Less Spending, More Doing?

I’m going to do something I have never done here before and post a topic before having thought about it more than an hour.  In fact, I have only begun thinking about it 20 minutes ago.  So here goes.

I believe that memory and remembrance is important.  I don’t think we would have the capacity to remember if it wasn’t important in some fashion.  I spent about a year and a half, as I was wrestling with the whole God’s Sovereignty versus Free Will debate, discovering that God is not bound by the time He created.  Not unless He chooses to be.  Now, as someone outside our dimensions of time, how would God see Time?  I believe He would see it, not linearly as we do and not micro-focused like we do, but rather as the whole together.  He must see Time as one might see the numbers on a ruler and not as a tiny insect would see it when it’s skittering across it.  Wouldn’t memory, then, be a glimpse or a scapshot of what God would see. 

I say all that to remind you of a little phrase I keep saying:  “Redundancy rings bells in my head.”   That redundancy wouldn’t work that way if I didn’t remember the first, second, third and so on-th times I’d heard something.   That little phrase I use is just my way of saying that God often brings up the littlest details of something to either tell me something about his character or tell me something about mine.  Some of you may remember some of the redundancy, but that stuff is not what I’m trying to talk about.

What I am trying to talk about is the latest redundant over and over again and again episode.  Actually, it’s a marketing slogan.  A marketing slogan for Home Depot.  “Less spending, more doing;  that’s the power of the Home Depot.”  I don’t know how many times I’ve heard that slogan on TV at work , but its redundancy has rung a bell in my mind.  Sure, less spending is good….if you’re trying to purchase something, and more doing is good….if you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing.  Would if that slogan were used to describe your relationship with God.  Less spending time with Him and more doing things, anything other than getting to know your Creator.  They aren’t even bad things, sin, at all, just not spending. 

I’ve bought into the “Home Depot” mentality. The more doing.  I am awake three quarters of the time in a single day and I spend 8 at work, and 10 watching movies or playing games on my laptop or writing my book or biking to my parent’s house so I can borrow/steal a car to do something at church.  They’re all good things in themselves, but become meaningless if I don’t remember my Creator and listen to Him, read His word and search his scriptures.   Now, don’t get me wrong, I have been mindful of Him while I work, singing and praying as I feel led, but that’s not the same as searching the Word.  In that, I’ve been less than diligent. 

We talk about a tithe, giving a tenth of our money to God, really His money that He gave us to be stewards of.  Have you ever tried to tithe your time?  I tried once and failed.  I’m going to have a dork moment here and tell you that a tenth of a day is 2 hours and 24 minutes.  I believe I’m allowed to have 5 dork moments every day, so I should have two left.  Anyway, 2 hours and 24 minutes might seem like a long time but think of what God could show you in that amount of time.  As I’ve never done it before, I don’t know what it looks like, but I would guess that it’s something like what the apostles were doing on the day of Pentacost.  I think I’m going to try it though.

JA Menter 3

Haven’t most of the paradoxical theological questions arisen from forgetting the nature of God?

Anniversary

One year ago today, I started my blog.  It has been an incredible year.  It has become all I intended and I hope that my viewers enjoyed the days they read my thoughts and reflections, however few and far between they were.  Those of you that logged on almost everyday to my blog, thanks! Sorry I disappointed you an average of six days a week. (The dork side of me wins again:)) I hope to post a few things in the next week or so.  It is my lot in life to have a lot of things going through my mind.  They will make it to paper er blog post soon. 

Thanks for reading and enjoy the next 365 days with me!!

JA Menter 3

The Stand

In listening to the music I’d ripped onto my laptop this past week, I came across this song on the Hillsong United CD.  It’s called “The Stand” and I’ve listened to it a lot.

You stood before creation
Eternity within Your hand
You spoke the earth into motion
My soul now to stand

You stood before my failure
Carried the Cross for my shame
My sin weighed upon Your shoulders
My soul now to stand

So what can I say
What can I do
But offer this heart O God
Completely to You

So I'll walk upon salvation
Your Spirit alive in me
This life to declare Your promise
My soul now to stand

So what can I say
What can I do
But offer this heart O God
Completely to You

So I’ll stand
With arms high and heart abandoned
In awe of the One who gave it all

So I’ll stand
My soul Lord to You surrendered
All I am is Yours
(c) Hillsong United 2006
JA Menter

