NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN

Whether you are talking about fashion or trends, if you wait long enough, things will come back around.  Proof of that hypothesis is shag carpet...even if they do call it "frieze".  I guess it's true that there is nothing new under the sun.  So we shouldn't be surprised to see the return of 3D, either.  Kids love putting on cardboard glasses and seeing things in depth.

Back in the early 70's, I taught second grade at Robinson Elementary and had a good friend named Ellen who taught first grade.  Ellen had great patience with first graders, but I was also drawn to her wisdom.  She often had such great insight and I wondered how she did that.  It was solid, common sense counsel like the Beaver's parents might offer.  Ellen was a Christian and I wasn't, but I was jealous of her ability to see things in depth just as if she'd put on 3D glasses.

Later when I studied the Bible, I realized that Ellen was just living as God intended His people to live.  The Lord had told His chosen people to live so as to attract the nations and bring glory to Him.  In a sense, they were to live and create a jealousy in the same way I was jealous of Ellen.

The Old Testament is the story of God "giving the ball" (the gospel) to the Jews.  The New Testament follows after the Jews fumbled the ball and God handed the ball off to the church.  Did you ever wonder why God chose the Jews?  When the Lord told Abram He would build a nation from his descendants, He said He was blessing Abram to be able to bless the world.  So Abram was blessed to be a blessing.  When the Jews did not obey Him or keep their promises and killed the prophets He sent, the Lord took the ball from them and assigned the privilege to the church.  Now the church was to be the light of the world in order to draw the nations to God.

A while back I remember Oprah saying some disparaging things about Christianity because she said it taught that God was a jealous God and she didn't want anything to do with such a God.  She knows man's jealousy is not pretty, but she misses the point.  Why DOES God get to be jealous...but we can't?  God's jealousy is different.  When the Jews intermingled with foreigners and adopted their gods, the Lord refused to share His numero uno spot.  That's because the Old Testament pictures His love relationship with the nation of Israel as a husband who loves his wife.  If a man becomes jealous because another man is pursuing his wife, few people would say the husband is sinning.  God's emotion is a pure jealousy and it is without sin.  The Hebrew word for jealous God ("Ganna") is better translated "impassioned".  To say that God is jealous over us is to say that He greatly loves/wants us.

What about the New Testament?  It never describes God as a jealous God, while "Ganna" is used six times in the Old Testament.  Those references exclusively refer to God.  The first time it is seen is in a familiar passage about the Ten Commandments in  Exodus 20:5.  "You shall not bow down yourself to the graven images or serve them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate Me, but showing mercy and steadfast love to a thousand generations of those who love Me and keep my commandments." A synonym of jealous would be "zealous". A zealous person shows ardor (fervor, eagerness, enthusiasm, passion, fire, devotion) in the pursuit of something.  God is looking for reciprocal ardor.  He certainly has already shown His passion for us at the cross.

My wise friend Ellen and I still keep up with one another even though she moved to Hot Springs 35 years ago.  With some people, you can just pick up and it's like no time has passed.  I have told her over and over how grateful I am because she was the one who initially attracted me to knowing more about Christ.  Several years after accepting Him, I taught third grade at a Christian school.  We learned that wisdom was "seeing things as God sees them".  If you want real wisdom, pray the Lord would show you things the way He sees them.  It's like putting on 3D glasses.

TRANSITION

"Should I get the tennis balls now?" Mike asked, warily.  It was 1976 and time for the Cruses' new baby to arrive.  As a twice-graduated Lamaze couple (the baby was late and they were forced to go back through the class)...Mike and Susan were fully prepped for the big show.  Mike was armed and ready to play his part.  But instead of a Polaroid moment, Mike found himself facing down a snarling she-wolf, injured and backed into a corner.  "Don't you TOUCH me!" the expectant mother growled.  Mike was encouraged.  He knew the book had said this latter phase would be called "transition".

Am I the only one who thinks our country is in transition?

The future is fuzzy.  All I know is that half of the country is tense, and the other half is filling out the basketball brackets with the President.  OK, maybe he is a cool guy.  But this takes me back to post-high school when you are surprised to find out sometimes the cool people are not really the cool people when they come to the reunion looking like Mickey O'Rourke.  Can't we just buckle down and take our country's plight seriously?

Remember the good old days when Alan Greenspan was the smartest guy in the room?  Whatever happened to Greenspan?  Now we are to believe that all this dollar dilemna blew up on HIS blindside, too?  Who CAN we trust?

