Update

Alisone has posted an update on her grandfather and the news is a bit brighter. She thanks those who have stopped by and offered prayer.

I have to work tomorrow so this will be brief and I'll be back as soon as I get a minute! Busy, busy week! I am getting a new computer in a week or so. It is ordered, just waiting on Dell to build and deliver. More on that too. Working on Mist, believe it or not. I just have been so busy with work and in the evenings I've kind of just loafed.

So, I will have a lot to cover when I catch a break. Take care. I do race by blogs and read up so, you'll see my smoke here and there!

Time, A Place to Pray

I have a special room that is all my own. The walls are lined with books and a lovely, thick, dark blue carpet covers the floor. A comfortable chair sits in a corner of this room. Next to it stands a small table with a lamp by which I can read. A window seat is piled with pillows on which I can relax and read. My computer is here so I can write. For times I feel like creating something to wear, my sewing machine is stored in a cabinet. There is a lock on the door to this room for the times I want to shut myself away.

It is a lovely room but not real. The reality is that I have no place like that in my home or anywhere else. When my children were small I had a spare bedroom all to myself where I wrote, sewed and had private time to read or pray. Now, they are teenagers needing their space. When I work there are phones and people. At home there are phones and people. Sometimes I want to run away just to be alone.

Our hectic lives often make it difficult to keep up with all the demands, especially women in the ‘90’s. More often than not we will have a full-time job, in addition to one or two children. If you are a Christian working mother, there are even more demands on your time. Non-Christian women may have time for a hobby or some form of entertainment, but Christian women have church services during the week. In addition to attending a ladies or prayer meetings, she must also find time to have daily prayer. And let’s not forget the cooking and cleaning. It is no wonder some women come to church looking like they just participated in a marathon, were mugged or never went to bed the night before. As for cranky, well I dare any man to try it for a week and still smile.

I’ve been many kinds of mom, stay-at-home, army, working and homeschooling. For five years I was a college mom. I was a full-time student with two children at home in 1992-1994. My husband’s job took him away from home for weeks at a time. Most of the time I was tired. No friends or family lived nearby to help with the kids or help out if my car broke down or if I became sick. And instead of offering to help with my load, my Christian “friends” criticized me for missing one service a week.

My day was long. I got up, got the kids off to school and was at school myself by 8 or 9 a.m. Upon my return the kids were usually already there. I helped with homework and cooked supper. Then I cleaned the kitchen, did laundry, got the kids bathed and helped with unfinished homework. I might have had time to relax but usually the boys were in bed by 9 o’clock so I could do my homework. I went to bed around one or two a. m. At 6:30 I began again. Saturday I cleaned the whole house and did laundry.

Donna became my best non-christian friend in college. One morning, during a break, we were discussing our harried lifestyles. As we discussed all the demands on our time she made a profound statement. She said, “We need wives.” We often joked about how much was required of us and how our husbands came in and got their favorite chair, asked for supper, and took a nap. It wasn’t really funny but it helped us deal with the frustrations. After college we both went to work. When we compared notes we found we were still doing the day job and the housework while hubby napped.

So when did I pray during the five years it took me to finish school? There were days when I was at home alone for several hours. I did a lot of studying then. I used some of that time for prayer. “Free” time remained a rare thing.

Every morning I drove 15 miles to school alone and in the afternoon I returned home. In semesters when I had a night class once or twice a week I made up to four round trips a day. On those frequent trips, I noticed people talking on their car phones, singing with the radio or just riding. I seldom listen to the radio in the car and I don't have a car phone. So I began to talk to the Lord. I told him of my worries all the way to school. At times, I drove to school thanking God for all He had done for me. I cried on my way home because I loved Him so much. Often I would arrive home unable to remember the trip.

I repeatedly apologized to the Lord for praying in such a manner. Many times a voice would whisper: this isn’t really praying; you look so silly talking to yourself; what will people think; and God doesn’t listen to this kind of praying. But I kept praying. I had to! I needed to talk to Him.

It reached the point that every time I got in my car I began automatically to talk to God. I didn’t realize how far it had gone until the day one of the boys and I had to go somewhere. As soon as I got in the car I began talking quietly to myself and he said, “Mom, who are you talking to?” I just stopped and stared at him. I was so startled I didn’t know what to say. I had instinctively begun praying the moment I started the car! That was the day I learned one of the many truths about God.

The scripture in Thessalonians which says to pray without ceasing has always puzzled me. I have pondered the idea of constant prayer often, but I didn’t see how anyone could do it. I discovered I was wrong. We can become so used to praying that it becomes instinctive, even in strange and unusual places. We can automatically break into praise and worship without thinking about it. Instinctive prayer! What a concept.

