let it snow

Today, I (Sherann) spent practically the entire day in Tehachapi. The drive was beautiful! For those of you who have never heard of this small town, it is located east of Bakersfield and roughly about 40-50 miles from the Mojave Desert. One of the great parts about the drive was seeing the lightly coated snow on the mountain tops. It was very ... magical.
After my meeting, I headed down south but this time took the back roads. (avoiding the grape vine) I spent about six hours in the car today, but I spent those hours 1. enjoying His creation 2. rocking out to Chris Tomlin's new CD "And If Our God Is For Us" 3. grateful for the faith family at first baptist 4. thoughts for 2011 5. Matthew 28:18-20.
You may be thinking... Matthew 28? That was random... Well, this has been THE verse for the past year and eleven months. And to be honest... it has never gotten old! God would speak to me in such a new and fresh way that I just can't get enough of it! I'm still processing from this afternoon, so I'm not going to write it out... but let's just say... wow!
Is there a specific verse that you can't get enough of? If so, how did you apply it to your life?  "And Jesus came and said to them, 'All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.'" Matt. 28:18-20

Giving Thanks

Thanksgiving is almost here.  So have you been thinking about what you’re grateful for?  Have you shared your thanks with those involved?  God, your parents, your friends, etc.?

I’ve (Aimee) been thinking about it for a little while now.  I’ve been thinking about all of the blessings that I have in my life: my health, a home, food, clothes.  And I’ve also been thinking about how ungrateful I can be at times.  There are times when I complain about having to walk so far, but there are people who cannot walk at all.  I get bored with eating a lot of the same things over and over again, but (worst of all) I rarely make dinner myself, and there are so many people who barely have enough to eat to stay alive.  I wish my bedroom were bigger so I’d have more room for my stuff, but there are people who have to sleep in their cars or on the streets and who have only as much stuff as they can carry with around with them.

I do not want to be ungrateful.  And I ask God for forgiveness every time I realize that I’m even leaning in that direction.  God has given me so many blessings, and it would be absurd of me to expect Him to shower me with more when I’m not using what He’s already given me.  The first step is to simply be grateful!

Be grateful for what you have.  There are many in our world, in our own country, and most likely even in your own city who have to make do with much, much less. 

When you’re grateful, you’ll find that you’re also happier.  Happiness does not come from getting what you want, but from finding contentment with what you have.  I’m sure you’ve heard that, or something like it before.  It’s an old idea, but we forget it very easily.

Praise God for the blessings that He has given you.  Let your loved ones know how much you appreciate them.  Consider ways to share your blessings with others, both those that you already know and those that you don’t know.

I also want to encourage you to remember what you’re thankful for as we move into the Christmas season and we start thinking about all of the money that we’ll be spending, and that others will be spending on us.  How will you spend your time and money this year?  What are you going to ask Santa for?  Will you be taking time to remember and be thankful for the best gift of all?  The gift that makes Christmas something worth celebrating?  Will you use your resources wisely?  Or are you going to allow yourself to get caught up in the race for more stuff?

I know what I’m thankful for this year.  I’m going to continue to pray that God will help me to remember it all as I move forward from this Thanksgiving Day towards next year.  I’m sure that there will be days when I’ll forget, and I’ll be ungrateful, but I pray that those days will be few and far between.

Happy Thanksgiving to you all.  May God continue to bless you and may your eyes be open to recognizing those blessings.  Amen.

Just Like Magic

The new Harry Potter movie is coming out in just a few days, so, yes, I’m going to do it.  I’m going to talk about Harry Potter.  (Sherann, you knew it was only a matter of time.)

PLEASE NOTE: If you aren’t a Harry Potter fan, I’m not going to get deep into details.  So, please stick around and give this a read.  With that said, to you who are fans, there will be no spoilers here, unless it would spoil things for you to know that the bad guy loses at the end of the story.  Oops.  Sorry.  I guess I spoiled it then.

I am a huge Harry Potter fan.  I’m a big fan of the fantasy genre to begin with, so when my cousin suggested the books to me years ago, I decided to give them a try, and of course, like millions of other people throughout the world, I was instantly hooked on the story of the Boy Who Lived.  But these stories are more than just entertaining.  A lot of truth is revealed, as is the case in many fiction stories and even in fantastical fiction such as this.

Let me tell you what hooked me.  The Harry Potter story is ultimately a story of good versus evil, in which good wins out in the end.  Too simplistic?  I don’t think so.  It’s similar to another book that we’re all big fans of: the Bible.  Before you start lighting the fires to burn me as a heretic, let me explain.  The Harry Potter series are not Christian novels, but there is nothing inherently un-Christian, or anti-Christian in them.  They advocate peace, love, acceptance, justice… yes, there’s magic, but it’s a fantasy story, not a manual.  There’s magic in the Lord of the Rings series, too!  Maybe I’ll talk about those books sometime … but not right now.  I don’t think that Harry is meant to be a messiah figure, not really.  But there are many parallels in his story to the human condition in general and to the realities of evil in the world, as well as the acknowledgment of the fact that there are worse things than death and the true power of love.

