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."