To remain a victim...

If we're willing,
God is our song when we are happy,
our escape when we are tempted,
our hope when we're despairing,
our joy in tribulation,
our strength in weakness,
and our immortality in dying.
Ultimately...
He Himself is our health.
Beth Moore, Mercy Triumphs

If we're willing.  If. I'm. Willing.

And if I'm not? I'm choosing to remain a victim of circumstance - a choice to reject the wholeness and health that Christ Himself has offered.  

I {LOVE} Sunday::to rest...

The difference between life and death...

To be still is to live come July and August in the deep, muggy south — where a leisurely pace and access to refreshment and shade, as well as shelter from sudden, heavy downpours and dangerous lightening, aren't options. 

To be still can be the difference between life and death in this subtropical paradise summer  — where God's tender guidance and care in Psalm 23.2 offers more than a peace in His sovereignty and presence. He makes me be still that I might live.

He makes me lie down in green pastures.
He leads me beside still waters.

Wordless Wednesday::to the moon and back...

{Photos::God's faithfulness revealed in His creation from the banks of the Caloosahatchee River on a Tuesday at dawn}

I {LOVE} Sunday::to meet together

Riverside Church

And let us consider
how to stir up one another to love and good works,
not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some,
but encouraging one another,
and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.
Hebrews 10.24-25

For a still summer day:: to know God's promises and to rest in His faithfulness..

  While the earth remains,
seedtime and harvest,
cold and heat,
summer and winter,
day and night,
shall not cease.
Genesis 8:22, ESV

When you want to make a difference...

For we are his workmanship,
created in Christ Jesus for good works,
which God prepared beforehand,
that we should walk in them..
Ephesians 2.10

Long before I surrendered my life to Christ, my heart was tender to the needs of others. My earliest memories include a desire to find a cure for leukemia {a lofty goal, I know - especially considering my less than stellar academic accomplishments} and the hope of traveling to Africa to care for sick and hungry babies. The closest I came to either of these childhood longings was when I became a registered nurse and years later when I watched my daughter board a plane on a mission trip to Rwanda.

Though I never realize those early ideals, I'm convinced that the goals of my youth were evidence of God's sovereignty in my life - that He fashioned me with extra measures of compassion and mercy, preparing me to walk in the works for which I was created - just not exactly in the way I had envisioned.

My career in professional nursing ended when I chose to stay home with our children, but the opportunities to show compassion have only increased. We've been able to sponsor several children through Compassion and World Vision and other child sponsorship ministries. We've also had the opportunity to volunteer with Habitat for Humanity and several other local agencies and ministries, but I know that we can do more.

As followers of Jesus, we are compelled - both by scripture and our love for Jesus - to do something to alleviate the suffering of others and share the love of Jesus. Our salvation is the gift of grace by faith alone and not our works, but we were created for the works that bring glory to God (Ephesians 2.8-10), and our faith is manifested in those works (James 2.14-26). 

There is a direct relationship between a person’s grasp and experience of God’s grace, and his or her heart for justice and the poor.  Tim Keller

We do long for justice and to make a difference, that's not the problem - it's knowing what to do when the social justice issues we're confronted with daily can seem overwhelming and insurmountable. The needs and concerns are so great that we don't know where to begin or if there's anything we are capable of doing that could or would make a difference.

Activist Faith: From Him and For Him, by authors Dillon Burroughs, Daniel Darling, and Dan King, perfectly answers many of those questions about what we can do and provides information and links to resources so we can begin doing something now.

Activist Faith: From Him and For Him covers 12 social justice issues of our day: slavery, immigration, poverty, environmentalism, disaster relief, homelessness, abortion, war/terror/genocide, religious freedom, family/sexuality, crime/punishment, and orphans - with a chapter dedicated to each one.  

Each chapter contains detailed and factual information, describes obstacles and difficulties that have been encountered in the past, real-life stories and examples of successful interventions, scriptural support for action, reflection questions for individuals or groups, and a list of tools and resources for research and action. 

Most importantly, each chapter includes a variety of answers to the question, "What can I possibly do to make a difference?" by offering multiple proven, practical and winsome ways each of us can begin to make a difference in how we live as disciples of Jesus.

Activist Faith: From Him and For Him, is an excellent resource for individual, family, and group study. I'm thrilled to have this book in our home. 

