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I know that going to the pumpkin patch is something usually reserved for October, but I have become accustomed to seeing the beautiful orange gourd until at least Thanksgiving. However, this week the pumpkin has begun it’s disappearing act and the proliferation of red has taken over in anticipation for the Christmas season. This makes me sad, because I love the pumpkin, I love going to the pumpkin patch, I love carving pumpkins, I love eating all the wonderful pumpkin baked goods my wife makes, I love both preparing and eating pumpkin seeds, and I love the fact that it reminds me that Thanksgiving is almost here. I can’t overstate my affection for our orange friend. (Well, maybe I have.)

I am thankful for this day, and even though they have begun to disappear, I am reminded by the pumpkin that I have a lot for which to be thankful.

“Heavenly Father, thank you for the many blessings in my life. Thank you for family and friends. May you remind me that each corner I turn, I turn because I am blessed. Thank you Father God!” Amen

 

 

 

As a postscript: I hope that the disappearing act is happening because they are being transformed into delicious delicacies. 

As I walked through the doors today I had a well laid out plan about what I was going to do today, and the tasks that were finally going to be checked off, however my day didn’t go as planned. An entire host of things that demanded my attention came up, and the day spun out of control.

I need this prayer right now.

“Lord I thank you for the chaos that has surrounded me today, and even more I thank you for never leaving my side in the midst of the chaos that lies inside and outside. May I learn to become more dependent upon You, and less dependent upon the plans and task lists I make. Praise be You in all things and in all circumstances.” Amen

In a recent trip to Berkeley, I got a chance to visit and watch games in the “new” Memorial Stadium on campus. I have seen dozens of games in Memorial Stadium, but over the last two years it has been renovated with a new press box, training center, plazas outside the stadium, concourses within the stadium, and seat configurations which have transformed this stadium from the 1920’s into a new creation. However, from the outside, much of the façade is the same as it was before the renovation.

So many of us concentrate on fixing up our exterior while leaving the inside the same. I am guilty of this. Over the last three years I have “renovated” my exterior, dropping about 150 pounds, and reclaiming my athletic roots, but some bad habits I have left alone in the core of my heart. This is inconceivable.

What have you left alone untouched in the corners of your heart? Where do you need renovation?

Heavenly Father, I relinquish to you those areas of my heart that need renovation. May you take on the ugliness that lies within, and make me a new creation in this old body. Amen.

Saturday must have been a long and dark day. Not only did they hide in fear of their lives, but even worse, they grieved deeply. Jesus was gone. His disciples had watched the soldiers carry him off to his execution the day before. Now it was Saturday, their master was dead and the grief cut deeply, leaving them utterly hollow.

They had not signed up for this. Jesus was supposed to be the Messiah. He was supposed to lead them to victory over their oppressors. He was supposed to establish Israel as a strong nation once again and allow them to bask in the joy of sweet justice. Pain, grief, and sorrow were not part of the package.

Perhaps you have felt like the disciples that dark Saturday. I know I have. Over a fifteen-month period in my life I experienced the deaths of a friend, two grandmothers, my father-in-law, and the church that we had planted, as well as the near death experiences of a sister-in-law and a niece. Wham! There I was. It seemed like everything around me was dying. I didn’t sign up for this. I thought the way of following Jesus was one of victory and peace. All I felt was pain and despair. Actually, I had lost the ability to feel. I wish I could say that I handled it with poise and dignity, quietly nodding and smiling, quoting pithy platitudes about God’s sovereignty. I didn’t. I toggled between numb denial and irritating doubt. I wondered if perhaps I didn’t measure up. Perhaps God was punishing me for something. Perhaps I’d been duped all these years and the universe really was a cold and empty place.

I have to think that the disciples had similar feelings on that dark Saturday. It seemed as if all hope was gone. We feel this way because we forget an important truth. The way of Jesus is a way of pain, grief, and sorrow. Jesus suffered much in his life – even before his arrest and execution. As a child he knew what it meant to be hidden in Egypt in fear for his life. He knew the loss of his stepfather, Joseph. He wept over the death of his friend, Lazarus. He grieved over the blindness of the citizens of Israel. He agonized to the point of blood in the garden of Gethsemane. He screamed out in the words of his ancestor, David, as he hung on the cross, “My God, My God, why have you abandoned me?”

