The Lord blessed us yesterday with one of the ten best days. The temperature reached into the eighties. According to me, Summer is still lingering. The hills and mountains are dancing. The fields and meadows, farms, orchards, and vineyards are singing. The birds of the air and fields are making melodious sonnets. The Lord is upon His Throne. All is well.
Our oldest daughter Janice, the Bostonian, celebrated her birthday yesterday. She and Jeremy spent part of the day swimming at the iconic Walden Pond near Boston. Praise the Lord for His simple, yet very rich, gifts. Janice get a great kick and thrill out of celebrating and indulging in the simple gifts. Janice was born 41 years ago in Corpus Christi, Texas (the Lone Star State). Alice and I spent some time visiting some friends and then having some Indian food with some of our family. We harvested from our garden... Bringing in the sheaves... We harvested with joy and with harvest songs. We gathered with gratitude.. Tomatoes, Hot peppers, cucumbers, beets, Swiss chard. The Lord blesses with His abundance. Alice is set to go into overdrive to can tomatoes and make lots of pickles.
Both my wife and I are now, as you all know, officially "retired" from our full-time work of the last many years. At the beginning of Summer, we had a retirement party for my wife. It was a blast! One of our very good friends - a professional photographer - made for us a memory book including photos of many of the friends and family who made the evening so special, along with a selection of family photos. It was a very special love gift that will be dear to us for years to come.
We are getting ready for Sunday: " Back to Church Sunday". There will be lots instrumental music. We are planning for a very special banquet following the worship service. Sunday School will meet at 9:30 AM. Worship will begin at 10:30 AM followed by the Sunday Banquet at 12:00 noon.
I was reading from the letter of Paul to the Philippians. It is an invitation and yet a challenge. "Therefore if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion"—in other words, if knowing Christ makes any real difference in your life or if Jesus and his Spirit have made any dent on you — "then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind" (Phil. 2:1-2).
It is exciting and thrilling and yet challenging to follow Christ and serve Him here and now. We are called to be the salt of the earth. We are called to reflect His light. We are called deflect the arrows of the enemy, the adversary, by the grace of the Lord and by the power of the Holy Spirit. We are called to relentlessly seek the world view of Jesus, the king of angels. We are going to experience a lot in life that tries to pull that viewpoint down—to make us bitter, prideful, prejudiced, resentful, callous, unforgiving, consumeristic, and otherwise self-focused. One of the rich blessings in being loved by Jesus is to experience His kindness and hospitality in and through His people on a day to day basis. Alice and I have received so much grace and, love, and radical and extravagant hospitality from others during our pilgrimage on this beautiful earth. The Lord has poured upon us and infused us with His hospitality through unexpected channels and streams in the desert. We are blessed and overwhelmed. You all have been part of the perennial streams and channels.
The Bible declares that "Hospitality" is one of the gifts of the Spirit. We who are redeemed by the Lord and loved by the Lord are placed on a new trajectory which is outward, otherward, and heavenward. We are called, gifted, and propelled to be empathetic. It is is not generated by our human effort. It is generated by the Holy Spirit.
You may have heard the story of the child who was late in coming home for dinner. Asked by her dad to account for this, the girl said she'd met another kid who'd dropped a bottle of milk on his way home from the store. "So you stayed to help him clean it up?" asked the father.
"No," said the child, "I stayed to help him cry till he got the courage to go home."
Praise the Lord that we are not alone in this adventure. We are not solitary. Jesus is our eternal companion. He is our eternal Home. Jesus. He lingers with us. He sits with us in our pain, in our doubt, and in our struggles. During my retirement years I indulge in watching the Travel Channel, and the Food channels including the Cooking Channel. I read with much joy and gratitude about a little restaurant named Nino's. Nino's was just an ordinary, family-style restaurant on Canal Street in Lower Manhattan. It was nothing special, just a place where people from the neighborhood gathered. On a good night, Nino's might have seated 100 people.
On September 12, 2001, however, Nino's restaurant near Ground Zero opened its doors to a new clientele. In the weeks and months that followed, Nino's served 7,000 meals a day on average: 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Its customers didn't pay a dime. They were New York's finest: police officers, firefighters, members of the Port Authority, the FBI, and CIA agents, construction engineers, and Red Cross workers, all laboring on the front lines to help their world recover.
If you went there, you might see police officers unable to keep their eyes open a moment longer, fast asleep over their food. You might run into a 6'5" fireman on his way in, with only the tracks of tears revealing his true skin color beneath a soot-smeared face. Maybe you'd hear the accents of a church group from South Carolina coming for two weeks to wash the walls of strangers' apartments. You'd see trucks arriving from who knows where to re-supply the tables—food and drink paid for by someone else, freely given, for those who needed it most.
One September morning, evil did its worst. It was intended to accelerate the closing-down, the hunkering-down, the fear, and hostility that still afflicts us too much in America. But even then there were people who kept on looking through a window on the world like God looks through—people who kept setting a table like the one God presides over eternally. Evil thought to make America collapse in upon itself like those great towers, but a faithful remnant of servants kept looking other-ward instead. They became even more outgoing, treasure-seeking, hospitable, empathetic, resourceful, and self-sacrificing, which is to say, they became more like Jesus. He is what our world still needs most. Our world faces daunting challenges. We face natural disasters and catastrophes. The Lord of the Church anoints His people afresh and anew in every season and in all seasons to rise up and march onward, forward, and upward. We serve under a captain who has never lost a battle. We march on to the New City which is paved with incorruptiopn and deathlessness. We once again keep on running the marathon, looking unto Jesus the author and the finisher of of our faith.
In Christ,
Brown
https://youtu.be/d61LamkXfwk
No comments:
Post a Comment