Grand Opening

By Rhonda Rhea –

I read somewhere that when a man can’t open a jar, he has to throw it away and never speak of it again. Another guy told me that if he can’t open a jar, he comes back with a blunt instrument. What is it with guys looking for any excuse to crank up the chain saw? Okay, so I do understand a chain saw is not a blunt instrument. Unless, of course, you use it to try to pry open a pickle jar.

I admit I personally have an extremely underdeveloped jar-opening-muscle. It’s withered away from lack of use. That’s because I’ve been married all these years to a really great jar-opener. When Richie is out of town for any length of time, I’m in a real pickle, jar-wise. Not a pickle jar. A pickle. Jar-wise.

On the spiritual side of the story, however, I’m all about opening up. I never want to neglect exercising my faith by failing to keep a prayer connection with the Father open and active. We need to build spiritual muscle or we become withered, wimpy semi-believers who shrivel at the slightest pressure. It’s true, if we want to keep our spiritual muscle operating at full capacity, we have to consistently pray, thanking and praising Him, loving Him with our thoughts and words, trusting Him with every need, struggle and hurt, staying ever open and transparent before Him.

Allowing “prayer” to become merely a “churchy word” can happen all too readily. It’s easy to let it become more about what we want, or what we want others to think we’re doing, or what we say we’ll do, or even what we intend to do, than it is about communing with the Heavenly Father. It can become a ritualistic, empty religious duty in our hearts and minds rather than the enormously high privilege and sweet exchange that it truly is meant to be.

Any time we find ourselves stuck in a prayer funk, we need to give ourselves a little tap on the shoulder—a reminder of our vital need to open up those lines of communication and to see our intimacy restored. Paul said in Colossians 4:2, “Devote yourselves to prayer.”

We need to get extreme in that devotion, and to stay extreme in our desperate desire to faithfully connect with the Father, heart to heart. Romans 12:11-12 says, “Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord. Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.” Dictionaries further describe that zeal as enthusiastic devotion and diligence, tirelessly passionate about a cause, idea, person or goal. That’s the kind of passion we want to take with us every time we enter our prayer closet.

A sluggish or apathetic spirit may squeeze out that passion now and again, but if we want to please the Lord and fruitfully live in His joy, we need to be all about getting right back on track in opening that prayer closet door.

That’s one thing we can always open on our own. With a grateful and expectant heart. And it’s the sure way out of any spiritual pickle.

Of course, now I’ve gotten myself all hungry for pickles. Guess I’d better call my husband. Somebody’s got to open this jar.

Holiness: A Clean Heart

By Carin LeRoy –

When I have company visit my home, I do my best to clean to make sure that things are dusted, scrubbed and picked up. I wouldn’t want them to think that I’m a dirty housekeeper, so I want to present my home the best I can when they arrive at my door. If guests are staying for the night, I give them washed sheets on their bed and a fresh towel. After all, would we give our visitors dirty bed sheets and a used towel? Of course not.

This brings us to another aspect of what it means to live a holy life. Just as we want our homes to be presentable and clean when guests arrive, we should also want our hearts and lives to be clean before God. We strive to confess our sins and keep our lives free from sinful habits. As Dr. Robert D. Luginbill says, “It is still possible for our feet to pick up a bit of dirt as we walk about in the devil’s world. God has given us the status of ‘holy people,’ but we are still imperfect and capable of sin.” It’s important that we don’t look lightly at our personal behavior and the sin patterns that crop up in our lives. Not only do we confess them before God, but we repent. Confession brings forgiveness, but repentance means we turn away from those sins by not allowing them to become a habit in our lives (Acts 3: 19,20).

“Create in me a clean heart, O God. Renew a loyal spirit within me” (Psalm 51: 10 NLT).

David recognized his sinfulness and asked God to create something new within his heart. He knew he was helpless on his own, and it would take God’s power within him to live a holy life. He desired to honor God but saw the weakness in his own soul. We all fail, like David, and have sins that haunt us. Yet God still desires for His children to live a life set apart and holy. God sees our hearts. Are we confessing our failures and repenting of the sins that grip us? If not, then let’s strive to learn like David what it means to have a clean heart before God.

PRAYER: Lord, create within me a clean heart. Give me a steady and loyal spirit that follows after You. Help me to repent from the sins that desire to take hold of my life.

“I will give you a new heart, and I will put a new spirit within you. I will remove the heart of stone from your body and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my Spirit within you; I will take the initiative and you will obey my statutes and carefully observe my regulations” (Ezekiel 36:26 NET).

Standing the Watch

By Alan Mowbray –

Have you been asking God for something lately? I know I have. Do you feel the answers are slow or non-existent? Me too—that is, until the other day when I read Habakkuk 2:1.

“I will climb up to my watchtower and stand at my guardpost. There I will wait to see what the Lord says and how he will answer my complaint.” (NLT)

The moment I read that scripture, something clicked. As a former Navy submariner, I’ve stood a few watches. Six hours or more at a time—some watches on deck, some below decks.

Each watch station has its own characteristics, but what’s unique about all watches is that initially, you as the person taking the watch are unprepared. Yes, you’ve put on your uniform, donned your weapons, strapped on your protective gear—but that doesn’t leave you ready. So you go to your watch station and do the turnover routine with the off-going watch—unprepared.