Some may say if you aren’t kneeling, it isn’t prayer. Too bad for the man with no legs. I once heard someone suggest that you can’t have a real relationship with God without an hour a day in prayer. Perhaps they had a whole hour every day, uninterrupted, in private. I don’t. Not many people do and so they just don’t pray at all. After all, if you can’t meet the requirements, why bother. Right? Wrong.

Others will say this type of prayer has no meaning because there is no conscious thought. It is true that no conscious thought is involved, but it is not true that the mind is not involved.

Every natural process in the human body is done without conscious thought. You don’t have to think about breathing because your body knows how to do it. You don’t have to tell your eyes to blink to keep them moist. Even your dreams are controlled by your brain without your conscious thought. And it is possible to learn to control your dreams while you are asleep. I’ve done it.

What could be more natural than to pray to the Creator? Words are formed in our mind and our mind tells our voice to speak. The Bible said “Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaketh.” Our heart and our mind appear to be linked. How could what I call instinctive prayer be meaningless if the mind/heart is involved in the process.

Prayer was meant to be just as natural as our breathing or our heart beat. It was intended as a means of constant communication between us and the Creator. We should find ourselves breaking into prayer for no reason, at unusual times, in unusual places. There should be prayer over our dishes, toilets, and car engines. I don’t mean roll in the floor, jump up and down, top of your lungs prayer (unless you want that, but be prepared for strange looks, especially from your children.). No, I mean conversation and thanks for all the blessings we have been given. God loves it when we just talk to Him! If we spent more time talking to God this way, we might find some of our heavy-duty prayers get answered a lot quicker and more often.

Perhaps we should stop worrying so much about a “special place” or a “special time” to pray. If you have either, use it and be thankful. If you don’t perhaps you should be more concerned with making the time special. Take a ride in the country or to work and make your time a place to pray.

A Righteous Legacy

Several years ago, I purchased a book called A Dynasty of Outlaws by Paul I. Wellman. It is unique in that it details the history of outlaw gangs, primarily in the Midwest, during period from the Civil War until the early part of this century.

You may ask, what possible spiritual insight you could get from reading a historical book about outlaws? Actually, history is a great topic to learn spiritual truths. And, as I discovered, studying about outlaws can give you an amazing insight to the spiritual realm.

Wellman’s book begins with a description of a raid on August 21, 1863, in Lawrence, Kansas. William Clarke Quantrill and his raiders sacked Lawrence and left 142 people dead. The book ends with the bloody death on October 21, 1934 of Charles Arthur Floyd, a.k.a. Pretty Boy Floyd. What lies between these two events reveals an astounding truth.

“For the squeamish, this book is not bedtime reading. . .” said one review. Truly, for this is a book that traces seventy-one years of violence among a series of outlaws in the mid-west.

I was fascinated with the history, but I was horrified at some of the acts these men and women performed with no apparent remorse. Murder was met with the same excitement as a child greets Christmas. But what astounded me even more was the fact that in seventy-one years, every one of these gangs was directly connected to the previous one in some way. Mr. Wellman includes a “genealogy chart” of these gangs to show their relationships. Bear with me while I briefly review this.

From Quantrill’s original raiders came three groups of men named respectively, James, Younger, and Shirley. From 1861 these groups were separate gangs. The James and Younger boys united in 1866-1882 and a woman named Belle Starr became Cole Younger’s mistress.

The Daltons, cousins of the Youngers, formed their own gang, which lasted from 1891-92. A member of the Dalton’s gang, Bill Doolin, went on, after the deaths of the Dalton’s, to form the Doolin Gang.

Belle got a new boy friend and with her brother, they formed a gang. She later got involved with three other men and from 1880-1889 she had her own gangs. She is murdered and it is suspected that her own son may have committed the crime in jealousy over her last boyfriend.

After her death, Belle’s son, Henry, and her last lover, Jim French, Cherokee Bill, Dick West and Ben Howell, former members of the Doolin gang, joined Bill Cook to form the Cook gang from 1893-1895.

Then, Al Spenser, survivor of the Cook gang, meets up with John Callahan, Eddie Adams and the infamous Pretty Boy Floyd. Floyd has two more cohorts before his death in 1933.

The terrible things I read shocked me but the significance of this generational connection brought an even greater shock. Bloody Bill Quantrill was the father of a legacy of evil in the Midwest unlike anything I have ever known. In seventy years of death and destruction, each group begat a succeeding group, sometimes two or three. There were direct and overlapping connections within each group. Pretty Boy Floyd could trace his criminal roots back to Quantrill. What a horrible legacy!

I wondered later if any of these men and women knew of the connections they had to the past, beyond their own generation. Did Floyd know he was a spiritual descendant of Bloody Bill Quantrill? Did Henry Starr know he too, was a descendant? Did the Dalton’s know who they really were? Probably not. Each of them would have viewed their exploits as being superior to any who came before. And in some ways, they were right. Each generation was more evil that the preceding one. Each inherited a greater blood-lust.

