Babies and Bathwater

If anyone ever asked me, no one ever has, but if anyone ever asked me why I believe the things I believe, my first and simplest answer would be:

Because it’s the truth.

And you have to believe the truth.

I have heard the voice of God, I have seen His work. I have felt the presence of Jesus, and I have been filled with the Spirit.



But this answer isn’t very helpful when someone comes to you with a very specific question.

A girl I knew once asked if someone who had committed suicide was in Heaven. The other people we were sitting with when she asked this question began to discuss it.

But I said, “I don’t think it’s a valid question.” This, of course, was no help to her at all.

Whether or not someone goes to Heaven, whatever the circumstances, is entirely between that person and God. I don’t think we are sophisticated enough to calculate what behavior is good enough or bad enough to negate the spiritual act of accepting Jesus as your Savior. If I say “Maybe there is no act, maybe everyone who accepts Jesus goes to Heaven, no matter what they do afterward.” Then you could say “But what about…” and list a whole zoology of crimes, each more horrid than the last. What about that guy? What about that guy?

I don‘t know.

And neither does anyone else.

But that answer didn‘t help this girl. She was in the throes of drug addiction, and she was having trouble accepting that just believing was enough, and she needed concrete answers and lists and do and don‘t and calculations.

And I, with my stripped down, minimalist view of Christianity, was not going to be able to help her.

There are times of course, when we need to have good answers, to have them readily at hand. You get in a discussion with someone who is trying to throw the baby out with the bathwater, who is saying I don’t believe in God because His church is full of corruption, His leaders are greedy money grubbers and all the Christians I know are hypocritical, tied up in knots, miserable, mean, stupid, condescending and/or misguided.

Saying you don’t believe in God because of the Church or the actions of Christians is like saying you don’t believe in the Little Prince because it was written in French and you don’t read French. Or you don’t believe in Clydesdales because they’re too big to be saddle horses.

The Little Prince is real. Clydesdales are real. God is real. And whether you like Him or not, this is the God we have.

You can get a translation of the Little Prince. Or you can learn to read French. And you can saddle a Clydesdale. They’re just better at being draft horses.

I understand the logic of “If the people who follow God can do this terrible thing in His Name, then He must not be much of a God, and why would I want to be part of that.“ But you can have a one on one relationship with God that doesn’t have anything to do with churches or the activities of any other Christian. Just you and God.



When you are with God, when you know Him well, you understand that there are things that happen that you just have to accept, that you just have to go with and know that you will not receive an answer right now. But if you haven’t reached that point in your relationship with God, then it’s a little harder. “You just have to have faith” is not an answer for someone who doesn’t see it. For them, it sounds like a cop out.

If you choose not the believe in God, because you choose not to believe in Him, there is nothing I can say or do to change that.

I don’t give you the kind of peace that the world gives. John 14:27 [God's Word]

Occam's Razor and All

In the 80’s, I read an article about British archaeologists who had unearthed several Stone Age villages. Based on the foundations of the buildings left behind, they believed they knew how the villages were laid out and how the homes were designed. They knew where the hearths and the cooking areas were. They knew where the families slept.

One thing they couldn’t explain was a dip which occurred just inside the front door of every dwelling. They imagined all sorts of things, including a theory that the area was used for some kind of ritual used to greet the father figure when he returned home.

Eventually they built a Stone Age village, based on these excavations. They found families to live in them. They gave them the same kind of uncomfortable looking clothing that the Stone Age people had worn, the same kind of tools and farming implements and the same sort of animals, and left these families to live a Stone Age life.

After many months, the archaeologists returned and found the families thriving. Things were going really well. And much to their surprise, they found inside the front door of each dwelling a dip just like in the original villages. They were thrilled. They even imagined for one brief moment that their experiment had been so successful that the modern families had started practicing Stone Age rituals.

So they asked, what was the dip inside the front door?

And the new Stone Age families shrugged and said, “That’s where the chickens take a dust bath.”

I bring this up because I think we have a tendency sometimes to do the same kind of thing with our religious life. We take a small thing, a verse, a word mentioned and turn it into something more powerful than it is. We make doctrine out of one vague reference. We define sin by half a verse. We get all involved in words and puns and the “true” meaning of things. We play little number games. We make up rules and we decide who belongs and who doesn’t.

But none of that is important to our relationship to God. Our religious life should be defined by our relationship with God and very little else.



I like to operate in a sort of an Occam’s Razor version of religion. If you haven’t seen the movie Contact, Occam’s Razor is the scientific principal which says that if you have several hypotheses to a certain problem, the simplest one is probably the correct one. That chicken dust baths are more likely to be true than patron welcome home rituals.

My relationship with God, my religion, if you will, works best when it is as simple and pure as possible.



I know people who have taken Matthew 6:6 literally.

But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret, and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.

I usually use the Revised Standard Bible or God‘s Word, but for this verse, I had to use the King James version, so it would contain the word Closet.

They go home and build a prayer closet. Verses 1 through 5 are talking about not doing things just for show. 6:1 Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no regard from your Father in heaven. I don’t think that’s saying hide your piety, but don’t do it for show only.

I do not believe that 6:6 is saying go home and build a closet and sit in it to pray. For one thing, you should be praying all day long. But then again, I do a lot of praying in the shower. I am alone and usually undistracted and it’s quiet there. So I’ve sort of got my own prayer closet, which I can use if I want to.

I was recently accused of being an antichrist. Not the Antichrist. Not the big one. Just one of the ones spoken of in 1 John 2:18, As you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come. The finger wasn’t pointed at me, but the definition the man speaking gave of an antichrist was me.

He said that the antichrists walking among us are the ACLU and people who are liberal, progressive and broad minded. That’s me. Not the ACLU but the liberal, progressive, broad minded part. I also include tolerant and accepting.

