PICTURE PERFECT MEMORIES

PICTURE PERFECT MEMORIES

                We all got together at Zach and Jamie’s house after church. Pam brought grass fed beef from Johnson City. Bonnie brought her trademark salad, Zach lit up the grill and we had steak and baked potatoes and salad, with homemade brownies for desert.

                Then we retired to the living room. Seth (My grandson) brought his entire drum set down and graced us with highly complex drum solo. Then we all gathered around in a circle to sing and play music for about 5 hours. Zach is a song writer and we have been practicing about ten of his songs in anticipation of recording them in the near future. Ben, one of Zach’s friends and an accomplished musician alternated between violin and mandolin and singing parts, Seth played drums, I played bass and chimed in on a few backup parts. Jamie joined Zach on several songs

                This month Seth is entertaining an exchange student of sorts, a young man of his own age (15) from Ireland and so we threw in a number of traditional Irish songs and Kaola’n (probably spelled wrong by sounds like Kaylan) joined in.  Actually, Kaola’n is part of a program in which they are sending young students abroad to see what life is like in countries where Catholics and Protestants get along. In Kaola’n’s town and in most towns in Ireland, there are literal walls dividing Catholic and Protestant communities. The go to different schools and churches, and live separate lives, because when there are encounters sparks fly and riots break out and it is a centuries long feud sort of like the Hatfields and McCoys.

                So this was a part of the rich texture that made up our day and it was what you might call “Blessed time”, a magic moment, a picture perfect memory of love and great food and great music to place in our mental photo albums.

                Next weekend we will be going over to Johnson City to spend the day with my son Josh and his wife Jessica and our granddaughter Aria who is now 8 years old.

                It is for these blessed times that I believe God sent us to Tennessee. In our lives of serving the Lord, we sometimes forget that He cares about families and the things that separate them. It should be no surprise really that God would care that we, as families, spend these end times together, healing wounds, reconnecting to help and to bless each other. In fact the last thing God said to the world in anticipation of a New Covenant was:

                “Behold, I am going to sent you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and terrible day of the Lord and He will restore the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the land with a curse.”  Malachi 4:5, 6.

                Earlier in the day at church we had experienced another picture perfect day. Our church program was put on by a group of young ladies from “Teen Challenge” a ministry started many years ago by David Wilkerson that has been delivering hopeless lives from addiction and other destructive problems. One by one these gals gave their testimony of how God had delivered them and set them free and how He is restoring their lives through a program of Bible study, prayer and training and fellowship.

                AS these girls shared their testimonies and sang their songs with beaming faces and exuberant joy it was hard to believe  that in recent months they had lost everything, been in and out of prison, and controlled by insidious drugs that were snuffing out their lives and breaking up their families.

                During worship these girls knew every song that we sang and they were singing along with their bright smiles and tear stained cheeks. It brought a whole new dimension of meaning to the songs that we had chosen for worship that day, songs like “Break Every Chain” and “Freedom” and “Power in the name  of Jesus.” And songs like “I surrender all to You…withholding nothing.”

                After the church service was over our worship team just kept playing. We invited the girls to come up and join us. We handed them mics and we just sang and played our hearts out for about 45 minutes.

                And so in all it was one of those picture perfect days where in spite of the many struggles and moments of complete grief and  haunting questions, the Lord is beginning to form a picture of our purposes here in Tennessee. He knew how much we needed assurances from Him that we had heard Him rightly.

                He plugged us in rather quickly in that I am already playing bass and singing with the worship team and I have been invited to teach a Wednesday night class this fall on the Feast days of the Lord. But there was more to the day than that. Bonnie, whose ministry in our Messianic fellowship in Vancouver had been in the kitchen, was wondering what her role would be in this church family. She loves putting on the meals and she is good at it and very organized. For Bonnie kitchen work is not work; but a calling to divine appointments and hugs and prayers and blessings.

                So on top of all the other picture perfect blessings that graced our day, Bonnie was invited to help in the kitchen and the lady in charge, being impressed with her abilities, confided in Bonnie that she had been praying for some time that God would send someone to sort of take charge of the kitchen duties since she is dealing with health issues.

                Bonnie and I have discovered something about going to church. We no longer go to church to be entertained or spoon fed. We don’t go there to surrender to some form of doctrine per se. We go to love and to serve and to bless lives. We keep our eyes open for God’s divine appointments knowing that often people come to church as a last resort. They come out of desperation… out of lives that are falling apart… or broken families and shattered dreams. If they do not have a divine encounter with someone on that one desperate occasion, they may never come back… they may never connect… they may never encounter the touch of the Lord that can heal the wounds of a life gone wrong.

                The church is not a hall of saints per se. It is a place of healing and restoration. It is a place where if its members are awake, lives can be mended in the mighty name of Jesus. Souls can be saved…the hopeless can find hope and saddened hearts can find the joy of the Lord.

                We can never again settle for just going to church… walking in and walking out without making someone glad they came, or letting God give us an anointed word that meets their exact need. Many people live lives of quiet desperation… loneliness, heartache and uncertainty. If they don’t have a divine appointment at church then where are they going to go?

                And many of God’s people, oblivious to the needs of others, just come and go, or judge all the “hypocrites” that surround them and complain about the Pastor, or the music or the air conditioning, or the color of the paint on the walls and so Pastors spend much energy babysitting these baby saints that have never matured one iota since the day they “Got Saved” in 1943 and “My how the church has gone downhill since the good old days.” And they never catch on why it is going downhill. They have lost their first love and the zeal that once animated them when they first came to the Lord.

                The revival and harvest in these last days must represent a moving away from self and all that self wants, to see that the fields are ripe for harvest. Don’t go to church to see what you can get. Go to church to see what you can give. We didn’t receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit to empower our complaints. We received the Holy Spirit to equip us to meet divine appointments with compassion and anointed words. Jesus always had the right thing to say and we should pray to do the same. We have the same Holy Spirit that guided Jesus throughout each day and each moment.

                In these things I have a long way to go, for in spite of my ability to express myself on paper, I tend to be quiet and reserved in public. It is not in my nature to just walk up and pray for someone. It is not in my nature to always have the right words to say when I don’t have a computer in front of me.

                So when I have one of those divine appointments I definitely know that the Lord set it up and that He made it happen and that He gave me the words that turned an otherwise mundane day into a divine encounter and an otherwise hopeless life into one of hope.

                We as Christians simply must learn to become mouthpieces for the Lord. We don’t have to know how to preach or to give a Bible Study. Jesus didn’t go around preaching some particular brand of doctrine. He was moved with compassion to minister to sin-sick souls. He came to minister saving life to desperate people. Sometimes people only need a listening ear and a comforting word.

                One of the things that God had done for us at our congregation in Washington was that He had given us an incredible and overwhelming sense of love for every person there.  Well, Tennessee is a very different culture than Washington and it is taking some adjustment, but God is the God of all cultures and I know that He is going to give us that incredible sense of love for everyone here as well. It has already begun.

                So our picture perfect day has been a day to remember… a day of settling in, of knowing that God is plugging us into His divine appointment.