You will think me foolish but as I closed the book, I thought about Quantrill and his dynasty, and I began to weep. What a terrible legacy to leave behind. He and his descendants left no noble deeds, no glory, no honor -- no good thing at all. They left behind death, destruction, sorrow and pain -- to themselves and to their victims.

Then I thought of my own family, my grandparents and great-grandparents. I thought of all the things I knew, both good and bad, about them. Into my mind came the memory of my grandmother telling me about how her father came to the Lord.

She told me about the time she was baptized in Salter’s Pool, a local swimming pool. As a child, when we passed this pool I would look down in the deep gully where it lay off the highway and think of her and imagine that day.

She told me about the camp meetings that were so prevalent at the turn of the century. I can trace my spiritual family back to the early 1900’s to a large, fairly poor, family who heard the early Apostolic ministers traveling through south Alabama.

Eventually, some were lost; some became preachers, and most continued on a walk with God until they left this world. Some of their descendents are still carrying on in the faith and some have joined other faiths.

When I went home a couple of years ago the pool was gone. So is my grandmother but the legacy she and others left behind, it remains. And oh my, what a wonderful legacy it is. It shines with promise and there is no shame in telling our children of the past or the future. There is a hope because someone blazed a trail and left a legacy of righteousness.

Divine Inspiration or Human Perspiration?

Who wrote the Bible? How many times have Christians been asked this question by those seeking only to debate? It is a question that often leads to a feeling of frustration and aggravation for those who are expected to have the answer – namely, Christians. What a question. And those asking aren’t going to like the answer anyway.

Did someone just start writing these stories in the Bible and add to them until someone decided it would make a best seller called the Bible? Did God dictate the words to all those men in different centuries, cultures and languages?

Long before it was a written document the stories of the Bible had been handed down for generations around campfires. Oral stories were the only way to pass on the cultural identity of a people. In ancient cultures those in charge of carrying the history were taught carefully.

The “tellers” were told the stories long before they could talk themselves. They were expected to learn, remember and retell the events that defined the nation. To not do this would have been considered a terribly loss by the nation and in fact, there is one point in the Bible where the oral history and traditions were not being passed down.

“And also all that generation were gathered unto their fathers: and there arose another generation after them, which knew not the Lord, nor yet the works which he had done for Israel.” Judges 2:10

In God’s sight, this was a crime so bad that He punished Israel.

The first fully developed system of writing is only about 5,000 years old – far younger than the human race. Early writing was done on wet clay tablets with special pens and invented by the Sumerians. The shortest written item required painstaking time.

Even after the invention of writing the many cultures, including the Hebrews, still loved to recite the history of their nation. Read the Psalms of David in which he recounts great moments in Israel’s history. The Psalms and other historical poetry was written to read aloud so the nation would not forget.

Since each generation had more to learn, you can understand why it was absolutely necessary to invent writing. Try telling the history of the world on a cold winter evening.

So, the Bible was thousands of years in the making. It wasn’t even complete as we know it in Jesus’ day. Jesus and the disciples in their letters quoted from texts that are not even in our current KJV of the Bible! Many texts that were considered sacred by the Hebrews are not included in the KJV. In the Gospels they tell us that they could not include all the things that Jesus did. One of the things I learned in news writing was that there is a lot more of a story that you don’t know.

As for God dictating the words, well, the Bible said “All scripture is given by inspiration of God” not by dictation. For those who don’t know, dictation is where someone literally speaks to you and you write down their exact words with no omissions.

Inspiration, on the other hand, occurs when you see, hear, or experience something that stimulates you to action, it motivates you. All writing is “inspired” by something – good or bad.

Today there are those who say that because human bias is involved in all writing this “inspirational” type of writing the Scriptures can’t be completely true. It is accurate to say that human bias is evident in all writing. This is what causes skeptics to ask questions. And questions are not bad. They drive humans to seek answers!

For example, the Gospels have several instances of apparent conflicts. Examine the way one gospel will describe an event that is also described in another gospel. However, the differences are not because someone made a mistake.

I noticed this when I read the story of the crucifixion where Peter cuts off the ear of the servant of the high priest. In John’s gospel Peter is named but in no other gospel is he named as the person who cut off the servant’s ear. Why? They were all there. They all had to know it was Peter. And even though the gospels are written 50 years after Jesus’ death they would not have forgotten that night. Yet, only John named Peter as the offender. Why? And why did the others not name him in their description? Were they embarrassed or did they desire to spare Peter further embarrassment? Maybe.

