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I want to thank my good friend Neal Windham for generously sharing his time, wisdom and heart for this week's "finishing well" devotional readings. This week and a few upcoming "holiday or special day" weeks, we will take a break from the "red letter recall" series in Matthew, as we focus on harvest, the election (next weekend), Thanksgiving, Christmas, & New Year's weekend, respectively. Neal does (as only he can) a wonderful job focusing on the blend of current events, the ache within our hearts for the suffering around us as well as the harvest season that we celebrate as October ends. As a little bonus, I'm throwing in a song recorded in the 80s from the Christian community depicting the truth in Neal's selected Scripture passage, Psalm 126, which refers to "those who sow the seed of tears will surely reap in joy". And it ends with an echoing refrain of "the Lord has done great things, He's turned our tears to joy"! You'll hear a little nostalgic feel of Christian music back in the day which served as a transition from the old hymns and sacred music, to the worship music we have now 4 decades later. Thanks for being faithful and holding onto the word of God and reading reflecting with us. I also want to encourage as many to come to our Christmas event that you can get tickets for online at the GRAND in New Albany on December 10. We would love to have you with us that night celebrating the Christmas season with an evening called, "Make Room". Some great special friends will be join us sharing with us that night. May the Lord bless each of you as we try to help each other finish well! Take to heart Neal's encouragement this week. Love you guys, george Those Who Sow in Tears (Psalm 126) - song _____________ Harvest Dreams I drove over to Brown County yesterday to meet up with an old friend. It’s harvest time in Southern Indiana, and most of the fields are empty. But the trees, oh the trees! Red and sugar maples, yellowing poplars, elms and oaks - all of them bursting forth on a grand palette filled with brilliant color. God’s ornaments peeking through for a few all-too-brief weeks. It’s fall. Sunny days. Crisp, chilly nights. Frequent forty degree temperature swings within 24 hours. And we feel so alive, so filled with wonder! Fall is that time of year when the imagination yields to the unseen, when the visible and invisible collide, when we begin to notice what’s not right in front of us. Charlie Brown’s “Great Pumpkin,” Thanksgiving, and Christmas are all just around the corner. A time for imagination, a lot like the wonderful world little ones inhabit all the time. As a little girl my daughter Charis had an imaginary friend named “Rock ‘n Roll and Cindy.” And she played with him and/or her (I still don’t know) day after day. She also had a very real pet rabbit named “Sarah or Thomas” on account of her inability as a four-year-old to distinguish its gender. Charis is a generous soul. Doesn’t want to leave anyone out, including even imaginary friends and pet rabbits of indeterminate gender. Come to think of it, I don’t even recall what gender that rabbit was. Psalm 126, our text this week, is filled with wonder and imagination. It begins with the words, “It seemed like a dream, too good to be true” (in Eugene Peterson’s The Message), just what happens when the visible (exile in Babylon) and invisible (forthcoming Jerusalem homecoming) finally collide. A bit surreal, a moment when experience doesn’t seem to fit reality, and we are caught between the two. Like that letter Miriam sent me in the fall of ‘76 saying she’d like to give it another try, and I was like, “Wow, Okay!” We were married the following summer. Surreal. The text continues: “We laughed, we sang, we couldn’t believe our good fortune,” the sort of stuff that happens during hay rides and harvest festivals and homecomings. And we’re like, “Wow, Okay!” So it just seems appropriate that this week, as October gives way to November, we camp out in the woods with the Psalmist, sitting around the fire, roasting hotdogs, and dreaming the dreams of God. Monday: Dreaming What seems too good to be true? With an embittered electorate, wars of enormous consequence (and no clear outcomes), crippling domestic problems affecting all of us, and a lack of trust everywhere you turn, it’s just really hard to dream. So how is it that these Israelites, who’d been through tortuous decades of pain at the hands of their mocking captors, were led to laugh and hope and dream again? Just this: God delivered them. Night became day. They’d been freed. They’d come home. And all of it because God could be trusted with His promises. This is why the apostle Paul dared to dream the dreams of God: “God can do anything, you know - far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams!” (Ephesians 3:20, The Message). God can and does heal the addict. God can and does bring that meandering prodigal home. God can and does repair “unrepairable” marriages. So it becomes important for us to earn a Ph.D. in Trust. In fact, I doubt it’s possible to really experience God’s Presence in an intimate way without trust, to have access to the heart and mind of God if we don’t fully trust Him, not possible anymore than having access to the hearts and minds of our spouses and children and closest friends when we refuse to trust them. Of course, people are fallible, and trust sometimes breaks down, but here’s the difference: God’s got us. Always has. Ours is a secure relationship anchored in come-what-may reliance upon the One who, more than any other, has earned our trust again and again. So this is why we dare to dream the dreams of God! What are your dreams? Name them. Write them down. Pray them. And never, ever give up on God.
