The Short Straw on Black Friday

My friend Joanne posted a link to this article on Facebook and I was shocked. Evidently there is just enough naievety to think that people are basically good and that we do care about our fellow human beings. Stupid girl.
I just hate living in a world like this. I am the person who lets that car out in traffic, lets the person with only a few things ahead of me in a shopping line, holds the door, gives up the seat. I have had other people model some of these polite, sacrificial behaviors and been the benefactor of much courteous treatment in my life, but I have also been pushed and shoved, although nothing quite like this.
I have never been out for the "Black Friday" madness short of going to the fabric store with my neighbor last year. It was pretty mundane - the doors were open when we got there. Although it was crowded and people were struggling to share the space with one another, there wasn't anything terrible to report. I do not understand this frenzy to save a few bucks. I do not understand how that can take precedent over the fact that other living and breathing human beings may be getting injured in the frey.
I worked at Walmart on Black Friday - but not until evening. It was pretty calm. All the die-hard shoppers who slept in their cars overnight, in some places for several nights were long gone by the time I got there. But when I read this article I remembered a conversation I overheard in the breakroom where several people were discussing who would unlock the doors on Black Friday. I wonder if Mr. Jdimytai Damour, the man who was trampled drew the short straw in his store. What a horrible mar on what is supposed to be the season of giving.

If I Should Die Before I Wake

Before you think me melodramatic, let me say that I have been thinking about death.
Not.my.own.
It is for something I am writing.
It made me wonder.....so I thought I would ask you -

If you found out today that you would die for sure in six months, and money were no option, what would be the three most important things for you to do with that time? Where would you go? Who would you see? What places would you visit?

Three things - will you share your thoughts with me for my project??

Sad Anniversary

One year ago today my father-in-law passed away. I was wondering about that this morning - if these year markers in heaven are like a birthday. It has been a difficult year for my mother-in-law. She told me yesterday that she was thinking that for a whole year she hadn't been able to talk to him. I feel sad for her. We are headed to meet up with her and my sister-in-law and to put flowers on his grave. In heaven I wonder if he cares about such things as flowers, or if he truly understands the temporary state of all that this earth has to offer. We will do it anyway to honor his memory and to stand beside my mother-in-law, because of love.

For Billy

He had huge blue eyes and shaggy dark hair that grew very fast. I know this because the mohawk that he had at the end of 8th grade was gone by the beginning of our 9th grade year. He was my first boyfriend. He liked Motley Crue and squirrel hunting. He had spent most of the 14 years of his life before he walked into mine surviving an abusive father and a permissive mother. Although his parents were divorced, they were very connected until the day his father put a shotgun to his stomach and pulled the trigger. Billy was always sad after that. You would have thought he had been liberated, set free from the evil dictator, but it had quite the opposite effect. The last conversation I had with his dad as we sat alone in the car while Billy and his mom went into the store still haunts me - he asked me to take care of his son. With the pure heart, full of love and romantic notions of being with my 14 year old man-boy forever, I said that I would. I didn't. Billy got very involved with drugs. Instead of overcoming the abuser that had shaped his young life, he became him. Our lives went different ways. I saw him years later and confirmed that we had indeed gone in opposite directions - he was still a 14 year old boy in every way, and I was growing, changing, moving on. When I was 23, married and pregnant with my second child, sitting on the back porch of my cousin's house she announced, "Did you know that Billy Breeden died?" casually handing me a glass of lemonade, as if we were discussing the weather. I completely lost it. I stood straight up and screamed. It wasn't that I still loved him - but I had given an irretrievable piece of my heart to him, never to be recovered. I wish that I had known about Jesus, I know He could have saved Billy from himself. It makes me sad even today to think of how young he died, but more to think that he never really lived. Today was one of those days that he passed through my thoughts. Young love never reached the depths that I know love with my husband, but it forever changed me. I am not that girl whose heart once belonged to Billy, who wore his football jersey and carried books covered with his name, but marked by knowing him all the same. And a word of caution to young ladies who may be reading this - don't give your heart away until you are very very sure that you are giving it forever, cause you can never get all of it back.

Prayer Request - Our Pastor's Family

When we started visiting the church we are currently attending on the last day of 2006, the pastor shared with us that his mother had just been diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. He is a self-professed “mama’s boy” and you could tell it to be true by how he spoke of her. Sometime this weekend – there was some confusion at church this morning about whether it was Friday or Saturday – his mother went to meet Jesus. Please pray for this hurting family.

I would like you to especially pray for this precious man that they call “Brother Randal”. He’s a big old guy with the dearest heart, and he loves the Lord so much. But as I have recently read A Grief Observed, I have come to know that even those whose faith is strong can be shaken while grieving. Pray for his strength.

