Category: Uncategorized

Our God Is in Control

Carolyn
“This is not how it should be.
This is not how it could be.
But this is how it is.
And our God is in control.
This is not how it will be
When we finally will see
We’ll see with our own eyes
He was always in control.
And we’ll sing Holy, Holy, Holy is our God
And we will finally, really understand what it means.
So we’ll sing Holy, Holy, Holy is our God
While we’re waiting for that day…
Our God is in control.”
Steven Curtis Chapman
If you read my blog, you may have seen we were praying for a friend who had brain cancer. He lost that battle last Wednesday night after 10 months. We traveled to the funeral in Tennessee on Saturday.
My husband has lost a close friend, someone who enjoyed hiking the world with him. I feel the loss, too. Jeff was patient, kind, gracious, humble. He lived as a man of God and honored Him in life and death.
We will miss Jeff.  We don’t understand why, but we know so many people prayed and asked God to spare his life, but God had other plans. One day we will see and understand. Today though, we trust Him. We trust our heavenly Father who is good and loves us. Can I praise Him in this, as I praise Him when I see healing here on earth? Yes, Lord, I praise and bless You. “You give and take away; my heart will choose to say, Lord, blessed be Your Name.”
Thank you, Father, for the hope of heaven, that Jeff is not dead, but alive with You. We know we will see him again! He is healed now fully and experiencing what we can only begin to imagine, all because of Jesus and Jeff’s faith in Him. Thank you for saving faith, resurrection life. We grieve with hope. Thank you, Jesus.
“We can cry with hope,
We can say goodbye with hope,
‘Cause we know that good-bye is not the end.
And we can grieve with hope,
‘Cause we believe with hope,
There’s a place where we’ll see your face again.”
Steven Curtis Chapman

Which Is More Amazing?

Carolyn

I’ve had this thought lately.

Which is more amazing? The fact that the God of the universe, our Creator and Savior, would care so intimately for us, would stoop to us, would invite us near to Him and His throne of grace, would assure us that when we draw near, He draws near to us — wow, what a thought! I think of all the passages in Scripture that tell us when His people cry out, He hears and answers and delivers. Just reading the Psalms the other day, I was struck again by this, not to mention the times I see it in the Old Testament as He would deliver His people Israel.

So which is more amazing? That our God cares for us in this way and gives us the privilege of prayer and of communing with Him — or the fact that I so often refuse?

I sometimes sleep late or resist getting out of bed to read and pray. I let other thoughts consume my mind during a day. I get busy, spend too much time on the computer, and the list goes on — and I forfeit those moments of time spent with the Lord. Moments of prayer, moments of my day given to Him. The very thing that most brings peace and joy to my day, I often miss.

Do you ever do that, too? So which do you think is more amazing? His seeking or our resisting of such an incredible invitation?

An Expectant Heart Filled With Hope

Carolyn

A high school friend Terri has hosted an Advent E-vent on Facebook for all the days of December leading up to Christmas. She asked different ones to write and assigned us dates. Today was my date, so I thought I’d share my Advent reflection here on my blog, too.

Romans 5:5 “Now hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us.”

This Christmas, I find myself filled with a sense of sadness. When I think I’ve pulled it together, it creeps up on me and hits me all over again. You see, my husband and I are losing a close friend. Unless God miraculously intervenes, he will not be with us much longer. Even typing those words weighs heavy on my heart.

It reminds me that the Christmas season is often a hard time for many people who have lost loved ones during the year or who otherwise struggle with sadness. It’s cold and dark outside. So many are celebrating with parties and decorations, some perhaps without a reflection on the true meaning of Christmas, while others lack the enthusiasm to participate. The commitments of time and resources can be demanding, and there is pressure to keep up, and to be “joyful” – or at least appear so.

Many are despairing. Many are discouraged.

It calls to mind the despair the Israelites felt as they waited for their Messiah, longing and groaning and waiting for deliverance.

But there is HOPE!

As we live in the season of Advent, we are reminded we need not wait in hopeless despair. The Savior did in fact come! We have a God who kept – and keeps – His promises.

When I lift up my eyes and see, when I bow my knees and pray, when I speak the truth of who He is and what He has done, when I still my mind to worship and praise and rejoice, I find comfort and rest. I am reminded that the God who came still comes. He has purposes in things we cannot see. He can meet the longings and needs of every human heart. We can trust Him, no matter the circumstances around us. This fills my heart with true joy, hope and peace as I know and trust Him.

As we celebrate Advent, the past Advent, we remember another one is coming! Jesus is coming again! We have a future hope and we can wait with confident expectation that He will again be true to His promises and that His Word is true.