TUESDAY: Fortunes Restored
The Hebrew verb shuv means “to restore” in Psalm 126. It’s used twice here (verses 1 and 4), and in connection with its object (“captivity”) means the same thing in each, “to bring the captives home.” But there is a crucial difference in these two verses. In the first, the captives have already come home, but in the second they haven’t. Sounds confusing, but this is probably what’s going on here. After decades in a foreign land, Jewish POWs were finally freed to go back to Israel and rebuild their homes, temple, walls, and lives. Yet the “home” they’d returned to was not the same. Its glorious treasures were gone, its people dispersed, and its buildings in ruins. So, while they were “home,” they weren’t really home. Things were not at all the same. In the wake of Hurricane Helene, Pinehurst, North Carolina resident Alexandra Koch, upon seeing a house float by, asked her husband Joshua, “Is that someone’s house?” And he responded, “That’s the back or our house” … “Such a surreal moment,” she said. “I had to go sit down. I couldn’t watch anymore - just unbelievable to witness.” Maybe that’s a bit of what some of these ancient Jews were feeling upon their return to Israel. Have you ever been “home” but not home? Kids grow up. Then they leave. Careers crash. Downsizing. Upsizing. Folks have to move a thousand miles away because of their jobs. Home looks very different. Fortunes are lost. Fortunes are made. And lost again. Just where is home? What is home? Is it a building or buildings? A place or places? Or is it a network of relationships built over time, the most important of which is our relationship with the God who ultimately restores all our lost fortunes? WEDNESDAY: Movement This is one frenzied text! There are folks sowing seeds with tears who are later reaping harvests with joy. I have long wondered just what it means to “sow with tears.” Sowing is such a profound act of hope, expectation, and faith. However, farmers do not always sow in the best of circumstances and, for that matter, sowing can be really messy, as our Lord taught us in the Parable of the Sower (Matthew 13). It seems those who sowed their seeds in tears did so in Babylon, among pagans, but they later reaped a harvest with joy in Jerusalem, among believing friends and family. As such, this is a text that takes the long view, reminding us that God is Lord of both the difficult past and the glorious future, Lord of both the cross and of the resurrection. And that’s it, isn’t it? The resurrection, grounded in Jesus’ own rising from the dead, keeps our eyes fixed squarely upon the horizon of His coming and of our meeting Him in glory. We just have to hold tight to what God has already done in anticipation of what is yet to come. How do you hold tight? What do you anticipate?
THURSDAY: Seed Wonder
Do you recall gently placing seeds in a cup filled with dirt, maybe bean seeds, maybe petunias, watering them, and waiting for the miracle to happen back when you were a kid? Boy, I do. I couldn’t wait to see the first signs of growth. And, while my seed venues have shifted over time, this ritual has never grown stale as I’ve gotten older. Something about the fusion of light and soil, of seed and water. I never get tired of it. Ancient pagan peoples in the lands surrounding Palestine (Ugarit and Egypt) associated seedtime with the death of their fertility gods and, conversely, associated harvest with renewal among these gods. But Israel’s God, Yahweh, competes with no other, is not subject to death, and does not change. Yet we do change. Sitting on the porch of his family farm, a dear friend and I were reflecting on life changes in our mid- to late-sixties a few years back. Fresh off a heart procedure, he spoke of feelings of “diminishment” and even “helplessness” that sunny October afternoon. I listened to him carefully, attempted empathy, and, after some time, called attention to where we were - the family farm - and when we were there - October. I asked lots of questions about the harvest, about the combines and storage and, well, just about everything I could think of related to the many harvests he’d participated in on this farm. Then I asked about his own life’s harvest. As a longtime and very successful counselor and spiritual director, he’d influenced hundreds of people, returning them to mental and spiritual vitality. His harvest is a really significant, one-on-one, life-changing tribute to the faithfulness of a man whose life was long ago given over to God in service to others. Some harvest! I think we both left that scene feeling less “diminished” and “helpless.” In fact, we went over to the barn to fetch fresh farm eggs in order to keep on keeping on. I have no idea how many millions of seeds have been planted and plants harvested on that good farm. But nowadays I sometimes stop to consider my own life’s harvest, to give thanks for being allowed to participate in God’s harvest. How about you? FRIDAY: Great Things The New International Version translates Psalm 126:2b-3, “Then it was said among the nations, ‘The LORD has done great things for them.’ The LORD has done great things for us, and we are filled with joy.” Notice the impact of the saving actions of Israel’s God upon the nations here. These nations recognized Yahweh had done great things for His people. Great things! Wouldn’t it be something if the current war in the Middle East ended peacefully, with no more bloodshed? If there were a permanent solution for both Israelis and Palestinians? Our hearts ache over the loss of life - every life - destruction of families, ruined homes and businesses, places of worship, hospitals, and schools. Not to mention the many Jewish and Palestinian believers whose lives seem forever ruined by this tragedy. As you read this devotion today, please put yet another psalm, another prayer, to work: “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem” (Psalm 122:6). All of modern Jerusalem - Christian, Jewish, and Muslim. And please pray for the hostages. (I invite you to spend some time getting acquainted with some of these people and their stories.) And not just for Jerusalem and Israel and the hostages, but for all Gaza and the West Bank, for Lebanon and Iran. For many needed changes of heart and, above all, many conversions to Christ! Because God is still doing great things today. Wouldn’t it be something if the nations could notice this as they did so long ago?
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