The past couple weeks I’ve really been dwelling on the idea of remembering Jesus—remembering the Gospel. As I read today, this passage in the beginning of Psalm 77 stuck out to me.

You hold my eyelids open;
   I am so troubled that I cannot speak.
I consider the days of old,
   the years long ago.
I said, "Let me remember my song in the night;
   let me meditate in my heart."
   Then my spirit made a diligent search:
”Will the Lord spurn forever,
   and never again be favorable?
Has his steadfast love forever ceased?
   Are his promises at an end for all time?
Has God forgotten to be gracious?
    Has he in anger shut up his compassion?"
                         Selah

Then I said, "I will appeal to this,
   to the years of the right hand of the Most High."

I will remember the deeds of the LORD;
   yes, I will remember your wonders of old.

Asaph describes his turmoil and mental anguish over his circumstances. Then shifts immediately. He says that he will remember God’s works and ‘wonders’ of old.

Every Christian can attest to God’s power to provide strength and comfort. Yet, we all quickly forget that he has done so for us in the past, when our present seems to fall apart. Like Asaph, we should make a careful point to remember what God has done for us in the past, in his Gospel in general and our lives in specific, to give us confidence for the future.

Someone very special shared this quote with me on Facebook a couple weeks ago and it’s been echoing in my mind ever since.

“You can be sure that God will never take from you something that is good. Rather, when you are ready, He will remove the evil (sin) and replace it with something far better. He will tear down your fortress so that He can build a palace in its place" – Erwin Lutzer

As new Christians we might see our sanctification as a loss of things we love. But over time, we learn that though they are things we love, they are also things that will inevitably try to destroy us. As older Christians, we often fear the loss of something ‘good’ only to find that it was laced with something from our heart that was ‘bad’.

With always perfect timing, God removes those things from us and we discover again that “there is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death.” (Proverbs 14:12)

Thank God that He knows the right way. And that way is better than anything we could ever conceive on our own.

Psalm 4:8:

“In peace I will both lie down and sleep;
   for you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety.”

Matthew-Henry writes:

“It is said of the husbandman, that having cast his seed into the ground, he sleeps and riseth day and night, and the seed springs and grows he knoweth not how. Mark 4:26,27. So a good man having by faith and prayer cast his care upon God, he resteth night and day, and is very easy, leaving it to his God to perform all things for him according to his holy will.”

Jesus says:

“Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?”

Anxiety and worry are an insult to rationality in the Christian’s mind; and to God in himself. Yet here many of us are, almost constantly hurling insults.

The public schools in our area are closed today, so my ten year old niece was home. We ate lunch at McDonalds this afternoon, along with my mother. At the restaurant, my niece ran into a classmate who also happened to be out with his family.

The boy wasn’t someone that my niece was really friends with. Just acquaintances from school. But within seconds of seeing him in the restaurant, she had struck up a conversation and staked out a seat for us next to him and his family. By the end of the meal, she’d asked to invite him over to play for the afternoon.

I spent most of the time amazed at how safe the two of them felt building a friendship with one another. It struck me that that kind of social confidence isn’t something you find very often in adults. We’ve all usually had too many bad experiences, so we keep virtually everyone at arms length until they can prove, in some respect, that being in an actual friendship with them is safe.

It makes me wonder what our personal and corporate ministry endeavors would look like if we threw caution to the wind and simply pursued relationships with one another regardless of the risk.

Because, it seems to me, that ministry and evangelism and discipleship happen both in and out of this kind of relational caution. But when we have our guard up and aren’t honest about it, I think we do a lot more damage than good. It could be argued that it’s from that kind of fear that the church got the holier-than-thou reputation. In an attempt to defend themselves from being hurt by other people, they put on whatever costume is necessary—and it’s totally inauthentic and thus, ultimately ineffective.

Although I’m far from being the one confident enough to lead this charge, I must wonder what it would look like for a small community to decide together that the risk of being hurt is less than the benefit of authentic ministry.

Since I became a Christian, one verse has always stuck out to me as strange and even somewhat comical. The verse in mind is Proverbs 26:13:

The sluggard says, “There is a lion in the road!
  There is a lion in the streets!”

Like much of Proverbs, this is just one in a long line of punchy, biblical one-liners of wisdom. So the context doesn’t do much to explain this verses meaning. So, when you read all on its own, it sounds, well, a little nuts.

But, recently I’ve come to find this has quite a lot of meaning to me.

I often make excuses not to do the difficult things I want to do, or should do, or need to do. Instead, inaction is vindicated by pointing out all the dangers along the path ahead of me. Of course, the actions are not truly vindicated—I’m left as a ‘sluggard’ for my inaction.

I think it’s interesting that this verse doesn’t make any commands. It only points out that making excuses makes us something we don’t want to be. And what’s worse, really?

I’ve written about how much I like storms before.

But today’s was different. I had gone outside to spend some time in scripture. I thought that the gentle rain and faint thunder would add a nice ambiance to the experience. For several minutes I read quietly and listened to the rain. Then, it seemed like out of nowhere, there was a flash of light and crack of thunder so intense that I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anything like it.

I’m a grown man and it sent my heart racing—not just because it was startling either. It was the kind of sound you could feel in your chest and joints and bones and you just knew there was real danger associated with it.

Within seconds the the rain became a downpour and I was no longer being kept dry under the porch overhang.

My heart was still pounding and I was still left anxious from the now much more aggressive storm. Then, as quickly as it came, it silent. No rain, no thunder. And I started thinking, as cliché as it might be, this phenomenon really does just scream, “God is here”. It’s no wonder whatsoever that so many of the Psalms use the imagery of storms and thunder and lightning to illustrate God and his movements.

I think for that flash, I got a small taste of what it means to ‘fear the Lord’.

He loads the thick cloud with moisture;
   the clouds scatter his lightning.
They turn around and around by his guidance,
    to accomplish all that he commands them
    on the face of the habitable world.

(Job 37:11-12)

If you keep up with this blog at all, you might have read this post from a few weeks ago. It was after I’d gotten home from shooting a wedding ont he Eastern Shore at which I had had a close encounter with a huge water snake of some kind.

Well, today, I was asked last minute to come and photograph a baby shower at a residence in Davidsonville. What I found when I was there was nothing short of alarming.

It would appear that the snake from the wedding on the Eastern Shore must have been one of influence and power. You see, when I arrived at the baby shower, the carcass of what can only be a scout was waiting for me at the bottom of the driveway. The snakes must have sent this one ahead to scope things out.

Obviously this one was waiting for me so that it could go and report back to some bigger even scarier snakes. Who knows what kind of catastrophe they’re planning!  Lucky for me, this one suffered the tire tread of a comparatively huge hunk of metal before it could complete its mission.

Then again, there’s no doubt, when they find out what’s happened to the scout, they’ll blame me for it.