God Time
Stories
Object:
Contents
What's Up This Week
"God Time" by Keith Hewitt
"One Bright Light" by Frank Ramirez
What's Up This Week
So often in our walk with God, it seems as though we and God are not always on the same page. We go along with our ideas of how things are supposed to be, while God often has his own agenda. One major area where this becomes apparent is timing. We think things are supposed to happen at a certain time and when that time comes and goes, we can think God has missed the picture. Keith Hewitt explores this in "God Time." On the other side, there have been many times that God has tried to communicate something to us and we have missed the message. Frank Ramirez offers us an example in nature in "One Bright Light."
* * * * * * * * *
God Time
By Keith Hewitt
Isaiah 9:1-4
Nevertheless, that time of darkness and despair will not go on forever. The land of Zebulun and Naphtali will be humbled, but there will be a time in the future when Galilee of the Gentiles, which lies along the road that runs between the Jordan and the the people who walk in darkness, will see a great light.
For those who live in a land of deep darkness, a light will shine. You will enlarge the nation of Israel, and its people will rejoice. They will rejoice before you, as people rejoice at the harvest and like warriors dividing the plunder. For you will break the yoke of their slavery and lift the heavy burden from their shoulders. You will break the oppressor's rod, just as you did when you destroyed the army of Midian.
If the process of international adoption does nothing else (and it does), it is a powerful tool for teaching the twin virtues of patience and prayer.
When my wife and I first decided to adopt internationally, it seemed as though there were more things to do than there was time to do them. There were agencies to sort through, and various programs within each agency to examine. When we finally decided on an agency, and a program (adopting from Russia), that's when things kicked into high gear.
There were forms to fill out and notarize -- several trees' worth of paper, at least. Since the agency we chose was out of state, we had to go on another hunt to find an agency in our area that would conduct the home study -- and then we had to get ready for that. There were photos to take, background checks to submit to, studies and interviews, even photos and medical histories to sort through, of referrals our agency thought might fit our profile -- and then doctors to talk to, to get their take on the histories we were seeing.
It was a paper chase that lasted for months, but eventually the time came when the last form had been notarized and submitted, when the last decisions had been made on our end, and everything had been committed to the care and handling of our caseworker, and her counterpart in Russia. That's when the hard part started.
That's when there was nothing to do but wait -- nothing to do but pray... and be patient. Almost by definition, bureaucracies are complex and slow to act, and we would now learn that the Byzantine maze of Russian bureaucracy made the IRS look streamlined and customer-friendly.
So we waited...
When Isaiah spoke of the coming Messiah, the words must have been like sparks struck into kindling. Here was something the long-suffering people of Judah could get behind, here was something they could appreciate -- a deliverer was coming! A leader was on his way who would restore them to their rightful place and rebalance the world to what it was supposed to be. A savior had been promised and was now just waiting in the wings for the right moment, waiting to swoop down and bring justice.
Only... you can almost imagine that when they got to the end of the scripture, their eyes would have flitted back to the top, and scanned through it again, searching, then maybe they would have gone back a third time, sure that they had missed the key. Maybe they even turned the scroll over, to see if there was a continuation on the back, and when they found nothing they would have sat there, puzzled over what had not been said -- for what had been left unsaid would loom as large as the prophecy itself.
Isaiah had made a rookie mistake -- in all his impassioned writing, in all the glory and wonder of the future that flowed, God-inspired, from the tip of his writing instrument, he had forgotten one of the W's. The "what" was clear, the "who" was there, the "where" had been defined, and the "why" was obvious to anyone who had grown up in an underpowered nation that had the misfortune to live in the buffer zone between a succession of mighty empires. But the "when" was missing.
There was no hint of when this great savior would come into their lives.
This was not an insignificant detail. To people struggling for answers, desperate for hope, it was critical to know when delivery would come. Would it be next Wednesday? Next month? A year from now? Or (shudder) five years from now? The coming of the Messiah was all well and good, but inquiring minds want to know -- need to know -- when to expect him.
In fact, it was not to be a matter of weeks or months, or even years. It would be more than seven centuries before the Messiah drew his first breath, so the faithful had to content themselves with prayer, and teaching the prophecy to their children. The people of Judah were getting a lesson in God Time.
