January 29-30, 2013 The Importance of Little Details…

THE ARK: “Have them make a chest of acacia wood—two and a half cubits long, a cubit and a half wide, and a cubit and a half high. Overlay it with pure gold, both inside and out, and make a gold molding around it. Cast four gold rings for it and fasten them to its four feet, with two rings on one side and two rings on the other. Then make poles of acacia wood and overlay them with gold. Insert the poles into the rings on the sides of the chest to carry it. The poles are to remain in the rings of the ark; they are not to be removed. Then put in the ark the Testimony, which I will give to you.” Exodus 25: 10-16

     I used to think I was a very detail-oriented person until I met my husband.  He is detailed about things I never even thought there was a need to be detailed about! I am detailed about my writing skills, making sure every comma is in place, every word spelled correctly, etc…I am detailed about planning programs and events at my job, making sure I think of every possible need for the event and/or potential safety or issue that might occur, but my husband is detailed about very tangible things, such as the way dishes are put in the dishwasher or how to properly prepare a meal and plate it.  His detail-oriented mind produces more efficient processes, and these little efficiency-producing details are useful in ways I never considered before.  I am detailed when it comes to big things; he is more detailed in the little things, which reminds me of God.  Reading through Exodus, we see how God really does care about the little details.  His description to Moses of how to create the Ark of the Covenant and really the whole of chapters 25-31 of this book (which detail how to build the first Tabernacle and how to dress the priests, etc…) reveal how important every detail is to God.  “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows.” (Matthew 10:29-31) He has more important concerns, right?  Our small first-world problems cannot be as important to Him as the state of the world overall, as so many suffering people on the earth.  Did you read the verse above?  Well, then we have our answer, don’t we? Every small detail of our lives matters to God, just like every tiny sparrow and every hair on our head matters to Him.  God knows and He cares. Sometimes it’s the little details we attend to that make all the difference. If we take care with the details, all else falls into place more simply.  So, start your day off right, turning it over to God first with a prayer, giving even the little things over to Him, then watch what wonders occur next because of your attention to the Godly details. 

January 26-28 Perseverant Waiting….

“But if we hope for what we do not see, with perseverance we wait eagerly for it.” Romans 8:25

    More than once within in blog, I’ve written about waiting on God, but I don’t believe I’ve explored waiting on God with perseverance. The word waiting, in itself, implies passively sitting and watching the world go while you wait for something to happen.  There’s no action in waiting, well, not in the normal sense of the word, but if you put it in Biblical terms of waiting, you’ll find lots of action you can take while you wait eagerly and with perseverance.  While we wait on God, we should pray, fervently pray for what we are waiting for, pray for God’s blessing upon the situation, pray for God’s will, pray for contentment while we wait, pray for His hand upon every part of what is happening or is going to happen, and that kind of praying doesn’t happen without action from our waiting place in this world.  While we wait on God, we can picture what it is we want, see ourselves in that place of God’s will, and believe we will make it there someday.  This reminds me of the Israelites wandering for 40 years in the desert…talk about waiting on God! It took God’s people 40 years (not 40 days, but 40 YEARS) before He brought them out of Egypt and into the promised land, and I thought I had been waiting a long time!!  No wonder they started grumbling to Moses on the way through, but maybe if they had turned those complaints into positive prayers to God and taken the view of the desert in front of them and pictured it as the promised land of milk and honey, they might have found the contentment they needed to make it through until arrival at their home.  It’s not really in our nature to be content when things are hard, to wait and not take some sort of human action to solve our dilemmas in life ourselves, but isn’t that the whole point? God wants us to look beyond ourselves and our meager understanding of life and people and look to Him for protection, for love, for guidance, for peace and contentment.  When we are looking anywhere else but up at Him, we will become restless and make reckless decisions that are not part of His plan, then He has to take us through even more tough times to get us where we need to be in Him.  If we would just wait, eagerly looking forward to what He has in store for us, picturing His will for our lives and if we would just wait, with prayer and perseverance, trusting that He will take care of us in time, His time, then maybe, just maybe we won’t have to go through so much pain while we wait.  Waiting could end up being a wonderful time of rest in God, allowing Him to take the burdens and problems in our lives that we no longer have any control over and letting them go. Simply not worrying about our problems could make waiting in faith one of the most peaceful times of your life, even in the midst of difficult, unresolved circumstances.  So, why not give your concerns over to God today and take action to wait perseveringly on God!! 