I would set my husband up against anyone for the post of Responsibility Czar.  He worked in high school and college, graduated and went to work the next Monday.  He worked a thirty year job, took an additional twenty year career as an Air Force JAG, retired and went back to work, saved well and had the future mapped out for his family.  Mike Cruse plays by the rules.  He managed his money well and the future was secure.  Well, until now.

People with a radical worldview (your money is mine, let's create a perfect world) are actively challenging what has set our country apart from the rest of the world.  Our America is the sweet land of LIBERTY!  Surely your knee didn't jerk with the Congressional knee as they imposed a punitive 90% tax on people who contractually had every right to the bonus money... who months ago were cajoled into staying on their post with the same carrot.  Surely you thought that smelled a bit "brownshirtish"....didn't you?  What leader pits one portion of his country against another? 

My country is in trouble.  No one actually thinks Tim Geitner can steer this ship...or thinks his boss can, either.  Our President is a product of Chicago dirty politics and a racially hate-filled church and a hard scrabble upbringing that didn't find him fitting in anywhere.  How ironic that he is now King of Cool?  Now he has all the control that his out-of-control-early-days yearned for.  We were not allowed during the election to see the connection between his worldview and the one that Bill Ayres holds.  Now it is beginning to seep out and make sense.  If you loved your country and wanted to see it prosper, would you fiddle while Rome burned?  It seems our President is glad for the financial crisis so that people will be occupied while he rams through a new world order.  His administration has repeated more than once that it would be a pity to waste such a crisis.

But what about God?  Where is He in all this?  For whatever His reasons, the Lord has seen fit to remove our traditional fortresses, the things that buttress our confidence.  We can't trust our money.  We can't trust our government.  We can't believe our leaders.  I feel like I've gone down the rabbit hole with Alice.  Someone sure changed the pricetags on things.  Nothing is as it appears.  Where do we turn?  Is there a baseline anywhere?

Nate was here this weekend.  We gave him David and Goliath figures to play with as we read that Bible story.  As we talked about the two, I asked Nate what Goliath had that would protect him.  Nathan pointed to his helmet, his shield, his spear and sword, and his body armor.  Then I asked Nate what was protecting David.  Nathan studied the smaller boyish figure, saw no armor and only a slingshot for a weapon.  The 4.5 year old mind was thinking hard.  Mimi explained..."All David had to protect him was God, who had protected him when he was a lonesome shepherd boy and a bear wanted one of his sheep."  

David knew he could trust God because David had life experience with God and so he leaned back on that confidence called faith.  Believers can stand firm in this transition because we know Someone who never changes... Someone whose sovereignty is not challenged by our dire breaking news...Someone who stands majestically victorious at the end of time.  

"Faith is the assurance (the confirmation, the title deed) of the things we hope for, being the proof of things we do not see and the conviction of their reality (faith perceiving as real fact what is not revealed to the senses)."  Hebrews 11:1

  

LITTLE PILLOWS

One of my special treasures is a 4"x6" clothbound book that was given as a get-well gift to my great-grandmother, Mrs. Fannie Dixon, by her Methodist Women's Missionary Society.  Tucked inside the book is the little enclosure card they sent her and the book is marked in pencil to have cost 25 cents.  The page with the copyright is missing, but the first printing of Little Pillows was in 1875.  The book pages are brown, but the truth rings clear.  It was written by Frances Ridley Havergal, who lived in England during the 1800's.  Miss Havergal was a poet and hymn writer and if you've ever sung "Take My Life and Let It Be"...you've enjoyed Miss Havergal's verses.  Little Pillows is a devotional book based on the premise that God's words are like little pillows that allow us to rest and sleep at night.  The book was written to use with little ones at bedtime, but it applies to all.

The book makes me think about two things...how blessed I am to have had a godly heritage, and the comparable need for a little pillow for great-grandmother's generation as compared to my generation.  Then I stress about the need for comfort in my grandchildren's generation as people get less civil.  I sure don't like going there. 

When I was growing up, my little brother Tim and I had a dog named Taffy.  She was butterscotch-colored and was no particular breed; she was just a smiley dog with an enthusiastic tail that whipped your legs when you wore summer shorts.  When Taffy went to bed at night, she circled her bed about three times before coming in for a landing.  As I get older, I increasingly anticipate putting my head on the pillow at night.  And I, too, have a little ritual to help me get ready.  

