Tag Archives: Time

Chapter-a-Day

Chapter-a-Day Numbers 33

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Wings Traveling Journal Spread
Image by Else10 via Flickr

These are the camping sites in the journey of the People of Israel after they left Egypt, deployed militarily under the command of Moses and Aaron. Under God’s instruction Moses kept a log of every time they moved, camp by camp. Numbers 33:1-2 (MSG)

We were at the lake with family this past weekend. My daughters, now in their twenties, brought up memories from family vacations many years ago. “Do you remember when…?” I was asked with fill-in-the-blank events and moments from their childhood. It’s always interesting to see which memories are still quickly available to me in my brains RAM, which memories have be relegated to a partition which is difficult to access, and which memories have seemingly been written over with more recent data.

Since shortly after I was in college I began keeping a travel journal whenever I went on a trip. Life is a long journey, and I know that some things will be forgotten or written over in my brain. My journals help me remember specific times and places. They will someday allow my children and granchildren to relive where I was, what I experienced and what I felt at a specific place and time.

In today’s chapter we find Moses keeping a travel journal at a time in history that record keeping was not that easy. They didn’t pass an office supply store every few miles and the raw materials for keeping such records was an arduous task in itself. Yet here we are, thousands of years later reading about their journey and learning from it.

Today, I’m thankful for lessons learned in time and the ability to record them for the benefit and amusement of future generations.

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Chapter-a-Day

Chapter-a-Day Luke 10

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Painting by Bueckelaer via Flickr and Jim Forest

As they continued their travel, Jesus entered a village. A woman by the name of Martha welcomed him and made him feel quite at home. She had a sister, Mary, who sat before the Master, hanging on every word he said. But Martha was pulled away by all she had to do in the kitchen

. Luke 10:38-39 (MSG)

My wife, Wendy, and I are blessed to spend more time together than most couples I know. We both work out of a home office, so a normal day is spent in the house together. We eat breafast together, we eat lunch together, and we eat dinner together. If I take a break from my work, I usually walk down stairs to talk to Wendy. Much of our free time is spent working together on stage or in administrating the local community theatre. We worship together and serve together on the visual tech team at church. Wendy and I have an intimate relationship that is built on the foundation of shared time, shared space, shared interest, and shared conversation.

The story of Mary and Martha, and the simple lesson of it, keeps popping in my path the past few weeks. I was reminded of it once again in worship yesterday morning. So often I approach my relationship with Jesus like Martha, in which my relationship is really about doing things around him. Yet, Mary had the more initimate relationship with Jesus because she spent time centered on conversation with him.

My relationship with Jesus and my relationship with my wife are really no different. If I want to find intimacy in the relationship, then it’s going to require a foundation of time, proximity, and focused communication.

Chapter-a-Day

Chapter-a-Day Isaiah 60

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Time. "I am God. At the right time I'll make it happen." Isaiah 60:22 (MSG)

Time rules our lives. We wake to it, eat to it, work to it, play to it, and sleep to it. We rarely stop to ponder how time affects every area of our daily life and perceptions. This is especially true in an era when we place increasing demands on time, and in turn feel the effects of time's increasing demands on us. Faster. Quicker. Efficient. Productive. More in less. Overnight.

This pressure of time, I believe, makes it increasingly difficult to follow the command to "wait on the Lord." That patience is a fruit of God's Spirit in us is quickly lost on us.

God exists eternally beyond time. He has the ability to see each individual circumstance in context of the whole. God sees purpose in our painful moments. He walks each leg of the journey with us even as he stands with us at the finish line.

Chill. At the right time, He makes things happen.

Creative Commons photo courtesy of Flickr and DaDaAce

Chapter-a-Day

Chapter-a-Day 2 Kings 15

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I80 western nebraska. Shallum son of Jabesh became king in the thirty-ninth year of Azariah king of Judah. He was king in Samaria for only a month. 2 Kings 15:13 (MSG)

Bear with me today, as my impressions from the chapter are more wholistic instead of being linked to a particular verse.

I've had a case of the blues for the past couple of weeks. Life feels a bit stagnant at the moment. It's sort of like driving through western Nebraska. You know that you are moving down the road, but you wouldn't know it from looking out the window. The view isn't changing. This has been a very long, very cold, very snowy winter. I feel a bit snowbound. I'm tired of gloomy, snowy days and long, dark nights. The days all seem the same. I feel like hope blew away in one of the three-storms-a-week blizzards a while back. [I'll stop whining now]

At the same time, I feel a whirlwind in the lives around me. A friend with an exciting new job. Another friend shocked to be released from his job. Yet another friend and his family struggling through the whirlwind of activity and emotion which accompanies the journey's home stretch. Surgeries, pregnancies, illness, divorces, changes, and moves. I watch them all from my computer screen inside Vander Well Manor. [Did I mention I was going to stop whining?]

I was struck, as I read today's chapter, of the contrast between Judah's experience and Israel's experience during this section of the historical timeline. Uzziah becomes king in Judah and rules for an impressive 52 years. Israel, on the other hand, becomes a revolving door of leadership. There is no clear royal line. It appears that, if you had the gonads to pull off an assassination, anyone had a shot at the throne. Of course, your reign might be as brief as Shallum because there were plenty of guys with gonads lining up in the queue to take their shot and off you.

One nation with a long, steady, even monotonous experience while next door there is a flurry of chaos and change. It reminds me today that there is a time for everything; a season for every purpose under heaven.

God, be near my friends who journey on a much different road than mine right now. Be near me on my own long, flat path as the experience that feels so different, and a bit lonely. Amen.

