Dazzled

By Elaine James –

Take a moment and remember a time when you were outside in the pitch black of the night and saw the amazing sky in all of its vastness. Did you lie down and look up and really take in the vastness of the sky? You couldn’t help but say “God you did all this.”

A friend asked a friend to lie down on the ground in Wyoming so they could stargaze. One spoke up with amazement in his voice and asked, “Why did God create so many stars and make the universe so vast?!”

The other replied, “Because God wants to dazzle you.”

Long ago, God, who is the intelligent designer, created the heavens and the earth. He is an amazing artist who has a ginormous love for us. He created the world with such intricacy. Awesome! I am challenged to be still and know that God is God. I use the word challenged because there is such urgency in my mind to be task-orientated that I struggle with time management. I can only imagine that you might struggle with this as well.

In this New Year I want to start out remembering the times where I was overcome viewing His starry sky. After all I just heard the Christmas story and was dazzled by the star that rose after Jesus was born (Matthew 2).

Imagine if everyone decided to start out their New Year with the starry Christmas night still in their heart and images of their last starry gaze in that special place. Slowly take a deep breath in and let it out with a prayer “God, take hold of my hand, here we go into the New Year, I don’t want to do this year without you.”

“And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years, and let them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so. God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth, to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good” (Genesis 1:14-18 NIV).

Dazzled

By Elaine James –

Take a moment and remember a time when you were outside in the pitch black of the night and saw the amazing sky in all of its vastness. Did you lie down and look up and really take in the vastness of the sky? You couldn’t help but say “God you did all this.”

A friend asked a friend to lie down on the ground in Wyoming so they could stargaze. One spoke up with amazement in his voice and asked, “Why did God create so many stars and make the universe so vast?!”

The other replied, “Because God wants to dazzle you.”

Long ago, God, who is the intelligent designer, created the heavens and the earth. He is an amazing artist who has a ginormous love for us. He created the world with such intricacy. Awesome! I am challenged to be still and know that God is God. I use the word challenged because there is such urgency in my mind to be task-orientated that I struggle with time management. I can only imagine that you might struggle with this as well.

In this New Year I want to start out remembering the times where I was overcome viewing His starry sky. After all I just heard the Christmas story and was dazzled by the star that rose after Jesus was born (Matthew 2).

Imagine if everyone decided to start out their New Year with the starry Christmas night still in their heart and images of their last starry gaze in that special place. Slowly take a deep breath in and let it out with a prayer “God, take hold of my hand, here we go into the New Year, I don’t want to do this year without you.”

“And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years, and let them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so. God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth, to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good” (Genesis 1:14-18 NIV).

Red Plate Day

By Cheri Cowell –

“It’s a Red Plate Day, Grandma!” I’d exclaim on the phone to my grandmother.

“Oh, tell me all about it,” she would say as she listened with the enthusiasm only a grandmother can show. Sometimes the story was about an award I received at school, a new skill I mastered, or something that might have seemed insignificant to anyone else but my grandma and me. “OK,” she would say, “I’m getting out my Red Plate for dinner tonight and you get yours; together we will celebrate your Red Plate Day.” The red plate was our take on the Red Letter Day tradition that began when churches marked the holy days on their calendars with red ink.

God has a lot to say about making people feel special. In this verse, Paul is teaching that because we are Christ’s representatives in the world, we should reject all that corrupts and strive to treat others as God treats us. Paul outlines six concrete ways that Christians “put off” their old lives and “put on” life in Christ, and how we use our speech can make someone feel special…like they are having a Red Plate Day.

“Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen” (Ephesians 4:29 NIV).

PRAYER: Thank You, God for the love You show through the encouraging people You’ve placed in my life. Help me to be more like You in how I treat others—help me use my words to lift up those who are down and encourage those who are discouraged.

Out Of The Blue Blessings

By Mary Sefzik –

I was a college student thrilled to have landed a part-time job as a braille textbook proofreader at Visual Aide Volunteers in Garland, Texas. I couldn’t believe I was actually getting paid to do something I enjoyed—reading.

My fingers skimmed across the page. “They forgot the period again,” I said.

“Good catch,” my boss complimented. A long-forgotten name flashed through my mind—Eileen, my first braille teacher.

Wouldn’t she be proud if she could see me now. I wanted to find my soft-spoken silver-haired teacher and thank her for giving me the tools I needed to excel at my first job.

I e-mailed another teacher to see if he knew anything about Eileen. He told me he had recently seen her at a local restaurant. He included a phone number and urged me to contact her.