I slide into the cool sheets and lay on my best side...that's the right side.  I extend the right leg straight and assume the "herron position" as the left leg bends at the knee.  Then I exhale deeply and close my eyes and start the video running of my day.  I'm looking to pick out the favorite thing that I can thank the Lord for that He has sent me during the day.  It may be something as simple as an expression on someone's face...or an unexpected answer to a prayer...or a big ole blessing that I can trace right back to the Father's hand.  Some nights the video runs longer than others.  But it just is helpful to end the day with gratitude to the Giver of all good gifts.

"Every good thing bestowed and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation, or shifting shadow." James 1:17 

CLAIM THE HIGH GROUND

One of the things that became apparent during the Civil War was that Southern men were "country boys" who had grown up hunting.  That experience gave them an edge with handling a gun and maneuvering in the woods.  Robert E. Lee led these men with brilliance in battlefield tactics, and the most basic of those tactics was to "claim the high ground".

Morally, the high ground could be defined as those principles which most closely align with what God declares to be right.  After all, our Creator made everything we see out of nothing, and so He gets to set the fenceposts.  People WITH the Lord want to stay within the fence.  People WITHOUT the Lord try to reason where the fence should be.  Too bad our thoughts are not like His thoughts; if we thought like Him, maybe we could know where the fences go.  Sometimes it's confusing because people without the Lord are not all like an IRS agent or Idi Amin.  There are many good people who do not have the Lord, but try to make their own righteous way.  They just have no help processing their data about why they were made, or how their gifting cooperates with the larger Plan.  I should know.  I was on that "good works" hamster wheel for thirty years, putting on my own fig leaves.  The trouble with the wheel is, you never know when you've been good enough.  Now I prefer confident epectation in Christ.

Politically speaking, when a party adheres to major principles that cannot be supported in Scripture, they look frantically for some "other" high ground to justify their stance and claim moral superiority.  That leads to some pretty interesting positions since, as my Grandmother used to say, "you never do wrong to do right".  Of course, that's because God's high ground IS the only high ground.

African Americans have demonstrated their confidence in one political party by overwhelmingly (85-95%) voting Democratic for years.  That party poses as their advocate, while actually holding them dependent on the government dole and a "victim" mentality.  The Democrats were in power for 30 years in New Orleans...did they improve the plight of those people in the projects?  Sadly, statistics show the welfare system has destroyed the black family.  The faux high ground there was for the government to take the place of the black male as provider.  But the structure of the family is God's design for taking care of His people and demonstrating His Abba Father relationship to us.  High ground is to live in the family structure as He designed.

An emotional high ground is the pro-life issue.  If the issue is presented as a woman's RIGHT, the right to choose is faux high ground because the Lord talks about knowing us in our mother's womb!  Thinking constitutionally, wouldn't the baby as well as the woman have a right to life/liberty/pursuit of happiness?  If there is any doubt about when life begins, doesn't it make sense to err on the side of caution?  We will all stand guilty for many lost lives because our country has subsidized a lack of regard for what the Lord has to say about life, and those made in His image.

Torture.  Everyone winces just to hear the word; no one wants the United States to torture.  But I would offer that waterboarding is not torture.  Ranger training includes waterboarding, so do we torture our own soldiers?  It is an efficient, fairly humane way to make someone think (in a very short period of time) that they are dying without permanently harming them.  On the other hand, torture is what the rest of the world does.  Ask Jack Bauer.  Last fall we were in NYC with an Israeli taxi driver who had immigrated to the US twenty years prior.  He spoke of his early life as a soldier and being captured...and he named the countries around his that were the worst to captives.  I would suggest that the faux high ground in this argument is the statement "the United States does not have to choose between it's ideals and safety...we will not torture".  This statement shows desperate attempt to claim any ground at all in the military arena.

In June we went to the Canadian Rockies and saw a glacier that had receded waaaay back from the road.  They had little signs that posted the glacier's progress back through time.  One of the first signs said "1928".  You know, in 1928 there was hardly the carbon footprint that we have today.  What made it melt back then?  Man without the Lord is pretty impressed with himself...and pretty big for his britches if he thinks he might have such a far-reaching impact on the globe.  Surely something is going on, but I doubt that man is causing it.  Faux high ground is to make this unproven science issue sound life threatening, therefore heroic to recognize and respond to.

It must be common for posers to inhabit faux high ground.  Listen to these ethics promises and see if you can detect any posing..."We are the party of change and transparency in government.  I will post  legislation online five days prior to voting on it.  I will go line by line and eliminate earmarks.  There will no longer be a place for lobbyists in the Obama White House"...Barack Obama.  And then my all-time favorite by Nancy Pelosi..."our party leadership is going to Washington to drain the swamp".

