Roses Among Garbage

Have you ever felt worthless? Like garbage? I know I have. I grew up in a home that destroyed my self esteem and the kids at school just made it worse. I grew up feeling worthless.

Last week I began a Bible study at church to deal with my food addiction and the very first question in the workbook was to analyze when your addiction began and write out all events in your past that contributed to your addictive personality. Including all the hurts.

I did this exercise, but in doing so I relived all of the hurts and pain. I felt like garbage again.

This morning I went to prayer meeting at church and when I got home I had to throw something in the garbage. Since I was outside I just threw it in the garbage can outside. When I got to the can I saw 2 roses on top of the garbage bags in the can. They looked like they had just been picked and were very beautiful. Since they hadn't actually contacted the garbage and were still clean, I took them out and brought them in, trimmed the stems, and put them in water.

As I was doing this God spoke to my heart. These roses were among garbage, but they were not garbage. They were just as beautiful as they were when God made them. We are like that. No matter how much abuse and hurt we are subject to we are not garbage. No matter how much garbage is in our lives we are not garbage. We are just as beautiful as when God created us. And God created EVERYONE beautiful! To say anything else is to call Him a liar and insult His work.

When I took the roses in because I found them beautiful, trimmed them, and put them in water I extended their lives. What God wants to do with us, His beautiful creation, is to take us into His house and give us living water, to extend our lives forever. We are that beautiful to Him. Just ask Him and He will do it.

Just as the roses among garbage are not garbage, we are not garbage when we are among garbage. We are more beautiful to God than roses are to us!

My Prayer

Wow! Has it really been a year since I last posted? Wow! Anyway, here is a poem I wrote a few days ago and the Lord laid it on my heart to post it here. I'm no Emily Dickenson, but I have had 2 poems published in books so this shouldn't be TOO bad. lol Seriously, though, it is just what flowed from my heart onto the paper that day.

Anyway, here is the poem:

Lord, beloved Lord, Jesus,
You have so much to teach me.
I have so much to know.
Teach me, Lord,
And help me to learn.
I have so much sin,
So much darkness in my heart.
And yet, I want to be perfect,
To have the heart
You want me to have.
Take this old heart and throw it out.
Cast it into the garbage heap.
Replace it, please, with a perfect one
That only seeks to please You, Lord,
And to do Your perfect will.

Please give me love for others
That will cause me to put their need for Salvation
Ahead of my fear of rejection.
Give me a heart of understanding
That I won't be hurt
When people abuse me for Your sake
And so I will be patient
When it takes time
For them to see things Your way.
Give me a heart of strength
That I may not smear Your name.
For people tend to blame You
When Your servants do not obey
Even though You did nothing wrong.

And Lord, I need so many other things.
You know what they are.
Lord, I ask You for all of these things
That I may honour You
And grieve Your heart no more.
Lord, please give me the heart
That You want me to have.

In Jesus' name,
Amen

The Road Map

Suppose you loved someone in another city and you desperately wanted to see them so you sent them tickets to come. But suppose you never told them how to pick up the tickets, what transportation they were for, or generally anything about how to use them? That would be kind of dumb and a waste of your money, wouldn't it?

Now suppose you had such a friend who sent you tickets to see them and paid for the tickets in full. Then they sent them to you through another person, along with directions and everything you needed to use them. Much more sensible, isn't it! Now if someone did do that for you, would you reject it because you didn't trust the delivery person? That wouldn't make sense, would it? After all, you had the tickets and directions in your hands! And even if you suspected that the delivery person had altered the directions to fool you, wouldn't you just call your friend and clarify the directions?

So why do things that make sense to us in other people suddenly look rediculous when we think of God?

God loves us but is separated from us by the gulf of our own sin. So God desparately wanted to send us the spiritual tickets we need to see Him in eternity. So He sent His own son Jesus to die for those sins that separate us from God. The price of those tickets is perfection, and since we couldn't be perfect, then perfect Jesus had to pay that price for us and take our wages of our own sins -- death. Death is the ticket that we paid for by not being perfect. Our tickets to Heaven are paid in full for those who choose to accept them.

Now, there was one more problem. How could we know how to get and use those tickets? He wasn't about to leave us to guess the way on our own! He's too smart for that! God had to send us the directions.

That's where the Bible comes in. Before God bought the tickets he already let us know for generations that the price would be paid for us. First He sent the Law which showed us just how far away from Him we are -- so we would know that the tickets were needed. After that He told us how they would be paid for through the prophets of the Old Testament. Then He paid for them with Jesus' blood. He began to tell us how to get the tickets while Jesus was here on earth, then continued through the disciples after Jesus' death on the cross.

The disciples and the people who translated the Bible are the messengers. You don't trust them? You have heard the lies that the Bible was changed many times or that there are so many translations that they couldn't possibly all be right? First of all, you need to ask the person sending the directions if they are the right ones. How? Through prayer and LISTENING! You won't hear God answer if you don't listen!

Also, think it through. The early scribes would never have dreamed of changing the scriptures. These people didn't copy the scriptures WORD by WORD, they copied them LETTER by LETTER! They didn't want to take any chances of spelling mistakes, so they looked at a letter, copied it, then looked at the next letter, copied it, and so on. If they made a mistake, they stopped writing, washed their hands, corrected the mistake, then continued. If they made 3 mistakes in one document, they considered it corrupted and burned it. This doesn't sound like someone who would change scripture to me!