This morning, the substitute pastor preached out of Habakkuk – chapter 3, verses 17-19 – which say this:

Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will be joyful in God my Savior. The Sovereign LORD is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer, he enables me to go on the heights.

We can rejoice in the Lord in spite of our circumstances. And yet saying this to someone who is grieving seems as if you have no understanding of their pain. Through the grief, it is the enemy’s battle plan to take us out. Please pray for this man of God that he would be able to stand, even through this greatest hurt of his life.

While this was on my heart today, I read this wonderful post about death at a blog I read frequently – and it says it all. Death has been swallowed up in victory! I Cor. 15:54

Lord, please comfort the hearts of Brother Randal and his family with this blessed assurance.

Death is After You - But There IS a Refuge

Deuteronomy 19:1-5
When the Lord your God has destroyed the nations whose land he is giving you, and when you have driven them out and settled in their towns, and houses, then set aside for yourselves three cities centrally located in the land the Lord your God is giving you to possess. Build roads to them, and divide them into three parts the land the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, so that anyone who kills a man may flee there. This is the rule concerning the man who kills another and flees there to save his life - one who kill shis neighbor unintentionally, without malice aforethought. For instance, a man may go into the forest with his neighbor to cut wood, and as he swings his ax to fell a tree, the head may floy off and hit his neighbor and kill him. That man may flee to one of these cities and save his life.

Accidents happen. Death is after you, but there is a refuge. Down life's road you never know what's over the hill or around the bend. There are times when it seems like difficulty and trials come one right after another. A family in our church is experiencing a time like that - coming home from vacation to find their house flooded, a sewage problem at their business - which happens to be a childcare center - and someone hits the fence, and this week their son's fiance fell 8 stories out of a balcony while trying to help friends move. (Please pray if you're reading this - YES, this means you - because this young woman has many broken bones, much organ damage, swelling on her brain, etc.)

You never know when tragedy or disaster will hit. Hurricane Katrina has been the worst natural disaster in our nation in our lifetime. Why would God allow this? If God is a God of love, why did He allow this? Why did He allow our home to be destroyed? The answer is not easy - we live in a fallen world.

Romans 8:19-22
The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not only by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberarted from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.

Al Mohler (president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) was quoted as saying : "...the CNN meterologist can explain the hurricane only in terms of barometric pressure and water temperatures. We know however that at its root this natural disaster isn't natural at all. It is creation crying out, 'Adam where are you?'"
(This makes me think of that song with the chorus: "Adam, Adam where are you? Adam, Adam, I love you." I had chills when Porky sang that one!)

"Living in this world is like living in a shipwreck. We find many treasures here, but clearly things are not as they should be." - G.K. Chesterton
(I had to check out his bio - especially since Kendra will be reading Father Brown stories this year! I share it here: Gilbert Keith Chesterton (May 29, 1874 – June 14, 1936) was an English writer of the early 20th century. Chesterton was known as the "prince of paradox" because he communicated his conservative, often countercultural, ideas in an off-hand, whimsical prose studded with startling formulations. For example: "Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it." Most of Chesterton's works remain in print, including collections of his Father Brown detective stories, and Ignatius Press is presently undertaking the monumental task of republishing his complete works.)

Jesus said things would only get worse. Matthew 24:6-8 You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of birth pains.

For all of us - death is at our heels.
In the story of the merchant of Baghdad, the merchant sends his servant to the marketplace, where the servant sees "death". Completely freaked out, he returns to his master, tells him the story and asks for the use of a horse so he can flee to Samaria. The master consents, and heads to the marketplace - where he also sees "death" and asks why he tormented his servant. To which "death" replies that she did not torment him, but was rather surprised to see him there in Baghdad, considering she had an appointment with him that evening in SAMARIA!

The statistic is still accurate - 10 out of 10 people still die. We all have an appointment with death.

God told Adam and Eve not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil - because on the day they eat of it they would surely die. We live in this horrible dicodomy of being made in the image of God, but being stamped with the sin of Adam.

Porky's uncle is visiting, and while on his flight, he sat next to a nurse who had gone to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina. While there she was raped by one of the people she had gone to help. The mar of sin is stamped on all of humanity.

Eventually death will chase us down, but there is a city of refuge.
Jesus Christ is our refuge - our strong tower, our fortress, our shelter, our rock, our hiding place. He's our refuge from our sin nature, our bad circumstances, to give us rest, for times of temptation, in times of trouble, in confusion, in weakeness, when we are overwhelmed, and when we feel hopelss.