The Quintessential Rearview Mirror

Friday, September 30, 2022

The thought of my suffering and homelessness is bitter beyond words.  I will never forget this awful time, as I grieve over my loss.  Yet I still dare to hope when I remember this:  The faithful love of the Lord never ends!  His mercies never cease.  Great is his faithfulness; his mercies begin afresh each morning.  I say to myself, “The Lord is my inheritance; therefore, I will hope in him!”  The Lord is good to those who depend on him, to those who search for him.  So it is good to wait quietly for salvation from the Lord.  Lamentations 3:19-26

When you’ve either been through, or going through a rough patch (COVID, War, Divorce, Prison, or a thousand other nightmares), the tendency is usually to stare into one of two places – the road ahead, or the rearview mirror.  To be glued to the rearview mirror is to hold on to the anguish and pain of the past, embracing the rough patch as the future.  To dwell on the past means you are driving blindly into the future, and we know where failing to keep your eyes on the road will lead.  (Laws against texting while driving were placed on the books for a reason!).

However painful the rearview mirror can be, at times we must shoot a quick look there, to be sure of two things:

1.    We are aware of what we left behind.

2.    We are still progressing away from the road that led to the rough patch.

If knowledge is power, running on a low battery is a dumb thing.  It is foolish to not remember what got you into the rough patch, or the dangers that might lead you back there.  Real wisdom is the common sense that puts knowledge (good or evil) to good use.  As the wise person once said:  if we fail to remember the mistakes of the past, we are doomed to repeat them in the future.

Even an ostrich in a hurricane has enough sense to look above the storm to chart his course.

For You Today

So, to be (at least) as wise as a bird-brain, use the rearview mirror to poke your head out of the hole in the ground so you can get above the harsh conditions, and get a bead on where you need to go.  In short, look above, you’ll find plenty of answers as the Lord leads you out of the rough patch, even if the road seems rocky.

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!

Go to VIDEO (read by author)

There are about 2,000 devotional posts and 400 sermons in the Rocky Road Devotions library.  To dig deeper on today’s topic, explore some of these: 

Has God Forgotten to Be Gracious? and Hard Times & Growing Churches   

[1] Images:  via Pixabay.com   Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation^©   

Consider the Rock

 

Wednesday, July 1, 2020

Isaiah 51:1-3

“Listen to me, all who hope for deliverance—all who seek the Lord!  Consider the rock from which you were cut, the quarry from which you were mined.  Yes, think about Abraham, your ancestor, and Sarah, who gave birth to your nation.  Abraham was only one man when I called him.  But when I blessed him, he became a great nation.”  The Lord will comfort Israel again and have pity on her ruins.  Her desert will blossom like Eden, her barren wilderness like the garden of the Lord.  Joy and gladness will be found there.  Songs of thanksgiving will fill the air.

Remembering from whence we came is, at once, the greatest blessing and bane humans enjoy and endure.  When we recall our sinfulness, willful and self-destructive, we must endure its shame.  When we recall our humble entrance into this world, small, and totally dependant on the kindness of our parents, we gain the perspective of dust; lowly we began, and we are bound for it again.

God points out to the enslaved nation of Israel, losers in war and captives again, that both their sin and their Savior are attached together.  The God who used Israel’s enemy to awaken them to their sinful ways would also be their Savior, bringing greatness out of brokenness, once again.

This is a thought that occupies my mind and soul these days.  And not just for America; we are only a few days away from the July 4^th anniversary of our nation’s birthday, but this is not patriotic nationalism.  This is about humanity’s survival.

God’s promises are at least two things:

          1.     They are certain…what God promises, God brings to pass

          2.     They are misunderstood, and misrepresented…just turn on the TV and see the commercials during religious programming. 

Isaiah says God promises joy that will replace the ruins of a disgraced superpower.  In so-doing the prophet invites the beleagured nation to consider the rock from which they were cut; he holds up their humble beginnings for examination. 

