Behind the Scenes

    In 1974, educator Erno Rubik came up with a hands-on way to teach architecture students about three-dimensional spaces. Although this Hungarian professor could not have guessed it at the time, his “Magic Cube” would become one of the world’s most popular toys. Forty-nine years later, millions of Rubik’s Cubes are still sold annually (https://rubiks.com/en-US/), and I would venture to say that most of us have tried to solve the colorful block puzzle at one time or another. I would also hazard a guess that most of us have never successfully completed the challenge, though I have known some children who have tried such tactics as removing and reapplying stickers on different squares, or even taking the block apart completely in an attempt to restructure it “correctly.”

    Life can be like a Rubik’s Cube, can’t it? We see hints of how to get everything lined up the way we want it to be, but sometimes, no matter how hard we work, things just don’t make sense. Enter God. He is the only One Who knows how to solve the puzzle. He is at once the director of the play and the stage hand, using “insignificant” props to coordinate the entire drama of His grace and purpose in our lives.

    That truth is easier to see in hindsight than when we are in the middle of the puzzle. One great thing about Scripture is the way the Lord has woven background details into the fabric of its stories. It’s an amazing thing to be reading along in a passage, and have the Holy Spirit lean over your shoulder, point out a word or phrase, and say, “See that!” or, “What’s that mean?”, drawing us into the story with new understanding. It’s the part of His work that we call “illumination” – turning the light on – and is one of the best things about spending time in the Word of God.

    The poem below is about a few of those examples. The New Testament tells us that the Scriptures can bring us solid comfort. Surely our God Who does not change is just as much at work in 2023 as He was in ancient times.         

    Before I sign off, I’d like to mention one way that every person reading this post can join God in His behind-the-scenes work around the world. Because next week begins Grace’s mission emphasis month, I wanted to mention my missions prayer blog, https://targetedglobalprayer.com/ . This blog features a daily city with three short prayer requests, and is designed to facilitate easy, focused prayer for Jesus to be known to the peoples of the world. It takes about one minute to pray for the three requests, and you can link that to when you are doing a daily routine like brushing your teeth or making your coffee. One minute isn’t a lot of time, but added to the one minutes of other TGP members, a lot of prayer is going up to the Lord of the harvest. Perhaps only eternity will reveal all the stories of lives changed by those prayers. If you are interested, here’s what to do:

1. Visit the above website to learn more, and select “Subscribe.”

2. Enter your email address.

3. Click on the “Confirm” button in the email you receive.

         

    Let’s trust our Father’s unseen hand, joining Him where we can, and leaving the rest to His infinite wisdom and goodness.

 

-MaryBeth Hall

 

 
 
         
 

A Second Look in the Rearview Mirror:

Seeing God’s Hand at Work Behind the Scenes

 

“It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter.” Prov. 25:2

 

Our God’s always working to accomplish His plans,

But often we don’t see His Providential hand

In the details and disappointments that come;

Yet the depths of His wisdom nothing can plumb.

Let’s pick up binoculars and look back in time

To three Old Testament stories recapped in rhyme,

And notice three details jump out to proclaim,

“Have faith in your God, though His plan you can’t name.”

 

Genesis describes Joseph’s years that were hard,

 Enslaved to Egypt’s captain of the guard.

Later falsely accused, he landed in jail,

But, wait…chapter forty has something to tell:

Potiphar’s house is the place of the prison!

From Potiphar himself came another commission.

Though he could have been sent far off or killed,

Joseph was kept right where God willed. 

 

View Numbers 2 from a perspective that’s aerial

To see tribal arrangement around the Tabernacle,

And you’ll see the first cross in Scripture recorded

Detailed in significance - by God Himself worded.

Study the sketch that pictures it all;

The Lamb came to rescue those trapped by the Fall.

No one but the I AM knew all that would be;

In this beautiful way He foretold Calvary.

 

Fast-forward to the year 473 BC;

Read of Haman’s decree in Esther 3.

The day it was published was Passover Eve;

Imagine how Jewish hearts did grieve

All the more as they remembered the past.