Call me weird, but I’m a big fan of books and movies that paint evil for what it truly is.  Evil is real, whether we want to believe it is or not.  Evil exists solely to steal, kill, and destroy.  Within evil there is no compassion, no mercy, and no love, of any kind.  In fact, as Rowling points out over and over again in Harry’s story, evil doesn’t understand love, and that is evil’s greatest downfall.  Voldemort is thwarted over and over again by love.  He doesn’t understand it.  He doesn’t believe in its power.  He doesn’t count on it.  Therefore, it always defeats him and ultimately defeats him.

Jesus Christ took the humble form of a human being and walked willingly to death on a cross in order to redeem us.  Satan thought that he had won.  Everything had worked out just like he had wanted, just like he had influenced them… or so he thought.  But then, three days later, God raised Jesus from the dead, and any perceived power that Satan thought that he had was shattered and the entire world would never be the same again.  Praise God!

Also, we can’t ignore the connection of the Ministry of Magic’s (Rowling’s magical government) intense effort to ignore the truth of Voldemort’s existence and our own efforts to ignore evil in our world.  For Harry, frustration runs rampant as he deals with people at school and in the government who are trying their very best to shut him up as he is trying to make people aware of the fact that Voldemort is alive and well.  Watching the movies recently with a friend who had never seen them before he turned to me and asked why the government would refuse to believe Harry.  And I said to him, “Because they don’t want to believe him.  Would you?” 

We would love to ignore evil and just pretend that it doesn’t exist.  No murder.  No theft.  No bullying.  No starvation.  No cancer.  No AIDS.  No orphans.  I could go on and on and on.  But the point is that evil exists.  We have to acknowledge it.  But we do so in the knowledge that Jesus has already overcome the world.  Love has already won.  Evil has no power here except what we give up, and we give it up most readily when we chose to ignore it.

Sale

I (Sherann) love items on sale. If you think about it, who doesn't?
This past weekend I decided to head over to a Christian bookstore. I love books. I love opening new books, love the way they smell, and love the way they are so uniquely different. Anyway, I started to look over the bargain books and found several books that caught my attention. I was so excited to buy them since they were cheap and especially since many of them were ones I had longed to read. So after looking through the bookshelves, I ended up buying four books.
1. 3:16- Max Lucado
2. UnChristian- David Kinnaman
3. Chasing Daylight- Erwin McManus
4. Words from the Fire- Al Mohler Jr.

I started to read Max Lucado's book 3:16 and found some great depth and insight into the heart of a loving God. I wanted to share with you a paragraph from this book. It was so gripping.

" Since he has no needs, you cannot tire Him. Since he is without age, you cannot lose him. Since he has no sin, you cannot corrupt Him.
If God can make a billion galaxies, can't he make good out of our bad and sense out of our faltering lives? Of course he can. He is God."

So glad He is a loving and gracious Father.

His credentials

I (Sherann) know that it has been awhile since my last post.  A lot has been going on and it continues to be a busy month.  However, the Lord has been really stretching me in regards to my relationship with Him.  When Aimee and I decided to be authentic with our faith, there have been numerous times where God was teaching us the same exact truth that week.  It's pretty amazing to encourage one another through our same experiences, even if we are 5 hours apart from each other.  So, this brings me to one of the same learning experiences that Aimee and I both had this week.  Aimee brought some great truths in regards to moving from knowing to knowing.  I found myself to face that same lingering question... "Do you truly trust in Me? or do you merely say that you do?"  Ouch.  For the last couple of days, I've been feeling more anxious than ever.  I start analyzing a lot more and fear starts creeping in.  Then those five letters started to penetrate my heart and mind.  TRUST.  Who do you trust, Sherann?  You see, I've been so caught up in "myself" or how "I" was going to handle the situation that I neglected to trust that Jesus had already gone before me.  It's a matter of choice.  His credentials show me that He is trustworthy. The Cross shows me His unconditional love for me. (1 John 4:9)  My credentials show uncertainty and more often, failure.  If we look at His Word, God never let a single person down.  He kept His promises and did extraordinary things through prophets and leaders.  And these leaders were not special by any means, but they chose to trust in Him because His credentials were legit. 
I choose to trust Him.  Will you?


"Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.  In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make straight your paths."  Proverbs 3:5-6 (ESV)

Moving From Knowing to Knowing

Something occurred to me (Aimee) truly for the first time just the other night as I was talking to my mother about what God has been revealing to me lately.  I said to her that God already told me that He’s going to be there for me and take care of me, I just have to keep up my end which is to keep my word and to work on my relationship with Him (not that I can do either of those things on my own, but perhaps that is part of the point).  Should I say that again?

God has already told me that He’s going to be there for me and take care of me… 

God has already told you that He’s going to be there for you and take care of you…

When it hit me I was a little ashamed.  For years I have been claiming that I trust God, and there have been times in my life when I have truly turned to Him with complete trust, but there hasn’t been any consistency to that trust.  God has already told me that He’s going to be there for me and take care of me before I ever made any commitments to Him, before I was even born, He already loved me and was already providing for me.  I thought that I already knew this, but as I prayed with a dear friend the other day, it’s often easier to know something in our heads than it is to truly know it in our hearts.