It was to an old couples’ childless vacuum God promised an heir, the firstborn of a nation, to be numbered as the grains of sand on the beaches.  To Sarah, 90 years old, and her 100 year old husband, Abraham, there was given a birth, and beginning of fulfillment.  What was once the emptiness of no evidence of God’s promised blessing, is now breathing, cooing, nursing, and filling diapers in a geriatric couple’s tent.  Amazement, laughter, and joy have replaced sad resignation.  Singing and dancing are the new order of the day.  Humble beginnings in Abraham’s tent now shows the flower of spring in the garden of hope.

But, it also began a rough ride. 

Abraham’s family has known what every other family on earth has experienced, treachery, jealousy, hypocrisy, poverty, oppression, tears, joy, singing, parched times, and good.  And, eventually, the fruit of God’s promise came to a cradle in Bethlehem, born a child with no earthly father, but nonetheless a part of Abraham’s lineage.  This is the centerpiece of God’s creation, understood from before the foundation of the universe, that the promise of restoration is carved from the bedrock of Yahweh’s strength.

And, here we are, muddled in such deep and abstruse mysteries, such as whether or not to wear a face mask in WalMart.  And we have deep pain over the shortage of toilet paper.  And on, and on, ad nauseum.  We are drowning in the proverbial puddle of plague-concern at the moment, with all sense of normalcy on-hold, except for the incessant droning of the news channels counting the dead. 

All this…and it is substantial…is momentary.  God is forever; and we have been mined from His quarry, not some primordial pond of protoezoa.  We are made in His image, and, blurred and muddied as that image is in 2020, we remain the apple of His eye[1], His crown of creation[2], and as much as we might feel as depressed and forgotten as Abraham and Sarah, the promises of God never fail.

Let’s Pray Together:

Father, we are thankful that the promise of Your word will never return to You unaccomplished.  What You set out to do is already done.  Prime our faith to receive this truth, we pray, in the name of Your holy child, Jesus.

For You Today

If the “virus culture” of this moment has you a little (or a lot) depressed or bewildered, don’t let the mud puddle claim another victim; just lift your head to look at the rock from which you were cut!

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road today.  Have a blessed day!

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Title Image:  Pixabay.com  Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation©

For other posts on God’s Promises see After the Storm – Part 2 and Why God Got Some Ink

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[1] Zechariah 2:8

[2] Genesis 1:28

Destroyed

 

Friday, May 15, 2020

Genesis 7:1-5, 17-24

When everything was ready, the Lord said to Noah, “Go into the boat with all your family, for among all the people of the earth, I can see that you alone are righteous.  Take with you seven pairs—male and female—of each animal I have approved for eating and for sacrifice, and take one pair of each of the others.  Also take seven pairs of every kind of bird. There must be a male and a female in each pair to ensure that all life will survive on the earth after the flood.  Seven days from now I will make the rains pour down on the earth. And it will rain for forty days and forty nights, until I have wiped from the earth all the living things I have created.”  So Noah did everything as the Lord commanded him.

For forty days the floodwaters grew deeper, covering the ground and lifting the boat high above the earth.  As the waters rose higher and higher above the ground, the boat floated safely on the surface.  Finally, the water covered even the highest mountains on the earth, rising more than twenty-two feet above the highest peaks.  All the living things on earth died—birds, domestic animals, wild animals, small animals that scurry along the ground, and all the people.  Everything that breathed and lived on dry land died.  God wiped out every living thing on the earth—people, livestock, small animals that scurry along the ground, and the birds of the sky.  All were destroyed. The only people who survived were Noah and those with him in the boat.  And the floodwaters covered the earth for 150 days.

There are plenty of disasters from which to choose an image:

·       Wildfires in California destroying subdivisions and memories

·       Tsunamis in Indonesia decimating coastline life

·       Terrorist attacks and the incredible stench of death’s aftermath

·       People standing dazed in the rubble after a tornado

Noah is the poster child for disaster.  Yet, the magnitude of the destruction of that global flood is largely contained in just two paragraphs; essentially it boils down to:  God said he’d wipe the earth clean, and it was so. 

