Crazy Friends

Three muskateers
Three muskateers

 

Don’t you just love that story in the Bible about the men who carried their crippled friend up on the rooftop? Then they tore off the roof and let him down on his bed to where Jesus was.

What were they thinking? Were they crazy to pull a stunt like that? Where did they ever come up with such a strange idea? I wouldn’t have thought about doing it that way, would you? What if they had dropped him? He could have been crippled  or even worse, died. But there was a crowd and there was no other way to get him in to see Jesus.

And when he saw their faith, he said unto him, Man, thy sins are forgiven thee…. Arise, and take up thy couch, and go into thine house. And immediately he rose up before them, and took up that whereon he lay, and departed to his own house, glorifying God. And they were all amazed, and they glorified God, and were filled with fear, saying, We have seen strange things to day. “Luke 5:20, 24-26 KJV.

Yes, it was strange to see. Jesus saw the faith of the man’s friends. They had faith that told them if they could just get this man to Jesus, he would be healed. Faith causes people to go out of their way to do something unheard of, never thought of before. Faith says, “if we can just get him to Jesus, all will be well.” 

Are you a friend like that? Do you love your friend so much that you will go to all that trouble, to do whatever it takes to get him to Jesus? Are you willing to lay down your life for your friend by spending time in prayer for her?

John 15:13 says  “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

Everyone needs a few crazy friends like that, don’t they?

The Desert Shall Bloom

100_0874

 

My hen-and-chicks plants bloomed this year. Maybe you have seen them bloom, but if I did,  I must not have realized what it was.        

I raise cacti, African violets and other houseplants in addition to my outside gardening. Cacti or  succulents are very strange. (Cacti is the plural for cactus.) There are some varieties that look just like rocks, some covered with stickers. Some of them are downright ugly. Others actually look dead. You seldom see one in bloom, except on a rack in the store.

Isaiah 35:1 said “The desert shall blossom like a rose.” The desert, the wilderness, the barren waste, where only cacti grow, will blossom like a beautiful English rose garden. 

Cacti or other succulents store up all the moisture they can get, then use it up during the dry season. Sometimes the dry season will last for years. But the cacti, though barely alive, somehow manage to survive on a very limited amount of moisture. 

After one of these long stretches of drought, when the rains finally come, the cactus bursts into bloom using all its energy, sending forth its seeds just at the right time for them to sprout and reproduce. 

The “rain” of the Holy Spirit is here now. We have lived through hard times, barely surviving on just a little moisture, just enough to stay alive. Some of us are dead looking, thorny, ugly, but we have survived and now it is time to bloom. Jesus told us that the Holy Spirit will be like “ rivers of living water” pouring out of our innermost belly, John 7:38. 

Jesus has caused the airwaves, the magazines, the bookshelves to be flooded with His Spirit. There are more Christian books, songs, magazines, TV programs than ever before in the history of the world. The Internet has been taken over by the Christians. 

The drought has ended. The rains have come. What has God given you to do in this last-day “rain of the Holy Spirit”? It is time to get the Word of God out where it can reproduce.

Snuggle Down Deeper

Sometimes very early in the morning, I get out of bed and go to the living room to stretch my legs. The recliner calls my name, so I take my baby neck pillow and baby blanket, and doze off for a while.

Sassy the cat almost always jumps on the coffee table, walks across it to the sofa, over to the arm of my recliner, where she lands on my lap and starts pawing at my covers to make her little bed. After I stroke her head a little, she settles down to nap.

When she hears the creak of the bedroom door, her head pops up, she stares down the hallway, and watches for the dogs. Then Sassy hurls herself off my lap, a black blur as she streaks to her hideaway in the laundry room, chased by the dogs who finally give up and head out the door.

If she didn’t run, the dogs wouldn’t chase her.She was the queen of the animal kingdom in this house before the dogs came to live here. If Sassy would stay in my lap, I wouldn’t let the dogs bother her, but Sassy doesn’t really believe that I will save her from the yapping dogs. Even after 6 years of living with us, she doesn’t trust me to watch out for her and hold her safely in my lap.

Do I really trust God? If I am sitting in the lap of my Father, Almighty God, Creator of the Universe, what do I have to be afraid of? I have nothing to fear from all those yapping things in life that threaten me.

Psalms 27:1, 5 “The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? the LORD is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid? For in the time of trouble he shall hide me in his pavilion: in the secret of his tabernacle shall he hide me.”

Now is the time to snuggle down deeper in Father God’s lap while He speaks peace to my heart.

Weeping Endures For the Night

Sadness is all around us. Hundreds of acres of trees and homes have burned in California and the word is that it was arson and only half-way contained. Two firefighters have lost their lives and many more have been injured, fighting the wildfires to save homes and lives.

Some of our friends and loved ones have died recently and we are sad for our loss, all the while knowing that they have reached their reward for lives of service on this earth.

Many have lost their homes, jobs, fortunes to the crash of 2009 and now find themselves out on the street, facing drastic changes in their lifestyles.

We hear of those who have lost their lives in foreign countries in the Armed Services. Some question the war and wonder if we should even be there, but nothing changes the fact that our soldiers face the enemy every day.

We see violence, war, starvation, and evil all around us and our hearts grow hard.

We find ourselves watching violence being reported on the 6 o’clock News while we eat our supper, emotionally untouched by what we see. We come across a charity TV program asking for donations to feed little children who are dying in foreign countries and we flip the channel to a sitcom which is more comfortable to watch.

The writer of Hebrews said that Jesus our High Priest was touched by the feelings of our infirmities, He can sympathize with our weaknesses. (Hebrews 4:15) John 11:35 says that “Jesus wept.”

I am personally glad I can still be outraged, upset, inconsolable, and tearful because it means I am still real. I am glad I can weep with those who weep, feeling their pain and comforting them with an arm around their shoulder and a comforting word from the Psalms.

In Psalms 30:5 (NKJV) God says, “Weeping may endure for the night, but joy comes in the morning.

Weeping ends and circumstances change, but everyone remembers the friend who hugged them, consoled them, and prayed with them in their times of despair.