It's a difficult lesson to learn: God's actions take place in God's good time, and not always according to our schedule. We may look around and see desperate circumstances, and wonder why God doesn't do something now. We may look around at our own lives, or at the world around us, and wonder why God doesn't do something now to answer our prayers, to end the problems we see, to bring resolution to uncertainty.
If you would truly question God about his timing, about his way of doing things, it would be appropriate to first build a star, or create a new species of animal out of nothing but -- well, nothing. Once you can do that, you may be in a position to challenge his judgment on an equal footing.
Sometimes, in retrospect, it's easy to see -- or at least guess -- why things happened when they did, the way they did. We can see that if Jesus had been born in Isaiah's time, the spread of Christianity would have been a far different proposition than it was 700+ years later, when the disciples could spread the gospel along a network of Roman roads under the stability of a Roman empire that kept the peace (more or less) throughout the Mediterranean basin, and beyond.
But sometimes, as hard as we look, we can't see the "why" behind the "when." And it's in those times that we have to trust in God above all things. God, who can grasp the entire span of the universe, through all time, in a single moment of clarity, knows how to arrange his date book. Even if we don't understand now -- and may never understand -- why things happen the way the do, when they do, it's enough to know that he's in charge, and that whatever happens to us here is just a fleeting instant in the time line of eternity.
The twin virtues of patience and prayer are separate, but conjoined, for although they each represent something distinct, they share a common beating heart: faith. It's faith that bolsters our patience to endure when reason says there's no hope, and it's faith that tells us that when we pray, there's someone actually listening -- someone who cares.
Our adoption? We did finally hear from the agency, after a couple of months... but that's another story.
One Bright Light
Frank Ramirez
The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness - on them light has shined.
-- Isaiah 9:2
It's not easy to get to Chaco Culture National Historical Park. Located in the northwest corner of New Mexico, it's an isolated part of an isolated state. You turn off a lonely two-lane highway to drive another twenty miles down a largely unimproved road.
Bring along whatever food or shelter you think you'll need, because there are no hotels, motels, or even soft-sided cabins, but there is a campground for you to pitch your tent. Water is available if you run out, which is good, because it gets awfully hot there in the summer -- and terribly cold in the winter.
Chaco Canyon might get ten inches of rain a year -- in a good year. From the Visitor Center - very informative though not particularly large -- you drive out to the canyon itself. The Fajada Butte is a recognizable landmark. A sluggish creek might run through the Chaco Wash if there is water. The forbidding cliffs rise on both sides.
Why take such trouble to get to this isolated place? Because a thousand years ago this was the center of the universe for the Anasazi people. From this place a web of roads spread out, straight and true, in all directions. Bells from Oregon, Macaws from Mexico, pottery from east as far as the Great Plains, and west all the way to the coast, a wonderful traffic of goods passed through here.
Corn was planted on every available plot of land with the hope that some of it at least would drink deeply of the sparse rains that fell. Every plant in the desert environment had a use. Turkeys provided eggs and feathers, dogs provided protection for the valuable turkeys and other valuable goods, and the people, whose excavated teeth tell vivid stories of good crops and famine as accurately as tree rings chart the passing years, hunted, gathered, harvested, and most of all -- built.
Here in Chaco Canyon are the ruins of buildings larger than anything that would be found in North America or Europe until the late nineteenth century. No one knows what language these people spoke or their names for the places they left behind, but later explores discovered Pueblo Bonito, four to five stories high with over six hundred rooms and over twenty of the rooms known to later Puebloans as Kivas, where dance and worship and ritual mixed together. Each of the Great Houses, as they are known, took centuries to build. Thanks to dendrochronology, the science of dating by tree rings, researchers can pinpoint what year each addition to each of the Great Houses was built.
A little past Pueblo Bonito there is a six-and-a-half mile round trip hike to the PeÒasco Blanco ruins. The walk would be worth it just for the opportunity to walk by a series of petroglyphs along one rock face, and to walk among the ruins. But near the end of the trail there is a half-mile detour that reads: "Supernova Pictograph."
There, on an overhang providing next to no shelter on a rock face, is simple painting.
There is a hand, a crescent moon, and a many-rayed star.
