I am reminded of a beautiful song which I love by Stevie Nicks. It's words haunt me at times. It is called "Landslide":

Well, I've been afraid of changing
Cause I've built my life around you
But time makes you bolder
Even children get older
And I'm getting older too

Well, I am building my world around God now as God is continuing to change all of us and everything for His divine purposes. God changes ever day as God recreates all things!

The Times We Need to Stop and Enjoy a Cup of Tea

I am watching "Expedition Impossible". In this show, several contestants are vying for the lead while journeying in Morocco. They all want to be the first to arrive at the goal line or face elimination. On this show, the teams must travel over mountains and rough terrain to get to their next stop. At one point, one team gets to a stopping place at a tea house where some members of the team want to stop for a cup of tea. They want to take time out to enjoy some Moroccan tea. They want to take time even if its just two minutes to have tea. They have the lead in the game. One member prophetically makes the statement "Why can't we stop? We are just flying though this thing. We have already accomplished so much let's take time out for some tea."

I am reminded how many of Jesus' journeys throughout the hills and desert of Israel required time to rest, ponder, pray and relax. He would often leave the masses and retire to the hills to pray. He could not take a steady stream of healing and preaching without rest, meditation and prayer.

We should aspire to Jesus' model in our own lives. So many times we rush through life like it it a contest to get to the finish line or be eliminated. In reality, we never reach the finish line in this life or the next. With and through Christ, it is always a journey that takes us winding through a variety of terrains. Some days it's mountains, some days lakes, streams or deserts. Each detour molds us to refine us to His image. It requires peace, patience, and prayer along the way. At times, it may even require a two minute cup of tea.

Life Unfolding

Hi all, I know it has been a while since I wrote anything. I have problems with discipline. I suppose I rebel from all of the discipline I had during my childhood. Anyway, I am thinking today about life and how it unfolds too quickly. For example, it seems as though the more I plan for the future the faster my life goes by. I can just remember what seems like a few months ago when it was the first of the year. Now the year is already 8/12th gone. Oh my!

I am reminded of the time that I worried so much about all of the years of my life that I felt I had wasted. What good had I done? All of the fear that I carried with me wherever I went. Life unfolded and I grew some in knowledge of the Lord.

I remember God's quiet words in my mind saying that even though the grasshoppers devour everything you have the Lord can give back in multitudes. It gave me such hope. Now hope is the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen. I remember also fondly those words I learned from my children's Bible memory at the Heiskell School.

Oh how I miss those days of picking up my children from school and doing something fun with them each day. Some days it was just going to the mall to take Kevin to Gamestop. It was so fun and enjoyable just spending time with my children. Life has unfolded into a new time. I can still recall the warm feelings if I have to drive in the vicinity of their old schools. Where did the time go? Life is just unfolding.

Now I am lucky if I get to see my son as he passes by from one room to the next. My daughter calls randomly to say hello and oh by the way do you remember the cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon, little boy blue and the man in the moon. "When you coming home, mom?" "I don't know when, but we'll get together then. You know we will get together then!! Life is just unfolding. Life is just unfolding.

"Redemption Island"

I at times tune in to the weekly TV show called “Survivor”. Many persons already know the plot. There are people who are stranded on an island somewhere in the world. They get voted off one by one by their peers for various reasons.

This season the popular TV show added a new twist. This year when a survivor gets voted off by their peers they go to "Redemption Island." It is on this island that they may find their way back into the game if they can win a battle against another survivor. The point to my story is that redemption is a key element to getting saved and being able to continue to live in the game.

This TV show is not that far off from what our life is like in this world. We all must be redeemed for our sins from the legacy we inherited from the first sinner Adam.

The question becomes: how do you get redeemed and choose life when you are facing death each and every day? What does Jesus mean when he says in John’s Gospel that "this illness does not lead to death rather it is for God's glory" so that the Son of God may be glorified through it." He’s correct. Lazarus’ illness does not lead to his death but it ultimately does lead to Jesus’.

These questions bring us to the Gospel text of John 11:9-41. We are told early that Lazarus has died. Jesus meanwhile knowing full well that he could have saved his beloved friend waits two more days then tells the Disciples "our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep" died, dead, gone! He was your friend hello!!

“And Jesus wept.” “You love us and you loved him; why did you not come and cure him while he was still alive?” I think many of us ask God that question when a loved one dies. Jesus asked it from the cross: “God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” You always think of love as something you can have because you are alive. But the opposite is true. Life is something you can have because you are rooted in love. Death does not erase love, it brings you more deeply back to it, to the place you came from—love’s rich loam.

Jesus tells her " your brother will rise again". She knows that he will rise in the ressurection so she really believes cause she says so. But Jesus tells her I am the resuurection and the life . Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live and everyone who loves and

"Jesus began to weep" most divine and the most human aspects of Jesus

Jesus reveals, God is not so much a rescuing God as a redeeming one. God does not protect us from pain, but instead enters it and ultimately redeems it. That might sound simplistic in the face of real death and evil, but it is not. That sorrow and grief and anger may be appropriate emotions at times. We do not need to hide them. But we also cannot allow them to stop us from continuing to move forward... even if our destiny is with Christ's... on the cross.

