Will you do that which is GREAT in the eyes of the Lord? Happy Birthday

2 Chronicles 25:1  

Amaziah was twenty and five years old when he began to reign, and he reigned twenty and nine years in Jerusalem. And his mother's name was Jehoaddan of Jerusalem.

2 Chronicles 27:1  

Jotham was twenty and five years old when he began to reign, and he reigned sixteen years in Jerusalem. His mother's name also was Jerushah, the daughter of Zadok.

2 Chronicles 29:1  

Hezekiah began to reign when he was five and twenty years old, and he reigned nine and twenty years in Jerusalem. And his mother's name was Abijah, the daughter of Zechariah.

2 Chronicles 36:5  

Jehoiakim was twenty and five years old when he began to reign, and he reigned eleven years in Jerusalem: and he did that which was evil in the sight of the LORD his God.

God is truly the author and finisher of our faith.  Each day and especially each year that God allows us is the beginning of something.  What are you reigning over?

I have just a few meditations to share with you on the celebration of your 25th birthday in the light of scripture where my devotions were during this week and my own experiences. 

We ought to pray with Moses, “Teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.”

I was 25 years ld when I found the delight of motherhood.  I had spent much time sharing myself with children but it was at age 25 when I met Elyse. (actually 24.9)  I never thought that I wanted to do this for my entire life, but it became the calling of my life.  

I challenge you to find the thing that delights you to commit to and to reign over.  I challenge you to find the hope and expectation that God has for you in your purpose and shine that light wherever you are.  Be the one that God sees has completed that which was right in the eyes of the Lord.  That is a challenging thing.

The challenge is to take the things that crop up as ungodly and use them for the glory of God.  Sometimes it is our job to cut down the trees of ungodliness and sometimes it is our job to make food out of that which might have ordinarily been discarded.  We have much to dig into for the glory of God to rectify.  I challenge you to find a problem and do what you can to clean it up.  don’t get distracted by all of the messes that are around you.  Find God’s purpose for your life and pursue it, to God’s glory! Run to the end of the Highway and enjoy the marathon of life! 

I really thought I would never dissuade people from the use of headphones!

 I was a headphone maniac as a child.  It was my only privacy, growing up.  I believe that the wonder of learning to listen happened to me as I spent hours and hours borrowing my father's wonderful earphones.  I got homework done and escaped arguments and cooled down from arguments in my wonderland of musical delight.

We didn't each have a device, like people now have.  So all of our music and entertainments were shared.  That is a real loss, I think and trying to find common ground musically and entertainment wise is a real effort now that each person has his or her own device and entertainment playlist.

I have been thinking about how this builds walls of gaps in our communication.  We must try to bridge those gaps and grow together, in spite of the difficulty.  One of my dearest memories of my father, who is long gone are the trips in the car and the long and not always desired speeches about this and that topic.  I didn't really ever want to hear what he had to say.  But these many years later, the memory of them is all I have of him.

I am only saying this to you because you are missing a great amount of delightful providence of having your daddy carrying you to and from work.  You can close your ears and go into your mental prep for work and that is great, but every once in a while stop and smell the roses of a moment with a man who loves you deeply and always has something to say to you that is just for you!  Don't miss it! 

Are you listening to God when you pray?

 Prayer is an expression of my heart.  Why should I listen to God when I pray?  Some prayers don't take that much thought, it is true, but all too often we are praying just to hear ourselves commit something to God.  That is a superstitious effort.

I am not sure that superstitious prayer is heard in Heaven.  God is sovereign and I am not Him.  But the Bible talks about Elijah who was a man of like passions as we are and God answered Him to shut up Heaven to His normal provision of rain to the people.  God was showing off to the people of that time that He had Elijah's back.  What an amazing relationship to have with God that He wants to show off for you?  

He was a regular person and he was not our Lord and Savior.  Jesus is our intercessor and He takes to primitive grunts of our prayers and makes sense of them to the infinite God of the Universe.  God has no impurities and cannot even look at impurity, but He carried our sins and our griefs on the cross to pay the penalty of sin and open a pathway for our prayers to be heard and answered from Heaven.  Not for our glory, but for the Glory of God!  What a Savior!

Do I take this infinite truth into consideration enough, when I am praying to God?  Do I consider the infinite cost that my privilege of prayer cost our Savior?  Do I think about my desires in the light of what God has revealed from Heaven about Himself and His purposes for all His people?  I want to fullfill your plan for my life, Lord.  Help me through prayer to be one who advances your kingdom and not one who is a stumblingblock.  In Jesus' Awesome Name. Amen.

keep your tongue from evil?

The problem of gossip!

Getting it off my chest!

Because of my father’s antipathy for gossip, I have always been aggressive at trying to keep my tongue from that one horrible habit that is a feminine stronghold.  I have found it impossible to keep my tongue as though my entire womanhood is dependent on having to talk about somebody to somebody.   I often talk in myself to myself and correct myself for talking about myself and others in such ways.  It is impossible to keep my tongue from gossip.

I remember the very first woman that I heard gossip to God in prayer.  She rehearsed for a half an hour in my hearing the real problems of everyone of our brethren and close friends and when she finished I surprisingly felt a weight off my chest.  although I wasn’t sure if I should have said amen or “oh really” at the end of the prayer.  i admired her ability to confess the sins of herself and others so proficiently before God , but i felt very tainted with the knowledge of everybody’s business.  I loved that she cared so much about us to carry all of those burdens to the throne of grace, but it also made me very careful, what I shared with her.

2 things always haunt me, when I gossip.  The thought of my sharing private information and the knowledge of how that information will be repeated in the telephone game that is friendship and motherhood and sisterhood.  I hear them repeating and saying Jayne said… and my heart is smitten with grief and embarrassment.

