A Walk Taking You

One of the great losses of modern man is to walk upon the earth.  By that journey we come to continually marvel at the exquisiteness of the created thing and the kindness of The Creator.  Reading in the Bible of the great ancients, God continually told them to walk across the land.  Walking seems to be the pace that is best suited for knowing God!

The latest meeting with God in the woods of my back yard.

Walking Keeps You From Falling

Walking is continually resisting falling.  Great way to look at life and reason to praise God.  Praise can be as easy as putting one foot in front of another.

I Doubt

“One of the paradoxes of the Christian life is that the more believers learn and grow, the more sensitive they become to how much they do not know.  Maturity brings humility-a better appreciation of God’s perfection and of our distance from it.  Faith becomes deeper, though not necessarily more solid.  It is less rigid than in its first days, often because believers have come to experience the unique power of doubt.

Those young in their faith often dismiss doubt as a shameful lack of faith.  But doubt is not unbelief; they are quite distinct.  Lewis (C.S.) and his fellow Oxford writers knew that.  They were men of impressive scholarship and faith, but they were also men who welcomed doubt and the work that it did in their lives.  Doubt recognizes the tensions and the ambiguities of life and, most important, our inability to grasp truth with the same timing and depth as God does.  Doubt can herald the perseverance of the desire to believe despite circumstances, mentalities, and feelings that work precisely against belief.  With the foundation of a commitment to Christ, doubt becomes the cry of belief in the dark and the starting point of new, deeper insight.

Learning is critical to this kind of faith-building doubt.  More study of God’s Word, more interactions with believers from other life experiences, more principles gained from other cultures can stretch our vision of God and the church and can leave us with more questions than before.  This should not be avoided but welcomed.  One cannot entrench oneself in pride when a doubt is pushing for further examination.  Doubt can motivate us to continually seek God’s perspective and guidance and to reaffirm our submission to his guidance, as doubt reminds us that none of us have perfect vision.

“Now our knowledge is partial and incomplete…Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity.  All that I now know is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.  I Corinthians 13:9,12””

The Soul of C.S. Lewis, Martindale, Root, Washington, pg. 283

Your House Is On Fire! Grab Something?

I have a new Bible.  Started reading it this morning.  The Word Of God is the most precious object I own.  I thought about this. 

My wedding band and my new Bible, Holy Matrimony, Holy Word, the two most precious objects I own.  I cannot seem to place them in hierarchy.

I was urged to consider this more objectively.  My house is on fire; I have time to save one object.  Would I grab my Bible?  It is good for humans to consider the value of the objects they process.  Helps to evaluate yourself.

You can tell a lot about a book by its cover

What Is Your Lucky Stars Name?

Several times a month I lay outside, look at the stars, and talk to God.  It’s a marveling time.  Why did God make the stars?  I often ask Him.  I do not know but one thing is sure, the stars let us know exactly where we are on planet Earth.  It is important to know where you are and often exactly where.  Stars do that for us. 

GPS is a gift from God and wow what a gift, it has spared many a marriage from utter madness.  Mine talks in a beautiful female British accent.  This gift is possible because we have learned by using stars to keep satellites in exact orbits to give us exact coordinates to know exactly where we are. 

If your GPS ever helps you, you can thank your “lucky stars.”

“He (God) determines the number of the stars and calls them each by name.” Psalms 147:4

Or better yet you can thank God!

The Whopper Bee

I am sitting in the mountains reading Revelation and watching a bumble bee feeding inside a purple flower.  One day the bee, flower and mountains will be burned up and replaced with a new heaven and a new earth.  In my greatest imagination I cannot think of a better thing that will be a new bee, a new flower or a new mountain.  That is what the Scriptures mean when they say,

"No eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no mind has imagined what God has prepared for those who love him."  1 Corinthians 2:9

Man tries, Walmart becomes Super Walmart, Disneyland becomes Disneyworld and the hamburger becomes the Big Mac and then the Whopper.  Somehow I believe we have missed the spirit of “new.”