Day Nine: Ambush at Dawn

Every New Day I Turn to You

      When the disciples-to-be went to find Jesus they said, "Everyone is looking for you." The value of his outward mission seemed more pressing to them than Jesus' solitary time in prayer. And you almost feel like Jesus confirms that when he comes back and says, "Let's go on to the next village so I can preach there because that is why I have come." But it makes me wonder if it was not that time in solitary prayer that kept him on track with his outward mission. Why does the bible make a point of having him spending time in solitary prayer before he boldly stated his purpose?
      I believe it is this solitary prayer time that God uses to set our course and put purpose into our hearts. Without private times with God, we are just tossing around in the wind without a rudder. Maybe it was this geniune desire for personal direction that was needed before they could be called legitimate disciples.
      Corporate worship and group studies are great and they are good at fanning our flames and making them grow higher.  But the fuel of that fire must be started in our private, personal relationship with Christ. Without someone putting new fuel in the pit soon there will be no fire to stoke. What value do you put on your solitary times with the Lord?

Day Eight: Good for What Ails You

     After reading and re-reading today's lesson trying to find the words to articulate some kernel of truth; I thought it might be best to take a moment of silence for reflection. Topic: relationships. Take a moment to reflect on the Joy God has brought you though the relationships you have had over your lifetime. Who has been there for most of the years? What about those who you knew only for a short time but left a big impact?

Day Seven: Scenes on a Sabbath Day

Broken Tree

     Healing is often a controversial subject even among the Christian community. TV "healers" have overdramatized the faith healing movement and made skeptics due to their flash and show. Many believers have prayed for healing and never seen it. I spent hours in hands-on prayer praying for my husband to be healed. I was hurt when I was told by a fellow Christian that he wasn't healed because he didn't have enough faith. For a long time after that I was afraid to pray for healing for others, "What if my lack of faith causes them to lose their healing?" Now I realize that is ridiculous. God said, "No," and neither my husband or I could have "worked up" enough faith to change his mind.

Below the Broken Tree

            But I do not believe that one prayer that we prayed to heal him was wasted. Revelation 5:8 says, "....they were holding golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints." God treasures our prayers so much that he saves them in golden bowls. When you are waiting on the results of a serious diagnosis, do you only call someone that can heal you or do you call your bestfriend and let them know how scared you are?

Day Six: A Sheer Show of Strength

Displays of God's Glory

          When my husband and I first came to know Christ as adults, I was on fire. I was so amazed at all the wisdom that was contained in the bible that I couldn't get enough. We signed up for a bible study small group and I was so eager to share with them all the suprises I was finding in God's word. "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22). If that is all you had in the world what an amazing life you would have," I shared with excitement, "Isn't that just amazing?" My group responded with smiles and grins and chuckles obviously enjoying my new believer excitement and the fact that I didn't realize that was one of the most popular verses among believers. The day I stood at the Christian bookstore and saw that verse on plates and posters and coffee mugs, I realized why I got so many grins and chuckles.
          God's word didn't just get me excited about my new life in Christ, it also affected the way I looked at the past. Before we made the decision to live for Christ, my husband and I had gone through a roller-coaster of a relationship. I had grown extremely bitter and angry and felt that I had given up my youth to fight a losing battle. Looking back on our years together I could only see the pain and suffering. When I read, "I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten (Joel 2:25)," I fell on my face and weeped. It was this promise from God that helped restore our joy in marriage. When I recieved Jesus' forgiveness, I was also able to forgive my husband and for the first time in years, I looked back on our 16 years of marriage and could see there were some really great times. God had truly restored the years that were destroyed by the locusts.
        Amazed by the power of Christ forgiveness and the promises coming true in his word, I ran back and shared them with my bible study group. Those that have experienced the amazing way Christ transforms our lives, knew exactly what I was talking about. Just like the disciples might have sounded when they shared the miracles that they were witnessing in their early walk with Jesus, I am sure those that had seen a miracle or two knew exactly why they were so excited. Those that hadn't experienced Christ may have thought the stories were overdramatic.
      Amazing things seemed to come at us right and left when we first opened our life up to the Truths we found in God's word. I never wanted to become complacent with it. 1. Why does God often seem to delight in new converts with bold, visible displays of His glory, while trusting His older saints to follow with less flowery fireworks?       

Day Five: Time with Jesus

     It is easy to think that you can’t keep up with the Jones’ when the only time you enter their home it is by invitation. Mrs. Jones pays the kids double their regular allowance to help prepare for your arrival and even pays the neighbor boy to mow the lawn and trim around the edge of the sidewalk with a weed eater. She is so particular about how the house looks when guests arrive she even bought fresh plants to put in the window seal for the occasion. Too bad you didn’t show up twenty minutes earlier for the tail end of the argument she had with Mr. Jones to take out the garbage before the guests arrived. You could have watched her frantically putting the vacuum away so that you wouldn’t know that she just finished cleaning the carpets.

     You look at Mrs. Jones’ house and wish your house was so neat and orderly and finely decorated. You leave feeling horribly inadequate. The fact is you have no idea what the Jones’ house really looks like. It’s all dolled up to impress you and obviously you don’t have a close enough relationship to be invited over on the spur of the moment. If you did drop by unannounced, good chance Mrs. Jones would greet you on the porch to talk in order to keep up her appearances.