"Lazarus come out!" Mary is asking the universal, timeless question about suffering and God’s seeming absence. Her query (“Where were you when my brother died?”) asks that question for everyone: Where is God when innocent people suffer? Where was God during the holocaust? Where is God when anyone’s brother dies? He enters into peoples’ helplessness and pain. Instead he redeems our suffering afterwards. He came out his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said "unbind him and let him go". We too are to be unbound and set free by the saving grace of Jesus Christ. Who has redeemed us by His precious blood. Yes we are redeemed not rescued. We still have our own lives to live on this island knowing that we indeed have been saved.

Open My Eyes

I remember the movie title “Close Encounters” from a movie about our world’s first encounter with aliens. At first, one would think that it would have no correlation to the Gospel of John 9:1-41. However, in looking at how we can have so many close encounters with Christ, I wonder how many of our encounters result in our being changed. Many times when we first come to Christ we actually feel like the alien ourselves. We have become isolated and estranged from our creator. Once we have a close encounter with Jesus it is unlikely that we will ever be the same.

It seems that so much of our lives we feel like aliens ourselves. We are separated and at times cut off from the love that is in God through Jesus. How many times do we have “encounters" with our own blindness and spiritual deadness? This story in John’s Gospel gives us the reality of Christ’s power to make us see and live again. When our hearts which hold our values, our will, and our emotions are in Christ, we can see much more clearly, too.

How many times are we blinded to the truth? Doesn’t this happen to so many of our politicians and leaders? They become blinded to what is the truth. We do the same thing. If we are all too busy trying to protect our fiefdoms, money, fame, power or whatever we stockpile, we still do not see.

To contemplate divine life is to find freedom; but it is also to encounter that which we do not like in ourselves. It is to stand up when there are those who oppose our new found freedom. However, we must open our eyes and be healed by the power of Jesus Christ. Only then can we be finally open to the evil, injustice and oppression all around us. Yes, we are all healed and made whole once we are opened to the light and no longer are blind in darkness.

I still vividly remember the horror of waking up to blindness in my left eye last November. I had a detached retina that happened over night. It came very quickly yet its scars still remain. I think the issue for me was not being able to see, being blind and no longer being able to see the light. I love light. I love the beauty that God has opened up to me through God’s eternal love and grace. I am no longer blind because I too had years ago a close encounter with God and I , too, will never be the same!

The Clash of Life

There are times and days that make you pause. Some times it can be bad news you hear. It can be something that turns your life upside down. It could be some harsh criticism that came your way through no fault of your own. It is at those times that I have to stop and collect my mind. My mind is usually going in all directions and never pausing to hear my stop warnings.

You are what you think. Well, if that's true I could be a bowl of mess. My thoughts can be so disjointed and on those days so rattled that it is difficult to make sense of anything.

Today was one of those days. I hate death and dying. I do not like to be separated from anyone whom I love. I do not like knowing for sure that nothing can be done. I do not like losing dear friends or family to disease. Why can't they figure out how to cure cancer? What seems to be the problem? How many more people have to die from this dreaded illness. I know there have been major breakthroughs and I'm thankful for those. I just don't like losing another person then another. I know they may be old. Who cares? They still have beautiful souls that laugh and love others. Isn't that good enough?

I know that God works in all things. I realize that life is about toil and troubles that may come your way at any time. I know that pain and separation are a part of life.

I believe in my higher power whom I choose to call God. All of that is a given. I know people can't live forever or we'd be full. I know people have to get old (not exciting at all). I am sensitive to the fact that the body wears out.

My issue is about a mystery that I may never know. It is about the all knowing ,all loving, all powerful God that is moving and working even as I am writing this post. Why God does the pain have to feel so great. Why does the ache have to hurt through to the soul. Why does it have to happen again and again and again?

Lenten Beginnings

Today we had a Lenten Prayer Breakfast. There were many "aha" moments during the session. One in particular was the thought of prayer in our life. At this time of Lent, I am reminded of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer said about prayer:

Prayer does not mean simply to pour out one's heart. It means rather to find the way to God and to speak with him, whether the heart is full or empty.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Some times I fail to recognize if my heart is full or empty. How can that be? I believe that I am not unlike many persons who are simply not in touch with themselves. We for the most part have no clear direction in our lives. We allow ourselves to be thrown from one side of the boat to the other. We let the wind alter our course and blow us to places we never intended. We are really never in control of our lives and our world. We don't even sit still long enough to know what we are thinking or feeling. Is our heart full or empty? More importantly, what is making it that way. I ponder at times if that is really all bad. God has control of the boat anyway!

We are about to begin another Lenten season. A time for reflection and pause in our lives. I invite every person to spend time with themselves this Lenten season. Sit, pray or contemplate all that God has in store for you. Look at what has come between you and God. Concentrate on keeping your journey simple, focused and aimed towards God. Try to sit with yourself even if it makes you uncomfortable. It is in our discomfort that we learn the most about ourselves. Whatever is between you and God needs to be examined for its merit. Perhaps it stays. Most likely, it goes and we become more in tuned to our creator.