At first I was very insulted. And then I thought, But I am not the Antichrist, or even an antichrist. And I know I am not because I talk to God, and He is happy with what I am doing. He tells me so.

I think that this man is not listening to God when he says these things, but listening to his own fears. I‘ve heard several people stand in pulpits and espouse ideas that are their own, particularly the preaching of politics, as if any idea they might have is divinely inspired.

I don‘t think God deals too much in specifics. We do. The Israelites surely did. They had whole books of them, Leviticus for one. I think God is more concerned with intent, with spirit, with the truth in your heart.

This fellow who called me the antichrist said we antichrists were watering down the church. And maybe from a certain perspective, Occum Razor and all considered, I am. And maybe that‘s uncomfortable for him. No prayer closets, no Us vs. Them, no ritual, no list of sins. Maybe he and others like him cannot operate that way. And that‘s okay.

I cannot operate his way. I like to think it’s because I am more highly evolved, but that’s probably just my intellectual ego.



We are all different and we have different needs, and God knows that.

God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. 1 John 4:16

Values

When I was writing these blogs earlier this year, I got to the twelfth one, and I wanted it to be bigger because it was the twelfth. So I wrote about the New Covenant. But I wasn’t happy with it. So I rewrote it, and I still wasn’t happy with it. So I rewrote it. And I realized that I wasn’t going to be happy with it, because it was preachy, and until I made it not preachy, I was going to be unhappy.

The last thing I want this to become is a platform for anything.

But a lot of talk has been going on about standing up for Christian Values, and without getting into anything too specific, I want to say this:

Jesus gave us two commandments. Love God with all your heart and all your might, and Love each other. So anything you do, in the name of the Lord, needs to be rooted in love.

Judging others, excluding people you don’t approve of, those don’t sound like loving things to me.

And you’re certainly not going to bring anyone to Christ by excluding them.

If you have loved me, you will keep my commandments. John 14:15

When we are defining our Christian Values, we need to be sure that we are not choosing a position first and then trying to back it up with Bible. We need to be sure that the voice that is moving us is the Voice of the Lord, and not the voice we want to hear.

We should also remember that at one time in this country, good Christian people forbade interracial marriage, and they used Bible verses to support. We should remember that there were good Christian white men in this country who tried to exterminate the Native Americans, and they used the Bible to justify that.

 In vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines. Matthew 15:9

Paul talks about doing things to honor God. He talks specifically about vegetarians, and he says those of us who don‘t believe in being a vegetarian should respect people who do if they are doing so to honor God. And you could make the argument from that that if someone says Well, I am not hiring certain people because I am honoring God, then we have to respect that. And that would be a reasonable argument.

Except, I believe, Jesus’ commandment to love each other should supersede that, and excluding people is not loving them.



And one more thought:

Where would Jesus be if He were here today?

Ministering at a homeless shelter or an AIDS hospice. Breaking loaves and fishes for neglected children. Talking peace and love to gang members.

Any chance He’d be eating chicken at a rich guy’s house?

Nah.

One Day the Pieces Fit

I do jigsaw puzzles. I admit it, I’m a nerd.

And I swear every time I open a puzzle, there is one piece that I am certain does not belong in this puzzle. I have this elaborate picture in my mind of someone walking through the puzzle factory and finding a piece lying on the ground. They pick it up and drop it into the closest puzzle box on the conveyor belt, but of course, it doesn’t go in that puzzle, and I have it. And then I work some more and I realize that that isn’t a man’s hat, it’s the front of this car right here.

Sometimes, the Bible is like that puzzle piece. You read a verse or you hear a story, and it just doesn’t make sense, and then one day, you hear it again, and you go, Oh, yeah.

We had left Hot Springs and gone back to Lone Star even though we didn’t have jobs lined up at Lone Star because we wanted to be near our families. We found jobs but they weren’t good jobs, and they didn’t pay much, and then, as I mentioned before, I got hurt.

I never handle being unemployed well. Not having money is hard enough, not being able to contribute to the family, and the boredom does me in. This time it was even worse. It’s amazing how much you can’t do without your right middle finger. I couldn’t even wash dishes. I wasn’t only bored, I felt completely useless.

On top of all that, there was something wrong with my car, and when I had money, I couldn’t find a mechanic who could figure it out. Now I didn’t have any money, and the car was just getting worse and worse and now I had to drive to Dallas for weekly visits to the doctor. And I hate driving a car when I’m not altogether sure it’s going to arrive at our destination.

I was not handling the whole situation well. I wasn’t sleeping, I was short tempered and grumpy. I was not being the person I wanted to be.

I did make it to Chapel a few times before the money ran out, and one week Chaplain Sam talked about the story of Caleb and Joshua and the Land of Canaan (Numbers Chap 13 & 14). If I had heard this story before, it had been a long time, and I’m sure I never sat down and examined it. Chaplain Sam’s main point was that we need to be brave and step up and take the things that God offers us.

But I saw something else. This seems to happen to me a lot. I looked at the statement We can’t go over there, there are Giants there.

God knew about the grapes so heavy they had to be carried on a pole. He knew about the pomegranates and the figs. But He also knew, when He told them He was giving them this land, that there was Giants there. He knew about the Giants, and He knew they could take the land anyway.

So when I’m feeling really discouraged, thinking things like maybe I don’t belong in horse racing. Maybe I am too old, too weak, too female, I have to remember that God knew all of this about me when He led me there. He knew about the Giants I would be meeting along the way, and He led me here anyway.

When Paul was going about doing good, some people got so wrapped up in his healing that they started taking things, like the rags he wiped his face with and using these to perform miracles of their own. There were seven priest brothers who were particularly well known for it.

