An old watch maker was summoned to the home of a dear friend. The friend’s son was very sick and the friend wanted company. In the early evening, the doctor came out and told them that the boy’s fever was severe. If the fever broke before midnight, then the boy would probably live. If not…

After the watch maker had been asked the time on multiple occasions, he gave his pocket watch to his friend. Every few minutes, the friend would check the watch and then snap it shut angrily. Few words were spoken. As the dread hour approached, the checking got more frequent, the snapping more angry.

Shortly before midnight, the doctor came out of the boy’s room. He was tired. He wiped his glasses and then he smiled. The fever had broken. The friends hugged. The watch was given as a celebratory gift. The watch maker went home.

Days later, the friend came by to see the watch maker. The watch never seemed to keep the right time. The watch maker adjusted the springs slightly and sent it back. Three times it came back and three times the watch maker looked at it, but could find nothing wrong.

The fourth time the watch came back, the watch maker knew that the problem was not with the watch. He set the watch to the time they found out that the son would live and then fixed it their permanently. He attached a note for his friend.

“My dear friend, I have checked this watched many times and am convinced the problem lies not with the watch, but with your perception of the watch. Every time you checked it that night, you ascribed to the watch the power to save your son. That power never lay with the watch. The watch was only telling you the time, but you asked the question so much, you began to feel the watch was refusing your request. Now every time you look at it, you remember one of those times when you did not get the answer you wanted. I want my gift to you to be a good one, so I have now fixed your watch so that every time you look at it, you will remember God’s answered prayer. From now on, every time you look at it, it will be the right time for God to intervene.”

For most of my life, God has taught me through short quick illustrations that I could apply to my life in meaningful ways. Jesus uses these images to teach, although His are always better and richer and deeper and layered and…well you get the picture.

The parables that God gives me personally almost always come at times when I’m not expecting them and right after something that the lesson illustrates. So here are four that I have been given recently. Remember that these are illustrations were given to me, so they’ll seem dumbed down to the general population. I’m hoping that when you see the simplicity of the lessons, you’ll start to realize He’s been teaching you as well.

Number One. Bee-ing in the yard.

When I was a child, I was very afraid of bees. If they were near me, I was afraid, if they were on me, I lost my mind. Being a tall, skinny child, this was quite the display. As I got older, and got into gardening, I learned a lot about bees and came to respect their place in the world. I also learned that when they were out by themselves gathering nectar for their honey production, they cared very little about me and would rather get out of my way than kill themselves stinging me for no gain to themselves or the hive. So I walk with authority through my garden and ignore them and they ignore me. But, should a hive spring up on my property, well, then they get a little touchy. The deeper into their territory I get, the more likely I am to get stung….repeatedly. Now setting aside the symbiotic nature of the relationship between man and bee, this illustrates for me the relationship between us and the forces of evil. As long as I stick to my places of authority, evil may make incursion, but knowing it has no real power there, it will be reluctant to do something that will show how powerless it is. But if I wander into its place of authority, deliberately seeking out sinful behavior, then I will get stung…repeatedly. And with malice aforethought.

Number Two. Well this joke writes itself, really.

I have a very large dog that eats very large amounts of food. He is beautiful and awesome and the biggest pain in the butt and my best friend. He and I are the perfect size for each other and God uses him to teach me about myself every day. When you have a large dog that eats large amounts of food, there will be an eventual large end result. While people may appreciate your large dog, they will not appreciate those large end results being left in their yard. So you must be diligent. Super freaking 4 AM with a flashlight and a pooper scooper diligent. Because, the piles your dog leaves will not be mistaken for the piles the Shih Tzu next door leaves. So you are diligent, but every once in a while, you forget. That is what will be noticed. Not the thousand times you cleaned up your dog’s poop and the poop from dog’s that weren’t yours just because you were there and had a scooper. The irony being, the more diligent you are about this task, the more likely that someone will notice when you miss. So it is with sin in your life. The better you do at eliminating sin in your life, the more obvious the ones you haven’t gotten scooped up yet will be. This is actually a complement to your spiritual life in that you’re moving in such a fashion that individual sins stand out rather than an overall atmosphere of sinfulness. But that won’t make it any more fun for you. Just continue in your diligence. You aren’t really doing it for the ones that may point it out. You’re doing it for the one who loved you anyway.

Number Three. In to me see.