As we look forward to celebrating Christmas, perhaps we can look around and find people who need encouragement and extend the love of Christ to them, invite them to church with us, share the good news of the gospel. For it is more than words. This is a true and living reality that should fill our hearts with hope, with confident expectation. And if He seems silent, keep believing, waiting and seeking. He will come when we least expect it!

Come quickly, Lord Jesus!

Prayers for Jeff

Carolyn

This is our friend Jeff.

He and my husband hiked the Alps back in 2007 and again in 2009 when my husband was researching the trilogy that he is now near completing. (Convenient, wasn’t it, that he set the books in a place like Switzerland that required several “research” trips!)
It takes a good friend to go up in a helicopter like this in the Alps and fly down into the mountain canyons and against the steep slopes! I think they both thought the pilot was going to crash a few times!
Jeff’s wife Elizabeth and I have said we all 4 need to go to Europe, but our children were rather young then, and we weren’t up for that much hiking and adventure! We’d travel a little differently, I’m sure.
We met Jeff and Elizabeth when we all lived in Charlottesville. They were doing their medical residencies and working while my husband was working on his Ph.D. in Religious Studies. We were in small group together with them and 3 other couples.
Here is most of our small group at a Tennessee football game.
Here we are hiking in the Smokies together.
Hiking was a huge part of my husband’s life until living in the Midwest! Chicagoland is not like Virginia or East Tennessee where he lived in the mountains as much as possible through college and grad school.
As the years passed, we kept in touch more with Jeff and Elizabeth because we all had family in Memphis, and they lived in TN, making it easier to connect. They were there with us around the time our daughter was born 3 months early while we were in Memphis. I flew down to St. Jude when their son was diagnosed with leukemia. Jeff has visited us in Chicago when in town for medical meetings. We’ve overlapped our trips in summers and holidays in Memphis where we’ve had countless dinners and times where we talk about a lot of theology or medicine.
Jeff and Elizabeth recently adopted a little girl from Ethiopia. While there, he got sick, was taken to the ER where they discovered a brain tumor, and he was medically evacuated back to the States and told to undergo emergency brain surgery upon arrival in Washington DC.
7 months later, we are still praying for a miracle. We went to visit them this last Thursday (Thanksgiving) and Friday for just about 24 hours, a quick flight in and back out the next evening. It was good to be with them and see and understand more of what they are experiencing.
When I think of Jeff, I think of the verse in Micah about what the Lord requires of us: but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God. I think that verse well describes Jeff.
As Jeff wrote in October:

“I continue to pray for complete healing and am still thankful for every moment God gives. This is a challenging prayer because, at least at times, my logic and God’s logic do not match up. Then I must rely on Him.

‘… yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Savior.’ Habakkuk 3:18″

If you are one of the few people who read my blog, please say a prayer for Jeff and his family if you think about it.

Peace

Carolyn

Last summer Tim Keller came to my home church in Memphis. I was in town, but getting over being sick and did not go. I ended up getting the tape of it, and he preached on Philippians 4:4-13. It was a message that at that time was very timely for me to hear. I ran across my notes from it the other day and thought I’d share some of the things he shared:

“There’s a difference between a morally restrained heart, a heart that has its impulses and its emotions tamped down, controlled from the outside by will power, and a supernaturally, gospel-changed heart, a heart that’s got its dispositions, feelings, orientations and attitudes changed from inside, long-term, permanently by the gospel.”

Keller said that there are 9 traits of a supernaturally-changed, gospel-changed heart; those are the fruit of the Spirit that are found in Galatians 5:22-23.

His quote resonated with me because it’s easy to have a life managed by will power and think then that everything is right in life, but when a supernatural change comes that is fueled by the gospel and the Spirit, even if things look similar to the outside world, the change is absolutely incredible. And to those who really know you, the difference will be obvious.

I know this from experience – trying so hard to live well, perfectly, yet so unhappy, and not realizing I was missing something called the Spirit-filled life and joy. Not that I now have things perfectly in order (I hardly have anything in order these days!), but there has been a fundamental change that only the Spirit could produce. Reminds me of Paul’s words in Philippians 3:12-14.

Keller went on then to talk about peace from Phil. 4:4-13 and what we are to think about. He described the character of peace–what it is. It is a deep, inner equilibrium, deep contentment in all circumstances, a tranquility, a lack of anxiety. The apostle Paul’s life was an example of one of peace in spite of torture, imprisonment, death.

Keller said there are many books on stress that talk about emptying the mind of negative thoughts – “just stop those thoughts” and “just don’t think about it” – and how calm in our culture means emptiness.

But the peace that Scripture teaches is not the absence of thoughts, but the presence of a Living Power. You can lay down and sleep knowing you have soldiers encamped about you. You have something greater than what’s wrong.

There was much more to his sermon (disciplines to develop peace, how the gospel produces peace, etc.), but these particular thoughts above really ministered to me, so I thought I would capture them here.