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

The Blessings of Marriage

Greetings All!

     Today I want to share a selection having to do with marriage -- though I must stress it's a helpful thought to consider whether one is married or not!  I do not know the title or publisher of the book I originally took it from years ago, though I did write down the author's name - Theodore Parker.
     I have used this quote numerous times at weddings and people have expressed their appreciation for it, and most all their complete agreement with it -- especially those who have been married for any length of time!  It is, in my humble opinion, worthy of your focused, thoughtful, and discerning consideration, since it contains much truth and wisdom. Enjoy.

“It takes years to marry two hearts completely, even of the most loving and tender type.  Every happy marriage is a long falling in love. Young people think love belongs only to the silken-haired and crimson-cheeked.  And it does in its beginnings.

But the golden marriage is a part of love about which the Bridal day knows nothing.  A mature and complete marriage, where wedlock is everything one could desire, where the ideal becomes actual, is not a common thing.  It is perhaps as rare as perfect personal beauty.

Men and women are married fractionally — a small fraction here, followed by a larger fraction there.  Very few are ever married totally, and those that are, only achieve it after some forty or fifty years of gradual growth, adjustment, perseverance and experimentation.

When a man and woman are successfully in love, their whole activity is energized and victorious.  They walk better, their metabolism improves, they think more clearly, their secret worries drop away, the world is fresh and interesting, and they can do more than they ever dreamed of doing.

In love of this kind, sexual intimacy in not the dead end of desire, as it is in purely romantic or promiscuous love. It is the periodic affirmation of inward delight in each other, and the crown of an active, intentional and well-lived life.  Knit together by the bonds of friendship and mutual affection, their love is as interesting as it is enduring — able to withstand the winds of adversity and change, bear hardships, build upon the mistakes of the past, and use them as opportunities for forgiveness and growth.”

     In a society which sees less and less reason for marriage (4 out of 10 thirty-and-under-people now see no need for it at all), this "thought" gives us a better insight into the blessings of marriage, how one should view it, and what it might take to improve it.

     The health of the family unit is key to the preservation of any civil society, and the health of marriages is key to the health of that family unit.  We must, therefore -- especially in a society like ours which is decidedly not "marriage-friendly" -- always be praying for those who have entered into this, "bond and covenant of marriage (which) was established by God in creation."  This relationship of committed love received Jesus' stamp of approval by, "His presence and first miracle at a wedding in Cana of Galilee."   After all, it's a way of life which, "signifies to us the mystery of the union between Christ and His Church, and Holy Scripture commends it to be honored among all people"  (from The Celebration of Marriage, Book of Common Prayer).

May you be encouraged to persevere in this God-ordained relationship, and partake of the blessings God intended through it, Pastor Jeff

Shattered Dreams

Greetings All,

     Today I would like to begin by asking you all to remember the families of those who lost loved ones on 9/11 - as tomorrow marks the 12th anniversary of that tragic and world changing event. I even read yesterday that over 1400 of the rescue workers and emergency crews who helped right after the collapse of the towers (and others I'm sure) have come down with some form of cancer from inhaling the dust, etc.  I would ask you to pray for them.
     Now, as far as our 'thought' for this week, it comes from Dr. Larry Crabb, and is taken from his book, "Shattered Dreams."
     In some ways it even relates to what I've just mentioned regarding 9/11, but I must warn you that it takes some readjusting of our minds, and a reorientation of our accepted presuppositions to comprehend what he's saying!  In a culture like ours where the "quality of life" paradigm under-girds everything we think, feel and believe, we must consider what he says lest certain portions of Scripture continue to remain a mysterious enigma to us. Are you up for the challenge?  Enjoy.

     "Shattered dreams are never random. They are always a piece in a larger puzzle, a chapter in a larger story. The Holy Spirit uses the pain of shattered dreams to help us discover our desire for God, to help us begin dreaming the highest dream. They are ordained opportunities for the Spirit to awaken, then to satisfy our highest dream... God is always working to make His children aware of a dream that remains alive beneath the rubble of every shattered dream, a new dream that when realized will release a new song, sung with tears, till God wipes them away and we sing with nothing but joy in our hearts.

