FOR THE BEAUTY OF THE EARTH

Spider Rock in Canyon de Chelly AZ

by Stephen L Dunn

Reading: Ecclesiastes 12:1

"We live in an ugly world," someone said to me the other.  They were thinking of the moral decay that has come to define our western world. They were also reflecting on the abrasive, divisive, unbending nature of much of human discourse, particularly political conversation.

Indeed, humanity has made a mess of Planet Earth. Our sin has made turned human relationship and history into a continuing descent into  depravity.

It would be easy for me to grow pessimistic, depressed, angry.  All that would accomplish would be to make me a poor vessel for the love of God.  A voice screaming doom and defeat in the wilderness.  A person who pulls into a defensive huddle where my salt and light no longer preserved or brought light to a very troubled place.

In the midst of that. my eyes are often draw unto the hills - to the places where the wonder and beauty of creation reminds me of the providential and powerful hand of the Creator.

In 1901 an American pastor, Maltbie Babcock. penned these words that bear witness to this fact.

This is my Father’s world, and to my listening ears
All nature sings, and round me rings the music of the spheres.
This is my Father’s world: I rest me in the thought
Of rocks and trees, of skies and seas;
His hand the wonders wrought.
This is my Father’s world, the birds their carols raise,
The morning light, the lily white, declare their Maker’s praise.
This is my Father’s world: He shines in all that’s fair;
In the rustling grass I hear Him pass;
He speaks to me everywhere.
This is my Father’s world. O let me ne’er forget
That though the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the ruler yet.
This is my Father’s world: the battle is not done:
Jesus Who died shall be satisfied,
And earth and Heav’n be one.
This is my Father’s world, dreaming, I see His face.
I ope my eyes, and in glad surprise cry, “The Lord is in this place.”
This is my Father’s world, from the shining courts above,
The Beloved One, His Only Son,
Came—a pledge of deathless love.
This is my Father’s world, should my heart be ever sad?
The lord is King—let the heavens ring. God reigns—let the earth be glad.
This is my Father’s world. Now closer to Heaven bound,
For dear to God is the earth Christ trod.
No place but is holy ground.
This is my Father’s world. I walk a desert lone.
In a bush ablaze to my wondering gaze God makes His glory known.
This is my Father’s world, a wanderer I may roam
Whate’er my lot, it matters not,
My heart is still at home.

Ausulkan Glacier, Canadian Rockies

Long ago Solomon wrote: "Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come and the years draw near when you will say, "I have no delight in them"; - Ecclesiastes 12:1.  Good counsel in troubled days. When you feel the world closing in on you, step put into Creation and see the hand of the Lord who is always at work.

(C) 2011 by Stephen L Dunn

CHOOSE YOUR ATTITUDE

This posting is a guest devotional from a good friend, Dale Miller. I am using it with his permission. Thanks, Dale, now I can get back to finishing the sermon for Sunday-Steve.


"Fulfill my joy by being like-minded . . . Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus."  Philippians 2:2, 5

        A little boy strutting through the backyard, baseball cap in place, toting ball and bat, was overheard talking to himself, "I'm the greatest hitter in the world."  Then he tossed the ball into the air, swung at it and missed.  "Strike one!"  Undaunted he picked up the ball, threw it into the air and said to himself, "I'm the greatest baseball hitter ever," and swung at the ball again.  Again he missed.  "Strike two!"  He paused a moment to examine his bat and ball carefully.  Then a third time he threw the ball into the air.  "I'm the greatest hitter who ever lived," he said.  He swung the bat hard a third time.  He cried out, "Wow!  Strike three!  What a pitcher!  I'm the greatest pitcher in the world!"

        I like the kid's attitude.  I'll bet he'll go far, no matter what he chooses to do in life.  His spirit reminds me of something I read about Thomas Edison.  In December 1914, the great Edison Laboratories in West Orange, New Jersey, were almost destroyed by fire.  In one night, Edison lost two million dollars' worth of equipment and the record of much of his life's work.  Edison's son, Charles, ran frantically around trying to find his father.  Finally he found him, standing near the fire, his face red in the glow, his white hair blown by the winter winds.  "My heart ached for him," Charles Edison said.  "He was no longer young, and everything was being destroyed.  He spotted me. 'Where's your mother?'  he shouted.  'Find her.  Bring her here.  She'll never see anything like this again as long as she lives.'"
        The next morning, walking among the charred embers of so many of his hopes and dreams, the sixty-seven-year-old Edison said, "There's great value in disaster.  All our mistakes are burned up.  Thank God we can start anew."

         With an attitude like that, no wonder Edison's name is still prominent eighty years later.  The point Paul was making in Philippians 2 is that our attitudes are important, perhaps more important than our actions, because they're the foundation on which our actions are built.
 
