Day of Silence

Paul and I downloaded an App called “Easter Now” that sends you alerts with the daily and hourly happenings of Jesus during the Passion week. This brings it all home, I never really thought about what Jesus was doing each day during this week and it seems He was pretty busy. Passion week begins with Jesus triumphant entry when He rode into Jerusalem on a donkey on Palm Sunday.  On Monday, Jesus went to the temple, along with His disciples, and drove out the vendors that were making a marketplace out of God’s house.  On Tuesday, Jesus went back to the temple to teach and He offended the religious leaders. Wednesday was a quiet day in the gospels and one can only guess what Jesus may have been doing, I imagine that He continued teaching since He did not have much time left. Thursday at 6pm (which was technically Friday by the Jewish calendar) Jesus and His disciples ate the Passover meal then they went to Gethsemane, so Jesus could pray. The Jewish day started and ended at twilight (which is 6 pm), so their days were a little different than ours since we go from midnight to midnight. According to our calendar, Good Friday started with Jesus betrayal, arrest, flogging, crucifixion and then His body being placed in the tomb, all by 6 pm. Then there was silence.

Imagine how Jesus’ followers felt after 6 pm on Friday. I’m sure the time spent from the moment the tomb was sealed until Sunday morning was full of doubt, turmoil, uncertainty, grief and many other emotions. This reminds me of how things may go for us today. Life is going along and then tragedy strikes or a crisis crops up and we are asking God why this happened and then we hear silence, just like the apostles. I went through this when the company I had worked for (I was with them for 15 years) reorganized and I was told to move to another state or I was out of a job. My husband was not working at the time and I knew that I was not going to relocate so to say that I was stressed out is an understatement. When I communicated my decision to them, I had a wide range of emotions including, grief, fear, and uncertainty. How are we going to live? What will we do now? Will our comfortable lifestyle change? All these questions kept running through my mind and I would like to say that they were quieted by my faith, but they were not. I knew in my heart that God would take care of us, but the fear and uncertainty were screaming louder than my faith. I was having my day of silence, when I could not hear anything and wasn’t sure what was next. Fortunately, my silence did not last long because my husband received a call from a company, the very next day, stating that they were interested in interviewing him for a position and he started working a short time later. We never know what is happening behind the scenes with God. It may feel like we are in silence but really it is God working His plan behind the scenes.  I know that I was so fearful about our situation (because I am a control freak) that I was drowning out any kind of reassurance that God was trying to give me.

On Sunday, the disciples received the answer to all the questions that were running through their minds because the tomb was empty. It took some of them longer than others for the fear and uncertainty to calm inside, but they all eventually came out of their silence. We can trust that God will do what He says He will do and that is enough during our times of trouble.

Romans 8:32 NASB

He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things?

Happy Easter All!!

Living in Peace

Living in peace, that is what we all crave today, don’t we? To have peace instead of all the violence and to have peace instead of all the debating and drama. To be able to start each day knowing that everything is going to be okay, knowing that the weight of the world is not on our shoulders. We pray for peace in this world today but have turmoil going on inside of us. Praying for peace is a great thing to do and I am not saying to stop that, but I believe that real peace starts on the inside of each and every one of us.  We all crave that peace that surpasses all understanding when we are in a storm.

This time of year, has great importance in this quest for peace. We are about to celebrate all that Jesus did for us on the cross. When Jesus went to the cross, He did so for everyone on the earth, but He was a game changer for all who would believe and place their trust in Him. All the hype about Easter with bunnies and eggs can be a distraction to keep our focus from the importance of this season. I am not saying that celebrating Easter is bad because it is a fun time for kids and families to gather and enjoy. We just need to take time to remember the importance of the season and what brought the celebration about in the first place.

When Jesus went to the cross He said, “It is finished!” and He bowed His head and gave up His spirit. (John 19:30) At that moment, Jesus had finished all that He came to earth to do and that was to reconcile us back to God. Everything that God does is intentional and with a purpose because with the resurrection of Jesus on the third day, all was complete. Jesus had claimed us back as His and with that, we can now live in the kingdom of God. Many don’t understand the concept of living in the kingdom of God, but Jesus references it over and over again in His teachings. We have a choice of where we are going to live from because Jesus tells us there is an option when He says, “My kingdom is not of this world. If My kingdom were of this world, then My servants would be fighting so that I would not be handed over to the Jews; but as it is, My kingdom is not of this realm”. (John 18:36) What does Jesus mean when He says, “Not of this realm”? It seems that there is so much more than we can currently see, and I think we forget about that or maybe never knew it. Jesus was mocked and beaten here on this earth because of His message about a better life for us. Let’s not continue this cycle and find out what Jesus was really talking about when He said that His kingdom is not of this realm. Remember that everything God does is intentional and has a purpose, so Jesus’ statement cannot be ignored.

Ephesians 1:3-5 NASB

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him. In love He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.

These verses show us that God’s intention from the very beginning was to have us as His children, holy and blameless before Him, and to give us access to every spiritual blessing He has through Jesus because of His loving grace. We now have access, in the spiritual realm, to all God’s blessings because of Jesus and our part is to believe and receive it. Things may not always look great in this physical world around us, but we know that we have access to the finished works of Jesus which include every blessing we will need in this life we are living here and now. 

