It was a nice, quick response to this post! CLICK!! Now don’t forget those grasshoppers!
I love the Word. I really needed to do this for the summer, or the busy-ness of life and family and Heaven Fest would swallow up my commitment. I look at it like a date: I have been invited to spend time in the Word, with the Word!
In the Psalms this week, you will read,
“You’ve kept track of my every toss and turn through the sleepless nights, Each tear entered in Your ledger, each ache written in your book…”
Of course it will sound a bit different in your translation (the above is from The Message). But watch for it. Find it. He sees.
FACTOIDS about the Book of Mark: He was a youngster and a straight-to-the-point kind of guy. Mark gets it: Jesus has changed everything and Eugene Peterson notes that Mark communicates an “air of breathless excitement in nearly every sentence he writes.” Mark just believes it: Jesus came! God is here and He is for us! Yeah!! Mark, in a hurry to tell the story, will remind us, too, that God is zealous in His desire to be with us, to SAVE us!
But overall-I would L O V E to be like Paul. He is absolutely one of my major Biblical heroes. I remember a song from the 70’s: “I wanna dance like David, preach like Paul…” and that is true. LOVE his strong words. Also the fact that he knows his written word is strong. He is a tough guy who writes – letters! Before the end, I hope to have re-written all of his letters for my family, to just shamelessly rip off his stuff in long letters to my family.
Here is what I am deeply pondering from the Corinthian letters (1 Cor. 7) about how to live in light of the time being short. “From now on…those who buy something [should live as if it were not theirs to keep….I want you to be free from concern…” I don’t know why that hit me so pointedly. Just made me realize that everything we buy comes with a pricetag of time and space and maintenance. Just pondering…
The whole thing basically says this: Don’t worry, don’t fret, don’t take stuff into your own hands. God has got you covered. A great Psalm to meditate on!
I was young and now I am old,
yet I have never seen the righteous forsaken
or their children begging bread.
They are always generous and lend freely;
their children will be blessed. Ps 37.25-26
Dave and I have lived in a few places (Minot, ND; Kokomo, IN; Sioux City, IA; Norfolk, NE; Denver-forever), different houses. And my parents have been all over since I left their home, too (Hobart, IN; Willard, OH; Richmond, IN; St Joe-MO; Butte, MT; Springfield, MO; back to St Joe-MO). I visited my parents in their current digs in Saint Joe early in the year. The house they are living in? Not home. No. But my parents? Wherever they land, is kinda home to parts of me. I always need to know where they are and what their house looks like so I will know the space my heart is rambling about in. Mom and dad are the fixed stars in my sky. LOVE them!
God, it seems you’ve been our home forever; long before the mountains were born,
Long before you brought earth itself to birth,
from “once upon a time” to “kingdom come”—you are God. Psalms
While we were at the Moslander Family Reunion last week in Chicago and Northwest Indiana, us old-timers took a late-afternoon, impromptu drive through the old neighborhoods; saw places we had worked and schools we’d attended and the house we called home. It is all the same, but so different. The huge mountain spruce in the fron yard at 4995 Roosevelt Place, trimmed to above roofline and barely clinging to life now, was once a full, thick, green privacy wall between the house and street. There are pictures there of my brothers in their graduation attire and even my babies running on the lawn from way back when. The juniper has all been removed in favor of more manageable potted flora. The dings Tim and my other brothers put into the side of the house playing baseball in the 70’s are still there, a testament to long summer days spent with a bat and ball in hand.
And we actually were just a few blocks from the Jackson family home in Gary, Indiana, btw!
The streets of Gary used to be positively frightening during business hours, the traffic heavier than the city had prepared for. The business district I used to drive is nearly a ghost town. Boarded up windows and abandoned buildings everywhere, yet minutes away, there are still quiet neighborhoods with established lawns and trees. You can buy a beautiful brick bungalow for $15,000 (the for sale signs made of cardboard and black marker) there on an empty street. The same would cost 1.3 million in Denver.
Surprisingly, standing there in the old yard, looking at the house in conjunction with neighboring homes and recalling old times and people from the past, it didn’t seem smaller. Often you’ll return to a childhood haunt and you’ll just feel like, “Wow-this seems so small now.” But that wasn’t the case at the Roosevelt Street house, the last home we all shared under one roof, the place my kids remember going to see Grandma and Grandpa Moslander. It really didn’t seem smaller.
It just seemed like: wow-how did this house ever hold all the life and loud love and laughter and memory and family and patio swimming in a 12-foot pool and Uno, all the huge bags full of 19-cent White Castle burgers after church ball games, or Bronco’s Pizza with 5 pounds of melted, dripping, greasy cheese, and church friends and Lake-effect wind and graduations and marriages and teen-agers and letter writing and boyfriends and girlfriends and Lake-effect snow and family altar and family feuds and kids and toys and books and WGN afternoon movies with our first color TV, first jobs and rusted out cars and Tip Top and Bible study and early morning prayer and first grandchildren and the first few spouses and all the rest of living that the Moslander family brought to it?
And it yet stands as a testament.
* LOVE Bon Jovi’s song, “Who Says You Can’t Go Home Again?” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abzbVFuxigg