Once you have assumed the watch, the real preparation happens.

When standing topside security watch on a submarine in port, there’s a lot going on. Initially, when you take the watch, all that activity has an equal priority to your ears, eyes, and mind. For the first ten or fifteen minutes, your mind performs the last portion of preparation for that watch—creating dynamic filters.

After standing there for a while, just listening, observing silently, your brain starts to block things out. That steam vent fifty feet away that pops off every 4 minutes fades into the background. The roar of the diesel engine powering the crane at the end of the pier becomes a quiet rumble. Even the soft, gentle slap of waves against the curve of the sub’s hull, the ebb and flow of its tidal forces tugging the ship against the creaking mooring lines, and its seemingly random pushing around of loose pilings against each other under the pier all disappear.

A different silence emerges.

Finally, you are prepared to hear and see and to stand your watch effectively. Even your body can sense differences around you. Now you’re really “on watch.”

New sounds touch your ears—conversations audible at couple hundred feet away, footsteps of someone walking on the deck of the ship opposite you, distant laughter, and unseen doors opening and closing. Your brain filters out what doesn’t change, while enhancing what does.

Until I read that verse in Habakkuk, I had forgotten what waiting on the Lord is really about. This is the position I should have put myself in when waiting for an answer from God. At my watch station. Alert. Mouth shut. Ears open to hear that still small voice speaking to my spirit.

(I Kings 19:11-13) He created us to hear His voice in spite of the clutter.

I won’t forget again.

Fast to Feast to Fast

By Robin J. Steinweg –

I confess. Sometimes I fast to feast and feast only to fast again.

How many Thanksgiving Days have I gone without breakfast—maybe even no lunch—so I’d have room for more Thanksgiving dinner? More turkey, more mashed potatoes and gravy, more stuffing, relishes, scalloped corn, rolls, frozen cranberry salad and pumpkin pie. M-o-r-e, please. Eat some more! Won’t you have some more? Look how much is left; have some MORE! And then I skip the next meal or two afterward because the thought of food makes me feel ill.

I don’t mean to cause a guilt trip here (not that I think you’ve ever done this). But I pondered this subject when I read an article, “Extending the Table” by Leslie Leyland Fields, in Kyria magazine.

Feasts and fasts—each can have a meaningful place in my life rather than be a gut-level response to a harried holiday time or to a family reunion.

A feast might be held in celebration of the Lord, one’s faith, country or family.

A fast might be physical (cleanse the body’s system, increase mental clarity, reset one’s body clock, change habits or diet). It might be spiritual (deny the body’s appetites to gain discipline, rely more on God, grow closer to Him).

In the future, I’d like to think things through in advance. To be intentional about it; purposeful. Not a fast to feast, or a feast to fast.

AUTHOR QUOTE: Feast or fast: without intent, they are harmful at worst and pointless at best. But what a productive thing either can be, if carried out for a good purpose!

“Then I set my face toward the Lord God to make request by prayer and supplications, with fasting” (Daniel 9:3a NKJV).
[They celebrated] “…with gladness and feasting, as a holiday, and for sending presents to one another” (Esther 9:19b NKJV).

The Joy of Juicing

By Kim Stokely –

My husband and I have started juicing. (Just as an aside, when did nouns become verbs like juicing or texting? And I no longer exercise, I “ellipticate.”)

A friend of ours gave us a juicer. “It works great,” she said as she handed it to me.

“It could juice a cracker!” her husband promised.

“If it’s so great,” I asked, “why are you giving it away?”

“We just don’t have the time.”

Time? How much time can juicing take? You throw some stuff in the machine and voila! Juice, right?

A recent Saturday morning found me in my kitchen surrounded by various fruits. A veritable orchard out in the Nebraska cornfields. I had mangos, strawberries, tangerines, apples and pears all piled high and ready to go. I plugged in the juicer, let the motor run for the allotted ten second “start up” time and then threw the fruit down the chute.

The machine roared to life. It shook and rattled as the inner blades decimated my offerings into a tall glass of colorful goodness, chock full of various vitamins and antioxidants.

*sigh*

Really? All that fruit and all I got was one lousy glass of juice. Ok, it wasn’t lousy. It was actually quite tasty, but besides the cost of the fruit, I now had to clean the machine. I understood what my friend meant about the time factor. To squeeze the pulp out, the machine chops it up then spins out the dry pulp. The juice runs out a little spout, the pulp collects (theoretically) in the tub behind the machine. In reality, it goes everywhere. The machine has to be taken apart and each component washed separately.

With the cost of fresh fruit and veggies nowadays, I hated the thought of wasting all the pulp. We’ve started putting it into waffle and muffin mixes. They’ve been delicious. The other day I snuck veggie pulp into my meatballs when the kids weren’t looking. They loved them and anytime I can get them to eat an extra vegetable is a good day for me.

It got me thinking about how God views our lives. (It’s a stretch, I know, but work with me here!) Every moment of our lives is precious. It costs us something, time we can never get back. It’s easy to spot the good stuff that comes out of each day. We drink that down easily and thank God for his gifts. But even the bad stuff, the “garbage” can be turned into something good if we take the time to let God clean it out and mix it with His love and mercy. It may take some work, but the results are well worth the effort.

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