Did John have a reason, other than accuracy for naming him? Maybe. Could John have been experiencing a little human jealousy of Peter? Remember, John was the beloved disciple but Peter had been given the keys of the kingdom given. We can’t know the answer and it may be nothing more than oversight on the part of the three other disciples. That alone intrigues me. I would find it hard to believe that all but one disciple forgot who cut off that man’s ear. It is an interesting puzzle.

Read passages such as this carefully and you may be able tell something about the personality of the writer by comparing the way writer describes an event with the same event described by another writer in another gospel.

Another instance is in the recounting of the Sons of Thunder seeking a special place in the kingdom. In Matt. 20:20 we are told that the mother of the Sons of Zebedee came to Jesus and asked that her sons be given places on Jesus’ right and left when he comes into his kingdom. Yet in Mark 10:35 it is James and John who come to Jesus with this request. So who did ask? Both stories say that the other ten disciples were angry with James and John for asking such a thing. Remember, the “right hand” in scripture denotes power.

Well, as a mother, I can believe that that mother just might have made this request. Matthew says she came with her sons, “worshipping him”. So she knew what power she was addressing. Or maybe the boys had asked Mom to ask for them. Maybe Matthew knew this and was simply being accurate.

Let’s say Mark also knew that the boys had put their mother up to this. In light of how women were viewed in that culture, at that time in history, it is conceivable that Mark may have discerned the source of the request and simply cut to the meat of the matter, not mentioning the mother. James and John were the ones desiring elevation; Mom was just a means to an end.

Interestingly, in this example, if you take things literally, it appears that either Matthew was mistaken or Mark was mistaken. Or you might assume that after 50 years anyone might be a little unclear. A person looking for discrepancies latches on to this type of example to prove there are errors in scripture.

Since I believe the Word is true, I believe this is simply an example of perspective. In both of these examples the event did not change, only the way it is perceived changed. Two different writers saw the same event happen and wrote about it in different ways—the way they saw it.

That is why discernment by the Spirit is so valuable in reading scripture. You must be able to strip away the writer’s bias and get to the inspired Word. To say a writer has no bias is an error in thinking. Time is not a factor to God and His creation (humans) has not changed since He did the creating. The men who wrote the Bible were exactly like men today. Every writer leaves his mark on everything he writes. It is the very thing that helps Bible scholars identify books written by different authors, particularly when the name of the writer is not known.

In 2 Peter the Bible says, “For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.” Holy men of God, motivated or inspired by the Holy Ghost, wrote the Scriptures and prophesied. It doesn’t say the Holy Ghost spoke. It says they, the men, spoke as they were moved on.

What motivated the writers of the Bible? An old, little used definition for the word inspire means “to breathe on” or “to inhale.” God “breathed on” all writers of the Bible and they “inhaled” that “breath”. What does that feel like?

As a writer I can tell you that there is something inside me struggling, always struggling, to get out, to be said. That is what moves me to write. When I am able to put it on paper, it is one of the greatest feelings in the world. Writer’s block is a living nightmare to a writer. The struggle goes on but there is no relief.

I can also tell you that when God is the motivator a writer will often write things he or she doesn’t want to write but which a driving urgency demands that he write. And while God has often given me things to write, it is never easy to get it right. The things that come from Him are the hardest to put into words. It takes a lot longer too. I have to pray over everything I write, while I am writing it! Then I have to leave it awhile, pray, and start again.

I suspect a similar thing occurs with preachers. They choose the words they will use to convey a particular thought. However, the thought may not be their own but rather, the direction of the Spirit. Finding words that accurately convey the thought is often difficult. Two preachers may have the same thought but use different words to convey that thought. Again, it is never easy to get it right. And sometimes, when they are done, they still wonder if they got it right. Ask any preacher. I have no doubt that true men of God must earnestly seek the face of God before they can deliver a message from God.

So who wrote the Bible? It depends on who you ask.

Achy, Breaky, Headachy

What a Saturday! I spent most of my day spawled on the sofa with a migraine. In the six or seven years I've taken Imitrex, I've never had to take two tables but one time. Until today. I two two, two hours apart. It was that bad. I also have never thrown up with a migraine but twice. Today, I thought several times I'd make it three. It was the wost one I've had in memory.

Sarah spent the night with me and during the night, the shoulder that had been hurting suddenly blossomed into a headache. I slept badly and the headache exploded too. I had no medicine until this morning around 9 a.m. when some could go pick it up at the pharmacy.

So, I spent the latter half of the day, feeling as if I had been hit by a truck. I am still exhaused and on my way to bed. I've made the rounds but I don't think I can take another minute.

I am also sadly behind on Mist. Sorry. The last two weeks I was either running my legs off or I was laid out with a migraine. Not a fun week but I hope the next two days off will make up for some of it.