Happy Birthday 36!!!

today

Halleluia Concert on the Green

 

Coco Gauff Champion At the US Open

 Coco, Are We There Yet?

Hooooorah!

I am ecstatic for her.  So many hurdles jumped and overcome to get there! She has won the biggest tourney in our own country and we celebrate her, today!  “Such a little girl, with such a big dream” (National Velvet)  Such a little lady, with such a huge mantle on her shoulders.  We rejoice with you today and we celebrate the labor of your hands and the shoulders on which you stand as belonging to all of us.   Thank you for making Tennis your sport and for encouraging us all through your victory.   

If you are victorious, We are THERE!

about This Place by Pastor Loran

" The scoundrel Jacob was in “this place”:"  where is “this place” this is my title to the sermon, but first The picture of Jesus rolling back the darkness with his own bare hands was part of the liturgy in the music and worship time.   It is a dark place.

The title on the website is God Is Where You Are.  I believe that.  

The magic of reminiscence is God’s blessing of having a memory at all, no matter that age has diminished much of my short term memory ability.

Pastor reminded us that Jacob was sooo afraid for his life.  A rock was his pillow and his brother was estranged from him for these years and had vowed to kill him for his having stolen the blessing from him.  Jacob didn’t know that Esau had cooled from the original anger, through age and many other blessings that he had received from God.  

The Ladder or stairway up and down out of Heaven. Jacob had awakened to the reality of spiritual activity that was around him.  Jacob had been blind to these realities prior to this, but now he was aware.  His relationship with God was solidified and he was able to trust God who was taking him into his confidence in this way.  God said of Abraham, shall we hide from our friend Abraham what we are about to do?  The blessing of the future was coupled with a deeper understanding of the spiritual realities and activities around him.  The same with Jacob.  The same with each of us. 

Pastor said it was a door of greater revelation into the activities of God that came in the darkness of that moment.  Keeping our eyes open for the open door of understanding that is provided in the darkness of difficulty was the application.  I can relate to that.  I can trust God who makes us understand him in the shadows of difficulty.  God’s silences are loud and the darkness of fear and difficulty are the ushers into the already open door of communion with God.   I am just chewing on an already clear expression of God’s word preached by my pastor. 

what's at the Museum? Day at the Museum? Did you see Galileo?

 

Thanks for being a wonderful part of making the trip to the art show and other sundry events worthwhile!

Sometimes I wish I had a big sister like Elyse.   She tries so much to mother me, also and I don't always appreciate it as I should.  

This trip the planning and the coordination was superduper because you were there Elyse! 

 

Read on

 The Storm lit up the night nearly as bright as the day and yet there was not as much thunder as I would have expected for the continual flashes.  Perhaps my concern for the children, not children as much as budding adults, was flooding my head so much that I couldn’t hear it.

I really couldn’t hear the thunder much.

Their eyes of need were seared in my conscience.  Thank you was their response to me.  Drink number 5,6,7, didn’t seem to phase them.  I said to myself, this is why my mother was in the toilet for many weekends in her early twenties after just such social events.  What kind of hangover did you have after your hangout parties with your friends in your twenties?

We had many, many wonderful prayer adventures in our twenties as we chased doctrinal integrity.  We stayed up very late.  We drank gallons of scripture and kegs of prayer reports from other countries and loads and loads of theological treatises from John Owen and Flavel and others, until we were inebriated with doctrine and in the deep of our mental capacities sometimes.   I am glad that we had to take the Cross Bronx Expressway home after prayer meetings and that oftentimes traffic kept us up much later than we would have had we lived around the corner from Trinity.

     We were chasing TRUTH!  We were attempting a coup d'etat of our own ignorance and attempting to take it captive to the excellency of Christ.  We were dancing with the dinosaurs of confessions and catechisms and we were saddling the horses of thinking and deliberating the effectiveness and care of worshiping God with your mind, as well as your body.  Our minds are somewhat tired and slower now, and yet we swim in the deep end of the pond of Biblical thought for our drink of choice.

     We have had 5 different Sunday School series in 3 different churches on the 1689 London Baptist Confession.  Is it relevant to concern ourselves with thoughts of our elders and thinkers 400 years ago?  Is it relevant to drink yourself into a stupor with a bottle that has sat for some years to become wine.

    I have no regrets, even though my youth was wasted on dead churches, my mind was bettered than it might have been had I been in a bar.  Although much the same mental inebriation is the result of much study with a silly youthful zeal.  I have come to understand.   “Thy word is a light”,says scripture and my mind does seem to have a built in magnifier to the thoughts and intents of my own heart and many manipulations of pundits and word whittlers, present and past.  That is a good fruit of much study.  I can’t say that we are better than those children we saw last night.  God might arrest them in their sin and make them greater monuments of grace than we could ever be and that is what I pray for them!  May they learn to become discontent with the drunkenness of alcohol and only desire the sincerest milk of the Word of God and Truth to the greatest drowning of any lesser inebriation!  In Jesus name, AMEN

War! What is it good for?