One day they were asked to knock the demons out of a guy, and they were doing their act, and the demon came out and said “I know God, and I’m acquainted with Paul, but who are you?” (Acts 19:11-15)

When I heard that the other day, in Bible Study, I almost slapped the table. But I thought it would disturb the others so I restrained myself. The Chaplain wanted to talk about using items like magic, but what I heard was Who are you?

If you don’t have a personal relationship with God, you can wave all the magic rags in the world. You can sing the songs and say the words and shake the hands and do all the right things. But if the heart is not there, if God is not directing your path, if God doesn’t know your personally, there is no act you can perform that will mean a thing.

Do not be afraid. Just believe. Mark 5:36 [God's Word]

"For Best Results..."

Elijah and one of his pupils were on a journey. They would have to walk three days to reach their destination.

The first night they stopped at the home of a poor man and asked if they could stay in his barn for the night. The man said “Oh no, come and make a bed by the fire in my house.” He and his wife showed them great kindness, shared their dinner and made sure they had everything they needed to be comfortable for the night.

In the morning, when they rose, they found the man and his wife quite distraught. Their only milk cow had died during the night. This cow has been an excellent producer and provided them with not only milk for their own needs, but enough to sell and trade.

As Elijah and his pupil left the house, Elijah said “God is so good, He’s so good,” and the pupil said, “How can you say that? They lost their cow. They need that cow.”

“Ah,” said Elijah, “But the Angel of Death who visited the house last night was supposed to take the wife. But because they were kind to us, he only took the cow.”

The next night they stopped for the night at a rich man’s house. They asked if they could stay in a barn or outbuilding, but the rich man sent his foreman to say that they were not allowed in any of the buildings. He said they could camp by a wall that had fallen down.

When they went to the place he indicated, they found a bunch of trees waiting to be planted. The gardener came by and said that he was going to plant them by the broken wall, but he had men come and move them away, and he would plant them further down.

In the morning when they rose, cold and hungry, they heard a great hubbub. The gardener had started digging holes for the trees and found a chest of silver coins and golden goblets. The rich man came out and declared the treasure was his and took it away.

When they were back on the road, Elijah said “Oh, God is so just. He’s so just.” And the pupil said “How can you say that? The poor man loses his cow, and the rich man who was rude to us gets more treasure.”

“Ah,” said Elijah, “But if the gardener had planted the trees in the place where we camped, he would have found a bigger treasure. A chest of gold coins and jewels.”

I was recently injured. Nothing serious, but enough that I got to ride in an ambulance, racked up $6,000 in medical bills and I couldn’t work. Things got difficult for us, but they were never intolerable. We were staying with my mother, and I felt bad because we could not contribute anything to her household, but we had a place to stay, and we made enough to get by. A friend paid me a little to tutor his pre-schooler, which more important than the money, allowed me to spend time with a little person I really love and kept me somewhat occupied.

I thought about this story of Elijah many times. Because I try to place myself in the Lord’s hands, I did not mourn my fate, did not question why me, why this, why now. I knew that because the Lord watches out for me, the outcome could have been much worse.

Maybe my small injury protected someone else from a larger injury. Or maybe the Lord just wanted me out of the barn, out of that situation and knowing me, He knew that I wouldn’t give up until I was forced out.

But because I put myself in the Lord’s hands, I know that whatever the reason, it was for my own good. It was the right thing.



Here’s a more concrete example.

We wanted to buy an RV. Found the perfect one for a reasonable price, and we had money to put down. At the time, I was working at a desk job, but we knew it would be ending, and I would be going back to horseracing. So an RV would be a perfect home for us.

So I was doing the whole Speak as if it were Already True Thing. Going forward in faith that the RV was already ours.

And we didn’t get the RV. A problem with my credit. No RV.

It was like a door slammed in my face. I didn’t know what to do, how to go forward.

And then a few weeks later, I got laid off, sooner than we thought it was going to happen. And I did go back to horseracing, but I worked four weeks for a woman who never paid me and it took more than a month after that to find another job.

So if we had gotten the RV, we wouldn’t have been able to pay for it right off the bat. We wound up needing the money we had for the down payment.

I am not one of those people who say that everything happens for a reason or that things always work out for the best. There are lots of people who can truthfully say that their story did not work out for the best. But I do believe that if you put yourself in the Lord’s hands and you make choices based on your beliefs and with faith, then the results, whatever they are, are the best results.

For we walk by faith, not by sight. 2 Corinthians 5:7

The New Covenant

The good thing about Christianity is that it will meet you where you are. If you are new and confused and struggling, Christ accepts you. You don’t have to pass a test or meet a minimum requirement. Just believe and Christ will meet you where you are and bring you in.

The bad thing about Christianity is that it will meet you where you are. If you are a mean spirited, thin skinned bigot, you can be a Christian, you can become part of Christ’s church and remain a mean spirited, thin skinned bigot. You can even pick the Bible apart and justify being a mean spirited, thin skinned bigoted Christian, but hopefully, as you become a better and better Christian, you also become a better and better person.

The goal, the focus of my spiritual life is to lead a completely spiritual life. I try to avoid ritual and Legalism and I pay no attention to the mythology, if you will, of our religion. Can I achieve a completely spiritual life? Probably not until I die.

There’s a guy in one of the churches I attend who likes to stand up every time we pray. He’s the only one. There he is standing up, while the rest of us are sitting down. I know this because I don’t bow my head.

Paul tells us in Romans that we are to accept our differences. He talks about vegetarians and about Holy Days specifically. What he says is that if someone does something, whether it’s abstaining from a food or dressing a certain way or standing up when they pray, and they do it in order to honor God, then we are to accept it because they are honoring God.