Just like the account of creation, God said – and there was!

This morning, when I went to the computer to post today’s devotion, I found the tech version of Noah’s world; everything was gone.  The physical computer machine was there, looking all innocent and 21^st century put-together, like the Earth after the flood.  But, when I booted up the criminal, all my files were under the deepest blue sea.  Here last night; gone this morning.  What now?  I felt the electronic equivalent of being cut-off from the past 40 years of ministry records, sermons, correspondence, bills, and (oh, my) FACEBOOK. 

I spent the next hour muddled in confusion about what to do next and recriminations over not being more diligent with backing up my files; I also prayed fervently…Oh, LORD, if you’ll just give me back my files I’ll be good….

I’m still not entirely sure what happened, but one word popped into my technologically-challenged brain – RESTART.  So, I did, and voilà, my files were back, and now I’m writing the next devotion. 

Noah wasn’t so lucky.  Or, was he?

There are two hinges to consider here:

·       Hinge #1.  God said He was going to do a new thing

·       Hinge #2.  God did it.

God told Noah to get in the boat, and then God closed the door on the previous chapter.  Then God opened a new chapter for the righteous man and his family.  This begs the question that is frequently my cling-to thought whenever it seems my world might fall apart (or be flooded over to 22 feet above the mountaintops):

What could be better than being in the center of God’s will?

Even when He decides it’s time for a restart?

For You Today

Our new normal after the virus flood is (at this moment) just a foreboding.  I’m not sure I’ve seen any pairs of animals gathering by twos…but, stay tuned, you never know what God is up to; our only certainty is the cross and an empty tomb.  Everything else is like what Noah left behind.

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road today.  Have a blessed day!

Go to VIDEO

Title Image:  Pixabay.com  Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation©

For other posts on “Flood Recovery in Genesis see “After the Storm” Part 1 and  Part 2

Rivers of Living Water

Wednesday, March 25, 2020

On the last day, the climax of the festival, Jesus stood and shouted to the crowds, “Anyone who is thirsty may come to me!  Anyone who believes in me may come and drink!  For the Scriptures declare, ‘Rivers of living water will flow from his heart.’”  (When he said “living water,” he was speaking of the Spirit, who would be given to everyone believing in him.  But the Spirit had not yet been given, because Jesus had not yet entered into his glory.)          John 7:37-39

Our dear friends, John and Anne live in Waynesville, North Carolina, a place close to the hearts of many North Carolina Methodists, right next to Lake Junaluska’s campgrounds.  Anne writes about their life in the mountains.  This past week they were (once again) on the Blue Ridge Parkway enjoying the falls:

[Grandson] David and I enjoyed Sunburst Falls. I said we had silent worship there with the falling water. I always think of living water welling up to eternal life and paused to thank God for what He does for us.[1]

Elizabeth and I have travelled some of the Pisgah National Forrest’s trail of waterfalls, and I’ve stood near them many times.  Somehow the idea of silent worship (as Anne called it) never entered my mind.  But so it is. 

Sometimes the silence invoked by the overpowering noise water makes crushing against ageless stone overwhelms a soul.  Anne’s timely piece on how life can be tossed upside down in a week – her word picture is Viral Pan-Panic – is a stark reminder that our days are looming, threatening any sense of normalcy. 

In such a world it’s easier to wander into fear, loathing the darkness.  It’s totally counter-intuitive to stop and thank God amidst the news media’s onslaught of disaster piled on calamity concerning the Covid-19 virus.  We are so conditioned lately to what the next morning’s game changing event will bring, you almost hate to turn on the TV.  One Facebook friend, whom I’ve known since kindergarten, posted that her husband is currently in the hospital with a bacterial infection, in isolation.  She was very quick to point out he did NOT have the Corona Virus.  A month ago none of us would have leaped to that conclusion of pandemic in a high school buddy.  Now, everything’s changed!

