Greeting the World

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Do not fret because of those who are evil
    or be envious of those who do wrong;
for like the grass they will soon wither,
    like green plants they will soon die away. Trust in the Lord and do good;
    dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture.

 Take delight in the Lord,
    and he will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the Lord;
    trust in him and he will do this:
He will make your righteous reward shine like the dawn,
    your vindication like the noonday sun.

Psalm 37: 1-6

It’s a good Scripture, isn’t it these days when it seems so many evil people seem to be flourishing with no thought of the damage they do to anybody. In essence, it’s saying that God has our back and we don’t have to worry. We can rest easy since we know that He will make everything alright in the end.

It’s been hot here which is normal, but what is not normal is that we have had very little rain. This is our monsoon season and there is no relief in sight. I have missed the pitter-patter of sweet drops falling in the afternoons and sometimes in the mornings.  I padded around the block this morning to say good morning to Mrs (or Mr) Dove, firmly ensconced in the Saguaro cactus–I think it’s a new dove, she seems very uneasy when I get close. The other one last year and the year before just sat and looked at me peacefully with a sense of confidence and safety in her position.

Mr. Woodpecker just showed up on the back wall where I am sitting. I am scribbling here in my journal…….I can’t write much anymore and I miss it. My previous job where I cut heavy leather and other materials makes my right hand tire easily and it gets sloppy fast. I used to love to do calligraphy. No more.

It feels good to address the day in a way other than Facebook or the morning news……Facebook only holds so much……it can’t hold birdsong or breezes or sounds of real life. There goes the coo-cooing of a dove as if to prove my point.

My Jesus Calling devotional tells me to rest by the wayside today. That sounds very good indeed, at least for part of the day.  It also says to remember that I am royalty in His Kingdom…….What a thought that is. Now I believe I will go on with my day.

The Lord’s blessings on yours!

Consider the blameless, observe the upright;
    a future awaits those who seek peace.
But all sinners will be destroyed;
    there will be no future for the wicked.

Psalm 37: 37,38

The story God longs to write

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“Jesus watches us”……. that’s the line that jumped out of my Dad’s letter to me.

There is a story God longs to write on your heart. You may not know it, but your very own life has an BC and an AD attached to it. God has thrown the invitation out and is waiting for you to accept. Salvation is the modern-day miracle of our times. Our redemption story is the single most valuable thing we can offer to a world waiting for hope. A changed life is the single most powerful testimony of God’s glory here on earth. You say miracles don’t happen? Look in the mirror. If you are a Christ follower today, you are a miracle.

As I was sitting in my “prayer chair” this morning I started thinking about the changed lives in my own little circle and then I looked back on my own life and I had to go from sitting to kneeling in a hurry. What grace has touched my life. At the age of somewhere around 13 or 14 I felt the Holy Spirit’s tug and I knew it was a decision I couldn’t put off. Where did that come from? I can still remember the night of my Baptism, the pastor in waders, me looking out to the crowd and giving my profession of faith……taking my place quietly after it was over, wet head and all. And the years after……when He pulled me back from the brink, delivering me from anorexia with that one dream and how the very next morning I ate food again. It was scrambled eggs and we were all crying, Mom and Dad and I.

And I remember Elaine when we first met and how she asked me how I could be so hopeful when she knew my husband had just died. Her life had started out in church but she had left that behind, as many of us do. Her path was diverted and for a while she wandered, but God was waiting to finish His story on her heart; He remembered that little white-haired girl with the flouncy skirts, sitting in her Uncle’s church in the front row requesting songs while her Aunt played “I’ll Fly Away.”

She left a whole life behind when she came to our town, and I never realized at the time how hard that probably was. She was baptized in a river, which her parents thought was crazy, but they were there anyway. And on the way home that night we ran over a carpet on the freeway. To this day we still laugh about it, how it caught under the car smoldering and it was like a Chinese fire drill, everyone bailing out to dislodge it.

I think of my Mom who was raised in church but didn’t know Jesus until around the age of around 35 or 40. When she met Him her life changed forever. Before, she worried about everything and had two bleeding ulcers to prove it. After, she was healed, body mind and spirit. She has impacted many lives by stepping out in faith, introducing herself to strangers and inviting them to Bible studies too many to count over the years.