A free feminine heart to bear these burdens to the Lord was stolen from me in an ultra self righteous attempt to “please my father?” in this area of my life.  He is long dead, but I hear him repeating my stories to him about my friends to the friend, which meant that the gossip that he was weeding out of my mouth was just as a part of his dna as it was mine.

“There is forgiveness with God, that He may be feared.”

I believe that verse with all my heart and it is just as sinful to exalt one sin to the highest level, without as much care of the many other sins that we engage in as it is to gossip.  

I want my friends and sisters to say to me, this is okay to share with anybody. or Share this with God and I will forgive you when you share this with your daughters, but nobody else, okay?  I never can tell at this age, what story will come out in what context and how it will haunt me in my own conscience.  Be careful how you raise your own children that you dont shackle them with a conscience that sees only one thing.

Carry your gossip to Jesus, both in confession and in reality.  He is the best gossip buddy you could ever have.  I am so grateful to the sisters in Christ who have taught me what to do with my besetting sin on that regard!  I am learning not to carry suffering in silence but to go boldly to Jesus with my sins and the gossip that I would say about someone else.  

I would give you that freedom as a gift.  Gossip to Jesus and become a great prayer

Lay aside every weight

Proverbs 17 thoughts in the light of meditations about Merlin

Using knowledge right

Using Excellent speech right is in view when we think about the mission of Merlin with Arthur.  

Having a view that the providence of God insists that any child that is given into your providential care must have royal or leadership in their futures.  

The myth of England that only the Elite were duly appointed to leadership.  Money and position paves the way for many.  But, just as true is the providence of knowing God as a condition for leadership.

The myth of America is trying to snatch the arrows out of the hands of the mighty men and redirect everyone from thinking about the children as being God’s (masculine) arrows to direct and instruct.  Women and femininity is prioritized and extolled as the condition that causes leadership.  “Buy into the feminist agenda or die in anonymity” they seem to say.  Every man for himself; motherhood, nor fatherhood is a condition for leadership or development. 

Habits of productivity

Habits of personal care

Habits of thinking

The Merlin myth seems to highlight the growth in imagination and empathy and sympathy as a condition for leadership.

I think that they were aware that there was a heartlessness that was birthed and provoked in the dark ages that “too bad” attitude that God was attempting to yank us as a world out of.

Thus Merlin’s magic revealed “The wrath of God against unrighteousness”  

In that Merlin was level headed that brain development was being severely hampered in the style of education that was choosing poor children to a life of certain servitude would soon be completely revoked and the entire system would need to be revamped.  Give everyone a chance.

I am intrigued by the imagination about feminism and the feminine wiles as being the “AntiChrist” so to speak.  Womanly confusion, whether in the emotions of squirrels or the complete competition element in the other witch”.

Every rendition of this ancient myth seems to include the confusion wrought into the equation of femininity.  Whether they were asking whether or not these tactics would be useful in educating women or not might be the question they were pondering.

I think that there was something of the competition element involved in Gweneviere’s story, which I would truly like to delve into in my studies and search of the ancient truth and how it impacts where we are today.

Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum,  England and the Americas domination of the process of cultural development in the general world scheme of present day.  As translated by Lewis Carroll…

{This is the story of growing out of an economy built on the Slavery industry in the West}

Where we are is steering the boat back into the quagmire of the dark ages where elitists rule the world and discount the considerations of the masses by their lack of imagination of inclusion.  They need to be directed is the argument.  They have had the media to do their bidding in directing.  And now that process has been dismantled and “unmasked”.  “It is in the interest of supposed progress that they do these things, but God steps in in just such a time as this to show us the folly of our way.

In answer to His Church’s prayers for effectiveness upon the earth.  God turns the tables on the elitists agenda and their 401k’s.  So that they needn’t imagine the possibility of their power being snuffed.  They are seeing the reality of these things coming upon them. 

Do we trust in chariots and bank accounts or do we trust that the God of His Church is truly offended at the development of ministries and the throwing away of the word Church from our vocabularies?  Are you the church?  Or are you the mission or the ministries?   Christ is coming back for His church?  His conditional promises are to those who are attached to her.  They are not unconditional promises.  They are not unconditional developments of a Santa Clause upstairs who loves to dote on human dear ones.  

They are the hearty promises of a jealous lover who is protecting his investment of love and care for the generations following.

Seeing God this way, we are humbled and provoked to cling to him and not to miss His perfect and true direction in the present.

Looking at history to learn what God has said through things that we have preserved through the antiquities, should be analyzed for the necessary ingredients that they possess.

Thinking and Thoughts

Brain Development vs. skill development

If we are reared as though we are made in the image of God: to have communion with Him and communicate with Him, that has ramifications in our educating.

If we are creating show dogs, who can perform this or that task and yet have no ability to engage in relationship, that is far below God’s letter of intention in and for our lives.

We are coming Up from Slavery as a World!  We are learning the inherent greatness of being made in the image of God, every one of us.  We are learning not to take people into our service as slaves and not recompense them for their services.  This is a great leap.  We are learning that no man is below any other man.  We who have much have responsibilities that others do not.

The War with the Orcs is this battle.  Fighting with and for people who cannot see the way out of the system that they have been socialized.  Skill development have a place, but each persons brain and mind and body is purposed by God.  We must engage them to see that as their highest priority.

whether Orcs or the Stormtroopers in Starwars, I am talking about people who are committed to their service to a system of education that is developed to create and extend the disparities that are already created.

We don’t want people to get to where we are, economically or relationally with God.  We cut the cords of our climbing.  Jack and the Beanstalk?  kill the plant so no one else can get to this place?  

Ezra and Nehemiah took their captivity and gave their people a way to grow in their minds to the place of thinking where they were.  Learning to think is important, even to the captives.