 The War of conscience!

The clouds swept in almost indistinguishable from the enormous sunshine that had monopolized the day.  It was surprising and consuming, the storm that ruled the night last night.

82 degrees my weather app recorded at about 3 oclock and it didn’t warn me in the least that a storm was brewing so quickly.  This kind of day reminds me of the part of Mary Poppins where the general warns Mr. Banks that there is a bit of heavy weather brewing at his residence.  The storm seemed to be just over the campus.  A bunch of dear young people were standing at the precipice of a catastrophe and we weren’t privy to their fall.  

I was stationed at the bar for the alumni reunion for the class of 2018.  I am glad I was, because I was completely unaware of the level of alcohol consumption of this age category.  My children may dabble, but I haven’t seen this much consumption since my parents’ and grandparents’ day.  In Moonlight bay the class of 1917 stuns their parents by all enlisting in the “great war”.  I knew many of them as educators and grandparents and they were many alcoholics, but I chalked that up to their having been so stressed with war in their youth.  Many died of their consumption of alcohol, young as Uncle Sonny that made Grandma Hanst go to her grave in grief or older in the eighties like Uncle Charles or Uncle Pat with monkeys on their backs so large that none of us could kill them, as much as we may have wanted to.

    Last night surprised me,   I fell in prayer love with these children whose silent cries in their alcohol consumption made me wonder at their social skills and why was this their hiding place from a room full of their peers.  You needn’t hide from your peers.  You needn’t be afraid, everybody is having the same problem and feeling of insecurity.  Alcohol cannot heal that emotional pain.  They won’t find that out for awhile, yet.

Excalibur! From the heat a load or a prickly or a sticky

 

"They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more."

Where is my father? He is in the mirror these days. shame on me.

The Squandered privilege of having a father!

My father never let me forget that he hadn’t had the privilege that I had.  Everyday, he lamented his constant lack of ability that hadn’t been honed in him for no one having had mercy to tutor him in such things as masculinity walking and talking.  He often would break into a womanly cackle, just to show us how it was an effort for him to “Man-up”.  No one will ever say that about you, was his impulse.  You will man up before you woman up.   

I recall, running to him when provoked by some fierce park enemy.  You will never be a sissy with me, he would push us back into the fray.   Do it!   My greatest lament was to disappoint him in my baby patticake game.  Put it AWAY!  The overhead that hit the tape would haunt me.   What a sissy!  What a wimp!  Not me.  

I love the meditations of Clarence Day Jr. In life with Father and the cheaper by the dozen book who had aggressive fathers like I did.   My father cracked his whip, because the whip was never cracked over his soul.  He felt that his fears and foibles and inabilities were traced to his orphan status.  His mother had to work full time and his father was gone.  He was the only child with his sister, in his whole neighborhood who had no male role model in the home.  He memorized and mimicked unrealistic models from the movies and wished for the opportunity to act out his masculinity on some unsuspecting children to their amazing fondness and emulation.   He got his wish.

We adored him, faults and all.  We emulated him, sometimes unable to change this about ourselves.  His imprints are so severe that we are all his little shadows.  How could that be?  He was so flawed as are we for emulating him.

The only thing worse than not being able to change the man that you imitate is not having anything to imitate at all.  Dont miss the privilege of your own father, in a day of unmasculinity. 

 

Yesterday, Our Supreme Court overturning precedent...

 97% safe for women 100% fatal for infants in utero and it is now seen to be so.

Where are you looking at the statistics for a drug?  This drug is safe and legal.  Safe?  Safe for what?  Safe to kill your baby, if you want to.  Yes, it wouldn’t hurt me a bit.

That is our motto, when contemplating abortion procedures.  Because they have been legal thus far in the country,  it makes them acceptable and normal.   That isn’t normal.  It isn’t normal not to revel in the reality of new life forming in the womb.  It is sad that we cannot see the futility of discussing life with a death consumed generation.  Is the drug safe?  Is the drug procedural?  It is the procedure that is now being called into question.  The cavalier attitude that because you can end the pregnancy, you should in any and all circumstances be accepted in your decision is at the table for concern.  We need to discuss this.  We need to back up and take a good look at what we have told to our children as to why we didn’t take their lives prior to delivery.

The drug, make it more private.  The drug makes it more personal control.  We all need prayer who think that it is time to forge ahead in business as usual.  We need help and forward thinking of yesterdays rules!  They were wrong.  Our mothers were quietly accepting a cultural infestation of elitism and we need to throw it in the rubbish can and find alternatives.  We need to find answers to real problems and accept these wanted and partially wanted and unwanted pregnancies as the providential reality and expect God to do great things with the lives that we are sparing from the lynch mob.  How could a bunch of legislators gang up on innocent babies?  It seems outrageous, but it is true.

