The Testimony Prompter

Back in the day when I was leading worship one Sunday after another, I would with some regularity provide moments for personal sharing from the congregation.  It was something which seemed to fit in with the informality of Sunday evening worship and I am sure was a carryover from my days of growing up in small rural churches where Sunday evening worship often included a testimony time.  One of the things which frequently happened in such moments was the same people getting up and sharing the same thing they did the last time such a moment was offered.     

It always seemed that there should be some freshness to what we were sharing about our faith in Christ so I started inviting people to share in response to the question, "Where is it that you have experienced Christ since we last gathered?   I thought it was a good question to enable people to be more current in their sharing.   And while I have no regrets about offering such moments for personal sharing, I am no longer so sure that my testimony prompter was such a good one.    

The reason is simple.  The question suggests that God is to be experienced every now and again in the ordinary moments of our life.  It caused people to search their memory for something that might be appropriate to share.  It did not really encourage people to think about the reality that God is constantly making Himself known to us and that there is not a day in which such does not happen.  Maybe the hesitation to share came from not being able to filter out some single thing from the many, many ways God in Christ was experienced since the last gathering.  One thing is certain.  Were it mine to do today, I would find another way to phrase this testimony prompter.  

   

Another Re-read

I started another one of my many re-reads in the last few days.  Some folks are deeply opposed to reading a book a second time.  Me?  Some I keep on the shelves and have read more times than I can count.  As far as I am concerned they are so good, I cannot get it all in one, or two, or three reads.  Of course, such is the case for any self-professing slow learner.  If I ever write a book, I hope it will be one that readers just have to read a second time!  The book I picked for this second read is "New Seeds of Contemplation" by Thomas Merton.  

I know why I never bothered to read this book years ago.  I was too busy.  I was too much in a hurry to get somewhere at which I do not think I ever arrived.  The word "contemplation" belonged in a monastery, not in a busy parish where God's business was getting done on the clock.  And then, back then Thomas Merton did not seem to have anything to say to me.  If he had written a book about growing a successful church, I would have had one in my hands, but for too long I was too busy to see any value in silence and stillness and struggling with the invisible internal stuff of the spiritual life.   

None of this is meant to pass judgment on anyone else.  It is simply a means of offering a confessional.  Others who worked in the larger growing churches may have managed to stay on track in their inner life with God, but I fear that I was not as adept at juggling the balls of being busy and being still.  Being busy felt better.  It felt too good.  And now as I read the words of Merton again, I find the spiritual hunger gnawing away at my insides again.  Maybe this time, I will chew on what the Spirit is seeking to reveal a little longer.   

Quartet Memories

Back in the church era when doors remained unlocked during the week, I was racing through high school  and figuring on being a gospel quartet singer.  Well,perhaps, I exaggerate.  The guys with whom I tended to hang out often went to the church and in the manner of the Blackwood Brothers sang old gospel songs.  One of our group was a musician and played the organ on Sunday Morning so we were fixed to become famous.  All we needed were good voices.   

Alas, we never made the status of the traveling quartet groups, but we had a good time and it helped us stay out of trouble.  One of the songs we would often sing had a chorus which had the words, "Many things about tomorrow I don't seem to understand, but I know who holds tomorrow, and I know who holds my hand."  I am grateful for the influence of those friends, appreciative of the way the songs took root in my life, and the way that even today, the memory of those songs provide help in difficult days.    Some things are worth remembering.  

The words of this gospel song are worth remembering.  It is a good reminder for all of us since we all run into moments when it seems that life is racing out of control and about to crash.  But, what we can know is that God sees ahead, cares about us as we go, and is always close at hand.  He is not God who is somewhere out there, but One who stays close enough to hold our hand.  

An Evening Sighting

 The sun had long since slipped away, 

     the evening, enveloped by stillness

        is where I stood in silence, 

          listening, watching, waiting.

Across the way I heard the stirring, 

      first here and then there, 

        never still, always moving,

          an evening walk in Eden.

Some listened and quickly knew,

     'tis just a bird, a hooting owl,

        others with ears to hear,

          knew more was out there.

Up and down the run of the branch,

     the Invisible One now heard, 

       no mere winged creature,

         the Holy One is with us. 