There has been a huge need for a book to give the theological background for why Christians should engage in social justice. Activist Faith fits that need perfectly. It provides solid biblical reasons we should care about the poor, immigrants, and modern-day slaves as well as practical steps for how to take action. Sean McDowell, educator; speaker; author of Apologetics for a New Generation

I {LOVE} Sunday::to restore, comfort, agree, and live in peace...

Finally, brothers, rejoice.
Aim for restoration,
comfort one another,
agree with one another,
live in peace;
and the God of love and peace will be with you.
2 Corinthians 13:11 ESV

When all you need is a little peace and quiet...

And the effect of righteousness will be peace,
and the result of righteousness, quietness and trust forever.
My people will abide in a peaceful habitation,
in secure dwellings, and in quiet resting places.
Isaiah 32.7-8

After my friend's children outgrew their need for a daily nap, she told them they still needed a quiet time to rest their ears. I suspected the need was as much for my friend as it was her children, but I thought the idea was brilliant.

And what a powerful habit for a lifetime - a daily time to rest my ears from even my own thoughts, that my mind can hear and be renewed by the Word and my heart can hear the Spirit's whisper, and the peaceful habitation and quiet resting place I desperately long for will not be dependent on my circumstances and a matter of the noises around me. It will be a condition of my soul.

A psalmist with a camera

{A requested unedited repost}

Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him. ~ John 14:21 ESV

Writing this post was a bit of a dare. I'll jump if you'll jump, Betsy and I timidly agreed. It can seem so self-serving to ask others to affirm you. And yet - do any of us want to waste time pursuing fruitless endeavors?

The responses you kindly left here and elsewhere have been beautiful grace gifts. I hold each of them close and humbly accept the common threads and high standards they demand. Thank you - each of you - for your passion-clarifying words.

The grace and clarity continued to unfold on Sunday, with a gift that I'm processing still - a small and yet peculiar manifestion as though it came to me directly from the hand of God Himself...and I risk being misunderstood as I consider these words from Spurgeon ...

The Lord Jesus gives special revelations of himself to his people. Even if Scripture did not declare this, there are many of the children of God who could testify the truth of it from their own experience. They have had manifestations of their Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in a peculiar manner, such as no mere reading or hearing could afford.  

Except for the dust cover, the gift - a book - seemed brand new. "It was an inexpensive Tallahassee thrift store find, but it had "Pat" written all over it," Kevin - who knew nothing of that self-serving post of mine - explained. He placed the large, thin hardcover book in my hands just as the morning worship service began, and I ran my fingers along the title: Psalmist With A Camera.*

In awe I opened the cover...

Photography, like all art, expands our vision. As the psalmist sang praise with words, Gail Rubin used her camera to capture her vision of the beauty and inner harmony she saw in the flora and fauna of Israel. When she set forth on what she would later describe as a "biblical safari" to photograph all the birds and animals mentioned in the Bible and still present in the Holy Land, she began to acquaint herself with the source for her project, the Hebrew Scriptures.

Thumbing through the glossy pages to the back cover, tears threatened to spill over as I continued to read...

Gail Rubin's photographs "...are epiphanies of nature, assisted by the hand of a sensitive photographer with an artist's vision."

How manifold are thy works, O Lord!...the earth is full of thy creatures. ~ Psalm 104:24

Could that be me, Lord? A sensitive photographer with an artist's vision? 

I read more about the sensitive Gail Rubin as we drove home from church. She was a young Jewish woman from New York - an editor who blossomed into a photojournalist. In June of 1969, she traveled to Israel on vacation, fell in love with the country and decided to extend her stay. Still in Israel after the 1973 war, she concluded that the pace of photojournalism did not suit her shy, contemplative personality, so she began to concentrate on nature photography and to work on projects with the Israel Nature Reserves Authority. On March 11, 1978, while photographing rare shore birds near the beach at Ma'agan Michael north of Tel-Aviv, she was murdered by Palestinian terrorists at the age of 39. I grieve that she died without knowing Jesus and the whole of Scripture beyond the Hebrew prophets and psalms, and yet I think if I had known her, she'd be the closest of friends.

All afternoon I continued my search to know more about Gail - her all-too-short life, her photography, and the circumstances of her tragic death. Buried in Union Field Cemetery in Queens, New York, it's on her gravestone that the words Psalmist with a camera are inscribed.

In the introduction to Gail's posthumously published book, Rabbi Michael Graetz wrote...