Could you smoke marijuana and say you are doing it to honor God? I suppose you could. If you could honestly support it and sincerely believe it, not just use God as an excuse to do what you want to do. We get back to the whole new hat in church thing. If you’re standing up during prayer just so everyone can see how devout you are, and I‘m not saying that this guy is, then no, you’re not honoring God.

I’ve told you about saying Thank you Lord when I get the bridle on a horse. A little ritual. When I say a formal prayer, I end it with In Jesus’ Name I Pray. I don’t believe it’s necessary, but I do it. I’ve heard people say that God doesn’t hear a prayer without those words, but I don’t believe that, because when you are continually in prayer, talking to God all day long, there‘s no beginning, no ending, no time to throw that phrase in there, and yet God hears those prayers. I spend next to no time in the Old Testament and I never look at Revelations. Do not debate whether there will be marriage in Heaven, how big our mansions will be or if suicides will be there. Those things hold no interest for me.

That is not to say that people who do those things are wrong. There are very good Christian people who do these things and cause no harm. But. I think we need to be sure that those things don’t become the focus, that the ritual or the details or the arguments or the history don’t become more important than our relationship with God.

I, personally, am trying to take advantage of being a Christian in the Age of Grace. I am very happy to be a Christian of the New Covenant.

The New Covenant was a promise written out in the Old Testament Book of Jeremiah and fulfilled by the birth, the life and the death of Jesus Christ.

The New Covenant is a wonderful thing. Whole books could be written about it and probably have been. I particularly like verse 10 which says that the law will be put in our minds and written on our hearts.

The New Covenant removes us from Judaic Law. From the Law of Moses. You can forget about most of Leviticus. We no longer have to slaughter a dove and enter the temple through a maze to speak to God. It’s not okay to burn a witch or to own a slave, even if he’s a foreigner and you’re nice to him.

And I know this is where I am going to lose some of you, there is no prohibition against homosexuality. How can I say that when I know there are whole ministries devoted to turning people around. Because first of all, I know a lot of Christian gay people who say that God accepts them just the way they are. Whether or not God condemns them is between them and God. And Secondly, because the prohibition against homosexuality is Jewish Law, is Mosaic Law and we do not live by Mosaic Law.

Now, I understand why someone would not believe that. Jesus said that He was not putting aside or changing the Law. And you can ask how I can ignore that. I don’t ignore it, but I also have to ask the question when did He say it, who was He talking to, and how did His death, the rending of the veil change that statement. I think it changed it quite a lot.

Paul talks about leaving Judaism behind when he talks about circumcision in Galatians. He takes it to an extreme, but what he‘s basically saying that if you‘re going to be Jewish, be Jewish. But if you‘re going to be Christian, you need to walk away from Jewish tradition.

Which kind of throws out the entire Messianic Jewish church.

And yet, we know that there are good Christians doing God‘s work in the Messianic Jewish church.

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will establish a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah; not like the covenant that I made with their ancestors, on the day when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt; for they did not continue in my covenant, and so I had no concern for them, says the Lord.

This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my laws in their minds and write them on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall not teach one another or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, of the least of them to the greatest. For I will be merciful toward their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more.

Hebrews 8:8-12

Healed By Faith

My nephew recently loaned me a book, Jesus, A Revolutionary Biography by John Dominic Crossan, which is supposed to be a revisiting of the life of Christ through a modern eye, or something like that. I read the back of the cover, and I read the flap and I read part of the intro, and I was getting kind of uncomfortable with the general direction it seemed to be taking. So I went to the index and I found a passage about one of the healing miracles.

The story I found was the healing of a leper. The author went into an excellent explanation of why lepers were so worrisome to the Jews at that time. That helped a lot. And then he went on to describe the act of Jesus telling the man, the leper that he was now clean. And the author said something like, “Obviously, He didn’t actually heal this man,” and then he turned himself inside out trying to explain how Jesus could say to the guy Go now, you are clean, when He hadn’t actually healed him and he wasn't actually clean.

And I gave the book back to my nephew.

I think there is a tendency among some people to try to intellectualize religious belief, to try to take the emotion and the hocus pocus out of it. But I think, personally, that without those things, scary as they might be, you lose the essence, the true power of the belief.

A friend of mine told me once that when she was young, she went to church with the neighbors. She had not been raised in a Christian household, she was just going with the neighbors to be going, and that when they told her about God, in her young mind, God was just a man. She said that if she had tried to understand God as anything more, at that point, she would not have been able to accept it.

So I am not going to say that Mr. Crossan has to believe the same thing that I do. Or that his belief is less than mine. The good thing about Christianity is that it will meet you where you are. I am just going to say that I find his version of Jesus to be severely lacking, and I am not going to read his book.

I touched on faith healing several weeks ago, when I talked about the laying on of hands on a horse with a suspected slab fracture, and how I had not been raised to believe in faith healing. My nephew, same nephew, made a comment that there are a lot of charlatans out there saying they are faith healers.

I accept that. I recognize the whole tent show, here to get your money, “Be Healed!” show. That’s not the kind of faith healing I want to talk about.

There are several times in the Bible when Jesus healed a person. Sometimes He laid hands on them, sometimes He healed them long distance through another party. Frequently He said Don’t tell anybody about this. And the first thing they did was run off and tell everybody they knew.

My favorite one of these stories is the Bleeding Woman. I have heard a couple of very good sermons on this story, you can look at it from several different angles.

This is the one where the crowd gathers around Him, and there is one woman in the crowd who has had some kind of illness which caused her to bleed for years. She said If I can just touch His clothing, I will be healed. So she fights her way through the crowd, reaches out and touches his cloak.

And He stops. Because He felt her. This part gives me chills. This crowd is pressing Him, grabbing at Him from all sides, and He feels her touch, and He stops.

And He says to her, Woman, your faith has healed you.

Anyway, in almost every instance, He says Your faith has healed you.

“Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish." And her daughter was healed instantly. -- Matthew 15:28

He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.” Mark 5:34.

Jesus said to him, “Go; your faith has made you well.” Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way. Mark 10:52

I believe that faith healing works, because I believe that faith healing works. The important thing is my belief, my acceptance that Jesus meant it when He said “Very Truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father.” John 14:12.

At the track, we put horses on mechanical wheels, which make them walk in a circle, so they can get a little exercise or be cooled out after working. The wheel mechanism is loose enough that if they decide to stand still, it will stop, but also if they decide to run, they can do that too. The running is really not good. You can put four of them at a time on the wheel, and if one starts running, they all have to run, and someone could easily get hurt.

So one day they started running. And we were standing out there, yelling whoa and waving hats at them, and they didn’t care. They were just running. And I thought because of some of the discussions we had had in church, that if I just had enough faith, if I just knew the right word to say, I could stop those horses. So I stepped forward, put up my hands, and I yelled “Calmness”. And they stopped and looked at me, like Yes, and what can we do for you.


When I put my hands up, when I said that word, I felt the power of the Lord move through me. When I prayed for the blood to stop running in my nephew’s head (different nephew) after his stroke, when I took authority over it in the name of Jesus and stated that the blood would stop, I felt the power of the Lord make it so.


I didn’t heal anyone. I didn’t stop that wheel. My faith in the power of the Lord did it.

Jesus said to him, “If you are able! -- All things can be done for the one who believes.” Mark 9:23

Two Short Stories

Here are two stories. One is how the Lord gave Leonard a tuxedo. And the other is how God locked a door for me.

I try to remember this story when things are not going as planned. When I don’t have a job, or I don’t know what’s coming next, or when I am waiting for something to happen and I want it to happen on my timetable, not God‘s.



I had a friend who went to college in Tahlequah, Oklahoma when the school there was still Northeastern State College. She was in a sorority and she lived on a sorority floor of the dorm. If there weren’t enough girls who wanted to live on the dorm floor, they had to let other people live there. At the time, many of her sorority sisters were married and they didn’t live in the dorm, so some girls they didn‘t know well came to live on their floor.

My friend makes friends with one of the girl because they liked to play music together.

But this girl, and I’m sorry I don’t remember her name but let‘s call her Leslie just to make things easy, was what my friend considered a fanatic Christian. She said that if you gave Leslie a cookie she didn’t say Thank you, she said Praise the Lord.

Anyway, there was a dance on campus, and someone asked Leslie if she was going. She had a boyfriend named Leonard, and she said If the Lord gives Leonard a tuxedo. Well, everyone waited until she left the room and laughed their heads off. Oh, yeah, sure, God’s going to give Leonard a tuxedo.

Well, the afternoon of the dance, Leonard was sitting in his dorm room, and there was a knock on the door, and Leonard goes to the door, and there is one of his frat brother standing there with a tuxedo in his hand.

This boy’s mother had surprised him by purchasing a tuxedo and delivering it to him. But this boy had already rented and picked up his tuxedo for the dance. He and Leonard were about the same size, and he knew Leonard needed a tuxedo.

The Lord gave Leonard a tuxedo.

Who buys a tuxedo as a surprise gift? Some woman who probably doesn’t even realize that she is listening to God.

This story reaffirms to me that God is an active partner in my life.

We were working at Lone Star Park, but we were living at my mother’s house, which is about thirty minutes away. My husband’s boss got us a room, because there were days when one or the other of us needed to be there either all day or late at night. We didn’t move a whole lot in, just an air mattress and a little fridge and a microwave. And since there was room for it, my husband had stored some old stereo equipment in the room.

I used the room a lot more than my husband did. We’re in Texas in June and July, it’s really hot. So I was using the room frequently to take a shower, take a nap, just cool off, have lunch before heading home or running back to the barn, and I had accumulated a lot of extra clothes and a couple of pairs of shoes, and I decided it was time to cart a bunch of it home.

So I walked out of the room with my purse and a bag on one shoulder, another bag on the other shoulder, a pair of shoes in my right hand and another bag in my left hand. I got to the car and realized I didn’t have my car keys out. So I put the shoes on the top of the car, dug the keys out of my pocket, opened the car and got in.

Drove home. Got out of the car in front of my mother’s house, and arranged everything in the same way. Purse and bag on one shoulder, bag on the other, pair of shoes in one hand, bag in the other. Went to the front door, and realized I had put the keys back in my pocket. So I am standing there trying to figure out how to get the keys out of my pocket, and I thought what did I do to get in the car. I put the shoes on top of the car. Oh. What did I do to lock the door of the room…..

I didn’t lock the door of the room.

The door didn’t have a door knob. It just had a dead bolt that you either had to lock with the key on the outside or flip the bolt on the inside. I tried all night long to convince myself that I had rearranged those bags somehow and locked that door, but I didn’t. I know I didn’t or the key wouldn’t have been back in my pocket.

What I was really worried about was someone getting in there and taking my husband’s stereo, and I was never going to hear the end of it.

So I prayed, I prayed really hard. “Please, Lord, don’t let anyone take that stereo. Lord, please, please, please.” And somewhere in there, I said “You know, You could just lock the door for me.”

So the next morning, I leave early. I drive like a crazy person, I park my car and I run to that door.

And…. you know what I’m going to say.

It was locked.

It’s just possible that God did that for me, so I could tell that story to you.

That is why I tell you to have faith that you have already received whatever you pray for, and it will be yours. Mark 11:24 [God's Word]

Two Short Thoughts

There’s a documentary about George Harrison airing on HBO right now. In one of the little snippets of interviews, George says that one of the things that drew him to Krsna Consciousness was that he wasn’t expected to believe in something until he had experienced it. But when he was a child being raised as a Catholic, he was expected to believe everything that was presented to him without question.