Would they again be rescued from tyranny’s blast?

But yet, that holiday was a God-sent reminder:

He will keep His promises, no matter the danger.

 

Oh, the depth of the riches of God’s knowledge and wisdom!

Nothing that troubles us is puzzling to Him.

Nothing that weakens us depletes aught of His strength,

And He is the One Who is our life’s length.

Often in hindsight He’s most clearly seen,

So by faith we will trust as we’re in the “between”

Of Scripture’s encouragement and Heaven’s sight,

When we’ll joy in His light - God Who makes all things right.

A Meditation at the End of Summer

Friends, it is the last week of summer. I know I am not alone in grieving this passage. While I recognize the appropriateness of a time of rest for growing things, and while I truly enjoy observing the changes and the beauty that fall brings, I just am so sad to say goodbye to another growing season. It is true I still have tomato plants putting on new fruit (I counted more than thirty today!), and the begonias and impatiens are vibrant and glowing; still, the little bit of autumn in the air is a warning that things are slowing down.

Perhaps I can take a lesson from my garden. As Ecclesiastes tells us, there is “a time to plant, and a time to pluck what is planted . . . a time to heal, a time to break down.” You will recall this passage in chapter three and remember that many contrasting ideas are listed. One message here is that, in this world, change is inevitable. We cannot expect life to stay the same forever. “He has made everything beautiful in its time.” 

Some days are good for getting lots of work done. I can clean closets and scrub the shower and re-shelve books. Other days are appropriate for visiting friends and enjoying recreation. In his wisdom, God built times of rest into our lives. The demands of modern life mean that not everyone can stop working on Sunday, but everyone should have a day of rest—and not feel guilty about it. In fact, if we don’t take time to rest and reflect upon God’s goodness, we are in defiance of his plan for us.

Likewise, some parts of life are full of busyness and productivity; other years are meant for a different kind of work. It’s clear from biology that young women are meant to bear children, but older women can—and should—offer help and encouragement to young mothers as well as to career women and even students. Paul’s instructions to Titus include admonitions for older women and men to set a good example of reverence to those coming after them. This is indeed worthy work, as are the more hands-on tasks of earlier years. 

So I work on embracing the coming cold and darkness outside just as I look at making time for rest and restoration for my body and spirit. I will enjoy every day of sunshine and each tender blossom while I can, but I will also harvest the basil and pull up spent tomato vines when the time comes, knowing that “there is a time for every purpose under heaven.”

 

--Sherry Poff

In Other Worlds

 

My cousin has an adopted daughter who is 16 years old. Baby Lilli was born with half her brain missing, due to her birth mother's drug use. Before the adoption, doctors said the baby was blind and deaf, would never know anything, do anything or even recognize family members. And she wouldn’t live a year. My cousin was absolutely convinced the Lord wanted her to adopt this child, and she was delighted with her baby.

You already know, from the beginning sentence, the doctors were wrong on their last prediction. They were wrong on every other one, too. Lilli hears well and can see, though poorly. She knows everyone in her life. After she learned to crawl, she scampered around the house with amazing speed. Due to bone deformity, walking is uncomfortable, so she uses a wheelchair. She has a special understanding of music and alphabet letters. She learned to spell words before she could say them. She made up names for her people. Mine, through a slightly jerky line of logic, which would never occur to anyone else, is “nine five six.” (I’m the only one who got a number for a name.) She can tease others and knows how to annoy her adults (like every kid). Favorite TV shows when she was little were “Jeopardy” and “The Price is Right.” She learned all the childhood poems and songs and all the old hymns. Lilli is severely limited, mentally and physically, but when viewed from the perspective of dire predictions, she has made amazing achievements.

Some acquaintances are put off by her limitations and differences and keep their distance. It takes effort and flexibility to get into Lilli’s world, and, like Dunkin Donuts, “it’s worth the trip.” When I have been able to lay down all expectations and accept whatever realities she presented, I have loved visiting Lilli’s world. She likes order, fun, music and peace. She enjoys whatever she is doing, is more skilled than I in her understanding of music and is always learning new things. I enjoy entering her life.

