Jesus

Greetings All!

     These past few weeks I was reading (and re-reading) testimonies written by people who are joining the church where I pastor.  I always find such personal accounts of God's work in people's lives to be fascinating and encouraging. Simply tracing the threads of God's providential and redemptive work in the lives of others encourages me in my own life!  In fact, they made me decide I would send out something different today -- my own testimony which I condensed into the form of a short poem and read at my ordination service in 1987.  And please keep in mind I do not claim any gifting as a poet, it was simply a shorter way of sharing what would have been much longer if I shared it in a different format.

     You will quickly discern I grew up in a rural place (actually, next to my grandfather's farm and sizable expanses of open land).  And although I do use metaphors in the poem, I want you to know the references to the dream of a cross "on a distant hill" and an encounter with an "angel" actually happened. 

     










     I have always loved Francis Thompson's extraordinary poem about God's pursuit of him, called, "The Hound of Heaven" (in my opinion, a must read).  In so many ways his experience mimicked my own as I hit my teens and early 20's: God's abundant kindnesses were excused away by my sin-hardened heart.  God's repeated mercies were met by my firmly entrenched resistance.  And God's unrelenting pursuit of me was countered by me running in the opposite direction.  Until one day, that is, when -- tired and burdened by the guilt of all my sin -- His grace conquered my resistance, and the sweet persistence of His loving overtures led to the divine conquest of my soul.  You also may have seen (or do see) that same process taking place in your own soul, hopefully with the same eventuality of conquest and surrender finishing off the story.  The following stanzas take you from my first memories of childhood to the time I entered the pastorate 31 years ago.  The poem is simply entitled, "Jesus."

JESUS

You sought me when my days were young; 

Your love reached out through everyone.

Such gifts you gave, so rare and sweet; 

Ten thousand clues laid at my feet,

Yet still our paths did never meet.

You called to me from peaceful woods, 

From morning dews which glistening stood;

In fields where flow'rs Your radiance shown, 

And wildlife's whispers in clear tones, 

Called out to make your glory known.

You called to me so many ways - 

In dreams at night of ancient days, 

Where on a distant hill there stood,

A silhouetted cross of wood.

And in the hush mine eyes did see, 

A figure hanging there... for me

I ran not knowing what to do, 

But still your angels did pursue.

I shunned your love, I knew Your creed - 

It was for sinners You did bleed!

My plans were set, I had no need,

My eyes were set on lust and greed.

I turned my back on all You'd shown, 

Excused away the love I'd known.

To me You'd been so kind and real, 

But yet my heart refused to yield.

So many kindnesses You'd shown, 

And yet my heart had turned to stone.

I sought life's thrills to fill the void, 

There was no pleasure not employed.  

For self I lived and breathed and slept, 

Until in broken shame I wept, 

To see the vigil You had kept.

"Such love," I said, "it cannot be,

That condescends to one like me!

If anything I'd earned Your rage;

Eternal wrath the sinner's wage."

But You in loving mercy shown,

With greater love than ere' I'd known.

You touched and turned me Lord to You,

With love unfathomable but true.

You caused my hardened heart to see, 

No greater joy could ere' there be,

Than loving You who first loved me.

Living in the Grace of Jesus, Pastor Jeff 

Touched by an Angel

Greetings All,

     This week's "thought" comes to you from Eric Metaxas and is found in his lesser know book entitled, "Miracles - What They Are, Why They Happen, and How They Can Change Your Life."  Metaxas  graduated from Yale with a degree in English and is much better known for his lengthy and best-selling book, Bonhoeffer - Pastor, Martyr, Propet, Spy  or his other more popular book Amazing Grace, about William Wilberforce and his heroic campaign to end slavery in the British Empire.

















In this book, "Miracles," Mataxas deals only with those miracles cited in Scripture, or told to him by friends and associates whose integrity he trusts implicitly, so as to avoid sharing stories from people whose character and credibility he cannot personally vouch for. (He even records for us the dream which he himself had, that led him to write the book on Bonhoeffer.) The stories come from personal friends who either witnessed or experienced phenomena that apart from a miraculous explanation is otherwise inexplicable. Phenomena whose veracity he might even have questioned if he did not personally know the various individuals. For any interested in this topic of the miraculous, this book is well worth the price. Most of the stories are too long to quote, so I share one of the shorter ones. Enjoy.