My heart raced, and my hand shook as I dialed the number. What am I doing? I wondered. This lady must be in her nineties, and I haven’t talked to her in years. Will she even remember me?

“What do I have to lose?” I argued with myself. The worst thing that can happen is I dial a wrong number or get hung up on. I’ll never know unless I try.

“Hello?” a soft voice answered after the third ring.

“Hello, my name is Mary Sefzik, and I am trying to reach Eileen Burke.”

“This is Eileen. Who are you, and where are you calling from?”

I tried again. “My name is Mary Ann Sefzik. I was one of your pre-school students at Dallas Services for Visually Impaired Children.”

“Oh, honey, I retired from there in 1991—many years ago.”

“I graduated from Dallas Services in 1989 when I was six years old,” I said, hoping to fill in her mental blanks.

“Oh my, Mary Ann. I can’t believe this. How are you? Where are you? What are you doing now?”

I told her about attending college, learning Braille music, and working as a proofreader—all things her teaching had helped bring about.

“I plan to graduate from college soon and wonder what God has in store for me. I wish I could see the future,” I said.

“God has something out there for you,” Eileen assured me, “and it will come one day, out of the blue, when you least expect it.”

Eileen attended my graduation party several months later and I was thankful to find she was exactly the way I remembered her. As she held my hand, I remembered those same gentle hands teaching me how to dial a telephone. I loved to hear her lilting northeastern accent. She could always make me laugh.

“I can’t believe you’re really here,” I said as we clung together in a tight embrace.

“You little rascal,” she said in her sweet, familiar way. “Do you remember the first sentence you wrote for me?”

Once again I was a shy six-year-old basking in the praise of a teacher I adored. “I can go,” I answered.

“You’re right. You said ‘I can go,’ and you went!”

I was amazed at how God chose to use a boss’s compliment and a simple phone call to bring about this special reunion. This experience reminded me that God’s blessings often come out of the blue, when we least expect them.

Things Unseen

By Rhonda Rhea –

We’ve been talking about getting an invisible fence for the dog. Then I got to thinking, wouldn’t it be cheaper to just get an invisible dog? Immediate reduction in food costs. And the yard clean-up? No comparison. If your invisible dog decides to use your sofa as a giant face towel, you’re not any worse off. Not to mention, taking your invisible dog to the imaginary vet could save a boatload of bucks.

On the other hand, invisible dogs are not very effective when you try to blame them for your missing homework. If they bark at intruders, I doubt you’ll ever hear it. And how about having a little beast so excited to see you that it can’t stop wiggling? I think we’d miss seeing that.

Faith is not exactly something you can see either. But even still, it solidifies in our minds and hearts everything that is most real. “Now faith is the reality of what is hoped for, the proof of what is not seen. For our ancestors won God’s approval by it. By faith we understand that the universe was created by God’s command, so that what is seen has been made from things that are not visible” (Hebrews 11:1-3 HCSB).

Everything we can see with our eyes has been created by the God we’ve not seen. The evidence brings faith. And the faith is more evidence.

Do you know what happens as we allow the Lord to grow our faith and use it in serving Him? He gives us eyes to see people in a way we’ve never seen them before and to love them in a way we can’t in our own flesh. He gives us glimpses of what He sees.

Paul expressed great gratitude to God for the people in Thessalonica. Why? “because your faith is growing abundantly, and the love of every one of you for one another is increasing,” (2 Thessalonians 1:3 ESV).

Singer, songwriter and—my favorite role of his—son, Andy Rhea, wrote about putting feet to our faith in the song “Drop Your Nets.” In it, he writes,

Lay me down, I will stay right where you want me to
Pick me up, and I will go. Oh Lord, you know I’ll go
Break me to the ground so I’ll be face to face with all the ones that I’ve
Stepped on, passed by
Missed their mute cries
Come on people, we have eyes to dry

Sometimes our call to faith beckons us to hear some cries and dry some eyes. It calls us to drop what might be most comfortable and to sacrifice. The song continues:

This is the call for disciples’ nets to fall down
This is the broken up soil, it’s time to seed it
This is the call for disciples’ nets to fall down
This is a vein full of love, it’s time to bleed it

A “dogged” faith, if you will, is one that shows up in how we see people. And how we love them. A key line in Andy’s song is “Let’s lay down our nets and scream, ‘We were made to see things unseen.’” Invisible. Yet seen.

As far as the invisible dog goes, though, I’m still looking. But they’re just so hard to find.

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