     Fact number two, the Joneses quarrel about as much as you and your spouse but you don’t know it because they are good at keeping up the appearances when guests are around. I know this because I have lived with the Jones’. You really do not know a person until you spend time with them. Yes, you can learn a little about the Jones family during these formal invitations but not as much as you will learn if you drop in on occasion unannounced and get invited into the family living area; the places where life happens in the Jones family. Yes, even in the Jones’ house the laundry and dirty dishes and junk mail piles up. And if you took up residence in the spare bedroom for a few months you would learn more about the way the real Jones family deals with each other in their daily lives. Of course if you don’t have that much time just help the Joneses move. You can learn a lot about a family in one weekend by helping them box up and move their personal belongings especially the last day when everyone is tired and sweaty.

1.What kinds of benefits begin to flow into your life after spending long periods of time with Christ? How do your attitudes and perspectives begin to change?     

Day Four: A Father's Dilemna

Who Do You Trust?

      When I think about following a total stranger, I always get this picture of a man seen once clicking bones together and walking down Clinton Parkway in Lawrence, KS chanting something about Jesus. In this day and age, he seems a little crazy to us. Not many  of us would follow him anywhere. But what about a man like Jim Jones who lead over 900 followers to a church in Jonestown, Guyana. There he orchestrated a mass suicide in the name of his religion.
      Until I read Beth Moore's explanation of preparedness I wondered how could the apostles who dropped everything to follow Jesus, know this wasn't just some crazy on a self-serving mission. John and James were actually working in the family fishing business alongside their father when Jesus said follow me. And they got up and went. They gave up their place in their businesses and their families and stood up and followed. How brave is that? How must they have known Jesus' voice to be the true saviour? They didn't even consider the cost.
     We are being prepared to hear our master's voice so we will not be lead astray. I always pray that I hear and recognize Christ's voice. I don't want to follow some crazy even if it is just to hear him speak a Sunday morning sermon. If I am going to give up something, I only want to give it up for Christ and that includes my time on Sunday morning.
    1. When have you been called to give up something that you were just beginning to enjoy and appreciate?
How did you know it was Christ asking you to give it up?

Day Three: Preparation Day

Following Faithfully

     A simple task of transferring an audio cassette recording onto a multi-track recorder took me several months to accomplish. Most of that time was spent reading the owner’s manual and figuring out what all the buttons did. I was determined and in the end I had successfully made a CD of my favorite live recordings of the music my late husband had recorded of his bands. I was unaware that this therapeutic session down memory lane after my husband’s death was also a time of preparation. All I wanted was to preserve his music on CD for his kids.
     Mission’s month at church commenced shortly after I finished that CD. Every week a new missionary would speak and let us know what impact they were making for God in some far off place on the planet. I wanted God to call me to go out to a far place, too, but I was now a single parent with four children. I left those Sunday morning services feeling sorry for myself and asking God why he didn’t want to use me too. Why not me?
     One Sunday morning in the lobby a missionary came up to me and said he had heard I might be able to help him. “Is it true you have a home recording studio in your basement?” I informed him that it was actually my late husband’s but I was learning how to use it. “Perfect,” he said, “I am learning how to do a radio show and wondered if you would be willing to record it for me so I can send it to Uganda.” God had prepared me just enough to serve on a missionary project to a far off place on the planet right from my own basement.
2. How can you demonstrate your willingness to follow Him faithfully into whatever he knows is next for you?

Day Two: Amazing

     Basements tend to fill up quickly with things that we have no other place or use for than to hide when company comes over. My basement was no exception. It also had things that three of four children and a sibling had failed to take with them when they moved out. I had a dream for this room in the basement. I wanted to renovate it and make it into a small home theatre to use in a small group ministry I believed the Lord was calling me to do. Every once in awhile I felt inspired to go down into this dark pit and contemplate what it would take to get it ready. It was so overwhelming I would run back upstairs and avoid going back down for months.
     The night my son came upstairs and told me the basement was flooding, I waded through the water in tears. Staring at soaked carpet, soggy cardboard boxes of other people's things, and piles of wet clothes I had washed to go to the goodwill I cried out, "Lord, you know the plans I have for this room. I thought they were your plans, too. Why is it every time I feel you leading me somewhere, I feel like you put obstacles in my way?"
    I squished over the carpet to assess the damage and determine where the water was coming from. In the process of containing the leak, my son and I began saving what we could and moving it into a storage room up off the ground. We filled several large trash cans full of  water damaged items and hauled them down to the dumpster. Before I had even determined where the leak was coming from we had completely cleared out the room. Mopping up the water for the last time as the plumber installed a new water heater in the adjacent utility room, I looked at the room and smiled. It was completely empty, floors mopped, and ready to renovate.
   1. When was the last time Christ amazed you? How did it come about? What did it change about your or someone else's circumstance?

Day One: The Little Brother

THE LITTLE BROTHER

     My late husband was a gifted musician. It didn't take long after joining our fellowship for this fact to become well-known. I had to work on Sunday mornings so we had chosen this particular fellowship because it offered a Sunday evening worship service that we could attend together. Within two months I got the phone call, "Honey, I've been asked to help on the worship team. I know how important our worship time together is so I wanted to see what you thought of this first before I gave them my answer. The associate pastor told me they had been praying for a sound engineer and you know how much help they need with the sound." And so it began, "Who am I to stop you from being an answer to someone's prayer?" I said.
   My husband quickly became well-known in the church. He was given a budget and revamped the sound system in the sanctuary and put together a system in the children's church, he started teaching a class so others could learn how to run sound properly, he ran sound for Sunday morning services and Wednesday evening's youth group, and even began playing guitar with the worship team on Sunday mornings. I on the other hand dropped in on Sunday evenings for worship, sitting alone in the sanctuary and occassionally being introduced, "This is Mike's wife." Soon everyone knew who Mike's wife was but only a few knew my name.
     3. How have you been identifiedy by your relationship with others? In what ways has this limited you and in what ways has this been a blessing?   

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