Category: Devotions

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.

We were studying In our small group last week about forgiveness. One of the verses talks about living as much as it lies within you, live at peace with all men.

Well that’s a mouthful. I can live , not within me, at peace. I can look someone in the eye and smile and pretend. It what’s happening within me, that gets me riled up because they are my porcupine. We all have them in our lives. Some of us have more porcupines than others . I am notsure if a herd is applicable, but I seem to have more than my share.

Why is it so hard to hug a porcupine? Because they have quills. Porcupines are happy until threatened and they have quills for their protection. There are times that porcupines are not threatened but they have quills. It’s their second Nature .

So as much as it lies within me, even if my outside seems to be quite calm and serene, my inside needs to catch up. I have heard the saying , “never trust someone who says, “trust me”.” I heard that again on the way to church the other morning. I needed it before the end of the day. A porcupine was shooting quills and I wasn’t even the one it was shooting at nor was I anywhere near. Sometimes we get in the way of a porcupine simply because we are in life.

I didn’t sleep well that night, partially because of the disappointment the porcupine threw at people, and partly because I am still trying to figure out why God made porcupines and now I have to figure out why God made people who act like porcupines. I tend to just hide. I like to stay away from the line of fire and dig a hole. That’s probably not the best thing, just as the porcupine shooting at people isn’t the best thing either, but, we are both here and need to figure out how to keep from hurting others either by shooting or by avoiding.

So once again I go back to the verse, as much as it is within you, live at peace with all men.

Stars in my sky… that’s what I told someone yesterday. I love a dark night… I love to sit on the dark dock up north and watch the stars. Sometimes there is a falling star, sometimes a million and sometimes just the constellations and me frantically trying to remember what I learned in grade school. The stars in my sky…. are the friends who have walked through life with me. Some of them are in groups similar to the constellations. They appear for a certain time, for such a time as this from Esther, others are the falling stars that are here for a fleeting moment but all make my night worth looking up in the sky. They bring comfort, thrill my heart and I can’t count them there are so many. It reminds me of the promise made to Abraham in Genesis 24. I could reword that to be ,”I will make your friends as numerous as the stars in the sky.” And again in 1 Corinthians 15:41 reminds me , the sun has one kind of beauty, the moon another. The stars yet another; indeed each star has its own individual beauty.” I am so thankful for the stars in my life. Each of them individual and each of them special regardless of the time they have shown in my heart. I did open a gift early: the kids worked together to contact 60 friends and have them write something and make a book of it, I know some more will come in, but it amazed me at what the stars in my life said from their heart. A cool birthday gift by even a more awesome gift to know that even in my darkest night there are stars shining in my corner… I just need to go look in my sky….

It broke. No we have no ice maker. We do however have a ruined floor from where the water had been dripping under the fridge for weeks or months and soaking up under the flooring. Ice; we have to make it by hand. Pour water in a small tray and freeze. Such a process and yet God does it so brilliantly. One wakes up to the trees covered and the world a fairy tale land. It’s beautiful, it’s almost sacred and it’s slippery. God takes no effort to design, create and amazing us with the beauty of ice. And, in a split second we go from gingerly walking, to flailing the air and landing with a great thud.

Job mentions ice. God is talking to Job about who created the world and where was Job when it all began. In chapter 38 God is giving Job a lesson The Who done it’s in the world. It reminds me of when I would stand three children in front of me and ask who gave them breakfast, who washed their clothes, who gave them life. God reminds us , “from whose womb comes ice? Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens when the waters become as hard as stone?” God made some pretty incredible things and ice has to be one of them. Oh, we can create ice, after God creates water. We can create ice after man has made a freezer for us to put it in, or unless God drops the weather temperature low…

The things we find beauty in we also find challenges with. In the cafe, when asked if you want ice, on a hot day in August, the answer is yes. On a cold day in January, perhaps the answer is no. We want ice. We don’t want ice. We want sun. We don’t want sun. We want snow. We don’t want snow. We want friends. We want to be left alone. We want stuff. We donate stuff. There are moments when the things we want, may disappear or we cease to want them. On a cold, icy day in Illinois with schools cancelled, we don’t really want any more ice and yet we have ice everywhere and the time to watch it’s crystals and be amazed at its beauty. It’s more beautiful when we aren’t sitting on our behind on the sidewalk covered with it, but it still is a thing of beauty.