Her work...has the magical quality of inspiring the viewer, so that he will walk in the fields and see the world as he had never seen it before. One who has seen her photographs can never again read the prophets or the psalms without visualizing the harmony and beauty they reveal. In that sense she joins in the long history and tradition of biblical exegetes whose insights illumine the Scriptures. With the psalmist she says, "I will sing praise to my God while I have any being."

As I remain in awe of how this thrift store find came to be my treasured gift, I think of Ann Voskamp and her response to discovering Eucharistique in the monastic bookstore in Paris...

Back by old wooden stairs climbing up stone wall, standing in a pool of afternoon sun, I pick up a CD of hymns. I read and I shake my head in wonder. Can that really be the title?** p.220

...and I, too, shake my head in wonder - at the timing and that God would so lovingly speak affirmation to me - a peculiar manifestation - through a thirty-year-old book in a second-hand store hundreds of miles from home.  

*Rubin, Gail (1979) Psalmist With a Camera, Photographs of a Biblical Safari New York, Abbeville Press, Inc.

**Voskamp, Ann (2010) One Thousand Gifts Grand Rapids, Zondervan

The bad news would be this...

I've always admired my husband Louis' quick thinking. He's never without a wise or witty answer or comeback to everything. Sure, that sometimes gets him in trouble, with me anyway, but most of the time he's right on target.

At dinner last night, he told me that someone at work asked him, Do you want the good news or the bad news?

There's only one bad news, Louis said he answered, and that would be that Jesus isn't coming back and since I know that wouldn't be true, go ahead and tell me whatever you want.

I can only imagine the look on his co-worker's face, but what a great perspective, don't you think?

If God is sovereign in all my affairs, loves me with an everlasting love, is my strength and my shield, promises to only give me good things, and I know all of that to be true, then what have I to fear?

Where is the bad news?

The Lord is on my side; I will not fear.
What can man do to me?
Psalm 118.6

If God is for us, who can be against us?
Romans 8.31

So we can confidently say,
“The Lord is my helper;
I will not fear;
what can man do to me?”

Hebrews 13.6

A homeschool mom's greatest fear...

...is momentarily realized when her adult son tells her he's going to write a book titled The Things My Mother Never Taught Me.

Click on over to Dan King's Bible Dude, where you'll find the rest of the story.

I {LOVE} Sunday::to hold fast...

Still like a hummingbird...

A hummingbird's heart can beat 1200 times a minute as she flutters about in search of the food required for her super-high metabolism, so I'm surprised when I find this female ruby-throated frequently perched on a bare branch atop the firebush in my Pollywog Creek backyard.

I learn that's not unusual. In fact, the hummingbird spends as much time resting, preening, and staking out her territory as she does hovering over her food sources and performing her mesmerizing aerial acrobatics.

So I look at the busy hummingbird in the light of Jesus' words.

Look at the birds of the air:

they neither sow nor reap 

nor gather into barns, 

and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. 

Are you not of more value than they?

Matthew 6:26, ESV

Today I will cease fluttering about and rest still in the more-than-enough provisions the Father lovingly gives.

The price of freedom is visible here...

Multiple parking spaces close to the front door were reserved for patients with spinal cord injuries and dozens of empty wheelchairs were lined up in rows outside the entrance. Just inside the doors, security guards checked photo IDs before we could enter.

Passing security, we stepped into a large atrium crowded with visitors and veterans of all ages. Amputees on crutches or in motorized wheelchairs weaved through the crowds and down the hospital halls – bringing to life the words engraved on the black marble slab at the entrance to the hospital grounds:

The Price of Freedom is Visible Here

Not war-wounded, but clinging to life with a liver damaged by a soul-sick addiction, our friend Nick in the ICU was treated with extraordinary respect and compassion. "If a member of the hospital staff enters my brother’s room and meets him for the first time, they greet him with affection and thank him for his service to our country,” his sister explained. 

I was impressed. In all the years I practiced nursing, I can't remember a single time that I was physically affectionate in greeting a new patient.

The price of freedom was indeed visible in the broken hearts and bodies in every hallway, elevator, and waiting room, but so was gratitude for the sacrifice - expressed in the love, respect and compassion the hospital staff showed toward those who sacrificed for the freedoms we celebrate today.  

It was but a glimpse of how I should live every day - the price of freedom in Christ visible in this place - in how I love and live with gratitude and affection for the sacrifice.

 Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.

Ephesians 5:1-2 ESV

{Edited from an archived guest post at (in)courage}