I had had the same thought years ago, when someone said that you had to believe something or the other because it was in the Bible. George expressed it much better than I did, and much better than I have paraphrased him here.

Frequently when we are discussing religious thought, we have to spend some time talking about semantics. You can accept and acknowledge all kinds of things because you read it, or someone explains it to you clearly. But when you believe it, you incorporate it into your thought process, it goes down into your core and becomes part of your operating system.

I wonder how many potential Christians we have run off by insisting that they accept every facet of our beliefs before they were ready.

How do you believe something you’re supposed to believe if you don’t believe it?

I’ve had a resurgence of interest in the Bible itself in the last couple of years. And I find things that I know I’ve read before, but not paid any attention to.

The parable of the seeds is one of those things.

In Matthew 13, Jesus talked about a farmer who planted seeds. Some wound up on the road and were eaten by birds. Some went on rocky ground. There was very little soil, and when the plants came up, they were scorched by the sun, because their roots were shallow. Some seeds were tossed into thorn bushes. This wasn‘t a very careful farmer. The thorn bushes choked them out. But some seeds were planted in good soil and they produced a hundred times more than was planted.

When He explained this parable, He said that the seeds on the road were the people who heard the word but did not understand it, and the devil came and snatched it away from them. The seeds in the rocky soil were people who heard the word and took it in while things were going well, but when times got hard, they gave up. The seeds in the thorn bushes were people who heard the word but let the world take priority. The seeds on the good ground, of course, are those of us who hear the word, accept it, take it, live it and pass it on.

I heard this and it really resonated with me. Because I knew people who fit into each category. And I thought if someone hears the word and just doesn’t understand it, how is that their fault. I knew someone like that. She went to church and she told me, she gave up, because it just wasn’t sinking in.

I have heard people say that there are some people who cannot be saved. I don’t think that’s true. I think there are people that I cannot reach. And maybe you cannot reach. But I don’t believe there are people that God would just write off.

She’s a reasonably intelligent person, not particularly emotionally mature, but she should be able to get it. And the only thing I could think was that she wasn’t ready to give up her own thoughts, give up what she was doing, and listen to what God was saying.


My friend Robbie was giving the sermon a couple of weeks ago, and while she was talking, I had a thought, and I have no idea why, because it didn’t have anything to do with what she was talking about.

I thought you can know all the Bible in the world, you can quote chapter and verse, know every detail we know about Jesus’ life and all kinds of things about the culture and times, but if it stays in the book, if it doesn’t come out and become part of your life, then it’s useless.

It’s easy to say Live by Faith, but do we? Do we make our decisions, determine our actions, knowing that God has our back? Do we pray about a problem we have, then put it aside and assume God is handling it? Or do we continue to worry and fret?

We were preparing to move again, go to the next track. I didn’t have a job, and we weren’t sure where we were going to be staying, and my mother asked me if I was afraid, and I said no, without even thinking about it.

And I realized that I wasn’t just saying No, I am not worried because I knew I was supposed to depend on the Lord, but because it had finally sunk in. God had my back. If I let Him handle it, we were going to be okay.

That doesn’t mean I don’t have problems. I have financial woes, frustrations at work, people I have difficulty getting along with, traffic snarls and things that I am just not happy about in my life. But I also have the peace that Jesus gives me, and if I depend upon it, if I allow myself, then I have nothing to fret over.



Three things are told to us: “Be still”, “My Peace I leave with you” and “Fear Not”. Someone counted, and Fear Not is repeated more than any other phrase in the Bible. Which means not only is it important, but we can count on it.

Do not fear, for I am with you, do not be afraid, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my victorious right hand.  Isaiah 41:10

Exactly That

It was suggested that all the Jews should leave the Vatican. When the Jews protested, the Pope agreed to have a debate, and if he won, the Jews left. If the Jewish debater won, they got to stay. Because of the language difference, they decided it would be a silent debate.

A council of Rabbis decided that their debater, for the sake of irony, should be a Jewish carpenter. And they chose a man named Mosche.

First the Pope “spoke”. He held up three fingers. Mosche held up one. The Pope waved his fingers in a circle around his head. Mosche pointed to the ground. The Pope brought out a wafer and a glass of wine. Mosche held out an apple.

The Pope threw up his hands. “I admit defeat. They can stay.”

The Cardinals surrounded the Pope and said “What happened?”

The Pope said, “I held up three fingers, to show him the Trinity. He showed me with one finger, that there is one Common God. I showed him God was all around us, and he showed me that God is right here. I explained that God absolves us of our sins, and he used the apple to remind me of original sin.”

When Mosche was asked for an explanation, he said, “I don’t know what happened. He told me we had three days to get out. I said not one of us is leaving. He said the whole city would be cleared, and I said we’re staying right here. Then he showed me his lunch, and I showed him mine.”

I was raised by a woman who would not let us say the word “fool”. My mother believes that that particular word was forbidden by Jesus. That He said Call no man a fool. She didn’t want us to call anyone names, but if you had to, you should say idiot or moron or dolt. But not fool.

I am not criticizing my mother. I’m just using her thought to illustrate a point. She had been raised with the same edict. Jesus said Call no man a fool. Even when I was young, something about that didn’t feel quite right to me. And many, many years later, I found the verse she was talking about.

Matthew 5: 22, Whoever calls another believer a fool will answer for it in hellfire. [God's Word]  You notice that my translation says “believer”. And if it’s read in the full context, I accepted that what He was saying was Do not criticize the belief system of another believer. That if the Christian sitting next to you said that the Sabbath was on Saturday, let him go with that. And maybe even if the guy on the other side of you said God was incarnated as a little blue boy, let him go with that.

