So this is my 100th post on this new blog site and I feel pretty good about it. I am starting a new series and have a plan that will keep me lined up. Hope it is doing someone some good besides me. I am thankful God has led me here and that I am following.
A month of Sundays. My brain translates this as a long time, but I do not ever remember rounding it down to six months until recently. It has a country feel to it that I associate with the time from starting back up from winter until harvest is over. It also has a hint that the men only came to church when the fields were resting. I probably saw it in an old Western and took it as gospel.
Since my brain appears to be actively pursuing excuses not to write a book, it has come up with another blog option called a Month of Sunday’s in which I summarize what I heard at church the last month. I have had worse ideas. And I followed through on some of those, so I will at least try this one once. I would rather not just regurgitate what I heard, so I will try to personalize it as much as I can.
Our pastor has been going through Revelations and he got to the really exciting (sarcasm?) part where two witnesses come to share the gospel with everyone who is left. I always associated the two witnesses with Moses and Elijah representing the Law and the Prophets, and although neither they nor the other writers of the Old Testament were around to see Jesus, everything they wrote pointed His way. The most unique point of the sermon was showing a live feed from the wailing wall where these two will be in the future and to see how the whole world will be able to see it happen live as they are killed, lay dead, and then rise again. It is so sad that the people of that time see this and still reject God.
Once a month someone at our campus takes a turn preaching and the most personal aspect of that sermon was the video before it talking about a missionary’s journey to a country that my colleagues are trying to get some work in. I decided I would look up the missionary if I ever get there. The key phrase from the lesson was Christ telling the woman “Neither do I condemn you.” I love that story, it reminds me my role is not to judge others or avenge, but to love. Christ must be my source for love, because I know I have a hard time moving past the sin nature judgements of everyone I encounter. I want to love everyone and I want to show it to everyone, but often times I am not strong enough alone.
The morning before the freeze, our pastor led a service about gratitude. It was timely as we had a good week to learn about what we should be grateful for. It was almost comical how he tried to finish in a flurry only to come back to it the next week to reinforce the lessons from the week. From the first week, I really wanted to start journaling those things that I should praise God for in my life. When I was little, I was taught to journal facts. I was encouraged to include feelings (and not just irritations). But even when I was journaling prayer requests, I never really looked forward to looking at the list again and was not praising God when prayers were answered. One of the challenges to attempt when things go wrong was to 1) assess damage and make repairs, 2) determine current position, and 3) Fix a new path forward. It jives with how I wanted to start each day, but I never thought of it in quite that way.
The final lesson was to be desperate for God with great joy, encouragement, and refreshment based on a couple verses in Philemon. I am not sure that has quite sunk in yet, but I think I was distracted trying to remember all the things I wanted to praise God about from the previous week. Maybe next month I should hold off before completing this task.
A month of Sunday’s ago, we were hoping to get school started on time and recover our lives from the chaos that was our government’s “fly by the seat of your pants” effort to control the spread of a disease that hindsight’s says we should have been prepared for. As new data comes out, we are further convinced that Big D had this in January last year when she tested negative for flu and strep but was really sick. The world is probably no more messed up than it was six months ago, but it certainly feels like we should be in a better place now that then. In many ways our world has been changed forever, but in some ways it has not changed since Adam and Eve’s encounter with the serpent. I need God in ways I do not understand and while I do not like the negative connotation of “desperate”, I think I can identify.