And that is the point for the church, and every follower of Jesus Christ; everything has changed.  No longer is there an inviolability of same ol’ – same ol’; no footsteps are heard in the Sanctuary on Sunday mornings at 11am.  It isn’t business as usual, and the waters are highly uncharted as to what that means for the future. 

And, if this pandemic viral bug can toss everything on it’s ear, grabbing the whole world’s attention and economic stability in two news cycles, think what the antidote of living water can accomplish for eternity if we who believe and follow Jesus Christ see that opportunity before us to interpret to 21^st century culture that whatever it is that kills the body is to be feared much less than He who holds our souls in his power.

“Don’t be afraid of those who want to kill your body; they cannot touch your soul. Fear only God, who can destroy both soul and body in hell.  Matthew 10:28

For You Today

The current crisis may or may not be a judgment of God, or simply a genetic evil cooked up in a petri dish.  But it certainly should help us focus on the only real center for disease control!  Two thousand years ago it was set up on a hill that looks like a skull.  And it was set up to battle the virus of sin – the ultimate pandemic crisis for humanity’s eternity. 

And Christ beat the stuffing out of the Lucifer virus!

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!

Go to VIDEO 

Title Image:  Anne Mehrling original work, used with permission             Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation©

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[1] You can catch-up with Anne at Mehrling Muse – Life in the Mountains

The Everlasting Arms

[1]

Friday, July 27, 2018

You need not be afraid of sudden disaster or the destruction that comes upon the wicked, for the Lord is your security.  He will keep your foot from being caught in a trap.  Proverbs 3:25-26^(NLT)

The hymns we sing come back to haunt us sometimes; their theology is sound, but our sometimes weak (and only wishful) application of that theology is shaky at best.  One of those hymns got me a few weeks ago.  The hymn in question is one I have sung often since I first heard it as a child:  Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.  What stung me is the faulty way I have clung to the chorus of that hymn:

Leaning, leaning, safe and secure from all alarms;

Leaning, leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms.[2]

“Safe and secure” is a basic human need and desire; we all want to be safe, protected from the boogie man lurking in the closet, or under the bed.  But the fact remains we do not live in a world where that kind of peaceful security is the norm.  Just ask Job.  If anyone could have expected his borders were going to remain secure, it was the rich, respected man from Uz.  But Job’s life fell apart in an afternoon; health, wealth, family, position in the community, and even his clear skin were covered with violence and boils – the man lost everything.  It certainly seems like the destruction that comes from the wicked won out there; where were the everlasting arms that day?

And what about all the times YOU prayed for something – and that something never materialized? 

And what about those fires in California, mudslides in Indonesia, and all the murders?  What about Alzheimer’s, cancer, and the all the creeping-up that old age does on you?  Why do children die in their cribs, and serial killers get to live in prisons we pay for…or, worse…just get away with it?  Why?  Everlasting arms…really?

It becomes abundantly clear how misleading the hymn can be when we apply the thought of God’s care and protection to our lives merely from the point of what WE humans think we need, or worse, what we think we WANT.

Back to a couple of weeks ago when I was pondering this gap in my theological garment, as to why bad things happen if God is really on the job.  My DVR is set to record Dr. David Jeremiah while I’m at church on Sundays, and one day that week Elizabeth and I sat down to watch the recorded message.  The sermon was one in a series from Ecclesiastes, so he was preaching on this enigma of how God can claim He’s looking out for us, and yet, such terrible stuff happens.  And this meddling preacher jumped right into the chink in my thinking.  Here’s what he said:

You will never find security in the things God does, only in WHO God IS.  God is consistent in His nature, but totally unpredictable in what He does.[3]

Now that sounds contradictory; if God is loving, shouldn’t his actions be the same?  If God is patient with us, why not just hold off all the bad stuff till we get our act together?    Why don’t the everlasting arms keep all alarms away?