And my Dad and brother have their own redemption stories too, no less miraculous. My Dad met Jesus in a church he didn’t particularly like……but Jesus is like that, He can show up anywhere. My brother wasn’t too keen on that church either, but on Easter Sunday 1982 he walked down the aisle as I sang in the choir.

My brother’s wife miraculously met Jesus after someone invited her to a play about Heaven and hell. Not long after she went through her own personal hell of chemo and cancer. She gave it all she had, but it wasn’t enough and my brother’s love big as it was couldn’t hold her here either. In that battle, it was Jesus love that broke through in the midst of her pain and said, “I’ll take it and you.” She died with a smile on her face and sings today with the angels.

The heart-breaking truth is: Sometimes the prayers for healing aren’t answered and no one knows why, but the important thing is, we know Who she’s with right now.

The single most important event in your life has either taken place or is waiting to take place.

It’s just three words, “Yes, I believe.” Someone is waiting to hear your redemption story today……….Like the eunuch, they are ready to say yes, they just need the right Someone to put their hope and trust in.

And the eunuch said to Philip, “About whom, I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?” Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning with this Scripture he told him the good news about Jesus. And as they were going along the road they came to some water, and the eunuch said, “See, here is water! What prevents me from being baptized?”And he commanded the chariot to stop, and they both went down into the water, Philip and the eunuch, and he baptized him. And when they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord carried Philip away, and the eunuch saw him no more, and went on his way rejoicing. Acts 8:26-39

Life After Eden…….

 

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“For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now. And not only this, but also we ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body. For in hope we have been saved, but hope that is seen is not hope; for who hopes for what he already sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, with perseverance we wait eagerly for it.” Romans 8:22-25

On the way to work this morning, I caught the moon going down. It slipped quietly down through the clouds, a pale peachy color. I thought of our world today and how it just seems that each new tragedy tops the one before. It’s been going that way awhile now. Looking at that moon, I thought, how can there still be so much beauty in such a broken world?

I felt for God believe it or not. I often think of how the world was when He first called it into existence and how perfect it all was. I can almost see it, feel it. It’s a train wreck down here. A bad man pays to have a gentle giant of a lion butchered for what? Cecil didn’t belong to him, I feel like he belonged to all of us. He didn’t deserve that. That would have never happened in Eden.

Added to all this there’s the whole nightmare with Planned Parenthood and the unconscionable acts that go along with it, and our own Government refusing to investigate. There are people all over the world being beheaded right and left. There is war on every front, and the terrible Iran Nuclear deal to top it off.  A little girl goes out on her scooter and never returns home. I was just in her town earlier this year.

It’s just too much.  It’s just too all-encompassing. Which is why I think we so wholeheartedly jumped on the bandwagon to impune that Dentist, who is now nowhere to be found with good reason. He was such an easy mark. It was such a terrible senseless thing for him to do and now the arrow that pierced poor Cecil has gone all around the world.

I was thinking on the way to work that history has really taught us nothing. I was thinking of how the Nazi’s treated their dogs to wonderful dinners while marching Jews out of their homes into the cold, babies and children and old men and women. They treated them as less than human. All these years later, many of us have gone to the museums and seen the ovens and the trains.

We have tsk-tsked and shaken our heads sadly and said that it will never happen again, and yet right here in America for many years, we have rewarded and paid into an organization whose founder has valued some of Hitler’s very own ideals. Here’s a sample of what Margaret Sanger thought and believed:

The purpose in promoting birth control was “to create a race of thoroughbreds,” Birth Control Review, Nov. 1921 (p. 2)

More children from the fit, less from the unfit — that is the chief aim of birth control.” Birth Control Review, May 1919, p. 12 

“The most merciful thing that a large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.” Margaret Sanger, Women and the New Race

Sanger believed that, for the purpose of racial “purification,” couples should be rewarded who chose sterilization. The Career of Margaret Sanger, by David Kennedy, p. 117, quoting a 1923 Sanger speech. 

What a society sows, it will reap. And this is where we’ve come. If a baby comes at the wrong time or is not convenient, or doesn’t fit in with our plans, or if it’s not perfect,  it is perfectly acceptable to kill it, even while it’s blissfully tucked away. But God sees it.

It’s the same kind of crazy psychology that allowed a sophisticated society like Germany to go along with an evil it slowly came to see as normal.