When scrolls got old, they were not destroyed. Some were put into a cave by the Dead Sea and forgotten (The "Dead Sea Scrolls"). This would prove to be important thousands of years later.

Long after these scrolls were put into the cave, people began to accuse early church leaders of changing the Bible. Then the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. Did they confirm that the early church leaders had changed the Bible? No. They proved that they HADN'T. The scrolls were identical in content to the Bible of today! Yet they were hidden a thousand years before the early church leaders existed!

And what about the many translations? They are just that -- translations of the exact same thing! All of the many versions say the same thing, just with different words! Does it matter if I say, "I have 4 kids," or "Four is the number of kids I have"? No, it doesn't. It's the same thing in different words, just as the different translations of the Bible are.

God promised to keep His Word intact. He did that by keeping an eye on It. He did not allow changes to take place. And anyone who has ever tried to discredit it or claim to have "extra-Biblical scripture" eventually is exposed for the liar they are. Several books have been written about the "Lost books of the Bible", but when you look into them deeply you find flaws in the claims. God has preserved His Word like He promised. He kept His road map to Heaven intact for all to use His tickets to Heaven.

Which Eternity Do You Believe In?

As I was waiting for the bus today a thought occurred to me. No matter what your beliefs, you are believing in some kind of eternity. Logically eternity must either be eternal nothingness, an eternity of causes and events, or an eternal god.

If you believe the Universe had a beginning then what happened before that beginning? Was it God, a series of events or was it nothing? If you believe that nothing existed before the universe began, then what caused it to begin? Was there a big explosion? Then what exploded and what caused the explosion? And if the cause and the object that exploded existed before the explosion, then there wouldn't have been nothing. So when did they exist and where did they come from? Nothingness doesn't have an intelligence or actions to cause it, so nothingness couldn't have been what preceeded the Universe.

So do you believe that eternity is a series of events? Then what are those events? How do things change? What caused those events? What caused the changes? Since events also don't have intelligence and cannot be self-starting, they couldn't cause their own Universe without some outside effect acting on them and they themselves couldn't have come to be without more than one effect. Also, most people who don't believe in God don't think they believe in eternity. So we are back to eternal nothingness before these series of events started.

So the only eternity which makes sense to me is an eternal God. God DOES have intelligence and CAN self-start. He CAN cause things to happen by Himself. He CAN design things. He CAN use intelligence to make things happen. To me, that is the only logical eternity. Think it through to the end!

God and Love

The other day my daughter, Christine, had a good point, and I want to post it here (She gave me permission) as she emailed it to me.

Every one believes in love, yet some people don't in God? I can feel God and I may not be able to see He Himself, but I can see what He does to people. That sounds just like love. "I can feel love and I may not be able to see love itself but I can see what it does to others". Or some may say "I can't feel God", but if you were never in love would you never believe in that? Pretty much every one has loved or been loved. Even if it was the kind of love that you have for your parents. But if you were never in love then you can't feel love. I can feel God. But since you've never met God how could you have seen him or feel him???

God is a Father, not a mother-in-law

A thought occurred to me a few years ago about people blaming God for not interfering in a situation to prevent what they percieve to be a disaster. There have been people who say that we don't know the whole picture and just need to trust God, and they are right to a high degree. But there is more to see here.

What is it that we ignore when we do this to God?

Suppose you had a relative or friend (I'll say mother-in-law because of the cliche and to be tongue in cheek. My mil is a wonderful lady) who was constantly interfering uninvited. You'd be pretty angry, wouldn't you. Or even if it wasn't constant, but she just did it once. You'd still be angry if the advice or action was not asked for. And you'd be justified in that.

So why be angry at God when He DOESN'T do that? He waits to be invited. Isn't it a contradiction to be angry at Him for NOT doing something you'd be angry at others if they DID do? So the church isn't the only place where there's "hypocrites" (BTW, only the world sees true Christians as hypocrites. God Himself knows and tells us that we're not perfect, and so do we).

7 Days?

I posted this first on my Evidence of God blog, but it is more along the theme of this blog, so I will re-post it here:

Something to Think About:

Did you know that it is very reasonable to think that the Earth was made in 7 days -- IF YOU KNOW HOW BIG GOD IS!!!!!

I was thinking about this the other day when a thought occurred to me.How long does it take you to make a salad? 15 minutes? About that, anyway.

Now suppose 2 ants were on the salad. Imagine one ant telling the other that you had made the salad in 15 minutes. The second ant might not believe it. After all, it would take an ant days to make that salad. He would think that making a salad in 15 minutes was IMPOSSIBLE, and an unbelievable claim. "15 minutes to make this whole salad? No way!" he might think. How could something that would take him days to make be done in 15 minutes?

But we are much, much bigger than the ant. The ant would have to assemble one piece of a lettuce leaf, then another piece, then another, and so on. But we are big and strong enough that we could assemble all of the lettuce at once, then all of the tomato at once, and so on. And so is God. Compared to God, we are mere ants or even smaller.

Could we make the world in 7 days? No way! Could something as big and strong as God make the world in 7 days? No problem