Tag Archives: Spiritual Growth

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Pay Attention! God Does Some Amazing Things That May Just Wreck You!

God, Knives, and Cancer

Sometimes, God steps in and does things that are completely unexpected. And if we don’t pay attention, we may miss out on something grand, and overwhelming, and it might even just wreck you!

Pay Attention!

You may know about my brush with skin cancer last October. Since then, I have had another recurrence, on my left temple, just outside of my eye socket. It stinks, but it there, and so it must be dealt with. Fortunately, I have a good dermatologist who knows his stuff, knows me, and between the two of us, we keep a pretty close eye on my skin’s condition.

My dad had the same thing. It metastasized into his brain, and he passed away in 2011. So this isn’t some simple little health issue. This has the potential to be vastly devastating, for me, for my wife, for my kids, and a lot of others who are close to me. So we keep a close eye on it.

Unexpectedly, this time around, we discovered that it would be better for us to pay out of our own pockets for this, instead of submitting it to the ministry share program we are members of, Samaritan Ministries. The bills were not enough to warrant sending them in, and Samaritan Ministries has been overwhelmed recently with needs, so it likely wouldn’t be fully covered anyway. So we decided to try to pay this one off on our own.

I collect pocket knives. Mostly traditional slipjoints, but I enjoy an occasional Swiss Army or other modern folder too. I have several in my collection, so I decided that I could part with a few of these to help cover the bills. And, I’m in a couple of knife groups on Facebook, so I figured it would be an easy thing to liquidate a couple of them.

What happened next caught me completely by surprise.

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Book Review – The Pug List by Alison Hodgson

The Pug ListWe have a pug. Her name is Molly Mollypop. She is almost nine years old, and she is a clown.

When we got Molly, we had no idea just how crazy our life would become. She is nuts, and has completely changed our lives. So when I saw The Pug List, by Alison Hodgson, I decided that it might be an interesting read, simply because of the common interest in pugs.

I was not wrong. The Pug List is an incredible story of hope and joy after extremely difficult circumstances. The premise of the book is tragic. The Hodgson family suffered an intentional house fire set by a completely random individual. They lost everything. In the midst of that recovery, they adopted a pug named Oliver. Oliver is the glue that held this family together in more ways than one as they regained their sense of balance as a family.

Oliver decided upon adoption that Eden, the youngest of the three Hodgson children, was her owner. We can relate to that. Molly has attached herself permanently to our oldest daughter. Make no mistake; Molly is her dog, and her dog alone. She only tolerates the rest of us, and usually only if my daughter is gone. It’s pretty funny.

Don’t get me wrong, she loves the rest of the family, but she belongs to one person. Eden experienced this same thing with Oliver. He was her dog, and everyone knew it. And Oliver is the healing package that God sent for Eden as she struggled to regain her balance after her world was destroyed. If not for Oliver, who know how well Eden would have recovered, or how long it might have taken.

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Memorize Scripture: 1 Peter 1:13-14

Hiding God’s Word In Our Hearts

This week’s passage is one the first passages that I memorized as a kid at church camp. I can still remember sitting behind the retreat center, on the sidewalk, working on this passage with my camp family group. And it is still with me now.

You can see this passage for yourself in 1 Peter 1:13-14.

1 Peter 1:13-14

In this passage, Peter issues a call to action. He calls his readers to be holy, although he won’t use the word holy until verse 15.

Until then, he states some preparatory commands, to be prepared, to be self-controlled, and to be hopeful.

In order to do this, we have to remember what he has already written to his readers. Many of his immediate audience were undergoing trials and persecution. Peter has just spent the previous verses encouraging them with the hope of salvation that they have. Now, he turns to giving them practical ways in which they can do this, and he gives them in the form of commands. In other words, these aren’t optional. These are necessary actions for us if we are to live holy lives.

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Seeking Hope When All Feels Hopeless

Watching Christ Work Through Short Term Missions

Last week, I joined several others from our church on a short term mission trip to the White Mountain Apache tribe in southern Arizona. That was a great trip, and really reopened my eyes to what others may be facing in their own lives.

