You will go out in joy
and be led forth in peace;
the mountains and hills
will burst into song before you,
and all the trees of the field
will clap their hands.
(Isaiah 55:12 NIV)
Tag: photography
The Festive and The Still
When you recognize the festive and the still moments as moments of prayer then you gradually realize that to pray is to live.
-Henri Nouwen
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In an Abundance
But He poured His grace over me,
and I was flooded in an abundance
of the grace and faith and love
that can only be found in Jesus the Anointed.
(1 Timothy 1:14 The Voice)
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The Author Who Benefits You Most
“The author who benefits you most is not the one who tells you something you did not know before, but the one who gives expression to the truth that has been dumbly struggling in you for utterance.”
— Oswald Chambers
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While He Lay Dying
I’ve been helping (in a small capacity) my daughter and our beloved son-in-law write their story. The book is titled While He Lay Dying and is the story of one little family in a small city who saw the love of God through the worst circumstances, as a young husband and father lay comatose, and on life support, his body shut down from toxic shock after contracting flesh-eating disease. The odds of his surviving were 0%. For a long time he lingered as near to death as his doctors had ever seen in a person who survived. His recovery was nothing short of miraculous. There were angel sightings, reconciliations, revelations, heart-healings and far too many co-incidences to be co-incidences, but it was not an easy time. Every day our emotions rode a roller coaster.
Going through proofs with them has stirred up a lot of feelings for me. They tell their story honestly, candidly and dare to boast in the lessons God showed so many during that time, as tens of thousands around the world joined to pray with perseverance for the life of one man. A physician on the team also contributes his account of witnessing this event and a pastor shares profound insights that are significant for the universal Church –the Body of Christ.
I am overwhelmed that the Lord allowed me to be a part of this story, and even though I like to think I am a writer, words fail me. Today I use some of my images to describe the feelings of those days with music by Vitali.
From the Foreword by Bishop Todd Atkinson:
Jesus trusted His Father and gave Himself over to death on the cross,
Then followed a long Friday night and a long Saturday…
And while he lay in the grave, His followers asked,
“What was that all about?”
For some of you it’s been a long wait…
Something died years ago.
Some part of your faith died.
Some part of your hope died.
Some promise you were holding on to died.
We cannot raise ourselves out of that…
But we’ve got a Father who is able to.
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Burning Coals
If you think God has no wrath you do not understand the power of His love. What kind of loving Father sees his children slaughtered and does not feel outrage?
Yet he tells his people not to avenge themselves. Romans 12:
Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.”
Instead he asks his children to respond in the most counter-intuitive way possible!
To the contrary, “if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.”
For those thousands of people around the world who trust in him and who are seeing their children beheaded and their fathers burned, and their mothers raped and the enemy surrounding their city this seems like an incredibly impossible request. But there s a reason. When we fight darkness with darkness we ourselves are overcome by evil.
Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
Evil brings it own kind of blindness. It lies to us. It keeps us from seeing who the real enemy is. The idea of heaping burning coals on someone’s head is to give them something to carry home and start their own fires with. It is a gift of light and warmth that allows them to change their thinking and breaks the cycle of revenge.
If we take revenge for very real cruel acts of hateful persecution we risk killing the very people Jesus came to save — hostages of the evil one who have been his captives for so long they have believed his lies. They are delusional. Mental health workers will tell you some of the most difficult people to work with are those who suffer from paranoid delusions because they fear the very ones who want to see them healed. There are times, when for the sake of safety of others (and themselves) when they need to be restrained, but it is always understood that their reactions are the result of working under the assumptions of a lie. Many persecutors are operating under the assumption of a lie perpetrated by the father of lies -the god of this world – the real enemy -satan. That’s where God’s wrath is directed.
It is so easy to be captured by the spirit you oppose. There are genuinely evil people out there who have deliberately chosen to be the devil’s servants. And there are wounded people who have been deceived. God sees the heart. That’s one reason He says he is in charge of vengeance. When we fight darkness with darkness we are contaminated by the lie. We are called to walk in the light.
Today I was moved almost beyond belief when I heard the story of a mother and her children in Baghdad asking to be baptized even as the city is surrounded by troops hell-bent on killing people who identify as believers in Christ. They ask this even as Iraqi soldiers surrounding their enclave have said that they are prepared to discard their uniforms and run. Where does that kind of courage this woman has demonstrated come from? Would my trust in the Eternal goodness of God be so great that I would do that under the same circumstances?
Would I be willing, like the brother of a man who had been chopped to pieces in Mozambique by those who opposed the message of salvation in Christ, to approach them and say, “You can cut my body into a thousand pieces and everyone will cry out, ‘Jesus Christ loves you.'” The entire village turned to Christ.
Love like this is more powerful than all the bombs in the world.
