One person

P 3076 Road building.

/ DVH

“And how blessed all those in whom You live, whose lives become roads You travel; They wind through lonesome valleys, come upon brooks, discover cool springs and pools brimming with rain! God-traveled, these roads curve up the mountain, and at the last turn—Zion! God in full view!” Psalms 84:5-7 MSG. 

“One day spent in Your house, this beautiful place of worship, beats thousands spent on Greek island beaches. I’d rather scrub floors in the house of my God than be honoured as a guest in the palace of sin. All sunshine and sovereign is God, generous in gifts and glory. He doesn’t scrimp with His traveling companions. It’s smooth sailing all the way with God-of-the-Angel-Armies.” Psalms 84:10-12 MSG.

I’m a word person. I love the Word of God, but today I’m also talking about the way words are put together. For me, words paint pictures in my mind. They take ordinary things and endow them with the Holy Spirit’s thoughts and beauty. We’ve travelled along a lot of roads – bumpy ones, dusty ones, gliding highways and roads with beautiful scenery, as we take bibles all over Australia. So I feel like a little bit of an expert on roads.

In the first part of Psalm 84:5-7, the words take me into our car,  winding our way through beautiful scenery, watching for what will appear when we get around the next bend. I dearly love to go on roads I’ve never been on before. Occasionally as we’ve travelled along, we’ve taken a side road – just to see what was at the other end! The picture at the bottom of this blog show you what we found at the end of quite an ordinary road. It was surrounded by cane fields. (Lucinda,Qld.) 

However, the bit in this Psalm that captured my heart is the very first verse. “And how blessed all those in whom You live, whose lives become roads You travel.”I would love to be a road the Lord travels upon to reach out to others. The kind of road that takes people from living in the same old same old, into the bright fresh land of daily discovering Jesus. I pray that other people can see Him in me, and enjoy the view, and maybe they will want to know Him for themselves. We can often think about witnessing as speaking etc. but enjoying Who God is, in the middle of this crazy upside-down, often scary life, can be the greatest witness and worship of all!

This Psalmist values God’s Presence more than the supposedly fine things this world can offer us. I’ve sat on a Greek Island, and their beaches are very pretty.  The sea around those islands, is the most beautiful colour. But the writer tells us that they would rather be scrubbing God’s floor, than be in any place of this world’s natural beauty. Anywhere our God IS, is a far more beautiful place than this world can offer.

I love to sing and worship, but I also love to sit and listen to worship as well. Listening to worship lifts my heart and thoughts above this often cranky old world. We all need that refreshing, so we can keep God’s highway in our heart OPEN. Worship makes us bigger inside, and more open to whatever He wants to do next, and it also positions our hearts to hear Him. The thing is, I don’t just think of worship as singing, or playing an instrument. I see it as a life-laid down, together with the way we love others. Surrender, is worship to me. 

Jesus travelled along a lot of dusty roads as He ministered, and distances never seemed to matter to Him. He sometimes went off the beaten track for just one person. He saw broken roads all around Him. His whole life was a highway into the Father’s heart, for mankind to travel on. Now that’s worth pausing and thinking about! 

In another version it says the first verse like this:“Blessed (happy, fortunate, to be envied) is the man whose strength is in You, in whose heart are the highways to Zion.”It is our strength and belief in God’s goodness, when we are under the pressure of highway creation, that makes our road solid and straight. This highway is not just a theory, it can make our lives with Christ accessible – but like any highway, the road to Zion comes at a cost. This cost exists, because quite beautiful, even seemingly useful things – that do not seem to be harmful – have to be removed from our lives if we are to become His highway.

There are times that I can see the precious Holy Spirit with His front-end loader, bulldozers, excavators, and graders, asphalt makers and road rollers continually rumbling along through my life, under the Lord’s watchful eye! All that equipment working on us is represented in our lives as situations, or other people. We all have difficult people who become implements in His hands —they are used by Him to make our road straight and strong and available to God and others. Road making is intense! It requires co-operation with the Lord, and a vision for a better, more available, ME.

We all want the King of Kings to travel down our highways so that other people can come out of the roadblocks and broken highways they are living in. Road building is a worthy calling. Bye. 👋

P 2990 The great wall of blankets … as seen from space!

