Every good gift bestowed,
every perfect gift received
comes to us from above,
courtesy of the Father of lights.
He is consistent.
He won’t change His mind or play tricks in the shadows.
We have a special role in His plan.
He calls us to life by His message of truth
so that we will show the rest of His creatures
His goodness and love.
(James 1:16-18 The Voice)
Pomegranate Flowers
Praise be to the Lord, to God our Savior,
who daily bears our burdens.
Our God is a God who saves;
from the Sovereign Lord comes escape from death.
Surely God will crush the heads of his enemies,
the hairy crowns of those who go on in their sins.
Your procession, God, has come into view,
the procession of my God and King into the sanctuary.
In front are the singers, after them the musicians. (Psalm 68:19-21, 24-25)
(Elisha said) But now bring me a musician.” And when the musician played, the hand of the Lord came upon him. And he said, “Thus says the Lord, ‘I will make this dry stream bed full of pools.’ (2 Kings 3:15-16)
Who would place musicians at the front of an army? Who would react to a national threat with the command, “Bring me a musician?”
We were walking from the Mount of Olives, past the Garden of Gethsemane, down through the valley of tombs and back up the hill toward the other side where Caiaphas’ house has been recently excavated and inside the walls where the Roman pavement of the soldiers quarters still exists below a convent. It was very hot -at least to a Canadian who had been driving through a snow storm only a week before.
At the bottom, in the shade of an ancient tomb surrounded by hundreds of graves, literally in the valley of the shadow of death, this young man sat and played his instrument. The others in our group went on to explore more tombs, but I stopped and sat on a low stool by his feet and listened. The music was foreign to my ears. I didn’t understand the structure or the harmony, but it soothed my soul.
I had once a dream that a hotel or place of refuge that we were preparing was inundated with new guests. At the front of the crowd, looking for a place to stay, were musicians of every sort. Some of them had guitars and we put them in gun cabinets while they rested. To me this spoke of the power of music in fighting the evil one.
When our son-in-love was walking through his own valley of the shadow of death on Good Friday, when doctors doubted he would survive, his faithful friends brought their guitars and sat in the waiting room quietly strumming and singing songs of praise to the great healer. Singing seems like an odd activity at such a time, but they understood the importance of warring with their instruments and with their songs.
There is something about music that by-passes our personal defence systems. It can get by the heart/brain barrier.
I had a singing student whose relationship had just broken up. She assured me, quite calmly, that she was fine, that it was a logical time to end it and she was ready to move on. We happened o be working on the song, “On My Own” from Les Miserables. She didn’t make it two lines into the song before the floodgates of tears opened. Music therapy works on the theory that words delivered via music can get past our intellectual defences and help us heal.
There is something about music that allows us to hear more than just the music. On that day in Jerusalem I felt jostled by crowds, harassed by vendors, impatiently tolerated by folk in religious garbs of many types, rushed by tour guides, dismayed by the lack of respect warring factions showed for each other and my feet and sun-burned neck hurt. Although our tour director carefully planned our itinerary to avoid the worst crowds there was no getting around this one if we wanted to see where Jesus spent so many critical hours. It was in the shade of a tomb, in the valley of the shadow of death, away from the crowds as I listened to a simple instrument played by a nameless man, that I heard my heavenly Father. He said simply, “Cease striving and know that I am God. It is finished. Rest in my love.”
The psalmist, David, understood. We war from a position of rest, in the valley of the shadow of death. That is where the feast is kept.
Beit El/Bethel
The Byzantines left a structure to mark the spot in the field where Jacob/Israel is said to have had his dream of an open heaven -or at least somewhere in this area that looks like an ordinary gently sloped hillside. (Dare I say I was somewhat relieved by the absence of a huge edifice or gift shop?)
Dreams are significant enough to be mentioned at least 121 times in the Bible. I’ve learned to pay attention.
Have you had a significant dream that changed your life?
Jacob left Beersheba and went toward Haran. And he came to a certain place and stayed there that night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place to sleep. And he dreamed, and behold, there was a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven. And behold,the angels of God were ascending and descending on it! And behold, the Lord stood above it and said, “I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac. The land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring. Your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south, and in you and your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed. Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land. For I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.” And he was afraid and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”
So early in the morning Jacob took the stone that he had put under his head and set it up for a pillar and poured oil on the top of it. He called the name of that place Bethel. (Genesis 28)
Sun dial
And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work. (2 Corinthians 9:8)
Tree Full of Life
Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but when the desire is fulfilled, it is a tree of life. Proverbs 13:12
New Life
I stood outside the door of our son-in-love’s room and listened to the most beautiful sounds I have ever heard yesterday.
“Look at me, Daddy! Look at me!”
“I love you, Daddy!”
“Tickle me again, Daddy!”