Praying for courage and profound world-changing love in the persecuted church around the world today –especially in Iraq. May they see the glory of the Lord as God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven.
Lord hear our cry! In the Name of Jesus who bowed the heavens and came down.
Psalm 18
I love you, O Lord, my strength.
The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer,
my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge,
my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.
I call upon the Lord, who is worthy to be praised,
and I am saved from my enemies.
The cords of death encompassed me;
the torrents of destruction assailed me;
the cords of Sheol entangled me;
the snares of death confronted me.
In my distress I called upon the Lord;
to my God I cried for help.
From his temple he heard my voice,
and my cry to him reached his ears.
Then the earth reeled and rocked;
the foundations also of the mountains trembled
and quaked, because he was angry.
Smoke went up from his nostrils,
and devouring fire from his mouth;
glowing coals flamed forth from him.
He bowed the heavens and came down…
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Doubting It
“Doubt is not always a sign that a man is wrong; it may be a sign that he is thinking.”
— Oswald Chambers
I’ve met lovely, honest people who tell me that they wish they could believe in a loving God of grace, but it is a struggle for them. I’ve also met people who believe in God but are not sure that Jesus Christ is the only way to make contact with him. I’ve met people who believe that Jesus is real and He was willing to lay down his life for them, but they don’t want to get close to an angry Father God. Others think God is great but they have trouble with the whole history of “Christian” behaviour thing.
Others believe in Christ and do all the expected life-style things, but are skeptical that he talks to people today or heals them or miraculously intervenes in their lives because, after 40 years of doing church, they have never seen it.
Some of us journey on this road doing the best we can with the doubts that make us feel too small for the task. When we read expressions like “man or woman of God” or “giants of the faith” we know that it is not referring to us.
Sometimes it’s a matter of needing our hearts healed or enlarged until we can receive. A child whose birth dad left on her second birthday is going to find it hard to believe that a heavenly father promises to stay involved in her life. A boy whose parents were impossible to please will likewise assume that God is angry and disappointed in him. A person who was betrayed by a so-called Christian, especially an older brother, or worse a clergyman, will wonder where this so-called loving self-sacrificing Jesus disappeared to when the going got rough, and if this a set-up to be used again. A person who has been lied to will not buy every story they are told, and if believing every ancient account of events in the Bible is a requirement for a relationship with God they have a large fence to climb.
Here’s the thing. Walking by faith does not require truckloads of faith. Faith is exercised; that’s how it grows. It starts with baby steps. As we take risks and find that God is not like authority figures who berated, beguiled and betrayed, we can take another step. When we give up trying to appease an angry God, and he doesn’t smite us, we take another step. When we see an important lesson in one of Jesus’ stories we take another step. When we dare to pray to him to find lost car keys and have a picture in our minds of them lying under a shrub by the back door, and there they are, we take another step. When we trust another person on this road and are nakedly open about our own scarred story of pain and they treat it like a precious privilege to be protected, we take another step. We are healed inside bit by bit and enlarge our capacity to think and feel differently.
Paul, the guy who distrusted the stories about this Jesus of Nazareth character so much that he had his followers dragged off to prison, later wrote that his prayer was that people, who were like he once was and who have huge doubts, would be strengthened with Jesus’ power in their inner being enough to have the capacity to be able to start to be able to comprehend his love. Our wounds have left holes in our hearts that love just pours through. We all need him to move first. So he did.
Jesus understands and is relentlessly kind. He is not shocked by our doubts, and understands the barriers religious people have left in the way in attempts to protect themselves from their own doubts.
If all you have is one tiny little speck of faith it’s all you need to start this journey. Eventually it will move mountains.
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Darkness is Only Threatened by Light
The Darkness is not threatened by religion,
spirituality,
doctrine,
loud music,
preaching,
crowds of Christians,
spiritual warfare,
prophetic conventions,
or revivals.
Darkness is only threatened by Light,
and to the extent that we have Light,
to that extent the Darkness loses its power over us.
When we abide in perfect Light then Darkness has no power whatsoever.
And light is nothing more or less than the revelation of Christ in His Glory.
—Chip Brogden
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Cultivate Faithfulness
A heavy frost has already finished off most of the plants in the gardens at Fort Steele Farms, but I was surprised to see a row of Swiss chard (or “squished hard” as one of my grandchildren calls it) glowing in the sunlight. It was the inspiration for this work. It was also the inspiration for remembering this scripture:
Trust in the Lord and do good;
Dwell in the land and cultivate faithfulness.
Delight yourself in the Lord;
And He will give you the desires of your heart.
(Psalm 37:3,4)
Cultivating faithfulness with joyful, trusting vulnerability leads to the freedom to become who God knows you to be, full of life and delightful colour long after others have given up in adversity. Perseverance builds hope -the kind of hope that does not disappoint.
Charis: Subject to Change 