But then I found so many other translations that said Brother instead of Believer. I found the Greek translation on biblos.com, and it is brother. Literally Brother, so then I thought that maybe my interpretation was wrong.

But then I realized that the key was what we interpret the word “brother” to be.

So what to do.

I looked at other verses, other messages, and more importantly, I talked to God about it, and in the end, at least for now, I have gone back to my original interpretation.

We cannot get too wrapped up in the specific words in the Bible.

A friend of mine gave a sermon, and it was a good sermon and she had an excellent point, but one of the keys to her sermon was that the word “heart” appeared in the three verses that she was tying together. But in my translation, the word “heart” only appeared in two.

This doesn’t negate her message. I think instead it proves mine. It’s the meaning of the verses that matter.

We get in trouble when we try to take everything too literally.

I had a disagreement with a man who thought it was very important that Genesis 2:7 read Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostril the breath of life; and the man became a living soul. My translation reads living being. He said My Bible was translated from the original Hebrew and Greek. I said So was mine.

I have heard someone say that we must take Genesis 3:20, The man named his wife Eve because she was the mother of all living things, literally. That we had to accept that Eve was the mother of all mankind. But it’s poppycock that the angels had children with earthly women.

We go three chapters further into Genesis and we find a couple of references to the angels laying with human women. Such as The Nephilim were on the earth in those days -- and also afterward --when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. Genesis 6:4.

So which is it? We’re taking things literally, or we’re not.

I could be accused of doing the same thing by ignoring the verses which say that women shouldn’t speak in church. I am not speaking in church but I am putting out a blog, using the internet as a pulpit.

Paul, who incidentally is the one who said women shouldn’t speak in church, settles the argument. He tells us in Second Timothy not to argue over small things and words.

I think we’re better off looking at things through the lens of study, of appreciating the difference in our times and theirs, in viewing the Bible as a source of learning, a guide to spiritual life. I think the key to all of these questions, literal or not, women speaking or sitting silently, is Prayer.

Read the verses, do the research, compare translations, talk to other believers. Or brothers. And pray and let God tell you what you should believe.

God has welcomed them. Who are you to pass judgment on servants of another? Romans 14:3-4 [English Standard Version]

We are the Church

This guy moves to the big city. He finds a nice church, and he goes the first week, and he wears the same clothes he wears to church back home. Nice pressed jeans, a good looking shirt, his best boots and a nice jacket. Bible in his hand, he goes in, sits down in a pew, and no one comes near him. They sit in other pews, no one shakes his hand.

He enjoys the service, and when it’s over, the preacher comes up to him, and says, ‘I see you’re new here.’ And the guy says, “Yes, sir, I am.” And the preacher says, “We’re glad to see you here, but I think before you come back, you need to ask the Lord what’s appropriate to wear to a church like this.”

The guy says, “Thank you, preacher, I will.”
Next week, same thing, he comes in his best clothes, looking about the same, and no one talks to him. Service is over, and the preacher says “Glad to see you’re back, but I thought you were going to talk to the Lord about how to dress.”

The guy says, “I did. I said ‘Lord, what’s the dress code for that church?’ And the Lord said, ‘I don’t know, I’ve never been there.’”

There’s a saying that if you go to Church, so everyone can see your new hat, that’s exactly what you will get. You will go to church, and everyone will admire your new hat, and a few people will probably wait until you leave and say that’s the stupidest looking hat they’ve ever seen in their life, and you will sit in the pew, and the music won’t touch you and the prayer won’t touch you and the sermon won’t be able to get past all the feathers and flowers wrapped around your head. But everyone will see your new hat.

There are some places where I go to church for the music, and I love the music. I sing all week. And there are some places I go to church for the fellowship. I have good friends there and I feel the love. I even go to a Krsna temple once in a while to dance and sing and I feel such joy there. There are only a few places I go to hear the message.

And none of these things are wrong. Well, the hat thing probably is.

I stumbled upon these verse recently. I don’t do a lot of work in the Old Testament, but I found this and I really liked it.

Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. Deuteronomy 6:4-9

Now I am not an Orthodox Jew, I do not wear a phylactery on my forehead or have a mezuzah on my door. I had to look those words up.

But figuratively, I want to have His name on my forehead, on my hands and on my door. I want people to recognize my visage, my face as Christian, I want my hands to do Christian work and I want my house to be a Christian house.

You know, most of the churches I attend are not churches at all. One is a dining room, another a rec room. But because we meet there, because we gather in fellowship there, because we pray together there, those places become holy, they become sanctified, and people who walk through those rooms receive blessing whether they know it or not.

You can make the place where you are, the area around your desk, your home, the same way.

When Jesus talks about the church, He means what I call the church with a small c. There were no buildings yet, no organization, just people who believed, who wanted to believe, who were ready to believe.

We are the church, no matter where we are, or what we’re wearing. We are the church and we become what people think of when they think of Christians. Both our fellow Christians and those we are trying to reach.

For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them. Matthew 18:20

In Conversation

In recent years, I have spent a lot of time in the Bible. I carry it to Church with me. I make notes. My copy of the God’s Word translation is a paperback, and I’ve got it highlighted in different colors and tabs marking passages all along the edges. So much that it’s hard to flip the pages. I go to Bible Study class, I listen to people talk about the Bible on the radio.


When I am looking for verses for these blogs, sometimes I just sit and read, and it very quickly becomes too much. I have to put it down. Too much to absorb, too much to think about. And passages that I just don’t understand.


The Bible is a big confusing, conflicting, complicated book. You would have to be a Bible Scholar for decades to resolve it. And there are people who are willing to do that and that’s very good for the rest of us. There is so much that can be misinterpreted, and you have to worry about which translation to use, and you have to remember to read the whole passage to get the proper context, and you have to remember where Jesus was in his ministry when He said each little thing. Was He just reforming the Church, was he saving the Gentiles too at this point, is the sacrifice in the plan, did the Pentecost change what He’s saying.


