Whispers of Truth

THE REALITY IS that life is hard in third-world countries in a way that most Americans cannot understand unless they have walked it out a bit.  Just in the eight days I had my feet on the ITM Honduras ministry location, they experienced problems that, for the most part, here would not be major issues. They struggled with their water filtration system (and life without water or with poorly filtered and treated water is not pretty for those who depend upon it); their septic system has to be pumped out frequently onto the ground at the back of the compound because even with proper installation, it doesn’t get absorbed into the ground quickly enough; transportation by one vehicle was out of commission for several days (until mechanics could be convinced to come and diagnosis the problem and be taken to a nearby town to have a part fabricated from other bits and pieces of available parts and then get installed by said mechanics after a trip to a town relatively nearby; and BTW, the coo...

The gate is opened a few minutes before 11:00 a.m. in preparation for their arrival, and they come. What starts as a trickle soon becomes a flood of small eager feet racing to eat lunch in the new food kitchen at In the Midst Honduras. Maybe they are running away from a morning spent across the dirt road at school just as much as they are running to anything, but running they are.   These tiny, bright-eyed school-aged children wear the required public school uniform of neat white shirts and navy skirts/pants; others wear the alternative bright blue polo shirts with their names embroidered on the front. Shiny, still almost-new, black dress shoes (66 pairs provided by donations and the ITM ministry) now coated in dust hide under the tables. As a mother and a grandmother, I cringe a bit on the inside at the white shirts and wonder at the state of cleanliness of these young ones after a morning spent at school for these little ones, but maybe that just speaks volumes to my lack of a...

As I read through Exodus once again, I see the stark contrast of Moses’ faith and close relationship to God set against the distant fear and lack of relationship of the people he was shepherding with the One true God of Israel. Chapter 19 finds Moses and the people three months into the wilderness at the foot of Mt. Sinai on a very dark night (Why have I never really noticed the new moon in the first verse of this chapter?). Moses has ears to hear God speaking to him, but the people do not hear the voice that called to Moses out of the mountain when they first arrived. They have seen the things God has done for them and through Moses upon their exit from Egypt and in the wilderness, but they have no relationship with God nor has God yet allowed them to hear His voice clearly or draw near and understand.  In verse 9, God tells Moses what He is about to do—allow the people to hear when Him speak to Moses—and then tells Moses why He is doing so—that they may believe him forever. Mo...

Rest is a lack of motion In the body this looks like a stopping, a ceasing from any kind of physical action; in the mind this looks like an absence of mental exertion or gymnastics.  No disruption. No agitation.  Ironically, reading this post about rest will temporarily cause you to suspend resting either your mind or your body—limited as the physical motion of scrolling upward with your index finger may be and the focusing of your eyes on the text and their moving left to right and downward to follow it—because reading this post requires movement, limited in physical and mental exertion as it may be.  Take a minute and really think about the last time you truly rested intentionally that was not just a collapsing of your body in sleep due to exhaustion. Sobering, isn't it? No noise. No distractions. No exertion. Nothing.  More than likely, you haven’t experienced too awful much of that in this busy, loud world in which we pass through on our way to another bett...

Comparison kills. I have been thinking about this a lot this past week, and it all started with pecans. This year, I took a different approach to picking them up, and over a period of about six weeks, each time I walked Ella Jay (my dog), I filled my pockets with pecans I thought looked good and then dumped them into containers by the back door. Each time the wind had a big blow, more pecans fell until last week, I finally asked my husband to go get them cracked and blown because I felt we had passed the time to have any good ones remaining on the ground. When I returned from a short trip to visit my parents, I walked in and saw the bag he left for me, I thought we had a pretty good harvest for a not-so-good year for pecans. And then I started picking out the pecans. Many were obviously shriveled and blackened, rather shockingly so; others were rather dry; some were less than wonderful; several partially blemished, but many were good. However, you would never have known what the she...

The struggle with being corrected is real because it is a struggle with pride. Being wrong, well, it just feels wrong. My flesh usually rises up first and balks at any attempt to correct me — be it offered in love or otherwise.  Then the reality hits me; I usually need correcting. By this point, I have usually compounded any problem that inspired the attempt at course correction to begin with, but at some point the cycle must be broken, and I have to change the way I feel about correction, discipline, if I am His child. The first five chapters of Revelation make this need for the ability to accept correction crystal clear just in case I missed it in the preceding 65 books. And lest I question the authority of the author, who by the way was not John but Jesus, here is His affirmation found in the message to Laodicea when it lay in need of repentance: “These are the words of the Amen, the trusted and faithful and true witness, the Beginning and Origin of God’s creation” (Rev. 3:14b...

Hebrews prods us to encourage others in Christ who are struggling. Today. As I read through the book again today, Hebrews 3:13 stands out, as it always does but with a better understanding that doing so also helps to protect me from being hardened (or settling into rebellion, as the AMP version offers) by sin’s deceitfulness. There is the reciprocity of the giving of encouragement as well as the receiving of it from others. I am not to always and only give encouragement (maybe that would mean I have been deceived by sin and hardened to the point of being proud or arrogant); I am not to always and only take it (maybe that would mean I have been deceived by sin and hardened to others’ need for encouragement, selfishly thinking I need it more). So how do I do this, practically?  Hebrews 4:14 offers the encouragement to HOLD FAST to my confession, to cling tenaciously to my faith in God’s unique ability to save in Jesus Christ. Hebrews 3:14 tells me to HOLD FIRM to my “newborn con...

Recently my husband showed me a short video that looked to be from the ‘80s and featured a very mature band singing a startling rendition of a very secular-sounding rock song. The adaptation, if I remember correctly, spoke of the “hotness” of God’s holy Word. It was interesting, to say the least, but if I had to guess, it was an early attempt by the demonization to interest young people in the music of the church. I have to say if I had been a youth in that church, I would’ve been hard pressed not to just laugh out loud at the absurdity of the performance that also featured back-up singers dressed like Jackie O and swaying in the background. In all seriousness, much of what churches do today to appeal to people, to just fill their pews, might one day be just as laughably absurd as that video was to me, but it really isn’t a laughing matter, this pull to make the church just like the world. Today as I was rereading 1 Timothy, the thing that jumped out at me is Paul’s mentioning of spir...