I can enter Lilli’s world by choice, but she cannot enter mine. Though our worlds seem different (to me but possibly not to her), Lilli and I live in the same world. But Jesus, Creator and Lord, came from a very different world. He chose to lay down expectations to which He had every right – worship and honor. He chose to enter and accept our reality, most of it inadequate and miserable, all of it less than he deserved. I can’t imagine that He loved visiting our world. But He loved us enough to do it.

The “world leap” that fascinates me is the reversal that’s coming, when we leave this world and enter the one that is now His. We will drop all our current expectations and be given the flexibility to engage in a world we cannot now imagine.  “What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived – the things God has prepared for those who love Him – these are the things God has revealed to us by His Spirit.” I Cor. 2:9, 10.

I do not think our usual expectation of heaven is at all accurate – a pretty place where we focus on and fellowship with our dear departed loved ones. I do not understand why we paint that picture at funerals. When my husband’s 17-year-old niece died, her mother said, with true joy and awe, “My baby is looking in the face of Jesus!!” Jesus! He’s the only reason we will be there! He will be our focus, our joy, our life!

“For we know that if our earthly house, this tent, is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.” 2 Cor. 5:1 “But someone will say, ‘How are the dead raised up? And with what body do they come?’ Foolish one, what you sow is not made alive unless it dies. And what you sow, you do not sow that body that shall be, but mere grain – perhaps wheat or some other grain. But God gives it a body as He pleases, and to each seed its own body…  So also is the resurrection of the dead. The body is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.”  I Cor 15:35-38; 42-45 “Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.” 1 Jn 3:2

When we exit this world, we will enter one that is totally unknown to us now, but totally suitable for us and for God. We will see Jesus! What’s more, we will be like Him!! Hallelujah!

--Lynda Shenefield

One God, One Body

I read a biography this summer entitled The Watchmaker’s Daughter which detailed the life of Corrie Ten Boom. You have probably heard of her: She lived in the Netherlands, hid Jews during World War 2, and was caught and taken first to prison where she was in solitary confinement for weeks on end and then moved to two different concentration camps.

After the war, she opened homes for those traumatized by the brutality they had witnessed, and she then began traveling and speaking about her experience and God’s sustaining love, grace, and presence even in horrific circumstances.

A book like that will always put one’s own situations in perspective. Wow... what an easy life I live. How small my trials seem next to hers and so many others who lived during those days. I recently came across 2 Peter 1:3-4a, and it amazed me to think that these verses applied just as much to Corrie Ten Boom in the 1940s as they apply to me in the 2020s. His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises.

God gave Corrie, through His divine power, everything that she needed for a godly life in that setting in which she lived. Those days for Corrie held great darkness, fear, loneliness, questions, suffering, and the death of her sister, but God carried her through it all. His power enabled her to smuggle a Bible into the concentration camp from which to hold devotions in her barracks. His power opened her mouth to speak truths from God’s Word to encourage women there who were crushed under the evil around them. God’s power allowed Corrie to forgive the very guards who had kept her imprisoned. God’s power kept her clinging to the precious and very great promises He had given in His Word.

What you and I have in common with every believer who has ever lived, be it Corrie Ten Boom or the apostle Peter himself, is that we worship the same God who gives to each of us all things that pertain to life and godliness in the time and place in which he sets us. That obviously looks very different across the decades and centuries, but it also looks very different from the people we sit next to at church. Our lives are each so unique, yet we are one body, called by God across centuries and locations to be His chosen people, as we heard this morning (1 Peter 2:9). We experienced that call as one people in a special way as we worshipped alongside our Hispanic brothers and sisters in Christ on Sunday morning. All of us in that auditorium and around the world who know Christ as our Savior can take courage. We hold in our minds and hearts such sweet promises that God our Father has given us. Through knowing Him, His glory and excellence, we have access to His divine power, enabling each of us to live in a way that shows forth His excellencies in our own unique situations, even in the most difficult times.

Be encouraged. You are not alone. God’s presence and power is with you, and His people, your family, are all around you. 

--Amy O’Rear