     It’s hard to hear, but it is important to know, that God is not committed to supporting our ministries, to preventing our divorces, to preserving our health, to straightening out our kids, to providing a livable income, to ending famine, or to protecting us from agonizing problems that generate in our souls an experience that feels like death. We cannot count on God to arrange what happens in our lives in ways that will make us feel good. Yet we can count on God to patiently remove all the obstacles to our enjoyment of Him. He is committed to our joy, and we can depend on Him to give us enough of a taste of that joy, and enough hope that the best is still ahead, to keep us going in spite of how much pain continues to plague our hearts...

     The battle is not to improve our circumstances, to supply us with money, to protect us from suffering, to keep us safe from pain and struggle, or to quickly fix whatever problems develop in our bodies. We are encouraged to pray for all these things, but we must always finish our prayer with that wonderful caveat that in our immaturity we find so annoying: if it be Thy will be so.

     The illusion that life in a fallen world is really not all that bad must be shattered. When even the best parts of life are exposed as pathetic counterfeits of how things should be, the reality drives us to a level of distress that threatens to utterly undo us. But it’s when we’re on the brink of personal collapse that we’re best able to shift the direction of our soul from self-protection to trusting love. The more deeply we enter into the reality that life without God is sheer desolation, the more fully we can turn toward Him…

     The richest love grows in the soil of an unbearable disappointment with life. When we realize life can’t give us what we want, we can better give up our foolish demand that it do so and get on with the noble task of loving as we should. We will no longer need to demand protection from further disappointment. The deepest change will occur in the life of a bold realist who clings to God with a passion only his realistic appraisal of life can generate.

     

     Until we recognize with tears how determined we are to move away from pain and how that determination reflects our blasphemous decision to preserve our own life, we will not be able to identify the subtle ways in which our relational style violates love for others by keeping us safe… We repent by radically shifting our motivation and direction from self-preservation to trust on the basis of the belief that Christ has both given, and is preserving, our life. The fruit of repentance is a changed style of relating that replaces self-protective maneuvering with loving involvement."

     It may take a few glances to fully comprehend what he's saying since we are so convinced that God's primary purpose in our lives is, "to support our ministries, to prevent our divorces, to preserve our health, to straighten out our kids, to provide a livable income, to end famine, or to protect us from agonizing problems that generate in our souls an experience that feels like death."  We're not used to hearing that God is instead committed to, "removing all the obstacles to our enjoyment of Him." Especially When the "obstacles" He's committed to removing are those very things we have convinced ourselves He's supposed to be supplying us with (like good health, a livable income, teens that behave, a wonderful marriage, etc.).

     This is one of the reasons so many Christians in our day simply cannot grasp how James could say (and Paul with him - Romans 5:1-5) that we need to, "count it all joy when we face all kinds of trials."  One can only do that when they realize (as James did) that the purpose in our trails and difficulties is meant by God to increase our reliance or dependence upon Him, strip away our trust in false sources of joy (and thus expose idols of the heart), wean our hearts away from their fixation on earthly things, and cause us to see that He Himself is the treasure that far exceeds all that this world has to offer.  Sometimes its only though trials and hardships that the things of this earth begin to pale in comparison to God and the eternal joys He has stored up for us.

     With prayers that you might see your shattered dreams and earthly disappointments as divinely ordained ways of bringing about your enjoyment of Him -- Pastor Jeff

This is Heaven!

Greetings All,

This week's thought comes from a bestseller back in the 1970's. In fact, my copy is not in the best of shape. It's called "I Dared to Call Him Father," by Madame Bilquis Sheikh, a Pakistani muslim lady whose conversion to Christianity was largely the result of God speaking to her through her dreams. It's no isolated phenomen, if recent reports are accurate, for God appears to be revealing himself directly to numerous muslim people through their dreams in recent years, in countries or areas closed to Christian missionaries. In light of the book of Acts this should hopefully come as no surprise!

The book is a quick read and well worth the short time it would take to do so. It's an autobiographical account of her spiritual journey which begins with her frightening encounter with the supernatural, moves to her sense of an inner emptiness which the God of the Koran could not quench, to an inexplicable sense of attraction and peace and joy every time she read the Bible, to her encounter with Christ and the God she eventually dared to call "Father." Enjoy!