        As he wrote to his friends at Philippi, the apostle Paul was in prison in Rome.  Paul saw everything that happened to him through the lens of his service to Christ.  Outwardly he was a prison of Caesar, but inwardly he considered himself a bond-slave to Jesus Christ.  Paul's attitude was one of humble service to the Savior who rescued him from a life of selfishness and self-centeredness.  It's no wonder Paul had an attitude of love toward everyone he met, even toward the Roman soldiers who guarded him day and night.

        Viktor E. Frankl, a prisoner held in a Nazi concentration camp wrote, "Everything can be taken from a person but one thing: the last of human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."
        And there are always choices to make.  Every day, every hour, offers you to opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determines whether you will or will not submit to the powers that threaten to rob you of your joy.  So my friend, today I challenge you to choose a joyful attitude, to choose an attitude of love, even when others align themselves against you.  Choose your attitude!

Determined to find joy in serving Jesus!
Pastor Dale


Pastor Dale Miller, Jr. is privileged to serve as the Senior Pastor of the Newburg First Church of God
"Where Christ is found, love is felt, and lives are changed!"
260 Newburg Road, Newburg, PA  17240

Mailing address: PO Box 160, Newburg, 17240
Email Address: Newburgfcog@centurylink.net

TOM AND THE MENSA SUNDAY SCHOOL CLASS

This post originally appeared in another blog of mine called EASTER PEOPLE.

I once had a church with a very small senior high Sunday School Class. Small, but extraordinary.  They came from two high schools, and the valedictorian of each school was in the class. One other was in the top five of their class. The other two in the top 5%.  All were headed to college, basically on merit scholarships.  One of them was under appointment to the US Naval Academy.

Their teacher was a single mom who was an R.N.  A cancer survivor, she had been abandoned by her husband following her recovery for a trophy wife.  She first worked as a pediatric ICU nurse and when that got to be too much, switched to geriatrics.  A passionate and caring Christian, she was a superb life mentor but by her own admission, outmatched intellectually by her “Mensa Sunday School Class.”

Jan was the teacher’s name.  She believed firmly that Christianity was not about knowledge but application.  Love was not a concept. It was a lifestyle. So she urged her students to adopt a grandfather.

The grandfather was a man named Tom in a nursing home that our church provided ministry.  He had been married but they had no children.  He had outlived his wife and any family he had had.  Tom was very much alone in the world.  And he was quiet, sometimes crochety, not an easy man to like.

The kids were undeterred and regularly visited him after school, or sometimes during the Sunday School hour.  They brought him out of his shell.  He didn’t become a motor mouth, but he did begin to talk a little.  They learned he liked chocolate milk shakes.  So when they would visit, they would bring him a shake.  The cool offering warmed him up.

Tom contracted an illness and after a while was hospitalized.  The hospital was not as convenient as the nursing home, but the kids continue to visit him–sometimes one-on-one, often armed with a milk shake.  As he grew sicker, he grew quieter. Yet Jan and her Mensa Sunday School Class moved beyond the awkwardness to walk through that valley with Tom.

Tom died.  And the nursing home contacted me to do the funeral.  “He has no family,” they said, “but he deserves a decent burial.  His only religious contact is with these kids and you’re their pastor.  Will you do his funeral?”

I agreed.

The funeral was actually held in the chapel of the mausoleum where his remains would be laid to rest.  A cold room, decorated in somber colors, illuminated almost too subtly other than to suggest death.  A couch was placed before Tom’s closed casket, and as his family, the kids crowded with Jan on this oversized piece of upholstered furniture.

As I entered the room, I saw the kids squeezed awkwardly onto that couch. Uncertain about what was happening or what they thought. At the back of the room was someone from the nursing home, standing next to the undertaker.  A sad scene, inviting sadness.

But then God spoke to me, and this is what He prompted me to say.  “Kids, you all know Tom had no family.  No one in this world to love or to be loved by.  And if you kids had not entered into his life there would only be three of us in this room right now–myself, the undertaker, and the lady from the nursing home.  And we are paid to be here.

“But because you entered his life, you became his family.  You are the people who brought love and happiness to his last days.  You are the people that he still mattered to God and that someone cared whether he lived or died.

“Your love and attention for a lonely old man was the best gift he ever received, because you put God’s love into action.

“So on his behalf and in the name of God, thank you. Thank you for being God’s people and Tom’s family.”

As I reflect, I simply ask – is there someone lost and forgotten, abandoned or uncared for, who needs to encounter the love of God with flesh on?  Are you that person?

(C) 2011 by Stephen L Dunn

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