There comes a time when you have to put the Book down and bring yourself, your problems, your questions, to God. You bow your head, lift up your arms and say Fill me, Lord. Talk to me, Lord. Tell me what you want me to do.


There is nothing you can bring to the Lord, nothing you can surprise Him with, nothing you can ask Him for that He doesn’t already know you want. He knows what you need, He knows what you want and He knows what is best for you.


So you say, why should I pray. What can I say? I know sometimes my prayers become nothing but “whatever”. Not a sarcastic whatever. But a kind of devolved, there is this thing that I need, or that I think I need and that I want, and all of this You know, Lord, and You know what is best for me. You know where You want me to be. And I have put myself in Your hands so…whatever.


God knows everything that is in your mind. He also knows everything on the mind of the atheist.


What God wants is to have a conversation with you. Just a conversation.


It’s not magic. You can’t go to the Lord thinking, Now, if I say enough words of praise, and if I say enough words of thanksgiving, and if I word my request just right, then I will get what I want.


It’s easier to petition the Lord if you’re already in conversation with Him. Ideally, you are in conversation with the Lord all day, everyday.


I do little things throughout the day that help keep me mindful of the Lord. Sing the chorus of a song now and then. When I put a bridle on a horse, I always say Thank you, Lord. Maybe if you work with cow ponies, putting a bridle on is not that big a deal, but when you’re working with young race horses, sometimes it’s a ten minute fight, and sometimes after that fight, I think What am I thanking Him for, but it just kind of centers me back to that mindset.


It’s really easy to get busy and forget to send your thoughts to Him and just think I’ll do it at the end of the day. But I find that when I do that, when I go for the day without turning to Him, and then one day I realize oh my, it’s been four days since I had a conversation with the Lord.


Or even more, when I‘m getting involved with a church and there‘s been a lot of concentration on formal prayer and I‘ve neglected my daily conversation, and then when I get to it, when I sit down and open myself up to the Lord, and just say Hey, Here I am, He always tells me that He’s missed me.


The Lord talks to me. I know some people think I’m just nuts. That I’m talking to myself and saying it’s the Lord. But I know that the Lord talks to me, and I know that the reason He talks to me is simply that I am open to listening.


I was at Bible Study at Remington Park and before the Bible Study starts, they have a dinner. We didn’t have a music minister at the time, and the guy who had been filling in wasn’t there, so Chaplain Carl put on a DVD of music.


One of the songs was I Can Only Imagine by Mercy Me. And I was thinking about how cool it would be that if when we got to Heaven, we each get some alone time with the Lord. And I was getting kind of emotional, thinking about walking with Jesus and seeing the actual color of His eyes, and He said, “But Beth, I’m right here with you now.”

And remember that I am always with you until the end of time. Matthew 28:20 [God's Word]

This is Personal

My favorite verse in the Bible is in the Book of Micah. Now, Micah is a terrible Book. It’s about destruction and punishment. It’s full of verses like “Put no trust in a friend, have no confidence in a loved one; guard the doors of your mouth from her who lies in your embrace“. Wow. And “They shall lick dust like a snake, like the crawling things of the earth; they shall come trembling out of their fortresses; they shall turn in dread to the Lord our God, and they shall stand in fear of you“.

But it is also a book with hope. It’s the book where the swords are beaten into plowshares. And “No one shall make them afraid; for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken“.

And this Chapter 6, Verse 8. He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?

This is my favorite verse for several reason. First, because it was my father’s favorite verse. And second, because some famous Jewish scholar said that this verse was the essence of the Bible, that all the rest was just amplification. But mostly it is my favorite because of the last bit, Walk humbly with your God.

Not behind your God. Not at His command. But with your God. Side by Side.

God could have chosen to rule over us by fear. He could command, and things would be so just because He said so. He could smite us with lightning bolts and herd us around like cattle. But that’s not what He chose to do. He chose to govern us with love, and He chose, He created us so that we could have a relationship with Him.

If you read every blog I write and only walk away with one thing, I hope this is it. This is personal.

Your relationship with God, with the Lord can be a personal, one on one, give and take. And your salvation is also personal.


I was working in a bank, this was so long ago, and the women were telling me about a girl who had worked there before, and she told them that she had started on a new diet, and she told them that she knew she was going to succeed this time because she had asked God to help her. And these women were laughing. This was so funny!

And I couldn’t figure out what was funny. They said God didn’t have time to care about whether or not this woman lost weight.

Why not? He has time to count the hairs on my head, which changes every time I brush my hair or pull my ponytail holder out. He has time to care about the things, even the little things which matter to us.

One of my nephews recently converted to another religion, and we were sitting at the table after dinner as we often do, talking, and we were discussing the similarities between his religion and mine.

I was saved when I was nine years old, and at the time I was 54. I had been a Christian for 45 years.

I don’t even remember what I was saying, but I said something about knowing that He died, He sacrificed Himself for me. And it just flooded me. This knowledge just ran through me.

He didn’t die for some theoretical, nameless, faceless person in the future. He died for me. For me. And for you.

How He did that when I didn’t even exist yet, I can’t tell you. That’s for God to explain.

There’s a small story in Mark 10. It doesn’t get told very often:

Jesus and the disciples went to Jericho. And as they were leaving, they were passing through a crowd, and a blind man called out to Jesus, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!“ The people around him told him to be quiet, but he called out again. “Jesus stood still and said ‘Call him here.‘ “

Jesus stood still. Jesus stopped. He heard one voice, and He stopped.

He was here to save the whole world, and He stopped for one voice.

And He’ll stop for your voice.

You did not chose me, but I chose you. John 15:16