Went to visit Ma Kettle at Myakka River State Park and fell in love with this mostly unspoiled old piece of Florida all over again! Ma Kettle was shacked up in cabin #1 and it was a beauty!
The whole place was crawling with wild life and was so full of rustic beauty everywhere you looked that our eyes were as happy as a taste bud at a steak dinner!
It was revitalizing and we are very thankful to Ma for havin us over.
It flooded again and I am always happy when it does. Everyone comes out and plays in the water!
After going to church in the morning, where I was among the dearest of friends and delighted at every turn, my brother and three brothers went out on Tampa Bay to test my newly completed motor mount!
It was a magnificent adventure!
When you use your flesh as currency you will always end up paying a higher price than you anticipate. These days even the youngest among us are responding affirmatively to the media machine’s marketing of all things surface. There is an absolute mania surrounding appearance. The last thing anyone wants is to look like who they naturally are.
The effort and resources exhausted to keep up with the latest look is debilitating and the ones who fully succumb to every bit of beauty hype are lost to the world of true fellowship and left to wander in a shallow dimension of superficiality. The reason I mention it is because I am as antithetical to this dimension as you can get without living on the streets as a filthy vagrant and I dearly miss so many people I once knew before they abandoned themselves to world of the fashionable.
Do not misunderstand me, I desire to be desirable like everyone else, I just remind myself it is a trap and I need only please my Lord. The ones who spend so much time covering up who they are with the thinnest layers of meticulously applied self esteem are unwittingly headed directly to the last place they want to find themselves. Surrounded by a crowd of the coolest people imaginable with the sudden realization they are as lonely as they have ever been. They are advertising their vulnerability to rejection and catching the eyes of those who consume flesh of other for their own pleasure.
For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another. For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another. This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would. But if ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under the law. Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, Idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, Envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law. And they that are Christ's have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts. If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit. Let us not be desirous of vain glory, provoking one another, envying one another.
(Gal 5:13-26)
I found myself in a conversation today about Sunday school. Very few people in our church are willing to volunteer their time to care for their own children and the children of their fellow church goers. Why this is might be a mystery but then again it might be as plain vanilla ice cream. I have my thoughts on the matter but I will leave them slumbering restlessly in the recesses of my mind.
The real revelation I had during this conversation was the sudden idea that when Jesus reclaims His creation there will no longer be children as we know them today. There will no longer be anyone in bodies that age. There will no longer be any reproduction of people at all. There will be only everlasting life, a reality without time in a new heaven and earth with God as the single greatest focus of His creation. Our human relationships as we know them will fall away. I find that this thought initially causes me distress in my current situation but I know that what God has for us is always perfect and find peace in that very truth.
Right now we are privileged to have been children, and have children in our lives. We live in a culture that calls children an interference to our personal lives and provides any number of convenient ways to store them or even do away with them before they can appear on the scene. The same popular culture portrays adults and parents as literal idiots and families as chaotic and dysfunctional in the music, movies and television shows it produces. To view children in the light of this world is to recognize they are the ultimate parasite. The challenge is to recognize who they are in the eyes of God and the indispensible role they play in stripping us of ourselves and conforming us to the image of Christ.
If we are of the family of God we must see children for who they are and behave accordingly. Children belong to God until they have awareness enough to reject Him. A baby is a gift from God to a couple who have developed an intimate relationship, but they are not the origin of this new life and are best serve to acknowledge who is. Each of us is responsible for a child’s well being just by virtue of their presence in our lives. In as much as we are the sole focus of our creator so much so that He sent Jesus to live with, and finally die for us. We need to follow this example in our own lives. We need to live with, and give our lives daily for the children God has given us in our time and place.
How terribly, then, have the theologians misrepresented God in the measures of the low and showy, not the lofty and simple humanities! Nearly all of them represent him as a great King on a grand throne, thinking how grand he is, and making it the business of his being and the end of his universe to keep up his glory, wielding the bolts of a Jupiter against them that take his name in vain. They would not allow this, but follow out what they say, and it comes much to this. Brothers, have you found our king? There he is, kissing little children and saying they are like God. There he is at table with the head of a fisherman lying on his bosom, and somewhat heavy at heart that even he,the beloved disciple, cannot yet understand him well. The simplest peasant who loves his children and his sheep were--no, not a truer, for the other is false, but--a true type of our God beside that monstrosity of a monarch.