January 23-25, 2013 Guided by wisdom…

“If you live a life guided by wisdom, you won’t limp or stumble as you run.” Proverbs 4:12

    You can’t go wrong by turning to Proverbs for guidance about life.  This popular book of God’s word is full of its own “wisdom,” reminding us about what’s important and what things we should stay away from unless we want to make our lives more painful and difficult. Looking back at my student Bible from high school, I have numerous verses highlighted that continue to speak to me when I fall back into bad habits or I’m going through a tough time. For example, “Hatred stirs up dissension, but love covers over all wrongs” (10:12) and “The tongue has the power of life and death, and those who love it will eat its fruit” (18:21).  The funny thing about wisdom is that it takes a lifetime to gain, so I figure even though I really haven’t gained that wisdom yet, if I just apply God’s instructions and trust in Him (“Whoever gives heed to instruction prospers, and blessed is he who trust in the Lord.” 16:20), I will be able to make it through life with relatively few stumbles or at least only minor ones.  After all, “There is no wisdom, no insight, no plan that can succeed against the Lord” (21:30) and “Humility and fear of the Lord bring wealth and honor and life” (22:4).  If you do not have the time to read more than one chapter a day from the Bible, start with Proverbs as the reading is easy (no long list of families or detailed descriptions about the way things used to be for those living long ago), but it is chock full of wisdom!! “Apply your heart to instruction and your ears to words of knowledge” (23:12). What better “words of knowledge” could you find than those in the 31 short chapters of the book of Proverbs?

January 20-22, 2013 Not me, Lord!

Moses said to the Lord, “Oh Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor since you have spoken to your servant. I am slow of speech and tongue.” The Lord said to him, “Who gave man his mouth? Who makes him deaf or mute? Who gives him sight or makes him blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now go; I will help you speak and will teach you what to say.” Exodus 4: 10-12

     The second book of the Bible, Exodus, begins with Moses, a man who no less than 5 times questions God about sending him to be the one who leads God’s people out of slavery in Egypt.  Repeatedly, Moses says things like, “Who am I, that I should go…” and “What if they do not believe me or listen to me…” and finally just plain, “O Lord, please send someone else to do it.” My fifth grader and his Christian friends have been dealing with something similar in their school lately. During Sunday school this week, his teacher shared with me that the kids in her class, including my son, were wondering how to respond to friends who don’t believe, worrying about how they will react and what they should say to them when their non-believing friends express their thoughts that God is not real or that they do not believe in Him.  It’s sad to think that they have to deal with this so young, but often they are better equipped to handle it than adults are, adults who have had many more years to mess up and recognize how inadequate we are.  Apparently, my son finds it fairly simple. He just tells his friends that he believes God is real, and that’s that.  If we all could be so bold without getting into sermons or becoming too preachy where we turn others off or push them further away from God.  In effect it’s saying, “This is what I believe. I’d love to talk to you about it if you want, but if you don’t, I’m still going to believe. And no matter what you believe, you’re still my friend.” That’s my favorite part. At his age, none of this actually seems to affect their friendships. There’s only a small group of children on the base (around 200 within the K-6^th grade elementary school), so they are limited with finding new friends if they have a falling out with the old ones.  In some ways, this is a good thing because it teaches them how to love unconditionally. Even if their friends do not go to church or are from a very different type of family or cultural background, it doesn’t matter. They will not shun them or form the same type of cliques and social groupings you’ll find at most bigger schools because there’s simply not enough children to do so.  They learn how to be friends and accept all types of people, while continuing to keep their own beliefs and cultural backgrounds in tack, for the most part. It’s quite amazing. They are a product of their environments, and they have adapted very well. This is a great example of how our attitudes toward God should be, adapting to what He needs us to adapt to at any given time. We all need to be prepared to be used by God in one way or another, to find ways to accept the place He has put us and allow Him to work through it instead of complaining that it’s not what we wanted or hoped it would be.  In fact, the more you resist being used by God, often the greater he will choose to use you, like Moses.  He didn’t want to go around saving his people from the Egyptians, but he feared God more, so he did.  One thing my son’s teacher told her students yesterday is to set a good example, to show God’s love through their actions, and that’s how they will attract their unbelieving friends to God. I am a big advocate of this. More often for me, it’s not what you say, but how you conduct yourself that matters.  If you are not happy in your current situation and complain about it, then that’s what others will see, an unhappy, negative Christian. Moses was very honest about his deficiencies and faults and even His fear in doing God’s bidding, but he revealed his true connection to God, his fear and reverence for him by doing what God asked of Him and allowing God to use him and his brother through all sorts of signs and miracles to set God’s chosen people free from slavery in Egypt.  It couldn’t have been easy, but He accepted what God had chosen for Him to do, and He moved forward to do it. I do not claim to know anymore than anyone else about God. Sometimes I worry that I have even written something that’s not quite right in my ramblings about the Bible because that’s what they are, my ramblings, my simple understanding of a very complex and mighty God and the world and people He’s created to live in it, but I have to trust that if God wants to use me, speak through me, than He will do so, even if I don’t realize He’s doing it, even when I don’t feel equipped to do it.  He will shape the thoughts and words as I type them. He will take the things I have wrong and cause those reading them to forget those parts and focus only on the truths He wants to impart to His children at that moment. He is greater than me. He is the “I Am,” and He knows exactly the right thing to say and do at all times. He created heaven and earth and all the beings in it, so how could I ever doubt that He can do what He needs to do through me and the others He made.  He can and He will, no matter who you are or what you believe about Him or yourself.  The absolute best part of all of this is that once you turn your focus to God and allow Him to use you, all the other blessings will follow, and those things that were hard to deal with before suddenly become easier because you have changed your focus and have put God in charge of it all, so before you say, “Not me, Lord” consider what you are really saying no to.       