/ DVH

“If we are out of our mind [just unstable fanatics as some critics say], it is for God; if we are in our right mind, it is for your benefit. For the love of Christ controls and compels us, because we have concluded this, that One died for all, therefore all died; and He died for all, so that all those who live would no longer live for themselves, but for Him who died and was raised for their sake. 

But all these things are from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ [making us acceptable to Him] and gave us the ministry of reconciliation [so that by our example we might bring others to Him], that is, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting people’s sins against them [but canceling them]. And He has committed to us the message of reconciliation [that is, restoration to favour with God].” 2 Corinthians 5:13-15,18-19 AMP.

Well you could easily think that hubby and I have lost the plot…until you read 2 Corinthians 5. Then, hopefully, maybe not! It seems the Apostle Paul also suffered from the same idiosyncrasies as we do, only his case was wa-ay worse than ours! He went on the road and stayed on it, permanently. He preached in jail as well. Gee I hope we never have to check that jail one out!! And what Paul is saying in Corinthians above in a nutshell is this – if I’m nuts, then I’m nuts for God, and if I’m sane then it is for your benefit.

He knew what was important, and he did more than ask people to church next Sunday – as if!!  Or hand out flyers and pass-it-on cards, he totally left comfort behind and travelled all over the Mediterranean preaching and starting churches. He was not just saying “I have A message” — he is saying “I have THE message.”  The message of the ages…  and … you in your small corner and I in mine ... we two are off on the road again! 

If I told you everything that is in our way you would think we have totally lost the plot! The thing is, we probably have. But Jesus is our Redeemer and He can take our spirit of stupid and do something amazing with it. All we need to do is be obedient. We are going because we too know we have been given the message of the ages and we want to give it away to everyone we meet. Our wonderful God is incredible, He turns up even when we have nothing to give. Actually, I should say – especially when we have nothing to give! He truly loves poverty- stricken people. Sometimes I wonder why we try so hard to look like we are coping, when God promises to be our strength. Moving on… 🙄

The above picture is just some of what we need to fit in our wonderfully elastic car. We have heaps of medical aids for me as well – not to mention some little things … like food and clothes! Every single time we go, hubby throws his hands in the air and says: “It is just not going to all fit in the car, I can’t fit it in.” This whole thing is becoming like a well-known play – the stuff always goes in. And afterwards we say things like:“I dunno how it went in, but it did. Just don’t sneeze OK?” Meanwhile the relief we feel when we off-load blankets, food, and bibles along the way is huge. Suddenly there is oodles more room… 

We once took our only slightly crazy dog on a trip with us … just once mind you … once was enough! Her presence added a degree of difficulty we were not equipped to handle. We are never doing that again. Instead we are giving her a holiday somewhere else safe. Anyway, hubby went around a particularly steep corner and a packet of chips and the lid of a container fell on her head.  She sat there for ages until we noticed she had a new hat, and then we figured out how far back that corner was! What a patient creature she is… I know I could definitely use some of her doggie patience.

As you already know hubby and I are big fans of love in action. Love in action facilitated me hearing the gospel. I was 27 years old. Years ago a dear older lady at a previous church used to come to my front door and give me the local parish newsletter every week. She didn’t have a car, and she walked all the way from her house to mine. I imagine I was one of many people she kept up with. 

I was highly suspicious of her kindness, and barely spoke to her when she appeared at my door, because I had 3 little kids who needed my attention. However, that lady just kept on coming … and when a crisis in my life occurred she was the person I phoned. I gave my life to Jesus on that day, all because she just kept on coming, week after week after week. We don’t always know what key will unlock someone else’s heart. But God’s love through her did not give up on me. She too was constrained by the love of God.

It is good to understand that loving God and others, starts with our obedience to what He has told us to do.“Therefore I urge you, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies [dedicating all of yourselves, set apart] as a living sacrifice, holy and well-pleasing to God, which is your rational (logical, intelligent) act of worship.” Romans 12:1. 

I have absolutely no idea what God could possibly want with my busted elderly body, not to mention dear hubby’s bad back! My theory is this – let’s all just live our lives presenting whatever we have to Him, following Him. Visiting our neighbours, or people in hospital or old people’s homes, shut-in mothers, plus genuinely caring for those people who work alongside us. We may never reach multitudes, but anybody can talk to one person! Let’s live this life, stuffing our cars full of blankets. ‘Cos love looks like something. Bye. 👋