Touched by an Angel

     "My friend Eva Meyer was thirteen and a freshman at Staples High School in Westport, Connecticut.  In the first few days of school (this was in the 1980's) she made some new friends and one invited her to a sleepover one Friday night in early September. Eva soon realized these girls were rather different from the ones she had been used to spending time with. For one thing, they were all interested in the occult. In fact, they decided they wanted to have a seance that night. One of the girls was heavily into the music of "The Doors," and said she wanted to invoke the spirit of Jim Morrison (who had died July 3, 1971). But Eva did not wish to "break on through to the other side."  She knew far too much about the dark side of the spirit realm to think it was a good way to spend the evening. She simply could not go through with it and said so to her new friends.

     So the girls decided they would all take a walk to the beach instead. The girl whose house the sleepover was at, lived within walking distance of Compo Beach. The quickest route there was straight down Hillspoint Road and over the Hillspoint Road Bridge, which crosses over I-95, the heavily trafficked interstate highway that runs from Maine to Florida. When the girls got to the bridge, Eva saw that there was a six-foot-tall wooden stockade fence blocking the road. Evidently there was "roadwork" being done on the bridge, although they could not see past the tall fence to see exactly what was being done. But the girl whose house they they were staying at told them she climbed the fence all the time and just walked across the bridge. She insisted that she had done it many times and explained that they just didn't want cars driving across it, but it was absolutely fine to walk across it.

     Eva explains that for "some strange reason" they insisted that she go first. They would boost her up and help her get over the fence. To this day Eva cannot figure out why she agreed to go first, but she did. She says that at the time she was a "five-foot-two, maybe one hundred forty pounds, somewhat chubby, very weak thirteen-year-old girl," who had never done a single pull-up in her life. Maybe this is why she agreed to letting the three of them help her up and over first, or why they suggested it.  So the three girls boosted her up with their hands and essentially heaved her over the six-foot fence.

     It was in the next split second that Eva saw the trouble. To put it in her own words, precisely as she typed them to me: "THERE WAS NO BRIDGE THERE!!!  NOTHING!!!"  It was an unspeakable horror, the sort of thing about which one has reoccurring nightmares. Eva remembers in that briefest of moments seeing a huge semi-truck roaring right beneath her flailing legs, which were kicking in midair, and she remembers the feel of the rough top of the stockade fence which she desperately tried to grasp with her hand as her body went over.

     Instinctively she screamed, "Jesus!!!"  Then, just as she lost her grip and began to plummet to what she knew would be her death on the highway below, with the endless speeding trucks and cars, she felt herself being lifted up.  She saw nothing, but in the blink of an eye she felt herself being scooped up in midair and carried back over the fence and placed on solid ground -- but a full ten feet away from where the three girls had tossed her over.  She says that she remembers landing -- "my arms stretched out wide, as though a parachute had brought me to a soft landing." And then she remembers the unhinged looks on the faces of the three other girls. She remembers that they were "utterly horrified, scared witless." Eva says they were, "white as sheets, with mouths agape, and eyes wide in terror."  All three of them shrieked and instantly bolted from the scene, running as fast as they could. 

     She remembers the feeling of those moments. She felt strangely calm, but confused too. She knew without a doubt that in that moment Jesus had miraculously saved her life. She simply walked home not telling a soul what happened, but remembers clearly that not one of those three girls ever spoke to her again. They wouldn't even glance in her direction or come near her. [Twenty-some-odd years later, around the time of her high school reunion, Eva discovered through Facebook that the girl whose house they had been at was a full-fledged Satanist -- her page filled with pentagrams and other dark, occult symbols]."

     If you read the book you will find one other amazing story about Eva later in her life.  One which may explain why she was so miraculously spared.

Just some food for thought!

In the Service of Jesus, Pastor Jeff