January 17-19, 2013 You call that a problem?

“Though He slay me, I will hope in Him.” Job 13:15

     A co-worker of mine has this saying within her group of friends when one of them complains about something that is less than critically important in their lives. For example, on Kwajalein, we may complain that the one Burger King fast food restaurant we have is out of French fries, and we don’t know when they will have them in again. Or, the one local department type store is out of triple A batteries for our game controller or label maker.  These are what my co-worker and her friends would call “a first world problem.”  It’s not like we have no water and have to save empty milk jugs or juice containers that someone on Kwajalein is going to throw out just to fill them up with potable water from a hose at the dock before we take our boat back home to the nearby island of Ebeye like so many of our Marshallese        co-workers or their family members have to do in order to have water for washing, drinking, and cooking.  Not having access to clean, running water in our homes is what most would call a third world problem, which is truly a problem because we need water to live.  As I near the end of the book of Genesis in my daily Bible, I have discovered that pretty much all of my problems are “first-world” compared to the inhabitants of the world back in Biblical days.  As I read about Joseph (the son of Jacob, who is the son of Isaac, who is the son of Abraham-the father of all nations) and how he suffered not only at the hands of his brothers (who sold him into slavery because he was the father’s favorite), but also his Egyptian master (who put him into jail because his wife told a falsehood about Joseph) and subsequently spent years away from his homeland before God brought him back to a place of honor within his society and his family, I feel humbled and blessed. I have always had plenty of food to eat, nice clothes to wear, a family and friends to support me. I do not know what it is like truly to be in dire need, to be accused of something I did not do to the point of suffering in prison for it.  The families in Genesis often struggled hard to get to the places there were in life and with God, which brings me to the verse I chose for today. It’s from the book of Job, who unlike Jacob or any of our families in Genesis so far, suffered more than any human being should ever have to, and yet, he continued to choose God through all of it.  I’m sure I will be writing more about Job when I get to that part of my Bible during this year, but to give you an idea, this man lost everything he had including every single family member (of which he had 10 children) and every bit of wealth he had worked hard for and then he almost lost his life, and still, he worshipped God for it. If we could have even an ounce of His faith in God’s plan for us, trust in what He is allowing to occur in our lives, what peace we would live with daily, knowing no matter what happens we don’t need to worry because He will bring good out of it; He will take care of it in His way and His time. So many of us don’t know what it’s like to suffer in our “first world” situation, not compared to so many others in this world.  It’s time to worship God even in the midst of the most trying times of our lives; actually, we should worship God ESPECIALLY during those times, and he will grant us the strength of Job and the favor of Joseph, and we will prosper, live, love, and sleep in perfect peace, God’s perfect peace.