There are plenty of things I do with my big old dog to keep him healthy and happy. I love him. What I often forget is that what he most desperately desires is time alone with me, doing a thing or doing no thing at all. We have a pen in back which he has outgrown in terms of genuine exercise. He can cross its longest parts in fifteen bounding strides. Yet he loves to be out there with me. Just the two of us. Because in this time, he shares my attention with no one. So here is, a kind of place of prayer for him. Where intimacy with his “dad” can be achieved, understanding beyond words can be obtained and life can be enjoyed one on one. We should all have this place with The Father. We should all have somewhere we go knowing that He is all we have to focus on, and trusting that He will meet us there. I have seen churches try to produce this in their worship time with music too loud and rooms too dark. This is trying to produce intimate space in a place of corporate understanding. Like teenagers trying to make out at the movies, these times produce more fumbling than intimacy. The time Gods seeks with us must be us alone with Him. Where He is all there is. Find that place and see if the world does not change there.

Number Four. Tomorokoshi.

A while back, I noticed an unusual plant growing in a container that did not have good drainage and I had not been able to keep anything growing in. I was told it was a weed, but as I could not grow anything in the container, I was a little keen to know what kind of plant could grow in it. It was not hurting anything, so I left it. The plant was pretty and it grew and I enjoyed it, but one day it flowered and I was in love. I don’t know why I loved the flowers so much. It may have been because they were so tiny, or their orchid like appearance, or the way they terminated the stalks they grew from so that the plant itself seemed to be showing its purpose in the daily chorus of the little blue and yellow flowers. Either way, it has become one of my favorite items in my garden and it greets me each day with a fresh batch of blessing. It is called Japanese Corn Flower and I love it. It’s important that we understand the things in our life, but sometimes that understanding can only come with time. What some people may think is a weed, may turn out to be a source of nourishment for you. It is true that when you recognize that something is destructive in your life then you need to pluck that thing out. But it is also true that our Father gives good gifts to His children and you may want to spend some time letting something unwrap itself so that you may understand the goodness you’ve been given.

Japanese Corn Flower

One day, while I was walking Tank… okay, one of the many times per day that I walk Tank, we decided to see how far down a certain street went.  We were used to finding roads that ended in other roads.  We have even found the occasional dead end and gone down to see what was so terrible that they just stopped making street.  We had never encountered a dead end like this.

The Boundary at the end of The Road.

This street terminated in a wall with bars and a gate.  It used to go through into another neighborhood but something happened.  You see, I live in a neighborhood that has gone through a lot of transition.  It had been THE neighborhood at one point many years ago.  It was so good and affluent that other neighborhoods built on to it because they wanted to be like it.  As with all big ups, my neighborhood experienced a down. People built cheap housing and property values dropped, so did the quality of the inhabitants.  Things got so bad, they let me live there.

A neighborhood to the north of ours which had been very happy to be attached to us at first, started to feel some reluctance at the association.  Cars were coming out of our neighborhood at high speeds, at all hours, stereos blaring vulgarities at ungodly volumes, often with law enforcement in pursuit.  Actually it was not much of a surprise that people didn’t want that spilling over onto the streets where they lived.  So, at the end of this street, they built a wall.

This was no ordinary wall, though.  They made it pretty.  They also put in a gate with a combination lock – the purpose being to not totally exclude communication between the two neighborhoods.  Anyone who had business going from one community to the other could gain access by means of the gate.  It was a way to close off the bad, but still allow the good.  It was a boundary.

Mastery of boundaries is the secret to most successful lives.  They are the only way to protect things worth protecting while still allowing us access to the rest of the world.  The Temple in Jerusalem had VERY clear boundaries, because there were VERY big consequences for violating those boundaries.

Should we, as Christians have boundaries? Yes.

…oh, more, sorry.

Remember that Boundaries are designed to keep certain things from influencing us while occasionally allowing us to influence them.  As Christians, we are called to influence the world, but not allow it to influence us.  As parents, you are called to influence your children and to keep them from being influenced by harmful things.  As a spouse, I’m called to have a positive influence on my marriage, while diligently defending the boundaries so as to refuse admittance to anything destructive.

So how should we use boundaries?    God always uses boundaries to protect one or both parties.  In the Garden of Eden, God had only one boundary and it was around the one thing that would destroy the relationship between God and man.  When that boundary was crossed, a ton of others went up.  You ever wonder about the whole “don’t eat pork” dietary thing for the Jews?  A lot of the laws concerning diet would have seemed crazy to other people of the day.  They tended to forbid the easiest practices and put restrictions on how much could be harvested and then they had rules about giving the best of your harvest to God.  The “no pork” thing is a prime example of this. Pigs are actually a lot easier to raise than most of the clean animals.  All of the communities around Israel would raise them, eat them and run them through the streets which meant that those communities would be entirely unclean for a Jew to live in.  In other words, part of the reason for those restrictions was so the Jews would have to stay among their own people and have faith that God would provide for them since it looked like He had taken away a lot of the easiest practices of the day.

