Ten days ago, I wrote about Hero Worship.  In the process of writing that post, I linked to Michael Card’s web site.  When I arrived there to get the correct url to link to, I found that he was coming to Ohio with a conference called Biblical Imagination Series.  A little whisper in my mind said, “go there.”  So I went.

Beginning Friday night, the next 26 hours were quite a journey through Luke – the Gospel of Amazement -  as we all learned a little bit about how to engage with the Scriptures in a way that is both biblical and that bridges the gap between heart and mind.  One thing I discovered in the process is how that bridge has been made in my life – it is the visual picture that is formed in response to either the words of scripture, or more often when the right question is asked about the scriptures.  If I don’t have a picture, I don’t really understand in my heart.  I also realized how powerful these pictures are – not just for me, but for those I share them with.  This is something I’ve been hearing for years – every time I hear Mark Gostlin teach on Word Pictures. (I’m starting to think I’m the slowest student on the planet since I have to keep retaking the class!)  In fact, a lot of the scriptural pictures I have that bridge the gap between my head and my heart came out of his sermons.  But I once again actually saw the power of one of these pictures in someone else’s face.

Met some incredible people.  The first night I sat with 3 lovely ladies and just thoroughly enjoyed their company.

Saturday, I sat next to a lady home for a few weeks from Thailand named Linda Horn.  Talked to her quite a bit about the sex trafficking situation in Thailand.  She was quite an encouragement.

Craig Dunham – great facilitator.  The post-it notes were a little more significant, I think, than I was initially ready to give them credit for.  I think he was surprised when I asked for his picture.

Eric.  Just listening to him talk for a few minutes, I could tell God’s got places for this guy to go.

Michael Card.  Still not worshiping any heroes except Jesus, but I’ve sure got a lot of bridges/pictures in my heart that come out of his lyrics, and I came away from the weekend with a few more.  One in particular had to do with the categories we tend to plug people into and the question, “Do you see this woman?” (Luke 7:36-50 – Thanks for that rabbit trail, Michael.)  One thing I noticed this weekend (again, nothing new, just a fresh reminder) – especially in meeting both Linda and Michael – was that God likes to use broken people – earthen vessels with all the cracks and holes that let the glory of God shine through.

I did actually meet one hero worshiper who was worshiping the wrong hero, and I think I needed to see that too.  Which leads to a funny observation.  I’ve never asked for an autograph from anyone before, but I did this time.  I doubt that I ever will again.  Afterwards I was wondering, “Now what’s the point of that?”  It’s not like I’ve got a first edition signed copy of the book that’s going to be worth thousands of dollars someday.  But there are certain experiences that it seems I’ve had to do at least once before I croak – first F ever in my senior year of college, first speeding ticket in 2009, first autograph in 2011.  Sorry Michael.  Love your music – hate the groupie feeling I got with the autograph experience.

The weekend was capped off – truly the icing on the cake – by a concert.  And the concert was concluded with the most wonderful benediction in song I’ve ever been part of.

Grace be with you all

And may the Great Shepherd of the sheep

Equip you with good things for doing his will

And grace be with you all.

When I first started going to church again in 1998, I ended up at Parkside Church in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, for about 6 months or so.  I had been listening to Alistair Begg on the radio, and I was pretty sure there wasn’t going to be anything weird going on there. He’s also a benediction man, and I used to love his benedictions.  Still do when I hear them on the radio. I had forgotten how blessed a good benediction can make me feel.  I drove home last night feeling very blessed.

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Some unfinished business.  The last exercise of the weekend was to write the parable of our lives.  Made a couple of false starts, then realized what I needed to do, but by that time I wouldn’t have been able to listen to the other stories if I took time to rewrite then.  So here is my parable.  There are others that could be written, but this was what came out of this weekend.

Jesus said to them, Hesed is like this.  There was a young girl who asked me for something that would not have been good for her, so I said no. But she didn’t understand that I had something better to give her, and she hated me.

Some time later, she asked me to go away, and I said yes.  She thought it would be forever, but I knew it wasn’t.

When she finally neared the end of the road she was on, she reached her hand up to my stars one night and asked me, “If you’re really there, would you let me know somehow?”

At just the right time, I let her know I was there and that I loved her, and she stopped hating me.  Now I can teach her to ask for what I’ve been longing to give her all along.

One of the questions from this week’s Bible study asks:

Who do you respect and admire as someone who “finished well”?  What is it about their life that you respect the most?

Without question, the first person who comes to mind is my Aunt Mimi.  On a long drive from Atlanta, Georgia, to Independence, Missouri, when I was 14, she and I had a lot of time to just talk.  Right at that critical time when I was already rebelling against God and was starting to bring some very destructive things into my life, she told me that God had a plan for my life.  I had forgotten about that until I saw her last January take the face of one of the next generation and hold it in her hands right in front of her own and tell him the same thing – “God has a plan for your life.”  How many other kids that she adopted as her own did she encourage that way? Lots, I’m sure.

Last January when she was still recovering from a broken pelvis, my sister and I had the opportunity to spend some time with her.  While she was still in quite a bit of pain, the thing that bothered her the most was not being about to participate in her Bible Study Fellowship group.  She was determined to get back on her feet and serving the Lord as quickly as she could (and she did).  She didn’t like being sidelined one little bit, but she believed that the Lord was teaching her something through it.

A few months later, my husband and I got to “drop in” and surprise her for lunch – the first and only time I’ve ever been able to just drop in on Aunt Mimi.  She was full of stories and encouragement, and I’m so glad we were able to spend that time with her because just a short time later she was gone.