God has already told me that He’s going to be there for me and take care of me…  He said it when He led Israel through the wilderness and provided for their every need, reminding them constantly that He was their God and that they were His chosen people.  He said it when Israel was sent into exile and He let them know that He was still their God no matter where in the world they were and that they were still His people.  He said it when He sent His Son to seek the least the last and the lost so that we could know Him better, to know that He is our God and that we are His people.  He said it when He sent His Son to die for the sins of the world so that we might be saved and be able to join Him someday in paradise, because He is our God and we are His people.

God has already told me that He’s going to be there for me and take care of me…  This is not a deal that is contingent upon anything on my part except one thing: I simply have to accept His Word, and accept Him.  By letting go and trusting Him, knowing that He is my God and I am one of His people, I have seen His provisions for me not only meet my needs but He has begun to surpass them and move into abundance.

At one of the conferences that I went to, one of the speakers challenged us by saying that we really didn’t have a right to complain that God wasn’t blessing us when He had already blessed us and we did nothing with what He gave us.  Why would He give us more if we haven’t been faithful with what we have already received?  He has blessed me with so much in my life and I have been faithful with some of it and that is unacceptable and shameful.  Through prayer and time in His Word God is growing me and I am being blessed more and more abundantly.  That is not bragging.  I’m praising God!

Casting Crowns, in their self-titled, album have a beautiful song called “Your Love is Extravagant.”  The first two lines say:

                        Your love is extravagant.

                        Your friendship, it is intimate.

We are so blessed to have a God that desires for us to know Him intimately and whose love is more extravagant than we could have ever deserved.

God has already told me that He’s going to be there for me and take care of me…  I think that I will be repeating that to myself for a while.

God has already told me that He’s going to be there for me and take care of me… 

God has already told me that He’s going to be there for me and take care of me… 

Wow.



Let me correct myself:
God has already been there for me and has taken care of me ...

Idolatry as a Favorite Passtime

I’ve found myself thinking about the sin of idol worship lately.  I just finished Exodus and started Leviticus, lot’s in there.  Plus, when I was visiting Sherann I read a little bit of a book she got when she went to see the Purple Pig Tour called, The Purple Pig and Other Miracles (I was scanning to try and find out where the name came from, but I didn’t get that far), and I happened to read a section where Dick Eastman was talking about an experience he had at a college event that touched on idolatry.  When stuff starts popping up over and over again, I don’t take that as a coincidence, but rather as instructions to pay attention.

So I started thinking more about it and praying about it.  Idols aren’t something that we often think about today, or at least that we don’t often think about in a negative way.  In fact, for years people would throw around the phrase “he/she is my idol” quite freely about celebrities all the time.  Today, we even have the ump-teenth season of American Idol, passing off the idea that idolization is no big deal.  It’s still not something that we take very seriously.  But we should.

Idolatry is anything or anyone that draws our attention, time, worship, and praise away from God where it rightfully belongs.  An idol is not simply a carved, man-made god.  It can be a celebrity or sports star or any person.  It can be television, video games, or any stuff.  It can be an idea or ideal even.  It can even be things within the Church, itself, that we have placed too high and too holy for our own good.  If we obsess over it, if we feel like we can’t live without it then it’s very likely something that we have idolized.  I'm convinced that at least part of the reason that God commanded the Israelites not to make any graven images is because then they would have slowly begun to worship those things instead of Him.  We often face that same danger today.

A few years ago we had fires that raged throughout Southern California.  We were about a mile away from one of those fires.  I’ve lived in SoCal all my life, and I’m not saying that earthquakes don’t scare me, but I have never experienced fear quite like that before.  Sadly, what I was really afraid of was not losing my life, but losing my stuff.  In an earthquake, even if the house collapsed, most of my stuff would be fine; it might get dirty, it might take some time to get to, but not destroyed.  But a fire!  A fire consumes everything.  And I was afraid.  And when I realized all of that, I felt sick to my stomach.

I think that it’s okay to like our stuff.  It’s okay to watch television or play video games.  But we need to have a proper attitude about/perspective on things.  If I was going to spend more time worrying about my stuff than worrying about and praying for the people who were losing their homes then my heart was not in the right place and I did not have proper perspective.

We need to recognize what we have begun to idolize in our lives and begin to fix the problem.  It may take time.  There may be relapses.  Prayer helps. 

I’ve been doing this in my life and I’ve been asking God to reveal the things that I have idolized without yet realizing it so that I can remove those things.  This doesn’t mean that I got rid of my TV.  It does mean that I have been watching much much less.  It doesn’t mean that I got rid of my stuff.  It does mean that I have shared my desire with family and friends to begin paring down my unnecessary belongings.  It’s a small step.  But it’s a step.

I want to give God all of the glory.  I want to give Him all my praise.  He deserves nothing less.  It gets easier as I focus more of my time and attention on Him.  I still have bad days.  When I realize it, those are the days that I pray a little more.  He is helping me along the way, because I can't do it without Him.