 Now that is something to celebrate during this season!

Our Thoughts Our Life

The past week has been incredibly busy with our youth group kids out of school for spring break and Billy came home from boot camp and we added a new addition to the family, an 8-week-old Yorkie puppy named Jasper. I wanted to post this last week, but my days got away from me so here are the thoughts that I had from our bible study.

Our thoughts will shape our lives. The way that you think about any given situation will enable your response to that situation. If you get disappointed, angry, offended, or anxious, that emotion will consume your thoughts until it shows out in your life in some way. I remember the old saying, “if you can’t say anything nice, then don’t say anything at all”.  That sounded like great advice, but can we really live by that?  Jesus tells us in Matt 12:34 that “out of the mouth, the heart speaks” so this is telling us that whatever we are thinking or dwelling on in our thought life is what is going to eventually come out of our mouths and show up in our lives. When time is spent during the day thinking about the anger, disappointment, offense or anxiety, we are not present for what may be going on right in front of us. Not only do we miss out on the present, we are setting ourselves up for a bad outcome in the future.

In our bible study last week, we talked about King David from 1 Samuel. God had anointed David to be king but first he had to serve the current king, Saul. David did great things in his service to Saul and the people loved him. All of this made Saul jealous, so he continuously tried to kill David. In 1 Samuel 10, David is running from Saul and he is captured by his enemy, the Philistines. He was afraid, so he acted like a madman in front of their king and they let him go. David was able to make a quick decision and was successful in everything that he did because he knew that God was with him.

Some of the Psalms were written by David and when you read them, it is easy to see that David was writing all his feelings down on paper. This may be the first documented case of journaling. Psalm 34 & 56 were written by David during the time I referenced here. In these Psalms, David wrote these words:

“The Angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear Him and rescues them”.  “When I am afraid, I will put my trust in You. In God, whose word I praise, in God, I have put my trust; I shall not be afraid. What can man do to me?”

We can see that David knows that he has God on his side because out of his heart, his mouth spoke. Couldn’t we all use this kind of knowledge when going through our day? I believe this is the message that God wants to convey to the world today. We do have the God of the universe on our side and He wants to help us. God tells us in His word that He has a divine protection for us and our part in all of this is to believe it.  We will feel fear at times, so when we feel that fear it is time to place our trust in God and to believe what His word says about our protection. When we are in a difficult situation, we can place our trust and focus on God and He will give us wisdom to help us in our time of need. Our thoughts are where we can have victory, or we can be defeated. Don’t let your thoughts defeat you. Get yourself a promise from God’s word that will fit your circumstances and meditate on it today. God just wants us to trust Him and the only way to do that is to know what He says He will do and believe it.

2 Peter 1:2-4 tells us this truth:

Grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord; seeing that His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence. For by these He has granted to us His precious and magnificent promises, so that by them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world by lust.

The Journey

I can’t believe it’s been almost five years since we packed up our things and moved from Colorado to Texas. God has done so much in both of our lives in the last five years. I can honestly say that I am not the same person that moved which is funny because when we made the decision to move I thought I had it all together. Paul and I had a good life in Colorado. As I said in a previous post, we had good jobs, a great house, family and friends so things were good. We were serving God in various ways through our church and in a motorcycle group called CMA, but I felt restless.  I would often think “is this all there is?” and “there has to be more to life than just the daily grind”. 

If you think about it, our society goes through a yearly cycle. January starts the new year, so we make resolutions which usually involve weight loss and then it is time to declutter your life so buy storage solutions to put away all the stuff you got for Christmas.  Preparation for spring is a welcome time because we are so tired of winter by this time, so everyone is getting ready to beautify the outdoors.  Spring is a time when you water your yard so then you can turn around and cut it every weekend. Then comes summer when the kids are out of school, so vacations are planned along with things to keep the kids busy till school starts again. Then comes the end of summer and everything is back to school preparation and once the kids are settled back in school the holiday season starts with costumes for Halloween and family feasts for Thanksgiving and then Christmas. For us, fall is the best part of the year because it is football season! Go Broncos!!  

Through all this, we go to work every week and try to keep up with all the activities as we keep our eyes focused on retirement. That is when we think that we can break the never-ending cycle and do what we want to do.

This reminds me of a man that I worked with in my last position as an HR Manager, he had worked with this company for many years and he was looking at retiring in a few months. He told me that he was going to move with his wife to California because that was their retirement dream. A very sweet man who didn’t necessarily enjoy his job, but he did it because he felt he had to in order to have his dream down the road. He was very excited when he finally retired in January but had a heart attack and passed away only a month afterwards. Absolutely devastating for his family.

My first thought in hearing this news was, did he know Jesus? I did not ask him back then if he knew Jesus and I wish I had because we don’t know how long anyone has on this earth. This made me think about how important this good news that we have is. God cares about what is happening on the inside of us. If we let Him into our daily grind, he will give us His peace and joy on the inside which will in turn affect our circumstances on the outside.

Philippians 4:7   NASB

And the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.