His Perfect Timing

Almost two months ago, I moved to my new house called Nob Hill.  In the process of packing up all my stuff, I unearthed a few of my old journals from my years in youth group, including my orbis.  It seems weird reading through them and seeing what junk I was dealing with then, knowing that it was almost ten years ago in some cases.  it just so happened that not many weeks after I moved, the seniors at Z-360 were given the reins to plan the Wednesday night.  Already thinking about what was happening with me back when I was their age, which was only a few years ago but felt like a really long time ago, I listened intently to what each senior had to tell their peers as their last formal words.  I remember mine fairly vividly and my notes for it are scrawled on the front of my orbis in permanent marker.  “No Compromise”  I talked about Christ being our foundation and compromise is letting that foundation crack.  I mentioned the foolish builders from Matt 7 who built his house on sand (a cracked foundation) and when the storms came the house was destroyed.  Apply what we know from Proverbs about wise vs foolish and I would have another blog post to put in the long line awaiting my attention, but this is not really what I want to do here. 

Other things that are in my orbis are notes from Pastor Grady just after he came back from sabbatical.  On Sept 7th, 2003 (which is an anniversary of a date that is imfamous for WW2 historians like me, but that’s just an off-hand dork moment), Grady talked about how Job was surprised by God with a sabbatical.  His timing being perfect like it is, as I read through this trying to decide what entries I would put into my “reminising old journals” post, I was concurrently reading through Job.  That is the connection to my previous post, 789, and to what follows here. 

One of Grady’s texts that sunday was Philippians 2:5-8.  In that passage, Paul tells of how Christ emptied Himself to the point of dying on the cross to be elevated to the Name above every name.  Another pair of verses to check out is Isaiah 28:12-13, which talks about “religion” or “Precept upon precept” hindering the rest God wants to refresh the weary with.  The next week, he used the Isaiah passage to point out that “Without rest, we cannot be emptied or filled with Jesus.” God created us with a need to rest, a true rest only found in Jesus per Matthew 11:28-30. 

So now, Job was surprised with a sabatical when he was emptied of all he had, including I believe his friends.  From that state of emptiness, he saw God and, though declared blamless by God, repented in dust and ashes.  His reward was that the Lord restored to him two-fold what he had before. 

Some interesting thoughts:  We talk a lot about God testing Job, but it was Satan that was givent eh go ahead to attack Job, his possessions and his body.  Perhaps instead, this was Satan testing Job and God proving His omniscience.

Nevertheless, the moral of this post is:

“Rest is a weapon!”

JA Menter

God’s provision of lineage is proved over and over in the bible, but some of the implicated lineages are fascinating.

789

I don’t really know why I’m writing this at a time when I’ll have more time this afternoon, but here it goes anyway.

“He has stripped me of my glory and taken the crown from my head.  He breaks me down on every side, and I am gone; my hope He has uprooted like a tree.  He has also kindled His wrath against me, and He counts me as one of His enemies.  His troops come together and build up their road against me.  They encamp all around my tent.  He has removed my brothers far from me, and my acquaintances are completely estranged from me.  My relatives have failed and my close friends have forgotten me.  Those who dwell in my house and my maidservants count me as a stranger.  I am an alien in their sight. … For I know that my Redeemer lives, and He shall stand at last on the earth.  And after my skin is destroyed, this I know, that in my flesh I shall see God whom I shall see for myself, and my eyes shall behold and not another.  How my heart yearns within me.”   Job 19:9-15;25-26

Perhaps I will be able to make sense of this after work.

Foolish Puppets

Here’s the complete lyrics for the song that I quote part of a lot.  It’s called Puppet Strings by Randy Stonehill.  It’s on his Welcome to Paradise cd.

“I can’t keep from mourning for this topsy- turvy world
With all its strife and pain
Mourning for the lost and the desperate children
Who can’t remember their names”

“And I can feel it in my soul
Now the end is getting near
I can hear the devil laughing
And its ringing in my ears”

“Long ago He chose us to inherit all His kingdom
And we were blessed with light
But wandering away we disobeyed Him in the garden
And stumbled into night”

“And I can feel it in my soul
Now the end is getting near
I can hear the angels weeping
And it’s ringing in my ears”

“We are all like foolish puppets
Who desiring to be kings
Now lie pitifully crippled
After cutting our own strings”

“But God said I’ll forgive you
I will face you Man to man
And win your love again
Oh how could there be possibly
A greater gift of love
Than dying for a friend”

“And I can feel it in my soul
Now the end is getting near
I can hear the devil laughing
And it’s ringing in my ears”

“We are all like foolish puppets
Who desiring to be kings
Now lie pitifully crippled
After cutting our own strings”

“Cutting our own strings
Cutting our own strings
Cutting our own strings”

© 1976 King Of Hearts Publishing