Author: marettej

I was the topic of a sermon. Not that it hasn’t happened in the past but it’s usually, “don’t do what she did” type of sermon. Today it was about answering a call, seeing God lead and being a miracle for others. Actually the sermon was about the loaves and fishes but it was tied into how we can be the miracle that God uses to bless other people.

The thought of the loves and fishes: I am now going outside the box for those of you would need to prepare to be led on a goose chase. The disciples found a boy with a lunch. Excuse me here but there were a lot of people. 5000 not counting women and children. That’s a lot of people. We tend to think about the breaking of bread off the loaf that never ended and handing it to the next person time and time and time and time again. I want to take it a different way. 4999 didn’t plan ahead. 4999 didn’t pack a lunch. I am sure there were reasons. I have rushed off in a tiff of excitement and forgot lots of things. I want to give major kudos to the mom of that young man who packed his lunch. She thought she was simply doing the mother’s job. Feed him, clothe him, wash him, ask him who his friends are, pick up his clothes, put his school books away, make his bed, find his lost homework and sign his permission slip kind of mother things. I doubt she had any idea she would be the source of Jesus performing a miracle. What if she had said, ” you can eat when you get home.” Or perhaps, “here are a few shekels. Grab something at McGalilee’s on your way home. ” She did what she felt she should do: pack a lunch. Her being obedient gave way to an incredible miracle.

We go through life doing the things we feel led to do. We do them because it’s the right thing to do. We are usually not aware that God maybe could use that little thing to perform a miracle in someone else’s life; or 4999 other someone’s lives.

I put in writing I was willing to help. Someone else had a need. They saw my note. They sent an email. I answered the email, that led to a visit that led to helping a church walk through a challenging time and get the joy back in music for them. All I did was put what I felt God leading me to do, pack a lunch, and that lunch did a lot more than any of us imagined,

Kind of mind boggling to think of what Jesus will do if we do simple things like packing lunches.

I stood chopping. Anyone who had never lived through a Minnesota winter probably can stop reading now and go to the last paragraph. However, if you have lived through 8 inches of frozen stuff with 15 inches of snow and ice on top you will relate.

I needed to open the gate. Gates are made to open, since our last little affair with winter, we have snow piles, frozen icy walkways and generally a lot of snow. I went to throw hay at noon yesterday and could not get in the gate.

I had two choices. I really only had one but I pretended I had two. Having a choice gives us the allusion that we have some control in life. I kicked at the frozen pile of white stuff mixed with black horse apples. It didn’t do much..ok, it didn’t do anything. I went back into the barn and got the shovel and the ice pick ax wedgie thing and began to attack the issue with a devoted heart.

I have been reading about the beginnings of Lent. The early disciples never forgot Good Friday. We seem to think that was Pope Gregory’s brain child. The council of Nicea observed fasting. I remember anniversaries of deaths. The early Christians would have remembered the next year when Friday came that Christ was crucified. They may not have made a lot of fuss, but they would have remembered. In a couple weeks we will remember. I won’t make a big fuss, it’s been 27 years but I will remember the day our son died. Those things you don’t forget. The Christians had their own way of remembering. Now, leading up to Easter, we have 40 days, not counting Sunday’s, that’s we remember. But if we remember without the sacrifice of the heart being involved, we are just observing casually an occurrence in life. Sacrifices only have merit when they come from a devoted heart.

I have chopped through ice and snow frozen hard before but the other day I had a devoted heart. I had purpose. I needed to get into the gate. My focus was stronger, my energy level was focused on one mission and every time I smashed the ice wedge and felt more frozen crud give away there was almost a bit of excitement. I said almost a bit. My heart was devoted and I was all in.

In 1 Samuel 15 we read about Saul doing something because he was supposed to and not because he had a devoted heart. And, he did it almost right. We don’t do things the right way if our heart isn’t in it. We do it almost right. But when we get focused and energized and our heart gets involved, watch out ice jams; we are breaking things up.

In that same chapter Samuel is telling Saul about God’s reasons for doing what he did; tore the Kingdom away from Saul because he didn’t put his heart into his actions. In the message it says, ” He (meaning God) says what he means and means what he says.”

Our hearts would explode with action, if we really believed that. If we remembered with passion and purpose and our sacrifices were focused on following what God said… with ice jammers and shovels in hand, our sacrifices would be energetically laid at Gods feet rather than flung from afar, not sure we are all in.

I can now swing the gate open; until we get another storm tonight that is. Then I will do it all again. Sacrifices sometimes seem to be one right after the other and we get our hearts tangled up because we just sacrificed: now you want me to do it again? Our life is a sacrifice. Our hours are simply minutes waiting for another way God needs us to sacrifice ourselves and pick up the ice wedges and shovels.

Lent..something I didn’t grow up observing. Do I understand it ? Not based on the cultural norms that were examples for me from those around me. Giving up for lent was a huge deal but it wasn’t about the giving up it was more about giving up and replacing it with something else. That’s really not giving up it’s just changing cars. Kids would make a big deal about not eating hamburger but instead of spending the time thinking about God instead of not eating hamburger, it was simply we eat fish. That never made sense to me. Things were given up for lent as a sacrifice simply of only giving up not giving more time to God. In fact God and Lent didn’t really go together. That’s the impression I got as a child. Was it right ? Probably not. Was it totally wrong? Probably not.