Then laughter and fake groaning and the sounds of a daddy and his little ones wrestling.
Later I watched as all three little ones cuddled their daddy and watched a movie. The baby was smiling in his lap, the two-year old flopped over daddy’s shoulders and the four-year old leaned on his chest and asked her hundreds of questions.
I watched mommy and daddy and the three little ones share a dinner of steak and chocolate -except for baby, of course.
I sat and talked with “John” about the journey we have been through since March 23. When I told him the stories of how people who had never prayed much were woken in the night with a burden to pray, of how people who had never seen God heal were following every report on Facebook, of how some were hearing the voice of God for the first time, of how a student’s mother told my daughter-in-law that she was receiving prayer updates from her mother in Vegreville who was receiving them from someone up there who knew the mother-in-law of this guy, of how friends stood by his bed and filled the waiting room day and night , of how his mother and I took turns holding each other up, of how his wonderful, quiet father was a bulwark of faith who said in his delightful accent, “We will have no negative words here. We will only speak truth,”, of how his father-in-law wept as he cried out to God, of how his wife gave thanks in the middle of the worst days of her life and was a beacon of hope to everyone else herself, of how hospital staff from other wards found excuses to come by ICU to see what was happening, of how my friend told me she had renewed faith to pray for her own sons, of how the church is waking to come together, to pray together for healing of this land….
He cried. He cried tears of sorrow for what his family and friends endured and of joy for the kindness of strangers and for what God has done.
He said, “He didn’t have to do it. I could have died, and I would have been okay to go to be with him, but God healed me. He has given more years to be with my wife and my children. I have always loved Jesus, but now there is something much deeper.”
“Do you know how much of your effort, how many of your outstanding natural talents and abilities God used to do this thing?” I asked him. “Nothing! None. Not a thing. Boy, you were the most helpless a man could be. You couldn’t even breathe on your own. You had no blood pressure without a constant drip of medication. You had no kidney function without a big machine to clean your blood. You couldn’t move without a nurse doing it for you. You couldn’t say one charming, intelligent thing. You couldn’t move a single athletic muscle. You even needed other people to give up their own blood to replace yours. And let me tell you, the handsome thing wasn’t working for you much in those days either -and when you finally opened your eyes they weren’t even going the same direction. God used other people in the process, but none of this came about by a single effort of yours. Not one.”
He cried some more. “There is something much, much deeper about God’s love that I know now that I just can’t explain,” he said softly.
Then we received a text message from someone who had been speaking to the physician who headed the large skilled team of specialists who treated “John.”
“You know it’s only by a miracle that guy survived,” he told him candidly.
We know.
So this is love. This is what a miracle feels like. He still has rehab work to do, but in the meantime, we laugh, we cry, we praise God. Mommy and Daddy and the kids cuddle together and we pass the popcorn while we watch a movie.
The words of an old song taken from Isaiah come to me as I write this in the early morning hours before the baby wakes up:
He has surely borne our sorrow
He has taken the sin debt away
He was bruised for our iniquities
And by His stripes we are healed today.
Love is louder.
Because He First Loved Us
Related post:
http://charispsallo.wordpress.com/2013/03/28/love-is-louder/
It’s a commandment.
Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem
While we were in Israel I was very aware of the presence of guns and the need to be vigilant against sudden violence. In the place where we live a lot of people own hunting rifles which are kept carefully locked up outside of hunting season, but I don’t know anyone who carries a weapon designed to shoot people, other than police. We don’t see many soldiers in these parts, and certainly we don’t see teenagers in shorts and flip-flops patrolling the community with automatic weapons slung over their shoulders like we saw at a kibbutz.
I don’t live in a place with concrete walls and barbed wire and big red signs in three languages that forbid other ethnicities from entering an area with threats to their lives if they use that road. I don’t know what it’s like to find out, like our guide did the day before he showed us around the site of the temple where Samuel was a boy, that my teenage daughter was standing next to a neighbour at the bus stop when someone passing by suddenly turned and stabbed him to death. The unarmed thirty-year old father of five died in front of her simply for his ethnicity. She was seeing a counselor at school the next day while some websites extolled the killer as a hero. I don’t know what it’s like to be a Christian living in Bethlehem, like another one of our guides, caught in the crossfire between warring factions and being worried about how to feed and protect my family. I don’t know what it is like to stand in the hot sun for hours waiting for someone to give approval that will allow me to simply go to my job. I don’t pretend to have any comprehension of the depth of the complexities of the conflict.
All I know is that I am told to pray for the peace of Jerusalem. So I do.
So many people say there is no solution. So few are asking God for His solution -and I do believe He has one. His ways are not our ways and our ways are not His ways. When we come to the end of our own efforts and humbly pray I do believe He will answer. He has a plan for eternal peace. He has a plan to heal the land.
