My Father's Voice

(Thank God for Your Life) Love, love, love.  Love makes the world go round... or so they say.  People are always falling in and out of love.  The passionate love today can turn into venomous hatred in what seems like an unbelievable short period.  What is this?  We have many different kinds of love; Eros ( physical love ; sexual desire), phileo ( meaning a deep, emotional feeling), fraternal (brotherly affection), and agape ( Christianity: Love as revealed in Jesus, seen as spiritual and selfless and a model for humanity).  Each word describes a type of love, but in our English language the word love is tossed around to apply to everything from pizza, our pets, a car, our family, our mates, and of course, God. God loves us with supernatural love, Agape.  He has called us to love the same way and has given us the ability to do so through His Holy Spirit. (Rom 5:5). Supernatural love (Agape) is unconditonal, while ...

I attended my cousin's funeral yesterday, Nov 22, 2011.  She and I had been close as children, but because my dad was in the army we, unfortunately, did not grow up together.  Of all my many cousins she, her sister and I were the closest.  I remember spending summers with the girls and their two brothers out in the country in New Castle, Pennsylvania.  We played in the barn and out among the grape arbor, romping in the huge back yard, and the fields beyond.  We picked fruit from a large cherry tree and captured butterflies and bumble bees in jars. Watched and caught lightning bugs in the summer nights. Those were days of carefree laughter.  Later I spent time with them when I was about eighteen.  We were older and had more than picking fruit on our minds.  By this time the family had moved to a small town in Ohio and new adventures awaited us.  My uncle, their father was a Baptist preacher and we...

Do you struggle to understand the who of God?  God is love... God is faithful... God is merciful.  We hear these words and most of us process and assimilate them on a natural level.  We know people who are loving or kind.  We know people who are trustworthy or loyal, although these are attributes of that person, they are only attributes. Those qualities make up the person, but the person does not make up those qualities. These descriptions are not adequate to sum up the person of God.   Attribute defined: An attribute is a quality or characteristic of a person, place or thing. (noun) Intelligence, charm and a sense of humor are each an example of an attribute. A 'loving' person can choose to love or not love, but God is love and cannot not love.  Love is His person.  A mortal person, kind as they may be, can, given the right circumstances, not be kind, but God's goodness flows to the righteous as well as...

Not too long ago I went to a life skills seminar, and our guest speaker was a former rancher/horse trainer.  He said that when we see the pictures of the wild horses we are not seeing the true state of the horses.  We see them running free, the dust clouds swirling around their pounding hooves, tails raised and manes blowing in the wind.  From a distance they are beautiful and majestic.  Truth is, when you catch one, and are able to get close to him, you will see a matted coat, open sores, pest infestation, twisted and deformed hooves, and a myriad of other unsightly conditions.  From a distance, what appears to be beautiful, close up, reality tells a different story.  This horse trainer talked about the first encounter with this once free creature in an enclosed corral.  The horse will run for as long as it takes him to get tired, with his face toward the open range and his rear toward the trainer, who has positioned himself in...

Standing at the kitchen sink washing last night's dishes...(I know, I should have done them before I went to bed), I began to recall something my husband said this morning.  He was telling me how amazing it was to just sit in the presence of the Lord and take communion. He said he spent time telling the Lord how grateful he was for all that God had done for us through Jesus.  My husband said it was as if a warm blanket of love wrapped around him.  Instantly, I could no longer heard his voice... my own thoughts took over, 'What's this?  You took communion without me?'  My feelings were hurt!  How could he have had this experience and exclude me?  BUMPER CAR flash back! Yup, I was having a bumper car moment! Was I trying to hop into his bumper car? Or was this something I was  supposed  be joined with him in?  And, as Father began to soothe my ruffled, religious feathers, He shared something I had not though...

I had been trying to wrap my head around the finished work of Jesus and the grace of God. The fact that nothing I do can increase or decrease what was already done was hard to comprehend.  Like so many Christians, I believed that if I did good things, good things would come,  and if I did bad things... well, you reap what you sow.  So, I made myself busy with doing good things and slipped into the "Believer's Rut", which is based on works and not on grace. Don't get me wrong, we are supposed to do good things because we are God's children and imitators of our Father.  Our good deeds should be the result of the Spirit of God residing in and flowing out of us, rather than from our efforts of trying to be good.  We are  good; Jesus said so in John 15: 3.  He said we are all clean because of the Word.  He said,"I am the true Vine, and My father is the Vine dresser.  Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit ...

From my kitchen I could hear this sound like the garage door opener engaging and disengaging repeatedly.  I looked out the door to the garage to see my husband trying to get the weed-eater to start.  The sound I heard was his frustrated efforts, intense in vainly pulling the starter cord repeatedly, and he seemed to be expending so much energy in his futile attempt.  I went to console him a bit and suggested he ask the Holy Spirit to help him with the task. I breathe a short prayer on his behalf as I went back into the house.  I returned to my project of cleaning out one of the file cabinets in the lower level and found a note Father gave me some time ago:  'As you have sought me, as you have desired me, as you have cried out for me, I will come to you.  I will   sweep you up into my presence.  I have come for you. I have come to take you unto myself.  I will sweep you into a new place in me. You have been l...

When I was young I was very timid.  I used to imagine doing things I was too timid to attempt.  I could hardly see myself even riding a bike.  I was never confrontational, and frankly, I would run rather than fight. Being the only child in a military family, I escaped many of the normal childhood rites of passage.  I usually moved before too many kids knew I existed.  That was both good and bad... bad because I escaped many of the hard lessons we learn as kids, and good because I escaped some of the hard lessons we learn as kids. I remember one time when I was about nineteen, some friends and I went to an amusement park.  Everyone wanted to ride the Bumper Cars, everyone but me.  I was afraid of getting into a bumper car alone.  I remember all of my friends each scrambling to get into a car, and I was standing on the floor looking terrified and desperate.  Every time I tried to jump into one of their cars, I was rejected.  I fin...

One day as I stood at my kitchen sink, I looked out the window in front of me admiring the freshly mowed lawn.  It was a bright June day; before the heat of the summer sun had scorched the grass.  The clouds, billowing across the sky, accented the beauty I beheld. As I admired the scene, I began to hear my Father's voice flowing into my mind.  He seemed to say," Beautiful, isn't it?'   I then realized that I could only admire the beauty of this scene but not partake or experience it.  This realization took me on a life experience analogy. As long as I just stood there and observed the lawn I was only a spectator.  To experience it I would have to physically stand, walk, run or lie in it.  Then Father said,"Life is like the lawn... You can stand at a distance and observe it and never experience it."  He continued to teach me a principle about the 'lawn of life'.  He said the beauty you see is not the actuality of t...