“Leaving Notes”

Posted on by
Reply

A few months ago I found my first rapture dream video on YouTube. Not every video on this subject feels sincere, but most do. People tell stories about Jesus’ imminent return and many of the things they say seem to fit with what the Bible says about how the Church Age or Age of Grace will end.

Jesus unleashed his changing, saving power on our broken world when he came and died for all of us, rose again to give us eternal life,, then poured out the Holy Spirit on any of us willing to take Him in.

Jesus tends to change the narrative. He comforts us but also drives us to do uncomfortably things like preach, serve, and take in the orphaned.

The description Jesus gives of the Rapture is a description similar to Noah’s Ark or Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt—make haste, go quickly, don’t look back.

So this story about a website for messages after the Rapture—

https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=5029712&page=1

got me thinking.

Wouldn’t it be better to say things now?

This is what I would say—

Nothing matters but Jesus and all of us have our value raised and our lives secured because he paid for us and our sins.

He wants to be your best friend.

His answers are good and his love is transforming.

And the Holy Spirit comforts and galvanizes those who let him into their lives.

Ask him if he is real now. Ask him to hep you feel and see his love.

Don’t wait, because Jesus is worth finding and pursuing.

—John 2 and 21, and everything in between.

What would you do with the end of “normal?”

Posted on by
Reply

In the early months of 2021 I formulated a plan based on the return of my life to me. I had almost died of Covid and had spent some time tethered to an oxygen machine.

I decided I should move slowly—literally. I felt like there was a sense of my own human fragility that had to be acknowledged—drive carefully, walk carefully, acknowledge the fog of your recovery.

Give some stuff away. I am a thrift store shopper and I tend to hold on to clothes. I went through several bags of clothes and was able to give them away with the acknowledgment that I had survived something and did not need that dress or that shirt in my new chapter.

Use the gift of a life given back for something. We took in our adopted granddaughters, whose lives have been pretty traumatic. I told myself—if I have been given more time, I need to use the time for brave things. That is not the easiest decision to make when your brave decision changes the lives of your entire family. But I can’t imagine my life without my granddaughters now.

I feel like we are all on the edge of change. Economies are brittle, wars are on horizons. Have we even really recovered from the trauma of a pandemic?

What would you do if today or tomorrow or Sunday was the last day of “normal?”

John 13

Childhood Friend

Posted on by
Reply

She was a strikingly pretty college student with a disconcerting way of saying truly disfiguring things as though she was doing an elevator pitch for a rom-com puppet movie.

She said the “idea was based on a childhood friend,” and that the horror movie centered on the omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence of the Christian God (wait for it)…being the malevolent antagonistic killer!

Quite. A. Plot. Twist!

Somehow in the process of writing a home-cooked horror movie she managed to pull off an egregious character assassination of both her childhood “friend” and mine.

I listened aghast as emblems of rescue and redemption were suborned for a Mean-Girls-meets-The-Shining revenge plot.

At one point the thinly-veiled childhood-friend-turned-megalomaniac-killer-omnipotent-deity murders the protagonist after repeating a common Christian invocation of the Trinity.

She got a fan-girl response from many in the audience with questions about whether her movie was going to be produced, possibly with the support of the university?

Afterwards, I broached a few questions—

Was she concerned about alienating over a billion Christians?

Had she shown the manuscript to the “childhood friend?”

Had she considered making a fictitious murderous-god-antagonist to vilify instead of the explicitly stated Real One?

Had she or would she run all this by Him?

It is a gut check to have to listen to someone you love get raked through the fire of untrue and scourging misrepresentation.

But this was not Jesus’ first rodeo.

He paid the price for my ransom and hers, and whether she could or would see it, his drowning snd destruction in the abyss of human violence and folly was, is, and will be our only way out of it.

It is “a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God,” not primarily because we are so broken, but because he was-for us, and that should require a response.

My childhood friend has saved me from the deep end so many times. I would be lost without him.

Thank you, Jesus.

In utero

Posted on by
Reply

Isaiah 49:1-2 NIV
[1] Listen to me, you islands; hear this, you distant nations: Before I was born the Lord called me; from my mother’s womb he has spoken my name. [2] He made my mouth like a sharpened sword, in the shadow of his hand he hid me; he made me into a polished arrow and concealed me in his quiver.

Shooting Stars

Posted on by
Reply

They pepper me with questions on the way to the office. When it is just the three of us we can lean into our survivors’ solidarity—

How do birds fly? What are shooting stars?

I want to say you are shooting stars, bright bits of light in night sky, not stars, but bits of iron and silicate broken from the mother rock

Contrails in the inky sky

What emperors wear

Posted on by
Reply

In my mind I have a picture of my maternal grandmother, mother of 11 children, flawed but beautiful

She looked like a grandmother—skin settling in, soft. Her hair went gray early but her face was always delicate and lovely

I am a grandmother now, and many of the adjectives apply to me—soft, round, wrinkled.

Fat to be blunt.

I am fine with all of this. I made a deal with myself years ago that I would see my aging process as an experiment in entropy—eventually gravity will have its due with us all.

I went on a deep dive this morning looking at a host of cosmetic procedures—surgeries, lasers, radio waves, deep tissue this or that—all promising to make a body toned, sculpted, and smooth.

I don’t really believe most of them work, but even if I did, I don’t believe they are for me.

I am supposed to “know God and glorify Him forever.”

https://www.apuritansmind.com/westminster-standards/shorter-catechism/