On July 4, 1054 the crescent moon would have risen in the predawn eastern sky. It is quite possible that some of the Anasazi would already be up, working hard before the heat of the day made such labor difficult. The sky was very important to these ancient people. Their buildings were aligned with the risings of the moon and sun at key seasons. On the nearby Fajada Butte were symbols of the cosmos carved into the rock in just the right spot so that daggers of light shone through the heart of these drawings on the winter and summer solstice, as well as both equinoxes.
So it is likely that on that morning over a thousand years ago there were people looking up in the sky to see an amazing event -- the appearance of a supernova in the constellation we know as Taurus.
In our time that supernova is now identified with the object known as the Crab Nebula. It blew up with tremendous force five thousand years ago and its light still took four thousand years to get here. Scientists estimate that if it had been less than fifty light years from our planet all life would have been destroyed.
This new star so bright that it appeared not as a twinkling dot but as a many-rayed object. Moreover, when the sun arose shortly thereafter the new star did not disappear. For the next twenty-three days. It was visible in the night sky for nearly two years.
Many believe that the pictograph at Chaco Canyon commemorates that supernova. There are other pictographs throughout the southwest that seem to show the crescent moon and a bright star together. It was only in the American Southwest that the Supernova appeared next to the crescent moon when it burst into the sky.
The Anasazi were not the only ones to observe this wonder. Chinese and Japanese astronomers also saw the star and wrote down precisely when it first appeared and when it finally faded from view 653 days later.
We do not know with what wonder and awe the Anasazi viewed the star, though it was significant enough to commemorate.
What is known is that evidently it was not noticed or seen by Europeans, who did not leave behind any records of this wonderful event. A great light shone, and it was all for nothing in Christendom. It shone for nothing.
What is the use of a great light that shines upon the people living in darkness if no one takes notice of it? What is the point if its wonder does not touch our hearts, nor directs our thoughts beyond ourselves to something greater?
**********************************************
How to Share Stories
You have good stories to share, probably more than you know: personal stories as well as stories from others that you have used over the years. If you have a story you like, whether fictional or "really happened," authored by you or a brief excerpt from a favorite book, send it to StoryShare for review. Simply email the story to us at storyshare@sermonsuite.com.
**************
StoryShare, January 27, 2008, issue.
Copyright 2008 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 517 South Main Street, Lima, Ohio 45804.
What's Up This Week
"God Time" by Keith Hewitt
"One Bright Light" by Frank Ramirez
What's Up This Week
So often in our walk with God, it seems as though we and God are not always on the same page. We go along with our ideas of how things are supposed to be, while God often has his own agenda. One major area where this becomes apparent is timing. We think things are supposed to happen at a certain time and when that time comes and goes, we can think God has missed the picture. Keith Hewitt explores this in "God Time." On the other side, there have been many times that God has tried to communicate something to us and we have missed the message. Frank Ramirez offers us an example in nature in "One Bright Light."
* * * * * * * * *
God Time
By Keith Hewitt
Isaiah 9:1-4
Nevertheless, that time of darkness and despair will not go on forever. The land of Zebulun and Naphtali will be humbled, but there will be a time in the future when Galilee of the Gentiles, which lies along the road that runs between the Jordan and the the people who walk in darkness, will see a great light.
For those who live in a land of deep darkness, a light will shine. You will enlarge the nation of Israel, and its people will rejoice. They will rejoice before you, as people rejoice at the harvest and like warriors dividing the plunder. For you will break the yoke of their slavery and lift the heavy burden from their shoulders. You will break the oppressor's rod, just as you did when you destroyed the army of Midian.
If the process of international adoption does nothing else (and it does), it is a powerful tool for teaching the twin virtues of patience and prayer.
When my wife and I first decided to adopt internationally, it seemed as though there were more things to do than there was time to do them. There were agencies to sort through, and various programs within each agency to examine. When we finally decided on an agency, and a program (adopting from Russia), that's when things kicked into high gear.
There were forms to fill out and notarize -- several trees' worth of paper, at least. Since the agency we chose was out of state, we had to go on another hunt to find an agency in our area that would conduct the home study -- and then we had to get ready for that. There were photos to take, background checks to submit to, studies and interviews, even photos and medical histories to sort through, of referrals our agency thought might fit our profile -- and then doctors to talk to, to get their take on the histories we were seeing.
It was a paper chase that lasted for months, but eventually the time came when the last form had been notarized and submitted, when the last decisions had been made on our end, and everything had been committed to the care and handling of our caseworker, and her counterpart in Russia. That's when the hard part started.