I wonder what God thinks. I think He cries,  personally. I think He weeps. I think He remembers how it all started out and how He created it perfect. Not one drop of blood was shed until we decided we knew what was best. I think He wept as He killed the animal that made the clothes that Adam and Eve wrapped around themselves as they left the gates of Eden.

I think He wanted them to know that with sin always comes death, heartache and sacrifice. But He also wanted them to know there was a way back home, and that Way came with the blood of His very own Son. God in the flesh.

There is so much beauty still in the world, sometimes I wonder how there can be. And yet, everywhere I look there are traces of Eden. And hope.

There is a way home. God holds out forgiveness as a gift to all of us who accept it. There is forgiveness for you if you have had an abortion. There is forgiveness still if you see nothing wrong with it. There is forgiveness for Dr. Walter Palmer, the dentist who killed Cecil.

And while all of Creation groans, we know it’s only temporary…….just this side of eternity, a new Earth is waiting to be born.

RIP and run free Cecil……..

And the wolf will dwell with the lamb,
And the leopard will lie down with the young goat,
And the calf and the young lion and the fatling together;
And a little boy will lead them.
Also the cow and the bear will graze,
Their young will lie down together,
And the lion will eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child will play by the hole of the cobra,
And the weaned child will put his hand on the viper’s den.
They will not hurt or destroy in all My holy mountain,
For the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
As the waters cover the sea. Isaiah 11:6-9

Casting our care……..over and over again.

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On my recent vacation I took a walk one early morning in the mist by the sea and I found that all along the pathway someone had left stones. On each stone was scrawled a message, or a date.  Some had paw prints and a name, memorial to a beloved pet, and some had Scripture. Part of the wonder of that walk was that those little stones added something. Those stones served as a marker in my heart, so that I will always remember it.

Jesus mentioned stones too as He rode into Jerusalem. “Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Jesus, “Teacher, rebuke your disciples!” “I tell you,” he replied, “if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.” Those Pharisee’s were such killjoys.

On that walk, those little stones were crying out to me in their own way. Well, it was more like whispers of hope. But sometimes whispers cry out the loudest, don’t they? I wonder about who painted the words on those stones and the rest of them I saw that day. I wonder what cares they had that they wanted to leave there, along that path?

Last night it was one of those tossing and turning nights. I was bogged down in my usual worries that played over and over like a needle stuck in the groove of an old 45. And this morning when I awoke, I decided that I needed to do what this little stone said to do……I needed to cast my care where it counted. To the One who could actually do something about it. And my prayer was simply for God to put the song back in my heart. Just that.

And as I thought back to when I first started my early morning prayer times, I realized that through these few years, my relationship to God the Father has changed. I always talked to Jesus, I always told Him I loved Him, but I never really told God the Father I loved him. Now I do. It’s because of the approachability of Jesus that we can take the blinding Holy brilliance of the Father, even though I know all the Holiness of the Father rests on Jesus as well.

What a perfect plan, what a perfect God.

Somewhere along the line the message has sunk in that God is not out to get me. He already has proven His great love for me even while I was sinning. Even as I disappoint Him again and again even now.

As I open the words to my devotional this morning I read these words:

Where shall I go from your Spirit?
    Or where shall I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there!
    If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!
If I take the wings of the morning
    and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
    and your right hand shall hold me.
 If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,
    and the light about me be night,”
even the darkness is not dark to you;
    the night is bright as the day,
    for darkness is as light with you.

Psalm 139:7-12

He is faithful friends……..He is the redeemer of days, and comfort in the night. Every hidden thought, and action is exposed to His Holy light and even then, He draws close. He is not surprised by anything we do. And the great miracle and joy of this life is that He cares enough to make a garden out of the wilderness of my heart. Over and over again.

His words fall like rain on my parched and weary soul.

In the light of eternity, where all will be well forever, nothing is a problem down here.

Have a serving of Holy

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We don’t just find “Holy” in church, but in all those little everyday moments that fill our years. Sitting at a curbside café with people bustling all around we feel something midstream in the action, a thought or feeling in our heart that causes us to pause and thank God that we are part of it all.

Did you ever wonder why we remember slices of days forever? And no one ever tells us that “this is a day, a moment, you will always remember” because they have no way of knowing that you will and neither do you, but for some reason you do. Of course, we remember the Big days. Weddings, funerals…..certain vacations, graduations, the birth of a child.