Creative Commons photo courtesy of Flickr and gjs

Chapter-a-Day

Chapter-a-Day 1 Kings 16

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Jesus owns a breadmaker. It was under Ahab's rule that Hiel of Bethel refortified Jericho, but at a terrible cost: He ritually sacrificed his firstborn son Abiram at the laying of the foundation, and his youngest son Segub at the setting up of the gates. This is exactly what Joshua son of Nun said would happen. 1 Kings 16:34 (MSG)

"If there is any purpose or value in this whole thing, it's completely lost on me," my wife said to me in the car yesterday. Behind her dark sunglasses, I knew her eyes were filled with tears. I understood. I feel the same confusion. Her statement echoed in my spirit the rest of the day and I've been chewing on it.

The purpose and value of difficult circumstances do not usually show themselves in the moment because they are not momentary in nature. We call them "lessons learned in time" because, for us, time is a required ingredient. We have a wonderful, state-of-the-art breadmaker in our kitchen. As good as it is, it still takes 3-4 hours to bake a loaf of bread. It can't speed up the time necessary for the yeast to perform its chemical reactions and make the dough rise.

God has all sorts of time because, unlike me, he exists outside of time's boundaries. It's likely that Hiel of Bethel and the people gathered at the dedication ceremonies at Jericho had no idea that the terrible sacrifice of his own sons had been spoken of 600 years earlier by Joshua. That's like Cristopher Columbus talking about the recent earthquake in Haiti. It seems an eternity to us, but not to God. He exists concurrently in both moments.

The difficult stretch of the journey I'm experiencing today is frustrating, agonizing, and confusing. I don't get it in the moment. I can only trust that someday I, or my children, or my grandchildren, or my great grandchildren will be on another difficult stretch and I will look back in time to find that the lessons learned through this time will profit me for that time.

Creative Commons photo courtesy of Flickr and solidstate76

Chapter-a-Day

Chapter-a-Day 1 Kings 7

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Toms bass It took Solomon another thirteen years to finish building his own palace complex. 1 Kings 7:1 (MSG)

We live in such an instant society. We want gratification immediately. Our computers are never fast enough, and we complain when a page takes a few extra seconds. We pay extra to have our purchases delivered over night so we don't have to wait a few more days. We have microwaves to make prepared dishes so we don't have to take the time to actually cook something from scratch.

Perhaps that's why the beginning of today's chapter jumped off the page at me. It took seven years for Solomon's army of laborers to complete the temple and another thirteen years to build his own palace complex. That's a long time. In today's standards of construction, it was an eternity.

The truth is that some things do take time. My brother, the luthier, says that it takes in the neighborhood of 200 man hours to craft a guitar by hand, not counting the additional time that the guitar must sit at different places in the process. You don't take shortcuts. There are no microwave ovens for the process. It takes what it takes.

The same is true for maturity. When it comes to being a disciple of Jesus there is no "add water and stir." There is no Star Trek transporter to beam us instantly to a spot on the horizon. God is not making us into a microwaveable pot roast, he's crafting us into a finely tuned instrument. We must each press on and walk our own journey. It takes what it takes.

So, I'm lacing up my walking shoes. Today is another leg in the journey. There's a long way to go.

Chapter-a-Day

Chapter-a-Day 1 Kings 5

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Taylor in Morocco. Solomon responded, saying, "You know that David my father was not able to build a temple in honor of God because of the wars he had to fight on all sides, until God finally put them down. 1 Kings 5:3 (MSG)

My parents grew up in the shadow of the Great Depression and World War II. While the 1950s were a time of increasing prosperity and mobility in the United States, their resources were limited along with the opportunities to travel and experience other cultures. When I was a young man, I had the priviledge of being part of a great church youth group. We traveled the state on weekends performing choir concerts and sharing God's message with different churches. During summer breaks we did short-term missions to Kentucky, South Dakota and Mexico. I had opportunities my parents could not have dreamed about when they were my age. My daughters, before graduating from high school, have ventured on missions to some of the same places I went along with Thailand, Costa Rica, Romania and Morocco.

We have been blessed to have the same experience of Solomon, fulfilling dreams and opportunities that previous generations could scarcely fathom. While some might be intimidated or even fearful of the march of time and all the change that it affords, I'm excited about it. I'm excited for my children and the opportunities they have to share God's love and message around the world. I'm glad that they've had greater and more diverse experiences than I could have imagined at their age. I'm thrilled to think of the impact they will have on lives that they touch here and around the world.

Chapter-a-Day

Chapter-a-Day Exodus 24

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O'hare nightmares.

Then Moses climbed the mountain. The Cloud covered the mountain. The Glory of God settled over Mount Sinai. The Cloud covered it for six days. On the seventh day he called out of the Cloud to Moses. Exodus 24:15-16 (MSG)

Wendy and I made our way back from the east coast yesterday. We'd been there for four days on business and we were tired. We'd already extended our stay by a day. United gouged us on price for changing our itinerary.  Then, it was just one of those days. I spilled scalding hot coffee on myself. Wendy left her iPod on the plane. We had to scurry around the bowels of O'Hare airport to file a lost article report. The more tired we felt, the more impatient we got.

Upon reflection, it is still a wonder that we could wake up looking over the Atlantic ocean and walk through our back door, fourteen hundred miiles away, in a matter of a few hours. How discontent, how impatient we've become.

I found it interesting that for all the pomp and fireworks on the mountain, God did not call out to Moses for seven days, and Moses was up there on the mountain for forty days and nights. I can't imagine how impatient people got waiting for him to come down.

Today, I'm reminded that God exists and operates beyond linear human timelines. His purposes are far greater than my modern day impatience, lack of contentment, and petty demands. God, help me let go of my self-centered impatience, and find rest in your perfect will.

Creative Commons photo courtesy of Flickr and paytonc

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