But Jesus told us it would be this way. In John’s account of Jesus’ final teaching Jesus said that God would prune the branches that clung to the Vine (John 15:1-17). Pruning hurts. To have large parts of your life severed from you is not a pleasant experience. There is no joy in the sensation of shears cutting into your flesh. Yet, as the Great Gardener knows, without pruning there is no life.

That is the way of Jesus – the way of God’s love and grace. God purifies us with pain. The disciples learned this and went on to write to the churches about it. James said to consider it pure joy when we suffer various trials, because in the end it makes us complete and strong. Peter told us that suffering refines our hearts like fire refines gold. Then Paul, as he described the painful process of working through persecution and breaking down the walls of prejudice, reached the climax of the whole process with one word – hope.

Saturday was finally over. On Sunday the disciples came face to face with a reality that is deeper than grief. They met hope. Jesus plowed through pain and grief and came out the other side alive once more. Saturdays will come. Of that you can be sure. They will come and they will be painful. They may last a day; they may last twenty months. When they come, remember this – without Saturday we don’t get to Sunday. The love of Jesus is our hope for today and forever. We will grieve, but we can grieve with hope.

“Lean on me.” God makes this invitation to you and me in every moment of our lives. We can choose to respond, “Please, God, rescue me! Come quickly, Lord, and help me.” But as for me, my focus often remains stuck on myself. I become caught up either in all that I accomplish or in all that I have left undone. I believe circumstances are either the result of my own abilities or the fault of my own limitations. When life is all about me, I am blinded from the reality of my complete dependence upon my Creator. The noise of arrogance and anxiety deafens the call to lean on the everlasting arms.

We are designed by God to be dependent. It is a twofold dependence – first, directly upon God, and second, indirectly upon God through those people God brings into our lives. Our existence is to be one of interconnection, not isolation.

As Jesus lived his life on earth as both God and human being, he lived the ultimate life of continual dependence upon his Father; yet he also depended upon the provision from his Father through other human beings. God provided for Jesus’ human life through Mary. Mary first carried Jesus inside her body and then in her arms. The nourishment Mary took in was the first nourishment he received. She prepared his daily bread and mothered him with all her heart – satisfying one of the deepest needs of the human soul.

In adulthood, Jesus depended upon a large community to accomplish the work he was called to do. A young boy provided the five loaves and two fish that would feed five thousand. Jesus asked a woman for water at a well – and depended upon her word to evangelize her entire Samaritan town, leading many to believe in him. Overwhelmed with sorrow in the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus sought solace in the company of Peter, James, and John, even as they fell asleep just when the Lord needed them most. When Jesus died on the cross, Mary was there with the other women and John, perhaps ready to hold his body one final time. Jesus called upon his disciple to do one more thing for him – take care of his mother (John 19:26-27). Even his tomb was a gift from one of his followers (Matthew 27:59-60).

Yet Jesus did not stay in this tomb beyond three days. For the One he depended on before all others raised him from death to life.

There is freedom in dependence. It enables each of us to accept our vulnerability. We no longer have to hide in shame or self-sufficiency. You and I can choose to lean on our Father amid a full range of disastrous and delightful events, praying, “Please, God, rescue me! Come quickly, Lord, and help me” (Psalm 70:1).

We lean in dependence on the Lord, we depend on those closest to us, and we lean also upon the saints who have gone before us in the faith. Sixteen hundred years ago, a European Christian leader named John Cassian published an account of his conversations with monks living in a Middle Eastern desert. One older monk, Isaac, had shared this prayer from Psalm 70 with the young John on his visit to their monastery. John’s book – and Isaac’s prayer – had such an influence that even today many Christians around the globe begin times of prayer with the Scripture verse Isaac commended to John Cassian. And on days when I am still enough to hear the call, Lean on me, I, too, join in this prayer practice, thanks in part to John Cassian, Isaac, and his fellow monks.

I wanted to republish this article from Relevant written by Ed Gungor about LENT.