Studying about our response to things around us forces us to either participate or ignore. We always ignored. However as an adult, I am choosing to participate in a way that makes “Giving it more not simply giving up”. I want to give God more of my focus by lessening my focus on something else. That’s basically what Lent is. I choose to not do this today, and instead of not doing this I will read the passage of scripture and think about it before resuming my normal activities.

I will focus on the cross and how important it is to me and where repentance fits in but I will also keep reminding myself of the empty grave because that’s where my HOPE is.

So today, Ash Wednesday, I am having a normal Wednesday, but I am choosing to put God in place of a few of the things I would normally do. Instead of listening to my Merle Haggard (I did meet his mother in church once) on I-Heart radio, I will listen to the book of Joel being read from my Bible app. Simple, but will redirect my heart. I am cleaning the house. “Create in me a clean heart Oh God.” I have been listening to podcasts rather than cranking the I-tunes up. Little changes, one step at a time, one way to see God closer than you did yesterday.

I sat with others taking it all in. I had no clue what half of the words and phrases mean which is why I had a friend taking notes. I listened, copied and watched. An expert in their field explained, showed, answered questions and the questions were many. Why? People had driven from all over just to sit and listen for a moment in time. To learn, to apply and to leave with a different perspective, a different angle and the chance to be better. It wasn’t just the learning about mandolins and fiddles and Ukelele’s, but in the midst of the explanations comes with it simple statements about life that apply far beyond music.

That must have been the basic idea of Jesus sitting and teaching. Though he was teaching fishermen to fish for things they couldn’t snag in a net, it compares with trying to take a violist and put them on a Ukelele. Not that they can’t learn but they have to change their approach and mindset. The disciples had to go from nets and fish to people and circumstances. It took awhile but they did figure it out. I thought of that when I kept trying to figure out an E major chord when my fingers didn’t want to bend the way the chart showed. The guy beside me was effortlessly playing. The lady on my right had given up. I knew it would be a matter of time but if I stuck with it, I could make it work. It’s that moment in time when the teacher and the student click, and the mind goes “ahh” and the tune sounds right. I wonder when that was for Jesus; when did he realize they finally got it?

Such a picture perfect scenario. A white Christmas, or a beautiful white snow gently covering the buildings and children sledding… However, blizzards, white outs,  snow-storms aren’t exactly beautiful.  We have been caught in a mangle of snow. I call it a mangle because there is nothing neat and tidy about a mangle. When something gets mangled, it’s totally twisted and bent out of shape. This snowstorm, blizzard, white out or total shut down of southern Minnesota has been a bit amusing.

White out; isn’t found in a small white bottle. White out is when it’s white out. The wind is blowing 50 mph with 10 inches of snow blowing around and making Matterhorn Peaks out of billions of small beautiful flakes we call snow. We cannot see the arena doors. We can see Grandpa’s trailer but we won’t be going down the hill without going through six foot drifts. Jim took the snowmobile up to the neighbors to feed their dogs. They are gone. The daughter was to come and feed them. Not only can they not get out of where they live, but the roads are all closed in southern Minnesota so you could not get here anyway. As he drove by the window, he was even with the window. The snow banks are 5 feet above the driveway and if you didn’t know there was a road there, you wouldn’t know there was a road there.

Wow, two days off. We had plans. Many people had plans. Plans kind of got put on a back burner when all the roads were closed, people stranded on the roads, cars blocking the roads and snow plows stuck. I was to have a wonderful day celebrating my last day of helping a church in a nearby town. It was to have been a fun day at Cowboy church. It was to have been a celebration of a 90th birthday of a friend.

I slept in, I worked on a puzzle. I took a nap. We made lunch. I let the dogs out. I opened up the door and let the dogs back in. I did shovel the front porch and the back porch but it did no good. Baihley and Jim fell through snow banks they could not walk through to get to the barns. They had to shovel their way into the pastures to get the horses into the barns. There was no finding the watering tanks and some of the pastures are totally surrounded by the Alps of Southern Minnesota. We didn’t know we had mountains, but found out by looking out our windows it’s a pretty spectacular view.

White out doesn’t come in a bottle. White out comes when reality hits our lives and causes conditions that one cannot see through. It happens more times than we want to think about. We look up and thought we saw the road ahead and  realize that it’s not what we thought! The road that was there, suddenly isn’t there. We call out to God saying it’s not fair; that’s ok. God wants you to talk to him. He wants to hear about the things you can’t see. He wants to hear that one minute the visibility was 2 miles and the next you can’t see in front of your hand.  God wants to be the out in the white-out’s of your life. It might be that you can’t see, but there is an out. That out might meany you sit in a snowbank for awhile. That out might mean you walk through the valley. God’s plan is usually us enduring a few blizzards in life which give us plenty of time to think. I have had more naps in the past two days than I have had in weeks. Kind of nice. I have enjoyed quiet times, puzzle times, praying times and listening to pod-casts and worship services. Normally on a Sunday I only hear one sermon. Today I listened to four. Well actually, I just listened to the same two, two times. I hear it better the second time.  God lets me enjoy hearing it the first time and then talks to me the second time.   My friends got a bit more prayer time today. I drew pictures and wrote scripture and made fudge that didn’t turn out.

Hopefully in a couple days southern Minnesota will return to somewhat normal winter. But for the 24th of February, everything came to a stand still.  For me, I am thankful. We will enjoy our goodbye’s another time. We will do Cowboy Church next month. We will however talk about the Blizzard of February 2019 for a long time.. And I hope I remember the things God spoke to me about for even longer.