Monthly Archives: October 2024

Candle Making

candles

I recently visited a living history farmstead that showed what life was like in Colonial days in America. One of the common household chores at the time was dipping candles. It was a laborious task that required dipping a cotton wick into a kettle of melted wax and hot water approximately 25 times to make one candle. Why go through all this work? Because candles were an absolute necessity at the time and the primary way to light a home at night.

Today we take light at night in our homes for granted, but imagine if you had worked all day making candles so you could have light at night. You would appreciate the flickering light of a candle in the darkness much more. You would be more careful with your candle use and make sure you got the most out of your time by candlelight.

God has created us to be lights in this dark world. So what should we be doing as the lights God has made? The Bible gives us some hints: We shouldn’t put our lights “under a basket” or out of sight in any way, but “on a stand,” where the light can extend to the farthest corners of the room (Matthew 5:15). Our lights should be used to help others: illuminating the words of Scripture to someone who has not read the Bible before, for instance, or guiding someone to a decision, and brightening the life of a person who is sad or lonely.

So savor your light. Use it wisely. Consider the work of the Creator. Then shine!

Look Out!

mushrooms

There have been these clusters of orange mushrooms growing at the bases of trees in and around my yard in the past month, and a wise biologist I know identified them as Jack-o’-Lantern mushrooms that form on wood near the bottoms of trees in the Midwest in the summer and fall. While these mushrooms are pretty to look at, they are actually poisonous.

I am reminded of the fruit growing on the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden. The Bible says that Eve considered the fruit “good for food” and “a delight to the eyes” (Genesis 3:6). So “she took of its fruit and ate” (Genesis 3:6). The eating of the fruit proved to be deadly to her and to Adam, who also ate, because it introduced sin into the world, and “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). Like the mushrooms by my tree, the fruit was pretty but poisonous, and we wish we could have been there in the Garden of Eden to say to Eve, “Look out! Don’t eat that!”

We might consider ourselves “oaks of righteousness,“ but things that are pretty but poisonous to our souls are still trying to entice us into turning away from God. As St. Peter tells us, “Be watchful.” (1 Peter 5:8). In other words, “Look out!” Don’t let anything come between you and God.

Groanings

praying hard

The Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. Romans 8:26

Sometimes all we can muster up from within us when we pray is a sigh, a breath, a groan. But the Bible tells us that the Holy Spirit can take these sounds and make them into groanings to God that capture everything we mean to say to God the Father through them. You see, we never need to have just the right word or phrase. We don’t need to recite familiar prayers from our childhood verbatim. We should never be afraid to just come to God and moan a little over everything that is happening to us and around us. Our every utterance to God, intelligible to the world around us or not, is a prayer. And it is those deep and longing noises from within us that often say the most to God about what is going on in our lives and where we really need some critical help.

I am reminded a little in all of this of Jacob wrestling with God in the Old Testament (See Genesis 32:24.). Our moans and groans are a kind of wrestling with God over issues that are not easily resolved or very clear cut. But God does not mind wrestling with us; in fact, he wants us to be real and honest with him about how we are feeling. So let out your sorrow, your pain, your anger, your frustration in prayer. Don’t hold back. God can take it. The Spirit will express it to him fully. We will be heard and understood by God, even if it feels like no one else is getting the reason or reasons for our wrangling.

No matter how intense it gets, when we walk away from prayer, we will have the assurance from God that he is with us always and he is in the struggle with us. Christ’s moans and groans from the cross on our behalf prove that to us.

Back to the Source

Jesus baptism

I remember when I did term papers in college that it was always helpful for me to go back to the source material (magazine article or newspaper clipping) to find out where a certain idea came from. (It was the ’90s.)

We do the same thing today when we “Google” something on the internet to discover how a particular movement or school of thought came about.

Late in his ministry, when people were seeking to arrest him, Jesus returned to “where it all began.” We read:

He went away again across the Jordan to the place where John had been baptizing at first, and there he remained (John 10:40).

We get the sense that Jesus went there to get some clarity, to keep these starting moments in his heart as his mother Mary had done at his birth, and to remember the words his Father spoke at his baptism, his rebirth: “This is my Beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17). Maybe he put some water over his head once again and was refreshed in his reason for being: to save us from sin. Maybe he was re-energized by seeing that place again and “living in it” for a bit.

It’s good for us to go back to our baptism now and then in our mind’s eye and sit with that thought for a while. Through water and the Word, we were made a child of God and we were washed clean to live a new life to Christ through the Holy Spirit. That moment can never be taken away from us, and that moment compels us to move forward in our own mission to follow through with what our Father had in mind for us from the very beginning of our journey with him.

A Row of Geese

row of geese

I was stopped in traffic on my way to work by a row of geese that was walking slowly yet deliberately across a major thoroughfare to a pool of water that had collected in a ditch on the other side of the street after a heavy rain. At first I was annoyed by the inconvenience to my commute, but then I became fascinated by the fact that each of the geese in the gaggle directly followed the one before it, and they would not be deterred until they reached their desired destination.

The instinct of a goose is to follow. Our instinct as disciples of Christ should be to follow, as well—follow the disciples before us, and follow the leading of Jesus. I think of the first disciples who dropped everything they were doing when Jesus said to each of them, “Follow me.” They followed right behind the Lord and went where he went, spreading the message of the Gospel. My prayer is that we recapture that same willingness and determination to follow Jesus faithfully and invite others to follow behind us to our final destination—life together in heaven with him through his death and resurrection.

Mason Jars

mason jar

If you have been to any sort of antique mall recently, you will see a large collection of mason jars. These rounded glass containers with metal lids were used in the past to store and preserve fruits, vegetables, jams and jellies, which are also quite appropriately referred to as preserves.

Now that we have freezers and refrigerators to store and preserve food, we no longer need mason jars for their original purpose. But they are popular now for decorative reasons to add a rustic feel to a room. And I have often seen them filled with marbles, buttons and coins. I have become a collector of mason jars, I admit, and have several lined up on the window sills in my kitchen.

I got to thinking about these jars when I ran across this beloved verse of scripture:

But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us (2 Corinthians 4:7).

If this verse was written today, it might have said “mason jars” instead of “clay jars” since glass can be just as fragile. So we are like mason jars in many ways—holding, preserving and storing the treasure of God’s revelation of himself in Jesus Christ, as the verse just prior to the one above tells us:

For it is the God who said, “Light will shine out of darkness,” who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ (2 Corinthians 4:6).

The earthen vessels of our bodies house the presence of Christ within us, and we should not hide that fact, but should let Christ shine through our fragile flesh in whatever room we find ourselves. You might never look at mason jars the same way.