That's when there was nothing to do but wait -- nothing to do but pray... and be patient. Almost by definition, bureaucracies are complex and slow to act, and we would now learn that the Byzantine maze of Russian bureaucracy made the IRS look streamlined and customer-friendly.
So we waited...
When Isaiah spoke of the coming Messiah, the words must have been like sparks struck into kindling. Here was something the long-suffering people of Judah could get behind, here was something they could appreciate -- a deliverer was coming! A leader was on his way who would restore them to their rightful place and rebalance the world to what it was supposed to be. A savior had been promised and was now just waiting in the wings for the right moment, waiting to swoop down and bring justice.
Only... you can almost imagine that when they got to the end of the scripture, their eyes would have flitted back to the top, and scanned through it again, searching, then maybe they would have gone back a third time, sure that they had missed the key. Maybe they even turned the scroll over, to see if there was a continuation on the back, and when they found nothing they would have sat there, puzzled over what had not been said -- for what had been left unsaid would loom as large as the prophecy itself.
Isaiah had made a rookie mistake -- in all his impassioned writing, in all the glory and wonder of the future that flowed, God-inspired, from the tip of his writing instrument, he had forgotten one of the W's. The "what" was clear, the "who" was there, the "where" had been defined, and the "why" was obvious to anyone who had grown up in an underpowered nation that had the misfortune to live in the buffer zone between a succession of mighty empires. But the "when" was missing.
There was no hint of when this great savior would come into their lives.
This was not an insignificant detail. To people struggling for answers, desperate for hope, it was critical to know when delivery would come. Would it be next Wednesday? Next month? A year from now? Or (shudder) five years from now? The coming of the Messiah was all well and good, but inquiring minds want to know -- need to know -- when to expect him.
In fact, it was not to be a matter of weeks or months, or even years. It would be more than seven centuries before the Messiah drew his first breath, so the faithful had to content themselves with prayer, and teaching the prophecy to their children. The people of Judah were getting a lesson in God Time.
It's a difficult lesson to learn: God's actions take place in God's good time, and not always according to our schedule. We may look around and see desperate circumstances, and wonder why God doesn't do something now. We may look around at our own lives, or at the world around us, and wonder why God doesn't do something now to answer our prayers, to end the problems we see, to bring resolution to uncertainty.
If you would truly question God about his timing, about his way of doing things, it would be appropriate to first build a star, or create a new species of animal out of nothing but -- well, nothing. Once you can do that, you may be in a position to challenge his judgment on an equal footing.
Sometimes, in retrospect, it's easy to see -- or at least guess -- why things happened when they did, the way they did. We can see that if Jesus had been born in Isaiah's time, the spread of Christianity would have been a far different proposition than it was 700+ years later, when the disciples could spread the gospel along a network of Roman roads under the stability of a Roman empire that kept the peace (more or less) throughout the Mediterranean basin, and beyond.
But sometimes, as hard as we look, we can't see the "why" behind the "when." And it's in those times that we have to trust in God above all things. God, who can grasp the entire span of the universe, through all time, in a single moment of clarity, knows how to arrange his date book. Even if we don't understand now -- and may never understand -- why things happen the way the do, when they do, it's enough to know that he's in charge, and that whatever happens to us here is just a fleeting instant in the time line of eternity.
The twin virtues of patience and prayer are separate, but conjoined, for although they each represent something distinct, they share a common beating heart: faith. It's faith that bolsters our patience to endure when reason says there's no hope, and it's faith that tells us that when we pray, there's someone actually listening -- someone who cares.
Our adoption? We did finally hear from the agency, after a couple of months... but that's another story.
One Bright Light
Frank Ramirez
The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness - on them light has shined.
-- Isaiah 9:2
It's not easy to get to Chaco Culture National Historical Park. Located in the northwest corner of New Mexico, it's an isolated part of an isolated state. You turn off a lonely two-lane highway to drive another twenty miles down a largely unimproved road.
Bring along whatever food or shelter you think you'll need, because there are no hotels, motels, or even soft-sided cabins, but there is a campground for you to pitch your tent. Water is available if you run out, which is good, because it gets awfully hot there in the summer -- and terribly cold in the winter.