I start with her two dreams. In the first dream she finds herself having supper, in her home, with a man she somehow knew to be Jesus. "In peace and joy we ate dinner together," she says. She then found her dream interupted by another one, where she is transported to a mountain top and meets John the Baptist. Because Jesus is now gone, she cries out, "Where is He? I must find Him! Perhaps you, John the Baptist, will lead me to Him?" She woke calling out loudly, "John the Baptist! John the Baptist!" (And all that despite the fact that to this point in her life she had never even heard of John the Baptist)!

In her second dream she meets a perfume salesman who gives her a golden jar filled with "perfume that glimmered like liquid crystal." When she went to touch it, the man stopped her and said, "No. This will spread throughout the world."

Weeks later she would receive a copy of the Gospel of John, and discovered that John the Baptist came to pave the way for Jesus. "If John the Baptist was a sign from God, a sign pointing toward Jesus, was this same man pointing me toward Jesus, too?" Not long afterward she received a note from a Christian friend, encouraging her to read II Corinthinas 2:14 in the J. B. Phillips Modern English Version. It helped her understand her second dream. The verse says: "Thanks be to God who leads us, wherever we are, on Christ's triumphant way, and makes our knowledge of Him spread throughout the world like lovely perfume." It drove her to a fervent search for the God who was reaching out to her.

"For several days I found myself alone with two books -- the Koran and the Bible. I continued to read them both, studying the Koran because of the loyalty of a lifetime, and delving into the Bible because of a strange inner hunger. Yet, sometimes, I'd draw back from picking up the Bible. God couldn't be in both books, I knew, because their messages were so different. But when my hand hesitated at picking up the book Mrs. Mitchell gave me [the New Testament in English by J. B. Phillips] I felt a strange letdown. For the past week I had been living in a world of beauty, not a visible garden created by me from seeds and water, but an inner garden created from a new spiritual awareness... Slowly, clearly, over the next few days I began to know that there was a way to return to my world of beauty. And reading this Christian book seemed, for reasons I could not grasp, the key to my re-entering that world."

Some time later she would read the book of Revelation. "And then abruptly I came to a sentence that made the room spin. It was Revelation 3:20: 'See, I stand knocking at the door. If anyone listens to my voice and opens the door, I will go into his house and dine with him, and he with me." I gasped, letting the book fall in my lap. This was my dream, the dream where Jesus was having dinner with me! At the time of the dream I had had no knowledge of a book called Revelation. I closed my eyes and once again I could see Jesus sitting across the table from me. I could feel His warm smile, His acceptance... Now I knew that my dream had come from God. The way was clear. I could accept Him or reject Him. I could open the door, ask Him to come in permanently, or I could close the door. I would have to make my full decision now, one way or the other. I made up my mind and knelt in front of the fire. "Oh God, don't wait a moment. Please come into my life. Every bit of me is open to You." I did not have to struggle, or worry about what would happen. I had said yes. Christ was in my life now, and I knew it. How unbearably beautiful...

It was still dark when I was awakened in a state of vibrant expectancy that morning of December 24, 1966. The hands of the clock pointed to 3:00 a.m. The room was bitterly cold, but I was burning with excitement. I crawled out of bed and sank to my knees on the cold rug. As I looked up, I seemed to be looking into a great light. Hot tears flowed down my face as I raised my hands to Him and cried out, "Oh, Father, baptize me with Your Holy Spirit!" I took my Bible and opened it to where the Lord said: "John used to baptize with water, but before many days are passed you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit." (Acts 1:5)

"Lord," I cried, "if these words of Yours are true, then give this baptism to me now." I crumpled face down on the chilled floor where I lay crying. "Lord," I sobbed, "I'll never want to get up from this place until you give me this baptism." Suddenly, I was filled with wonder and awe. For in that silent pre-dawn room, I saw His face. Something surged through me, wave after wave of purifying ocean breakers, flooding me to the tips of my fingers and toes, washing my soul. Then the powerful surges subsided, the heavenly ocean quieted. I was completely cleansed. Joy exploded within me and I cried out praising Him, thanking Him... "Oh, Lord," I said, as I lay back in my bed, "could the heaven you speak of be any better than this? To know You is joy, to worship You is happiness, to be near You is peace. THIS is heaven!"

What more could one say? In Him, Pastor Jeff