George Macdonald
I hear it all the time. Working with children is a gift. Not true! There is no gift only a sacred responsibility. You were once a child. You have been there yourself. You are in fact no different than a child and to be inept in relating to children is to be equally inept in relating to your peers in matters of sincerity and openness. We are all truly called to be servant to the child. They are honest and raw. They forgive easily and love freely. They are transparent and for that reason are certainly intimidating, but they are here to remind us daily of who Christ is calling us to be.
I paid very little attention in the months preceding this event. I would hear about it at church and let it slip my mind. Loitering in the halls of the church during the event has really been a blessing. The single most impressive aspect of this whole event is the family atmosphere. We are strangers but we are kindred spirits in the Lord.
The host home idea has got to be one of this gatherings biggest strengths. I so believe that it is living life together that we begin to know Jesus better. The home is a sacred place and the ultimate place of worship. The church building does not hold a candle to a Christ centered home with a faithful mommy and daddy growing up their God given little ones in the light of the Word of God. When a home is open to visitors the impact is colossal. The truth is everyone want to be a part of a happy home and a loving family. God created us to be His family. I am filled with both joy and sorrow for the things I have seen these past few days! Glory to God.
It was a packed house and I saw from a few rows back one of the dear little ones I know tell Jesus she chooses Him with a broken heart and a broken and contrite spirit. She could be the only one that responds to the message the whole week and it could not be more worth it.
Today A father of one of the host families invited me to meet them at Picnic Island where they were taking their Frontliners for some recreation. I went and it was the best. I got plenty of video but it is far to sacred to post so here are some stills.
There were a few families from South Tampa Fellowship there with the same idea and we all clumped together and increased the enjoyment even more!
One of the couples had recently acquired kayaks which they shared to every ones delight!
This is fellowship only God brings and the way we should always live as the church.
This Frontliners thing has only been here two days and it is really making waves. I am excited to see what the rest of the week will bring.
George MacDonald
Went on a spectacular adventure this morning! Creation was in it’s prime and the good old Upper Tampa Bay Park was sublime.
Think for a moment how Jesus was at home among the things of his father. It seems to me, I repeat, a spiritless explanation of his words--that the temple was the place where naturally he was at home. Does he make the least lamentation over the temple? It is Jerusalem he weeps over--the men of Jerusalem, the killers, the stoners. What was his place of prayer? Not the temple, but the mountain-top. Where does he find symbols whereby to speak of what goes on in the mind and before the face of his father in heaven? Not in the temple; not in its rites; not on its altars; not in its holy of holies; he finds them in the world and its lovely-lowly facts; on the roadside, in the field, in the vineyard, in the garden, in the house; in the family, and the commonest of its affairs--the lighting of the lamp, the leavening of the meal, the neighbor's borrowing, the losing of the coin, the straying of the
sheep. Even in the unlovely facts also of the world which he turns to holy use, such as the unjust judge, the false steward, the faithless abourers, he ignores the temple.
"Shall I hide from Abraham that thing which I do?" Genesis 18:17
Its Delights. This chapter brings out the delight of real friendship with God as compared with occasional feelings of His presence in prayer. To be so much in contact with God that you never need to ask Him to show you His will, is to be nearing the final stage of your discipline in the life of faith. When you are rightly related to God, it is a life of freedom and liberty and delight, you are God's will, and all your common-sense decisions are His will for you unless He checks. You decide things in perfect delightful friendship with God, knowing that if your decisions are wrong He will always check; when He checks, stop at once.
Its Difficulties. Why did Abraham stop praying when he did? He was not intimate enough yet to go boldly on until God granted his desire, there was something yet to be desired in his relationship to God. Whenever we stop short in prayer and say - "Well, I don't know; perhaps it is not God's will," there is still another stage to go. We are not so intimately acquainted with God as Jesus was, and as He wants us to be - "That they may be one even as we are one." Think of the last thing you prayed about - were you devoted to your desire or to God? Determined to get some gift of the Spirit or to get at God? "Your Heavenly Father knoweth what things ye have need of before ye ask Him." The point of asking is that you may get to know God better. "Delight thyself also in the Lord; and He shall give thee the desires of thine heart." Keep praying in order to get a perfect understanding of God Himself.
Oswald Chambers
That God should hang in the thought—atmosphere like a windmill, waiting till men enough should combine and send out prayer in sufficient force to turn his outspread arms, is an idea too absurd. God waits to be gracious not to be tempted. A man capable of proposing such a test, could have in his mind no worthy representative idea of a God, and might well disbelieve in any: it is better to disbelieve than believe in a God unworthy. More from this text
George Macdonald