Think about the Temple.  The different courts surrounding the Temple were there  for so many reasons.  They kept people from entering places they were not allowed and thus from incurring wrath.  For instance, the court of the Gentiles kept the gentiles from getting mixed in with the assembly.  This would make the assembly unclean and could get the gentile judged by God for the infiltration, or be subjected to judgment meant only for Jews, because the gentile was not where he was supposed to be.

The courts kept the Temple services from becoming disorganized by limiting the areas people could move into.

The courts also protected people.  One of the many reasons there was a Court of the Women was because even in those days, men’s hands were untrustworthy things.  Remember that in a lot of the surrounding cultures, female participation at their temples could be limited to prostitution or birthing children for sacrifice.

We need to use boundaries in these same ways.  We need to protect the vulnerable areas of our lives.  We need to take care to keep things that need to be separated from being thrown together (sacred from common, intimate from public, this isn’t a klan meeting).  We also need to remember that when we have to put someone outside a boundary, that we also make a way for them to come back and clear guidelines for how that would happen.  The example God gives us is that when we were placed out of the point of intimacy with Him, there was only one way back but it would be through a sacrifice that none of us were worthy to give.  So He also provided that sacrifice in the form of His son and made Him the narrow gate by which we could return to the Father.  At the death of Jesus, the boundary that most closely surrounded the presence of God – a curtain as thick as a phone book – was ripped from the top to the bottom.  This boundary protected our sinful selves from entering into the presence of a righteous God and being destroyed in the transaction.  God wants no boundaries between us and was apparently as ready for this boundary to go as we were.
That’s pretty good to know.  Also a great example to follow.

Terrors into Teddy Bears

by Keith D Troop

10/25/11

I have done bad things. I have had bad things done to me. These things are some of the most horrific wounds that I will experience, though I’m sure that the future may yet over match. I’ve worn these wounds as scars that have affected my behaviors and perceptions across the course of my life. They have shaped my image of God and my image of self. Some of these wonderful gifts revisit me at the most inopportune moments causing me bowel wrenching, mind freezing terrors from which I may need days to recover.

Some things that I have seen keep me from seeking sleep and others have made me wish for the eternal sleep that my earthly mind may not be troubled with them anymore. In truth, there have been many times when the contemplation of remembering what has gone before has been enough to put either a gun or a bottle in my mouth. Fortunately, the bottle usually kept me too uncoordinated to work the gun.

The more that I guarded and protected these things, the more they festered in me. They began a process of moral and spiritual corruption in me that I became powerless to halt. Had not God intervened, I would have died from the activity of prior events, some of which were decades in my past.

I was wounded and scared and scarred and battered. My terrified self had lost ability to function under the weight of my own wounds and fears. They were mine and the more they became mine the more I became mine and the more I became mine the less I allowed God to have me. That spiral continued until I became deceived into thinking that I was entirely my own and in that place even my blessings became curses. Let alone those things that all men would see as curses in my life, those things became intolerable.

Praise be to God that one day He reminded me that I was not my own, that I had been bought with a price. Praise be to God that if I am not my own then neither are my blessings. Praise be to God that if my blessings are not my own, then neither are my curses. Praise be to God that if my curses are God’s then they are His to do with and to use both in my life and in the life of others.

So it was one day as I sat in place full of wounded souls, amidst the cries of pain and anguish I heard a wound that was familiar to me. I knew the same woundedness that this person felt. I knew the depth of the pain that they experienced. I had experienced it also, with all the rawness and hideous agony. But what to do with that in my own life? I still didn’t know the answer to that. So I moved close to the hurting person and shortly we began to speak.

After listening to them, I thought that maybe I should share with them my pain. How to do that was a mystery to me though. My pain was still so very painful. Should my wounds have been physical then I’m sure that I would have been the very epitome of gore. An x-rated image in what I perceived to be a g-rated world. To even speak of such a horror would feel like unleashing a fiend in a kindergarten. Like introducing Freddy Kruger among the Care Bears.

Still, to hear their wounds was to hear their isolation. To know their pain was to know their separation. If I could understand their feelings from their words, then perhaps I could ease their solitude with mine. If they felt a pain similar to mine then they most probably felt the horror of that pain just as I did.

Perhaps, just maybe, if I advanced some of my own horror, then their horror would seem less horrific. It was worth a try. So I dug into the dark recesses of my soul, where I kept the unspeakably hidden things of my life. There I grabbed a small handful of the offal that made up my experiences and slowly advanced it towards this other. It was there that the magic occurred. It was there that something beyond myself came forth.