RELEVANT Magazine – Lent Is Good Religion.

Using the 40 days leading up to Easter to practice unnecessary devotion.

Today is the kick-off day for the 40-day journey to Resurrection traditionally called Lent. Christian communities all over the world use this time to intentionally make room for God in their lives through fasting, praying and special gatherings. It constitutes what I think can be good religion.

As an evangelical, I get that there is a bad kind of religion—the human-centered kind that tries to act in certain ways in order to earn brownie points or merit badges from God (truth is, none of us wants what we have earned from God!). Connecting with God does not happen through our performance of religious practices—connecting is all about a relationship with God and what God “performed” in Christ for us. If that is not understood, religious actions can actually kill living faith. That’s the negative side of religion—the side that sullies the innocence of faith. James called it “worthless” religion (James 1:26).

But there is another side of religion that is not bad. In the same place James spoke of “worthless” religion, he says there was a “religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless.” This is religion born from God’s initiative, and it is undefiled, innocent, and powerful.

The word, “religion,” comes from the Latin religare, which means “to tie fast” or “to bind to.” Bad religion is about binding yourself to actions that you think earn you favor from God. Good religion is about binding or tying yourself to practices because you have experienced God’s favor. It is a way for us to love God back, as well as a way for us to move deeper into His grace.

In this context, James mentions binding ourselves to “good works” (i.e. caring for those less privileged than ourselves), as well as binding ourselves to things that keep us from “being polluted by the world.” That could be anything from prayer to fasting to engaging more deeply within the Christian community. Here’s the question: What helps you stay clean in this fallen world? Bind yourself to that—that is good religion.

Unnecessary Devotion

Scripture encourages all believers to “devote” themselves “to doing what is good” (Titus 3:8), as well as to “devote” themselves to prayer (Col. 4:2) and the reading of Scripture (1 Tim. 4:13). The word “devote” is derived from the word “vow.” There are oodles of texts that call the Christian to consider deepening his/her commitment within the context of faith. Why? To make God love us more? Absolutely not.

We should never be nervous about how God feels about us. At the very core of faith is the assurance that God loves each one of us incautiously and recklessly. We should find great comfort in the fact that He knows every stupid, silly, mean, ill-motived and outright sinful thing about you and me and, yet, He still pursues and loves us. But on some level, we can’t just think about that; we should respond to that.

I want to love God more than I do. Jesus’ words haunt me here: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30).
I’m not sure I love Him with all that.

Oh, I have my moments when my faith is white-hot (an occasion of worship at church or at the apex of a morning devotional), but those moments don’t seem to last. I want to love God more than I do. I want to love God enough to be willing to do what saints who have gone before us have done.

I’m not talking about ordinary faith here. Nor am I talking about something that is required. I’m talking about loving in God in unnecessary, unrequired ways. That’s good religion.

There is a required love. We’re supposed to love God enough to receive what he has freely given us in Christ. We’re supposed to love God enough to face the cross in order to ensure what Jesus did isn’t ignored by us. Salvation is found there. And that is where our journey of faith begins. This is really all that is necessary or required by God as far as loving Him is concerned.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t more.

There is plenty of room for believers to love God more—room for us to be caught up in an infatuation with the Holy. Seasons like Lent provide space for us to intentionally do so. I’m not saying we should try to love Him extra in order to make Him love us more—He loves us period, not in response to what we do or don’t do. But loving God back is a natural thing for those who have been deeply touched by Him.

It’s sad to me that American Christianity often takes such pride in being religionless. We put so much emphasis on belief; to be sure, believing is where it all starts—I’m just not sure that believing is enough to make us world-changing, kingdom people. Richard Foster wrote, “In our day heaven and earth are on tiptoe waiting for the emerging of a Spirit-led, Spirit-empowered people. All of creation watches expectantly for the springing up of a disciplined, freely gathered, martyr people who know in this life the life and power of the kingdom of God. It has happened before. It can happen again …”

Maybe getting a little religion this Lenten season can help get us there.

 

I would like to wish everybody a Merry Christmas! Allow the Grace of the Season to wash over you over these next twelve days, and resist the stress. May this be a blessed time for you and your family!