But remembering the ordinary, that’s something else again. I like to think of these ordinary days as pearls. We get them out of the box from time to time and finger them like rosary beads, feeling the smoothness of the worn stones, going back over the memory. Holy slices in the midst of eternity.

I remember one particular day in Jamestown, California, stopping in at a coffee-house and buying a mug bearing the name of the town. I carried that mug and the memory with me when I moved to Payson, Arizona. One day at work I was sipping my coffee from it when it started to snow. I carried it with me to the window as I marveled at the spectacular beauty of the scene. I’ll never forget the bosses daughter running around the complex shrieking, “It’s snowing…..it’s snowing!”

One memory married to another, like stepping across stones in a garden pond.

Another day, long before I moved, my Mom and I went to visit the home of one of my friends. I don’t think she was home but her Mom was. We sat in her spotless and scrubbed kitchen visiting with the rain pouring down outside and the hum of the dryer coming from her laundry room. For some reason, the warmth of that kitchen remains with me all these years later. It was an “all is well” for right now moment.

Maybe what we should try to do is cultivate more of these “all is well” moments. It comes down to a choice of either being wrapped in worry or peace at any given time. Jesus spent a lot of time telling people not to worry and not to be afraid. Somehow that comforts me. His disciples must have been worry-worts and fearful sorts just like me.

Maybe the best way to practice our faith in a way that is most pleasing to God is by cultivating an “All is Well” mentality in an “All is Not Well” world. Because if we really believed the words of the Book, we would know that everything is really going to be alright in the end.

Moment by Holy moment.

What can I give Him, poor as I am?

If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;

If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;

Yet what can I give Him? I can give Him my heart.

Christina Rossetti

Happy Almost Birthday to my Dad!

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Dad……I know you don’t relish turning 87 and I can hardly believe the number myself.

This is you leading the pack in Yosemite. We always called you the Mountain Goat…….Thank you for handing down to me a wonderful legacy of loving nature and animals and a deep respect for all living things.

I hope the cake got there in one piece, I thought 87 deserved a homemade cake from me however it looks when it gets there.

Thank you for all the laughter we have shared and are still sharing. One of the most important things you and Mom have mastered is to never forget how to laugh no matter what life throws your way.

And it has thrown you quite a bit over the years.

Thank you for all your calls and letters……I always love seeing those white oblong envelopes in the mail. You should have a new book on your Kindle as soon as you can get to the library to download it from it’s place out in the wireless world. It is hovering there waiting for you.

When I saw the title, I couldn’t resist. Please let me know how you like it.

I wish you God’s richest blessings and peace for tomorrow. I will call, because I want to hear your voice on your special day.

I love you……Your daughter.

As always, right behind you on the trail.

Creativity and our DNA

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Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. Genesis 2:6

Whether you believe the account in Genesis or not, (I do) you can’t deny that creativity is a part of who we are. Even before we can walk or run, we are stacking blocks. Why are we not content to let the sand just lie there and be sand? Because the truth is the act of creating is part of our DNA handed down from our Father in Heaven.

I remember craft time in school when they handed out the clay or the paint how excited we all were. And not just the ones with the natural talent, everybody. And back then no one worried if we were good enough, we just wanted to join in and watch the colors mix, splash over the page, feel the clay warm under our kneading hands. My Mom still has one of my projects from first grade and I still remember that feeling of seeing my finished product; a teal colored fish with a roped piece of clay for a smile.

This morning, after hearing about the Nuke deal, I was kind of bummed out honestly. I thumbed through my phone at the news flashes and threw it back down on the bed distractedly. I didn’t want to hear anymore. I turned my attention to the blank paper that was going to be a card for my Dad’s 87th Birthday. I decided to draw a simple sketch of a place that holds deep significance to our whole family. I crouched on the floor with a few pencils and working from a photo, I sketched a scene.

Soon the cat came in and thought it was play time so he started batting the pencils out of my hand. They both wondered why I was on their level so they hovered around, curiously watching. I found that in those minutes I lost track of time and all the worries of the world outside. For those few minutes I was doing something Holy. I was a partaker in creating something from nothing and even though it’s just a simple drawing, I know my Dad will love it because he is an artist. He understands the joy of the creative process.