A Land of the Holy

I returned last Friday from a ten day trip to the Holy Land. As I saw so many ancient 1st century artifacts, I also saw barbed wire atop walls separating and isolating nation by nation. The city of Bethlehem which is in the West Bank was isolated by a wall separating it from the rest of Jerusalem. It was difficult to see Christ between the wall, barbed wire and land mines signs.

Muslin, Hebrew, Christian all inhabited the smallest of geographic areas.

On our last day, we visited the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. Mounds of shoes left before people went to their death. People who were slowly and methodically isolated and inhibited from their day to day activities. The horrific sights and sounds of people telling their story. The woman who cried as she echoed the horrors of those days.

All the while it made me think about what I was seeing in Israel. People intentionally being separated from economic and social opportunities. Have the people of Israel forgotten all they endured not too long ago?

A small country with so much going for it. A beautiful land, a fertile land for thousands of years. Religion seeming to go side by side with the land, the people and the story.

Making Disciples

This past Sunday, I preached on the topic of making Disciples. Many of you might have heard the podcast already on the web. I asked two key questions that I think deserve more attention. The first was "Am I in Christ?" and the second one was "Am I in my calling?"

While in business for close to thirty years, I saw so many people who seemed to randomly live their life. Yes, they had a job and made enough salary to get by and then some. However, they did not possess the "it" factor. They did not have a sense of calling in their life. They perhaps were not living up to their full potential in God. I was one of those persons for most of that twenty five years in the corporate world. All I saw and did somehow seemed to flow through the eyes of the company. My family was seen through that lens. I remember always thinking that life must be about more than I was seeing and feeling every day.

I found that difference once I was called by God just as the first Disciples were. After preaching the sermon from Matthew where the first Disciples are called, I realized that God has an imprint already on all of us from the beginning of our lives. We have been sought out and bought by God to be redeemed. All of the work has been done for us or has it?

Jesus first called two brothers then two more. They were all fishermen but none were "fishers of men". None of them really understood or realized the impact on their lives through their dedication and commitment to Jesus. We all are something or have something. The problem is that we never seem to use all that we were created to be for God's highest glory and desire for us.

Yes, God fits, qualifies, authorizes and even commissions us. We have all that we need. All we are to do is follow. There is the rub. For to follow means to sever ourselves from all else so that we can maintain a diligent attendance on Christ. We must know Him inside and out and be able to imitate Him in all that we do. We found it difficult to maintain a constant diligence on anything these days. There is too much in our lives. There is too much complexity and information and knowing. We find it almost impossible to sever ourselves to be with our children or ourselves.

Severing ourselves can be quite difficult. Depending on all that you possess, your family ties, your job, your self identity, we can be quite tied up in our humanity.

I believe that is where God meets us. In our humanity, Jesus issued two commands in the Gospel in Matthew of the calling of the first Disciples 1. repent (I realize that you are human so just say you are sorry) 2. Come after me or follow me. The Gospel suggests that both of these acts are quite important and necessary for our salvation. I am reminded of the Nike ad "Just Do It". I think to become a Disciple we must all really look at Jesus' slogan "Just Follow".

Routine with a "N"

What an experience was felt by me today. My son after having pain for some time underwent a colonoscopy on January 7th to check for Crone's disease. A twenty millimeter polyp was found. It was removed and the results were to come in from pathology within ten days. Today after getting an early morning call from my son complaining of severe pain again. Being a helicopter mom, I called his doctor's office. I left a message stating all that had transpired along with a comment that we had not yet received the results of his colon test.

Throughout the day, I spoke to my son as he asked me if they had returned my call. Some time in the late afternoon, my cell phone rang. My son said "mom have you spoken to the doctor yet?" I responded "no not yet". His voice sounded strange. He then said "they called me". "What did they say," I asked? He responded "I have cancer". I really don't remember what he said after that point. I remember thinking I must not react. I must be strong."What do you mean son?" "That's not funny. Please don't say that" I hurried the reply. "Mom do you think I would be kidding about something like that"?

My world collapsed right in front of me. "What? I don't understand what happened?" "What did they say"?? "What are they going to do"?? "What is happening. I need to talk to the doctor. Let me call you back".

The story ends well. It seems that the biopsy show pre-cancer tissues or cells. Come back in one year to do the colonoscopy over. There was no cancer. However, the emotion was overwhelming during the ten minute time period that went from routine to the non-routine.

I have to reflect on our health care systems. How does a child who is only twenty years old hear over the telephone something that is obviously medically a routine diagnosis. It is of course to everyone except the patient. More subtle to reflect upon is the quick movement from routine life to the non-routine.

It makes me think about all that we consider routine in life and how quickly the routine can suddenly shift without notice. The routine can quickly become the horrific. An example, the recent shootings in Arizona. A routine campaign to meet your politician in a shopping center where people are just routinely wandering by. In a matter of minutes, it becomes the non-routine. People are being shot and killed. Many are wounded. Many are dead.

God is in the details. God is in the big picture. God is with us throughout everything the routine and the not so routine. Our challenge is keeping God in our routine enough so that when the non-routine happens, we still see God. His presence is evident.