In the days surrounding her funeral last summer, I had a few quite moments to sit down in the chair where she spent the majority of her time with the Lord and look through her Bible and page through some of the Bible studies she was working on.  I pulled out a couple of quotes that I think say something about her walk with the Lord and that I hope will someday say something about mine.

From a note inside the front cover of her Bible:

There’s enough time to do everything God wants me to do.

From a Bible Study Fellowship worksheet that she was currently working on:

I made these plans, but God had other plans, and I’ve never been sorry I went his way.

And something my dad said about her that made the newspaper on the Sunday before her funeral:

“Her heart was so open and golden,” James Birney said. “It didn’t matter whether you were family, you always felt as if she was someone you could trust.”

She didn’t make favorite aunt status for no reason.  Was she perfect?  Of course not.  Did she finish well?  Absolutely.  May I finish as well.

In the ladies’ Bible study tonight, the question was asked, “How do you define success?”  There were a lot of answers – no right or wrong on that one.  I said that my definition of success is to be like Christ, and I’m a miserable failure.  To my mind, if I were actually like Christ, I would have arrived.  There’s nothing more I could hope to achieve.  Not going to happen in this life, but it’s actually not an entirely hopeless ambition as John states in his first letter:

Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is. (1 John 3:2)

There is coming a day when I will have my desire, and maybe along the way, I can have it in small measure.

I’ve been thinking all evening about what it actually means to be like Christ, and a number of things are coming to mind:

• He was filled with the Holy Spirit without measure.
• He was truly humble.
• He always did the Father’s will, always said what the Father told him to say.  He was obedient to the point of death.
• He willingly served those who should have served him, those who never thanked him, and even those who hated him and betrayed him.
• He loved without reservation, without self-interest, and sacrificed everything for those he loved.
• He set his face steadfastly toward the cross and took all the shame and pain and wrath that should have been mine.

I’ve never been a hero worshiper because there’s no mere human who could ever measure up to what I thought a hero should be.  Jesus, on the other hand, is definitely hero material, and the more clearly I can see him, the more I want to worship him and be like him.  Hero worship indeed!

So picture a run of the mill laundromat on a steamy Saturday afternoon.  My dryer had broken, and we had not yet replaced it, so I had washed all of my laundry at home and took it to the laundromat to dry. (I should actually do this more often – everything was done in no time!!)  This day, no one else was there, and, in spite of the sign that said “NO RADIOS”, I saw someone else’s radio sitting on top of a shelf.  So I got it down, plugged in, and tuned in.  That afternoon the station was airing a program with Michael Card, in which there were interviews and discussion interspersed with some of his songs.  I was folding clothes when a series of songs came on that took me right to heaven (seriously – my body might have been in a laundromat folding clothes, but I was in heaven).

First up was El Shaddai – God Almighty, God Almighty, God Most High, Lord.  From the age of Abraham and Isaac, and Moses and the Exodus, to the coming of the Messiah, the song packs into 3 minutes all of the Ages.  Right there in the laundromat, I could see the whole scope of God’s redemptive story.

Next was Song of the Lamb – Lyrics very nearly straight out of the book of Revelation.  The scenes played out at the end of time with the victorious army, the temple in heaven, the angels with bowls (of God’s wrath) in their hands, smoke, and glory . . . Now I’m no longer folding clothes – just listening and seeing and awestruck.

Finally, the song was Come Worship the Lord – and by this time I could do nothing less.  At least on the inside, I was flat on the floor, face down.  I’m glad no one came in right then because the tears were freely flowing down my cheeks.

I’ve thought about that experience many times since then, especially when considering how to approach what Jesus says about worship in John 4 for our study in the Gospel of John.  Jesus disconnected true worship from a particular place, but he didn’t disconnect it from himself – The Truth.  And right now my next step would normally be to analyze and explain, but I’m really just speechless again.

When my husband and I came back from Marion to live in our own house again, I was pretty sure that rather than slip back into the comfort of my old church, I was now supposed to get to know some of the people and churches closer to home.  During our previous years in this house it had occurred to me more than once that if I was ever talking to one of my neighbors about Christ, I had absolutely no idea if there were any churches nearby that I could recommend to them if they didn’t want to travel 15 miles to go to church with me.  Suffice it to say that I now know there are at least 2 Gospel preaching churches in my own little one-stop-light town.

But on a similar note to my post in 2009 about looking for a church in Marion, I think I’ve found the place where God is going to park me for a while, and for a lot of the same reasons that I was attracted to my church in Marion.  The overwhelming impression after barely a couple of months there is that this is a house of prayer.  That’s because every time I turn around these people are praying for each other.  Both my first pastor and my pastor in Marion would also gather the church around individuals to pray for specific ministries or needs.  In fact, the church in Marion sent me out with just such a prayer when it was time for us to leave there.  It’s truly a blessing to be on the receiving end of the prayers of your entire church body.

During my 2nd visit to the church here, the pastor gathered everyone around a young Middle-Eastern family who were enduring some persecution for sharing the truth about Islam.  Later it was a man being deployed to Afghanistan and his wife.  Today, a man who is launching a new ministry and his family.  And all I can think of every time I’m witness to these things is what Jesus said when he cleared the thieves out of the temple:

“It is written, my house shall be called the house of prayer.”

The passage Jesus is quoting from in Isaiah actually calls God’s temple “a house of prayer for all people.”  No matter who I am or where I come from, because I love the name of the Lord and have taken hold of his covenant, I can come into this house of prayer and know that my burnt offerings and my sacrifices – whatever I bring to the altar – are accepted.

Lot’s more that could be said here, but it’s late, and there’s a long day coming as soon as I wake up.