San Francisco Movie {and Sewards Folly? March 1867? }. Are we on a balance scale?

 Reversing the curse?

Faith and unbelief are intertwined in all hearts.  The hearts of the openly faithful and the hearts of the openly unfaithful lie bare in the presence of the Lord.

The San Francisco movie made in the nineteen thirties gives me a view of how closely the mind of people were to right and wrong then.  I know that my father imitated the masculinity that he saw in that movie.  He probably was movie quoting so many times in the interactions that we had about faith in his latter life.  

I find it odd that men of seemingly complete unbelief can be so drawn to women of faith.  

{I have watched just the clip of Jeanette Macdonald singing San Francisco so many times and never, ever connected it with the san francisco earthquake.   I said to myself, she seems as though she is singing about heaven.  She gets so animated, which is not culturally usual for white women of operatic style?  I have studied the opposite parallel for years about the singing of San Francisco and Paradise.  I hadn’t noticed that the bar was called the Paradise. Until yesterday}

God’s jealousy for His Bride

Everyone who heard that woman felt as though they owned a part of her,  I saw this with Ethel Waters also, an aside.  Young people are looking for somebody to show them the right way.  Someone to give them a good reason to eschew evil is a longing in the heart.   There are so many duplicitous people.  Clark Gable had won over my father, even though he had seen the whole movie and knew God’s judgment was on him.  He was, as it were, prodding God to do some major demonstration to deserve his faith.  That is a faith to some people.  “ I will believe in God after the great earthquake, as it were.”  God doesn’t ever succumb to such provocations, even though he knows it might have won this one or that one to faith.  God was defending and demonstrating His righteous patience and indignation.  There are no angels who deserve a second chance.   It was as though jeanette macdonald was God’s gift to Clark Gable for his gift to the church.  She was his organ and his organ in the church was a line into his soul,  mustard seed, perhaps.  Anger and bitterness kept his faith dry and dead, if it were.  

God doesn’t get capriciously angry to punch us as Clark Gable did his friend, but God had to show that he is angry with the wicked everyday.   He hears the arguments of the wicked to him in their unbelief and is carrying on a conversation even with them as he does with the believer.  They will know when they are judged that they ended the conversation many times with God before he was finished.

There are many reasons that we all deserve the earthquake experience.  We provoke him everyday in our personal and in our public lives.  Only Jesus, has paid the price for sins and yet we sin, high handedly and low handedly so to speak.  But it was masterful that somebody made a parallel between God’s judgment and the development of San Francisco as a community.  Political, culture wars,  alcohol, gambling and pillars of economy…etc, etc.

He has helped us pick up the pieces of San Francisco and yet it still remains on the fringes as though it is a string uncut from the quilt of this nation. 

God, heal our every flaw!  Jesus keep us talking from the precipices of our sins and help us to grow an economy that reflects your truth and mercy.  Amen

 

God does so move in a mysterious way

 The Hymn of the Day

God Moves in a Mysterious Way

The mystery of God's movement is sometimes a quiet thing and sometimes a loud thing.  The clouds and the sky are usually quiet and the designs of the beautiful wildlife are a quiet mystery.  What a funny stripe the skunk has on it’s back and the perfume of gore is its amazement.  Who thought of that? God! Millions and billions of design elements in the birds and flora and fauna around us.  Still we find so much time to look at animations of people when the animations of God are so fascinating. The designs of God’s loudness are the sounds of the laughing hyena, or the calls of the whales to eachother from the deep.  Loudness with humor and meaning.  Loudness of thunder that strikes such fear in us, that if we heard it rattle more than one clap at a time, we would cower under the bed.  He gives us what we can handle of loudness.  

His mystery in design is as infinite as his attributes.

The hymn says that He plants his footsteps in the seas and ride upon the storms.  Tiptoing around us and riding above us as though we are in the middle.  He cares and entertains us in his mystery and yet we are often so unaware.

Greedy!

 Greedy for Grace.

Where is my Sweet Spirited Contentment?

Christmas, just being past, makes me remember the hunger of looking for my name on the presents under the tree.  Where is my next present?  Where is my gift from so and so?  Where is my…? Amazing that we can develop a hunger and thirst for more, just through the practice of doing it so regularly.

As I go through the Rare Jewel book again, I feel that spiritual greediness welling up in my soul.  His first chapter, Jeremiah Burroughs says Contentment is a sweet, inward heart thing. UUUgh!  Where’s mine? Greediness for contentment is oxymoronic, isn't it?

IN Thankfulness for a Delightful Holiday Season!