Memory and Hope

Today is one of those days for looking back and ahead.  I look back for the memories and ahead for the hope.  It is a day many of us have noted with the passing of the years.  It is the day remembered in our family as the birthday of my mother who died during the worst of the covid pandemic.  Had she survived the last battle, she would be at her 90th birthday party today.     

When God gave us the gift of memory, He blessed us in a way that life in the past is lived again.  Of course, not all of our memories are good.  Some are painful and some we try to forget, but mixed in with the living of life are those which bring smiles to our faces and warmth to our hearts.  I am grateful for the mother God gave to me and the memories of her constant faith in me and her everlasting hope for me.  Today I remember the struggles which were a part of her life and the way she stood tall midst them, pressing on despite them, and refusing to let them define her or those who who were caught up in them with her.    

And, I am also grateful, deeply grateful, for hope that is a part of the present and the future.  Though not with us, she is with the Father in heaven and with those who are known as the great cloud of witnesses in the heavenly place.  In that eternal world she lives in the presence of others like her parents, brothers and sisters, and my father.  I do not completely understand the image of the heavenly witnesses, but it must be a joyous life giving gathering.  And, as she now dwells in that heavenly place, my hope is as yours and that is that one day when the journey here is done such a gathering awaits us on the other side.

The Hardest Thing to Give

It often seems that the hardest thing for us to give to our Father God is the one thing with which we are most abundantly blessed.   Every day we receive the same amount of it.  We receive the same amount whether we are rich, or poor.  He takes no account of the size of our pocket books, or the affluence of the neighborhood.  When we are laid in our grave it can be said of each one of us that we received from God twenty-four hours every day of our life.  Time is the hardest thing for us to give to God our Father.     

We are so blessed with it; yet, we offer it to Him as a gift in such a careless manner.  We may give to God the first fruits of our income, the Biblical ten percent, but we mostly give to God the leftovers when it comes to giving time to Him.  And, as we know, time is a most important thing to give freely in any relationship.  Our relationships with family suffer when we allow other things outside of the home to dominate our use of the time which is ours.  Too many children grow up wondering who the man and woman are that show up in the house at the end of the day.     

Maintaining a relationship with God is the most important thing we can do in this life.  What it requires is some of the time He has given to us.  We seldom think that He blesses us with time for this reason.  We are more prone to think that He gives it to us so we will have time to earn a living.  And while there is some truth in such a thought, it is also true that making a living cannot be the definition of our life.  If it is, we have wasted our trips around the sun.  He blesses us with plenty of time.  He blesses us with enough that there is enough to grow in our relationship with Him and still have enough left over for other important things in our life.

The Dance

While most of the folks I know probably cannot imagine me dancing, there was a time when I would cut a rug every now and again.  It was something I learned to do, or tried to do when I went to Young Harris College up in the north Georgia mountains.  Back then there was not much to do at Young Harris.  There was a motel with a restaurant which welcomed us in during the evening hours for coffee and an ice cream dispensary that had a pinball machine.  Entertainment was scarce; thus, the dancing at the occasional Saturday night college sponsored events.      

The truth is there was not much to dancing in those days.  Move a little or a lot and it was dancing.  But, even then with such a loose definition of what it meant to dance, I was a lousy dancer.  I always felt like I was out of sync.  Others seemed to hear a beat which was a mystery to me.  I moved about, waved my arms, and looked like someone who knew what to do, but it was something which never really gave me a comfortable "this is me" feeling.     

Sometimes this is exactly how we feel in our spiritual lives.  It does not happen all of a sudden, but we suddenly realize that we have gotten out of sync with the plan and purpose of the One who is our partner in this journey toward Home.  We no longer hear the beat of the Word.  We move about as one who knows what to do, how to do it, and when to do it, but deep within our spirit, we sense that something is wrong.  And, as we allow ourselves some moments of getting to know ourselves again, we come to know that our life has gotten out of step.  There is no longer any matching strides with the One who called us.  Fortunately, He is watching.  He knows.  And, He pauses and leads us to the place of the heart where we can once again right a life that is prone to stray and walk around out of sync with the holy purpose He has for us.