When we share our art with someone we are actually joining with God in the creative process He started when He created the world, the cosmos and us. And when we pass it on it becomes a kind of benediction that makes them want to reciprocate in their own way.

Art is a way of keeping our sanity when the world outside seems anything but. Art is a way of building a bridge of hope that lifts us above and beyond ourselves and points to something and someone greater. It says that there is much that is still good. To much to give up.

Turns out there is a world of adults out there who long to go back to those coloring and finger painting days. There are whole workshops now devoted to distressed, depressed, burned out adults who long to get back into the rhythm of doing something they left behind long ago and turns out they shouldn’t have.

So push aside those thoughts that you’re not good enough.

Or do that thing you secretly have always known you were good at.

Paint, draw, sing, build, write. And don’t let anyone tell you it’s a waste of time or even worse, that it’s childish.

You spend enough time in your day being an adult. Now take a break for awhile and enter into what you were really made for

You won’t be able to stop smiling, I promise.

(This post is an abbreviated version that was swallowed up earlier in the day. It is out there in the cloud somewhere)

I started writing on this theme from a prompt I heard about over at The High Calling, though I missed the community link up. Read some great articles on this theme right here.

No Wiggle Room in the Beatitudes

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Yesterday I wrote a post. It was after I had read something that fired me up a little. But after I posted it, it didn’t feel quite right. I felt a bit unsettled the rest of the day. And a friend’s comment made me think, (Thank you Mark). Sometimes we get off track a little because we just want to say what we want to say. And sometimes all it takes is a thoughtful nudge to get us going in the right direction again.

I have since taken the post down, but the gist of it was that I didn’t think we had an obligation to pray for our leaders when they are corrupt. Rethinking that position, I think that maybe we need to pray for them even more. The reason why is because when we do that? We get fresh healing ourselves.

So today, I go back to those crowds and that dusty road where Jesus walked in the middle of the throng, and I imagine myself as the woman pressing against Him reaching for the hem of His garment. You see, she had no illusions. She knew she needed healing. Sometimes I forget I still need it to.

This morning as I leafed through the pages of my big old marked up red Bible, the one I reach for when I need to remember when it was all so exciting and new; and I heard Jesus voice ringing through the hillsides when He preached that famous sermon on the mount known as the Beattidudes.  And surprise, surprise……I found no wiggle room there when it comes to love and forgiveness. No wonder those words seemed so radical back then. They still do.

You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. Matthew5:43-45

Even Isis, Lord? Even those who might seek to do me or my family harm? Even those who misunderstand what I am trying to say, who misinterpret and twist my words? Even someone who might even kill someone I love? Even them?

The answer is always the same. Yes. We are called to love and forgive. Anything and everything. Because He did.

He forgave me everything, and He intercedes for me even up to this very day, and pours fresh grace into my life, even when I make bad choices. He has filled me with His Holy Spirit who enables me to do the impossible. I think of the laundry list of things I have neglected to do for Him, times I have turned the other way when someone who glanced my direction may have really needed a kind word.

All the things I said I would do tomorrow.

I am humbled afresh today. I think it’s possible to stand down for peace even while holding up your convictions. The Beatitudes have taught me again how far I have to go in that direction.

Holding onto His hem today……….all I need is one touch.

Jesus got up and began to follow him, and so did His disciples. And a woman who had been suffering from a hemorrhage for twelve years, came up behind Him and touched the fringe of His cloak; for she was saying to herself, “If I only touch His garment, I will get well.”……Matthew 9:19-21

The Universal Language

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The heavens declare the glory of God;
    the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech;
    night after night they reveal knowledge.
They have no speech, they use no words;
    no sound is heard from them.
Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,
    their words to the ends of the world.

In the heavens God has pitched a tent for the sun.
    It is like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber,
    like a champion rejoicing to run his course.
It rises at one end of the heavens
    and makes its circuit to the other;
    nothing is deprived of its warmth.

Psalm 19:1-6

If you’ve ever spent any time in nature, any serious study of it at all, it would erase all doubt forever that there was a God who set it all into motion. King David spent much of his youth outdoors, many nights out under the stars watching over his family flocks. His writings reflect that. Some of the most beautiful passages of Scripture come from the Psalms. I truly believe one of the best thing parents can do for their kids is give them an early exposure to nature. I will be forever grateful that my childhood was filled with camping trips and days spend by the sea.