Chaco Canyon might get ten inches of rain a year -- in a good year. From the Visitor Center - very informative though not particularly large -- you drive out to the canyon itself. The Fajada Butte is a recognizable landmark. A sluggish creek might run through the Chaco Wash if there is water. The forbidding cliffs rise on both sides.
Why take such trouble to get to this isolated place? Because a thousand years ago this was the center of the universe for the Anasazi people. From this place a web of roads spread out, straight and true, in all directions. Bells from Oregon, Macaws from Mexico, pottery from east as far as the Great Plains, and west all the way to the coast, a wonderful traffic of goods passed through here.
Corn was planted on every available plot of land with the hope that some of it at least would drink deeply of the sparse rains that fell. Every plant in the desert environment had a use. Turkeys provided eggs and feathers, dogs provided protection for the valuable turkeys and other valuable goods, and the people, whose excavated teeth tell vivid stories of good crops and famine as accurately as tree rings chart the passing years, hunted, gathered, harvested, and most of all -- built.
Here in Chaco Canyon are the ruins of buildings larger than anything that would be found in North America or Europe until the late nineteenth century. No one knows what language these people spoke or their names for the places they left behind, but later explores discovered Pueblo Bonito, four to five stories high with over six hundred rooms and over twenty of the rooms known to later Puebloans as Kivas, where dance and worship and ritual mixed together. Each of the Great Houses, as they are known, took centuries to build. Thanks to dendrochronology, the science of dating by tree rings, researchers can pinpoint what year each addition to each of the Great Houses was built.
A little past Pueblo Bonito there is a six-and-a-half mile round trip hike to the PeÒasco Blanco ruins. The walk would be worth it just for the opportunity to walk by a series of petroglyphs along one rock face, and to walk among the ruins. But near the end of the trail there is a half-mile detour that reads: "Supernova Pictograph."
There, on an overhang providing next to no shelter on a rock face, is simple painting.
There is a hand, a crescent moon, and a many-rayed star.
On July 4, 1054 the crescent moon would have risen in the predawn eastern sky. It is quite possible that some of the Anasazi would already be up, working hard before the heat of the day made such labor difficult. The sky was very important to these ancient people. Their buildings were aligned with the risings of the moon and sun at key seasons. On the nearby Fajada Butte were symbols of the cosmos carved into the rock in just the right spot so that daggers of light shone through the heart of these drawings on the winter and summer solstice, as well as both equinoxes.
So it is likely that on that morning over a thousand years ago there were people looking up in the sky to see an amazing event -- the appearance of a supernova in the constellation we know as Taurus.
In our time that supernova is now identified with the object known as the Crab Nebula. It blew up with tremendous force five thousand years ago and its light still took four thousand years to get here. Scientists estimate that if it had been less than fifty light years from our planet all life would have been destroyed.
This new star so bright that it appeared not as a twinkling dot but as a many-rayed object. Moreover, when the sun arose shortly thereafter the new star did not disappear. For the next twenty-three days. It was visible in the night sky for nearly two years.
Many believe that the pictograph at Chaco Canyon commemorates that supernova. There are other pictographs throughout the southwest that seem to show the crescent moon and a bright star together. It was only in the American Southwest that the Supernova appeared next to the crescent moon when it burst into the sky.
The Anasazi were not the only ones to observe this wonder. Chinese and Japanese astronomers also saw the star and wrote down precisely when it first appeared and when it finally faded from view 653 days later.
We do not know with what wonder and awe the Anasazi viewed the star, though it was significant enough to commemorate.
What is known is that evidently it was not noticed or seen by Europeans, who did not leave behind any records of this wonderful event. A great light shone, and it was all for nothing in Christendom. It shone for nothing.
What is the use of a great light that shines upon the people living in darkness if no one takes notice of it? What is the point if its wonder does not touch our hearts, nor directs our thoughts beyond ourselves to something greater?
**********************************************
How to Share Stories
You have good stories to share, probably more than you know: personal stories as well as stories from others that you have used over the years. If you have a story you like, whether fictional or "really happened," authored by you or a brief excerpt from a favorite book, send it to StoryShare for review. Simply email the story to us at storyshare@sermonsuite.com.
**************
StoryShare, January 27, 2008, issue.
Copyright 2008 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 517 South Main Street, Lima, Ohio 45804.
