Wanderings

Yearly Archive: 2008

Yesterday Was A Blast

Church on the lawn – sun beating down on my head – no bugs flying around…

On and on this could go. Needless to say, the fire on the pole and the blown transformers meant no electricity for the school where we meet. So, Saturday night at 7 p.m. a crew cleaned up the recently mowed field and made sure that everything we needed was out of the storage container. That in itself meant sorting through what had been removed earlier in the day, and getting the right pieces out.

Bright and early Sunday morning, the crews were in place to move 200 chairs and staging. Rolling the chair racks over the grass was not an option – we found some old asphalt behind the building, but still, every stack was a two-man job. By 9 a.m. we had chairs, stage and canopies up as the sun continued to rise and beat down on us. It could not have been more perfect (somebody knew what He was doing).

There have been times when we have planned to do things outside, and the day started off cloudy or foggy, and may clear up by 11. This was a perfect worship experience. Acoustic guitars, congregation singing along and just praising God. Then the message about what happens when we lose our source of power. We need to stay plugged in… Our power comes from a source that we need to stay connected to. When we forget to “plug in”, we start to falter and fail. Check out Acts 1.

Words and Words

Sometimes, that seems like what we say and hear has turned into. In one of Shakespeare’s sonnets it says “It is a tale full of sound and fury signifying nothing.” That is one the things that has stuck with me since high school (now that was a long time ago. There are days, when I get the feeling that my words are that way. There are other times when they are inciteful and precise without hurting other people. What we say and how we say it can be helpful or hurtful.

Reading James this morning got me caught up in chapter 3 where he talks about the tongue. The comparison of the tongue to a fire was almost real-time. What with the grass fire burning on Sherman Island right now, it’s easy to be very real about the the damage the tongue can do.

Then I looked up a cross reference to Proverbs…

Thought Collision

My mind is spinning. Too many books being read by my eyes, feeding my mind, which then has to digest the information and then try to reconcile everything. In addition to my daily Bible reading, there is a copy of “The Idiot’s Guide to the Reformation” and then there is the Bay Hills 101 course I am in.

For some reason, this is the day they all came together at one point – kind of like what we think of as an “atom smasher”. The three points seem to have all fired the same arrow from three different directions. You are probably wondering where this is going. It’s back to “having faith ought to make a change in the way you live”. Notice, that’s not “change things around you”. Rather, it’s what happens in the way you act and respond to people and events – how we “do” life.

I guess that the arrows even came in the TV show “Eli Stone” last night, in the “Live Brave” line. One of the characters said to the prisoner “I guess I should have done something – something more”. Believers (I not sure that fits Eli) ought to be different people – different enough that those who aren’t, see them as different. Kind of like a seed that gets planted – the water and sun make it different than it was. The little seed grows up to be something else, and people (birds and animals too) see it as “different”. It is no longer what it was. Now the question is “am I?”