As I reached forward this handful of gore and pain, it transformed on the way to this other person. It became something else in that moment of transfer. The rotten, disease-ridden, pieces of me that left my hand became shiny beautiful treasures as they were taken up by this other. Where horror landed, flowers sprung and bloomed and the emptiness within me flowed forth a well spring of comfort for this other. My tears became their smiles. My fears became their strengths. My sins showed forth their righteousness. My dead places became places of life for this other.

A bridge of horrific things was used to break the solitude for us both. By reaching forward with this terror from my soul, I became a hand this person could see. I became a light for them in the dark place. They reached back with the woundedness they had and together we comforted each other. By sharing our pains, God transformed them as they spent a moment in the heart of the other and then were returned to us. Now my terror had become a teddy-bear, not just for this other, but for me as well.

I am not my own, I have been bought with a price. I am God’s glorious inheritance.  I am both His treasure and at the same time, a storehouse for His blessings. My error was in thinking that all the blessings He stored within me, would look like blessings while still in their wrapper. It was only when I unwrapped them, that I was able to see them as He sees them and understand them as He intended. It was my error to think that all the blessings He stored in me were there merely for me and my betterment.

Pardon Me Sir, May I Borrow Your Tank?

Why Christians should start learning to use their weapons instead of the enemy’s

Keith D Troop

7/15/15

Fear is the only weapon left to the powerless.  Those types of attacks that gain no strategic ground and that are said to show the ‘resolve’ of our foe and that are focused against those that had no reason to think they would be attacked, are designed to fill us with fear. That’s why we call it ‘terrorism’ and those who do these things ‘terrorists.’ If those persons acting in this manner had any real power, they would simply exercise it against those targets that vexed them, rather than spending all their time and resources trying to make their targets afraid.

As a child, I spent much of my life afraid (if we’re being brutally honest I can get there pretty quick still to this day). One day, I noticed that I had outstripped many of my peers in the area of physical growth (I got big, though still painfully thin, a malady time has corrected). More importantly, my peers also noticed and I stopped being bullied. A few well-timed events made me aware of some form of shift in our relationship and I soon found myself as the bully. In my defense, I did not know that was what I was doing until a friend pointed it out. Having always operated from a place of fear, I did not realize that my actions were now causing fear in others. More importantly, these actions did not make me any less afraid, they just changed the things I was afraid of.

Satan’s only weapon against us is fear.  He uses his fear-based control of the lost to send fear-inducing messages against us.  When we hear those messages, he adds additional messages of fear to make us extra afraid.  Those still lost in the darkness are well versed in the language of fear. It is the only language they know well.

Recently, several things have happened to cause fear in the hearts of Christians. If you are a Christian in America, you’ve probably heard about them (especially on Facebook and Twitter). The most distressing thing in this is that I have seen Christians responding to being afraid by trying to make people afraid. If they are in the darkness, they are already afraid. It’s like threatening a sick person by telling them you are going to make them sick. That is not the weapon of people living in the light. It is the weapon of people living in darkness. Those who speak the language of darkness, the language of fear are far more talented in its communication than those who have been ransomed into the light. We are borrowing the weapon of the powerless to express the immeasurable power of an infinite God. We are asking Satan, the most defeated thing in the history of defeated things, if we can poke around in his armory for something to stop his plans with. He is most accommodating here as he knows we’ll never beat him like that and more importantly, he loves seeing God’s children act like Satan’s slaves.

History tells us again and again that you do not allow the enemy to dictate the place where or the manner or the strategy with which you engage him. Yet we are constantly trying to react in kind to those who are misguidedly being used against us.

God does not give us a spirit of fear (a proclivity to be afraid at the things we hear), but of power and love and of a sound mind.  A sound mind can hear a fear inducing message and discern that it comes from one who is powerless and therefore is nothing to be feared.  Because the Christian is powerful and not powerless, he has the POWER to choose to love.  A powerless person cannot choose to do anything.  All his decisions are made by the motivation of fear.  A powerful person can decide whether to respond with fear or love.  Only a powerful person has the option to love.  That’s what our faith is all about.  God empowering us to choose to love Him.  A power that starts by Him first loving us.  Power breeds power.  Fear breeds fear.  Love breeds love.  And perfect love drives out fear. When we respond to the weapon of our enemy (fear) by trying to send fear back, we are adding to his strength and denying our own.  Everything that has happened recently is designed to make us afraid.  Unfortunately we responded with fear and continue to react fearfully.  Our politics, our social media, our interactions with the world should be free from fear, empowered with love and directed by sound minds.  If that is not how we are reacting to these things we see, then we should be silent.  This sums up our best reaction to the current political climate.  If we are not sure what that looks like, then without fear, we should talk with each other and ask how to best express God’s love through His truth in whatever situation is causing an unsound mind.  Then we pray and prepare and when the time is right, we act.

Storms