'funner'

I have no idea why this thought come to me the other night?
Or do I have an idea?

After sitting through the latest episode of The Pacific…
And then a few minutes of Saving Private Ryan…
I realized how much having friends meant to me again…

Take The Pacific episode.
It finishes with a sergeant living on a plane, headed for home to help sell war bonds.
You got this sense watching it that he is a little torn.
On one hand you get the idea he is happy to be away from all the fighting, the bloodshed, the misery of war.
But he also is wanting to be with his friends…

I have friends here in Taupo.
And I have friends around the country, and even other countries..

While we all watched the TV on Monday night or did
whatever else we had planned for that evening...many of us were contacting each other.

There was debate on facebook over the merits of The Pacific vs Desperate Housewives.
There was a friend chatting to me via Skype.
There were numerous texts.

You know what I think?
I think that it is really cool!
I like having friends.
I know that I need friends in my life.
In fact friends make my life way more interesting.
They make the fun more ‘funner’
They help you through the times that are not so cool.
Without friends we seem to feel less than what we could be.

Ecclesiastes 4:9-10 (New International Version)
9 Two are better than one,
because they have a good return for their work:
10 If one falls down,
his friend can help him up.
But pity the man who falls
and has no one to help him up!

All that I want to say at this point is…
Thank you for being my friend!

Something to think about…

eat

So have you been eating your Bible?
Like really biting down hard into its juicy goodness!

I find it interesting that the Bible compares itself to food.
Milk, Meat, Bread, Honey…
Like we learnt last Sunday, this is not an accident.
God’s Word is supposed to get inside of us like food does.
It is meant to be ingested.
Digested.
To then provide us with something on the inside.

I have been thinking about this some more today...
But along the lines of that funny word ‘palette’.

Over the last few days we have had some friends staying with their 2 year old and a baby.
You watch what they eat...or should I say try to eat...and you can see it is not that sophisticated.
Their ‘palette’ is not yet developed to enjoy more adult things like Hollandaise Sauce and Trifle soaked in sherry.

One thing I have experienced is that the more I ‘eat’ God’s Word the more my palette has developed.
It is not just soap and toast to me anymore.
It is rich and classy.
It has texture and body.

It all starts from just starting.
Trying a piece here and there.
Developing your palette through just reading each day.

If you keep eating it your palette will grow as well.
It will nourish you more. Speak to you more.

Plus it has this added bonus...you can eat as much as you like and it will never make you fat!

Something to think about…

warehouse

I heard this story a few years a go now…
It seemed to me a good time to re-tell it in light of what we are launching as a church this weekend…

In the 1930s, Stalin ordered a purge of all Bibles and all believers in the former Soviet Union. Millions of Bibles were confiscated and multitudes of believers were sent to the gulags (prison camps), where most died for being “enemies of the state.”

In Stavropol, Russia, this order was carried out with a vengeance. Recently, the CoMission ministry, which Campus Crusade for Christ sponsored, sent a team to Stavropol. The city’s history was not known at that time. But when our team was having difficulties getting Bibles shipped from Moscow, someone mentioned the existence of a warehouse outside of town where these confiscated Bibles had been stored ever since Stalin’s day.

After much prayer by the team, one member finally got up the courage to go to the warehouse and ask the officials if the Bibles were still there. Sure enough, they were. Then the CoMission asked if the Bibles could be removed and distributed again to the people of Stavropol. The answer was “yes”!

The next day the CoMission team returned with a truck and several Russian people to help load the Bibles. One helper was a young man, who was a skeptical, hostile, and agnostic collegian who had come only for the day’s wages. As they were loading the Bibles, one team member noticed that the young man had disappeared. Eventually, then found him in a corner of the warehouse weeping. He had slipped away hoping to quietly take a Bible. What he found shook him to the core. The inside page of the Bible he picked up had the handwritten signature of his own grandmother! It had been her Bible!

Out of the many thousands of Bibles still left in that warehouse, he stole the one belonging to his grandmother—a woman persecuted for her faith all her life. No wonder he was weeping—God had just dramatically revealed Himself to this young man. His grandmother had no doubt prayed for him and for her city. Her prayers had followed him, and now this young man’s life has been transformed by the very Bible that his grandmother found so dear.
Source: Campus Crusade for Christ

That is not much I could or should add to this story...

Something to think about…

veil

I can’t help it…
Several days after Easter and I am still thinking about it.
Maybe it is the recovery from a long weekend?
Maybe it is the sugar detox I am now trying to be on?
Whatever it is, I guess it can’t be a bad thing to think about?

There is this moment in the whole story where part of the temple in Jerusalem was damaged. Namely the Veil.
Matthew recorded it like this…
At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook and the rocks split.
Matthew 27:51 (New International Version)

What was the moment?

The moment where Jesus died…

And what does it mean?

It is really quite important!
Up until that time the veil was always a barrier.
From the days of Moses until then, it was a barrier
between the presence of God and everyone else.
Only the appointed priest could go behind the barrier, and even then for only a short while to perform certain tasks.

The big deal in the moment is this…
God gets rid of the barrier between us and Him and says no more! No more will only a special someone have that privilege! We all now get that opportunity.
We get a chance to see God for ourselves.
To have access to His presence.

We finally get to see God…
And what is our first impression?
Jesus dead on a cross! God in human form sacrificing himself just to make this all happen.
What an amazing first impression!

Something to think about…