Well, that’s a good question, for which I still don’t have the answer, but suffice to say, I don’t need the answer yet.  Like Job, who questioned God’s motives about all his problems, and got an answer he wasn’t ready enough, or big enough to handle, God said:  Little man, you can’t see from up here where I see; chill out, I’m on your side.

If you need a Scripture verse to hang that on, here it is:

For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.  Isaiah 55:9^(NLT)

For You Today

The bottom line is always that the everlasting arms are always on the job, and we can trust in God to keep us from harm; it’s just that we can’t see those arms when they’re busy wrapping around us, keeping the real hounds of hell at bay.  Keep your eyes higher than your problems; that’s where the real action is!

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day. 

Go to VIDEO

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[1] Title Image:  Courtesy of Pixabay.com

[2] Leaning on the Everlasting Arms, Elisha A. Hoffman & Anthony J. Showalter, 1887

[3] Dr. David Jeremiah, Turning Point Broadcast, July 11, 2018

After the Storm - Part 2

[i]

Tuesday, November 29, 2016

Then God told Noah and his sons, “I hereby confirm my covenant with you and your descendants, and with all the animals that were on the boat with you—the birds, the livestock, and all the wild animals—every living creature on earth.  Yes, I am confirming my covenant with you. Never again will floodwaters kill all living creatures; never again will a flood destroy the earth.”  Then God said, “I am giving you a sign of my covenant with you and with all living creatures, for all generations to come.  I have placed my rainbow in the clouds.  It is the sign of my covenant with you and with all the earth.                Genesis 9:8-13^(NLT)

I watched a movie last night about the USS Indianapolis.  In 1945 the ship carried the atomic bomb to its staging area in the Philippines, later to be dropped on Hiroshima.  On its return voyage to the states it was torpedoed and sunk.  The crew numbered nearly twelve hundred, 300 of which immediately went down with the ship.  Another nearly 500 either drowned or were eaten by sharks in the 5 days it took before rescue ships arrived.  The movie was graphic, and the violence portrayals were more than disturbing.

Rewind to Noah on the ark.  Having just seen the worst destruction ever in the history of mankind I think it is safe to say Noah was probably a little hesitant about leaving the ark. 

That floating warehouse and zoo had been the place of safety for over a year.  Inside was dark, smelly and safe; outside had been the scary, violent unknown.   If I had been Noah, when God said:  OK, it’s time to leave your little boat, I believe I would have tried to pull the covers back over my head, and meekly whine:  That’s OK, I’m good here; I’ll just stay inside a little longer, if you don’t mind.

It’s scary to venture where you’ve never been, or where you’ve been hurt before.  Noah and family had probably been scared half to death by what they’d seen and experienced in the storm that howled and pitched their boat like a twig in a tornado. 

The men of the USS Indianapolis were adrift for 5 days, and more than a few of them became delusional in the face of little hope being rescued.  Noah and family had little hope that there was going to be anything in their future but water and this rocking barge that stank from a year’s worth of life with animals in a small place.  I can imagine Noah’s sons asking:  Dad, are we there yet?

But eventually the waters receded, the land dried-up, and the Lord made a covenant with Noah’s family, which even included the animals:  Never Again!  To seal the deal, God signed this covenant with His multi-colored signature across the entire sky – the rainbow of God’s promise. 

God said this would be a forever reality, and even though we see floods sporadically, with loss of life and property, God’s promise has been true that there has never been another flood to wipe all humans off the face of this earth.

The storms come and go; God’s promise stands.

For You Today

Listen once again:

Then God told Noah and his sons, “I hereby confirm my covenant with you and your descendants…. Genesis 9:8

Are you one of Noah’s descendants?  Well, unless you’re a chimpanzee or a platypus, the answer is “yes”.  So you’re included as a beneficiary of God’s promise to never again destroy the earth. 

What other of God’s promises can you think of that have your name written on them?

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road…have a blessed day!

Go to VIDEO

NOTES

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[i] Title image: Erik Christensen, via Wikimedia Commons