When things are put in order, if the Creator doesn't occupy first place, creation moves into that vacuum.  Man is left to plead for a snaildarter instead of the life of an unborn baby...plead for the right to die, instead of for the right to live...or plead for a casual use of stem cells (http://townhall.com/columnists/CharlesKrauthammer/2009/03/13/using_embryos_without_limit).  Criminals are coddled because the death penalty is considered harsh; the environment is considered more important than the lives of people.  Things are morally "upside down" just as when someone goes financially upside down in a home mortgage.  Priorities get all whomper-jawed.

If we could just agree to agree with the Creator, we'd all be on high ground.  Do you hear that old hymn..."this is my Father's world, O let me ne'er forget that tho the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the Ruler yet.  This is my Father's world.  The battle is not done; Jesus who died shall be satisfied, and earth and heav'n be one."  Heaven is true high ground.

"For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is His lovingkindness toward those who fear Him."  Psalm 103:11

CARRIED ALONG

Susan has come out into the sunshine after a five month tunnel of varying stages of incapacitation as she dragged her left leg. Now, thanks to Dr. David Barnett and the Baptist Joint Replacement Team, Susan has a shiny new stainless steel and plastic knee. Dr. Barnett must have gotten that sucker in there just right because in PT they got 123 degrees of flex and ouch that was good. Those medical people on third floor should get a standing O...along with a host of other precious friends...who, as Mike prayed last night..."Lord, please bless those friends who have really loved on us this week". In fact, during this whole process I've totally felt CARRIED ALONG. 

Prayer'll do that.  What a grand thing to have access to God's throne room!  I can just see the Sovereign's switchboard light up as Beth's Bible study group prayed in Fayetteville, Brad's family petitioned from NYC, friends in Baton Rouge and Nashville and Jacksonville, FL, and our Community Group and CBS group and neighbors all called or emailed that they would help cover me.  I felt it!  Fourteen people were in and out as Mike sat during the surgery.  Brad got to fly in and stayed the first night with me; that gave me a huge lift! 

You know, when you're staring down a bone saw, you worry about the most minute things...like bacteria. And because I have varicose veins, I also thought about clots.  But since there was NOTHING I could do about either concern (except ask folks to pray "bug-free" and "clot-free"),  I laid back in God's care.    And when those anxious thoughts barged to the front of my mind, I had a Psalm 56:3 whiskbroom ("what time I am afraid, I will trust in Thee").  I knew that no matter how many people come to encourage you, it's YOUR gurney going back through the double doors. That's when you need to know Jesus never leaves you.

So Mike and I are thankful for exceptional medical help and for friends who pray.  I also need to blow kisses to Mike. During our journey, he's learned to do laundry (oh, those pesky sorting rules) and he's kept us fed and the kitchen sink cleared out (better than I ever did).  These last months have forced us to cooperate more, depend on one another more, and I do believe we've grown up some.  We've each been to foreign lands...I am now exercising and eating right...Mike is nurturing.  Who knew?   My best friend is rock solid.

Oh, and one other thing.  That third floor at Baptist (where one goes to get a spare hip or knee) has wonderful nurses that are attentive and full of compassion.   Mario, the physical therapist, is excellent and Butch is a wacky OT who distracts you to forget you are standing on your new part.  BUT there's this one man I wish you all could meet named James.  He must be in charge of the Joint Replacement Team. It's James who comes down that hall each AM/PM routing out all his dwarfs (Grumpy, Whiney, Sleepy and Reluctant) and herds them down the hall on their walkers to physical therapy.  Heigh Ho!  His groupies do not want to move their parts, but James coaxes with his big grin and cheerful spirit.  I'd wager there's not a long list of people able to do James' job.  But he does it with great humor and grace.

When all was done, I left the hospital after three nights.  My pain level never went over about a four (out of ten).  I didn't get sick from the anesthetic, although the pain meds made me ookey and they had to be tweaked.  Now a physical therapist and nurse come to the house.  Our Community Group and CBS group and neighbors have brought yummy food we need help eating.  We feel very blessed.  Oh, and wait, one more thing.  As these credits roll, I have to add my right leg to the applause list.  Since last October, it has done the work of both legs.  It's been quite the soldier.

So for my buoyancy over circumstance, for safety, for the love of others, for answered prayer, and for His generous carriage...I thank my God.

"even to your old age I will be the same, and even to your graying years I will bear you.  I have made you and I will support you; I will carry you and rescue you." Isaiah 46:4