And think about it, nature really is the universal language that God used to try to get us to look toward Him. Some people still miss Him entirely. They are so dazzled by nature that they forget to keep looking further to the One who fashioned it (and them) all together in a perfect symphony of rhythm that repeats itself day after day. Night after night. We just have to open our eyes to see it. And keep seeing it.

Sometimes when the world makes no sense, I go out and gaze up at the moon. It reassures me that God is still in control.

The Father, Son and Holy Spirit worked together in perfect unison and spoke it all here out of a great love. Everything we see here is because He loves and continues to love.

And everything we see that has marred His great creation is because we have failed to love.

C.K. Chesterton had it right:

“The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister.”

I believe what I believe…….

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I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds; God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God; begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made.

Who, for us men for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the virgin Mary, and was made man; and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate; He suffered and was buried; and the third day He rose again, according to the Scriptures; and ascended into heaven, and sits on the right hand of the Father; and He shall come again, with glory, to judge the quick and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end.

And I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of Life; who proceeds from the Father [and the Son]; who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified; who spoke by the prophets.

And I believe one holy catholic and apostolic Church. I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins; and I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.

According to Wikipedia, the purpose of a creed is to provide a doctrinal statement of correct belief, or Orthodoxy.  The creeds of Christianity have been drawn up at times of conflict about doctrine: acceptance or rejection of a creed served to distinguish believers and deniers of a particular doctrine or set of doctrines. For that reason a creed was called in Greek a σύμβολον (Eng. symbolon), a word that meant half of a broken object which, when placed together with the other half, verified the bearer’s identity. The Greek word passed through Latin “symbolum” into English “symbol”, which only later took on the meaning of an outward sign of something.

In the year 325 AD a controversy arose whereby Arius, a Libyan presbyter in Alexandria, had declared that “although the Son was divine, he was a created being and therefore not co-essential with the Father, and “there was when he was not,” This made Jesus less than the Father, which posed soteriological challenges for the nascent doctrine of the Trinity. Arius’s teaching provoked a serious crisis.”

The Nicene Creed of 325 explicitly affirms the co-essential divinity of the Son, applying to him the term “consubstantial”. The 381 version speaks of the Holy Spirit as worshipped and glorified with the Father and the Son. The Athanasian Creed (not used in Eastern Christianity) describes in much greater detail the relationship between Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Apostles’ Creed makes no explicit statements about the divinity of the Son and the Holy Spirit, but, in the view of many who use it, the doctrine is implicit in it.

On its own, this statement of belief would be only a collection of words, however, since it is rooted and grounded in the Holy Word of God it stands forever as a unifying standard that applies to all Christian Churches. I never recited this growing up as a Baptist but when I visited other churches and they would recite it, I always loved it though inwardly I cringed a bit with the “Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church” because I thought I was being hypocritical saying that part when I wasn’t Catholic. But in this case, the word “catholic” is derived from the Greek adjective καθολικός (katholikos), meaning “general”, “universal. (Although some Catholics might disagree on that point)

This morning, millions of churches will gather together and break bread over these words. In this instance, we are totally unified despite our different denominations. I found myself saying these words this morning as a awoke, well really singing them. In the 1970s Rich Mullins wrote a tune to these very words and I played it on the way to work yesterday. Of these words he says:

And I believe what I believe
Is what makes me what I am
I did not make it, no it is making me
I did not make it, no it is making me
I said, “I did not make it, no it is making me”
It is the very truth of God
And not the invention of any man…….

Amen, dear Rich, you have been living that out with Jesus for years already. I can’t wait to meet you……..

My prayer for today:

“Oh Father, though the streams of culture and the world flow swiftly and changeably around us, Your words are like a mighty rock it swirls around. The world has its eyes turned elsewhere, but ours are forever turned to you. You are the first and the last, and your words were formed long before this world existed and they will stand for all eternity. We thank you that though everything else changes, you never do. In an unsettled world, we draw tremendous comfort from that. I pray that the church will continue be an open door for people coming in from the world battered and bruised and that we in the church might be a conduit for the great love and mercy you have shown to us. You are light in our darkness, without you, we have nothing.” Amen