Desert Landscape

This trip was a perfect opportunity to get out of our own comfort zones and serve others. Our goal was to help clean up a building that American Indian Christian Mission hoped to use as a church building in the small town of Cibecue, on the reservation. That turned out not to be what God had in store for us. Instead, we helped to build the church in other ways.

Our work project was to help tear down some walls, a part of the community youth center that the health department required to be repaired before it could be used again. While three or four of us worked on that, the remainder of our group weeded, picked up trash, cleaned up the area around the community buildings, and interacted with several of the people who stopped by to see what we were doing.

In many ways, this was a much greater impact on the community than cleaning out the proposed church building would have been.

After the work was done, and lunch was eaten, we hosted a Vacation Bible School for community kids. Our highest day was around sixty kids, but we averaged closer to thirty-five or forty the rest of the week. Many of these kids worked their way right into our hearts.

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Step Out Of Your Comfort Zone With Short Term Missions

Later this week, I am headed out with two of my kids to American Indian Christian Mission, near Show Low, Arizona. The three of us are really excited about this short term missions opportunity!

Short Term Missions

Trips like this one are always cause both excitement and some amount of trepidation for me. A short term mission trip causes you to step outside of your comfort zone and do things you may not be comfortable doing. That has the ability to make one very nervous.

But at the same time, the excitement is there, because a short term mission trip has boundless opportunities for growth. It’s pretty incredible actually.

On this particular trip to AICM, our team has an incredible project. One of the larger communities on the White Mountain Apache reservation, and yet one of the more isolated communities at the same time, has no church. AICM has been working with the tribal council to lease a property and plant a church there to help meet both the spiritual and the physical needs of the community.

AICM has had a long standing relationship with this tribe, and with this community. They have been there, working with and alongside the people there for years, and have built a solid reputation. Several of the students at the AICM boarding school have come from this community as well. So planting a church there is a natural expansion of the work that AICM has already been doing.

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Memorize Scripture: 1 Peter 1:12

Hiding God’s Word In Our Hearts

Peter compared faith to gold in the verses just preceding this week’s passage, and now goes into just how incredible this faith really is.

You can see this passage for yourself in 1 Peter 1:12.

1 Peter 1:12

When the prophets of the Old Testament were proclaiming the Word of God, they were not always speaking of things pertaining to themselves, or even their contemporaries. They were speaking of things to come, to “you,” Peter says to his readers.

Peter’s readers were among those whom the prophets were serving. What I find to be especially amazing is that this includes you and me, reading this letter today. The prophets wrote things that were meant for us to understand that they longed to understand themselves.

Of course, what they longed to know were things that pertained to the Gospel. They foretold things such as the sufferings of the Christ, his crucifixion, his resurrection, his glories. But they didn’t, couldn’t, know what these things meant when they spoke or wrote them. These things were yet to come, and they longed to know.

What they did know was revealed to them by the Holy Spirit. This is the same Holy Spirit that filled the believers in Acts 2. This is the same Holy Spirit that was promised as “Comforter” by Christ himself. This is the same Holy Spirit that lives in us. He comes from Heaven, and thereby underscores the divine importance of the message he brought to the prophets.

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Memorize Scripture: 1 Peter 1:10-11

Hiding God’s Word In Our Hearts

Peter has just called the attention of his readers to the salvation which they had received and the hope that they had. Not only is this salvation spectacular, it is unique to mankind.

Take a look at this passage in 1 Peter 1:10-11.

1 Peter 1:10-11

Not only is mankind overwhelmed by this great salvation that Christ has obtained for us, but the prophets of old and even angels long to know about this salvation that Peter is describing.

According to this passage, Peter explains how this salvation was of the greatest of interest to the prophets of the Old Testament. Perhaps one of the greatest themes of the Old Testament prophets is the grace that would be revealed when the Messiah came. Peter, along with Paul and several other New Testament writers point to this interest of the prophets multiple times.

Peter describes them as looking intently into the future, longing to know more about this grace and salvation.

The topic of grace is one of the main topics of 1 Peter, and is probably due to the fact that Peter knew just how important this topics was to the Old Testament writers. And if something carries that much weight before it even occurs, it must be worth paying attention to. And that is just what Peter does, along with most of the rest of the New Testament.

Grace is paramount.