If I were President, I would probably not be a Christian, because the money and compromise that it takes to become president in this country doesn't square with Christian ethics. Fighting for the life of the unborn is a major priority to me. Giving the youngest and silent among us a real chance at getting born has been a long hardfought battle. We are still in the throws of the delivery of that concept in our country. Education has been created around this horrible unsavory concept and much of our lives have been detoured to revolve around the hole in our morals that has grown and grown with each addition to the supposed freedom of a woman to murder her conceived child.
That is my most great burden. I would make a law alleviating the decision and giving the decision to a Christian group of thinkers who would recreate our syllabus of education and our judicial system to be accommodating to the most vulnerable unborn and elderly who are on the chopping block of our society.
Children and the elderly would be a priority and peace making from inside our country.
There would be a waiting list to enter the country that would be contingent on care of our own citizens. those are just 2 of the issues of my concern.
How do you finish the match, when the crowd is against you, the score is against you and it seems all of your best attempts seem to fall flat?
I watched a match last week and I was rooting for the underdog in that match. I could really relate to her. I don’t always root for the underdog. The other young lady was not the most skilled player, but her conditioning was clearly superior, which is why she won. I tuned in in the very beginning of the third set. It had been 2 and a half hours of grueling tennis. I love those kind of matches, although I haven’t three hours to devote to engaging my attentions to one match, unless it is a final of some grand slam. This was a qualifier match for the Open, hardly worth my attention usually. God had some sutures to apply to some open gaping wounds in my soul, that I hadn’t even noticed.
Hallelujah, for his attention to detail. This little girl may never play another match and her ministry to my soul would have been worth the humiliation of her loss. I owe her a debt of gratitude.
My first memory of a long match was a three hour grueling match against a formidable women at Rochdale. For weeks before the match, my father prepped me for a loss. You can’t practice as much as she is practicing, he said. You have school and so you might get a game or two. Minimizing my expectation was my father’s go to coaching style. He was a very young thirty something father of skilled athletic women and he was very proud of that status.
He had learned the power of persuasion from a doting, devoted quintuplet crew. I, perhaps more than they all.
The match came amidst many other responsibilities of freshman year at a new school. A brisk September, Saturday morning tourney match came upon us. My very first new can of balls. The investment of each match. Pop, fizz and that intoxicating freshness and greening of your mind and olfactory nerves is always exhilarating. I will never grow tired of that level of expectation. 40 something years later the sense of anticipation seems to still linger. We didn’t play 3 sets, we played a 9 game single set. It took 3 long hours for us to wrestle and crawl out from under the smoke of our entanglement. I had won. I could hardly believe it. I had beat my most formidable foe. A real woman and I at 14 had triumphed. My muscles and body felt wrung out, but my ambition had received a great and huge boost that would carry me through many battles won and lost over the high school season of play and growth.
Had I lost, perhaps my ambitions would have been more tempered. I can’t imagine that.
The young lady in the match that I saw the other night took me to that inevitability of having lost that match. I felt as though I had lost and several times I did lose, but perhaps if I had lost that match, I might have gone in another direction of life altogether. My father would have been right in his estimation of my skill set and perhaps I would have tried some other expression of life skills, completely. Who can tell?
What are we learning in this world of higher education? Is it against the will of God to use the means at hand to progress and to engage our culture, for our profit and for our usefulness in the world in which we live? Does God want me to engage the world with the grace of God or retreat and hide from fear of the seepage of it’s indelible ink on my soul?
God is greater and can handle me in my engagement with the culture. I believe that there is nowhere that I can go that is apart from his ability to rescue me from others or from myself. Pastor preached against the leaven of sin in the believer’s life. What defiles us, truly keeps us from deeper intimacy with Christ. Asking God to keep us from the ungodliness of our culture is truly a Danielic task. Other cultures seem to take their religion so much more seriously than we do. They have outward adornments and they have feasts and things that everyone has to accommodate and we feel very diminished, because for the most part, Christianity has built our economy around our feasts and life. It doesn’t seem special in comparison.
It is, though and it doesn’t make our religion less special because we have built our lives around it. Christmas, Sundays, Easter, etc., are beautiful and beautifying experiences that draw us into a deeper relationship with the very one who made and sustains the world! Hallelujah! We needn’t make ourselves obnoxious and notorious for not engaging or interacting with the godlessness of the idolatrous around us. Our God is in control, the gods of the nations are the distraction of this world. The idolatry of worldliness is offensive and stinky, but we know that God is greater.
Who do we serve? Why are we learning in an ungodly environment? Can I stand, with all of these temptations and differences rubbing shoulders with me?
I most certainly can! God is greater and he empowers me to do all things for his glory! I can learn and represent Christ even in the midst of an ungodly university around me. I mustn’t get disappointed, when those who represent religion show no mercy for the torrents of sin that attack. They shoot us by ridicule for choosing to represent Christ in an uncomfortable position,ie, sports, and arts and other unusual circumstances. A man in the sports arena, is never assumed to be a heathen, but a woman, no question, she is a heathen. That isn’t true. We love Him because he first loved us and he will love us through this difficulty as well!
Lord, I trust you with my soul! Lord, I trust you with my mind! College is no match for your omnipotence and so I engage the world in which we live, with a victorious and expectant attitude for you to glorify yourself in my experiences. For the Glory of Christ Jesus and for the betterment of his church in our age! Amen
And it was so, when the days of their feasting were gone about, that Job sent and sanctified them, and rose up early in the morning, and offered burnt offerings according to the number of them all: for Job said, It may be that my sons have sinned, and cursed God in their hearts. Thus did Job continually.
My Dearest “son of my Vows”,
what a bright and resourceful young man you have become. I feel that I can share more with you now because you have struggled some in this COVID time.I feel so much in common with you, although I am eldest child in my family and you the youngest. So much struggle has made you very sensitive and careful as a communicator and as a peacelover in the family.I love to watch you carefully tread through the minefield of personalities that it is your providence to endure.
This morning, it was the providence of God for me to begin the book of Job.I really think this is my least favorite book in the bible and yet perhaps the most endearing to me.I put on the seatbelts of my mind, every time that I get to this reading.I prayed to God to give me strength in the form of a very deep sigh! and I pressed on.
Lord,this is Christmas season and you know how this book will carry me through seasons of memories that are difficult for me to get up from.Yes I was this impertinent to the Lord, all the while knowing that He can carry me if I fall from this Christmas meditation. “You need this right now”. I felt that His silence and comfort confirmed this and I pressed on. Of course I can choose to wriggle free from this providence and go on to a happier book.A less personal book, etc.
We were in the book of Job as a family in devotions, when Baby Benjamin passed away. It always carries me right back to the last day that I held him in my lap and cradled his tiny head in my hands adoringly.
I considered rushing through the book seeing that it is 42 chapters long I thought perhaps if I read 6 books a day I can get through it in 7 days instead of dragging this all through the Christmas season.I knew in my heart that this wasn’t going to edify my soul to rush through this difficult and blessed expression of God’s heart to me.So I am trudging through it and I intend to drink every lesson from God as He holds my hand and walks me through the many years of Job’s life and the many years of my life where there are questions and lets me see His sovereignty, even here on earth, before I face Him in the true judgment. I trust Him to settle my soul.I will be 59 this year and I trust that God will renew my strength in this reading as He has so many times before.
I ask for your prayers and hope that you will grow to know and love the Lord and see Him working in your life in His wonderful and sometimes scary ways!Love, Mom
