Stand Firm
Stories
A Story To Live By
Stand Firm
After these things the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision, "Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.
Genesis 15:1
Therefore, my brothers and sisters, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, my beloved.
Philippians 4:1
I had a visitation from an angel when I was sixteen years old. That experience anchored my soul through times of turbulence. I was praying at the time, kneeling at my bedside, but I was not sleepy and was fully conscious. The angel's appearance was not what I would have imagined had I been trying to conceive of such a being. I knew, though not a single word was spoken, that it was the angel Gabriel. He stood in the corner of my room, tall, luminous, and commanding. His hands were extremely long, like the hands in an El Greco painting, and his face was gaunt. Probably the visit lasted only a few seconds, but, like other numinous experiences I've read about, it seemed timeless. The appearance was so startling, so completely unbidden, that I can picture it as vividly today as I saw it then. It was a real experience, not a hallucination, and I believe it was intended precisely as an anchor to hold my faith steady through repeated exposures to ideas and philosophies that might otherwise have shifted it.
John Killinger, Ten Things I Learned Wrong from a Conservative Church, The Crossroads Publishing Company, p. 132.
Shining Moments
Deliverance
David Eaton
For he will hide me in his shelter in the day of trouble; he will conceal me under the cover of his tent; he will set me high on a rock.
Psalm 27:5
I grew up on a farm in southern Minnesota. In 1962, my father and uncle shared several farm implements, so we would help each other out. On an October Saturday, I was helping my Dad pick corn on Uncle Jerry's farm. The day was getting late but Dad wanted to finish so he could take the equipment back to our farm to get started picking corn on Monday. (We never did farm work on Sunday, for that was the Lord's Day and a day of rest.) By the time we finished picking corn, it was dusk and our farm was over 2 miles away. Neither tractor had lights so we were in a hurry to get home. With instructions to follow him, I drove a tractor and wagon. I was probably 1,500 feet behind his equipment (tractor, corn picker, and wagon). It was getting very dark, but we were nearing the home place.
As I came around a corner, going full throttle (18 mph) on the John Deere B, (9 year olds love going full throttle), I met a vehicle was coming from the other direction. Its headlights were on high beam and it had stopped on its side of the road in front of me. The light blinded me and suddenly, right in front of me, was the back of the wagon connected to the tractor my Dad was driving, stopped on his side (and mine) of the road! My older brother had come looking for us and had stopped to talk with Dad. Dad didn't realize I could not see his stopped equipment.
I had just enough time to make one hard attempt to disengage the hand clutch -- but it wouldn't disengage. I was standing behind the steering wheel -- much like a ship's captain -- when I felt the tractor being steered through my arms. My tractor and wagon entered the ditch, missing the stationary wagon by a foot, drove parallel to the wagon, corn picker, and tractor and came up out of the ditch, missing the front of my Dad's tractor by a foot! After returning to the roadway I once again attempted to disengage the hand clutch, and this time it released easily. My Dad came running and, with frantic tears in his voice, cried out, "Are you all right?" Can you imagine what had gone through his mind and heart through all of this? Calmly, I assured him that I was fine, but had lost my cap in the process.
Upon further review, some very interesting facts turned up. It was understandable to just miss the back of the stationary wagon when I entered the ditch, because I had reacted as immediately as I could. But why did I miss the front of the tractor by only a foot when coming out of the ditch? That question wasn't answered until the next morning when my Dad went back to look over the scene in the daylight. Had I stayed in the ditch one second longer, I would have hit a field road culvert, connecting a farmer's field with the road, and certainly would have flipped the tractor over. He also discovered a barbed-wired fence on the field side of the ditch that could have caused me injury or worse if my tractor had veered too far to the right. And, it would have taken a professional stunt driver to have entered and left the steep ditch at just the right angle to avoid tipping over.
Anyone investigating this scene would have been foolish to suggest that it was skill, or even luck, for a 9-year-old boy to have maneuvered a tractor at full throttle through all of this while standing up! I knew that, through the power of God, Someone else had driven that tractor into and then out of that ditch, though through my hands and arms.
My mother was the first to interpret that God had a special plan and purpose for my life. He had preserved me in a special way and I had profoundly experienced His presence. Maybe that was the day, way back 40 years ago, that I first began moving away from being a farmer and toward becoming a minister....
David Eaton is pastor of Zion Covenant Church in Ellsworth, Wisconsin. His father, Kenneth Eaton, at the age of 78, is still farming the land mentioned in his story. David and his wife, Shawnee, have three sons, Tim, Kyle, and Scott. David has served four congregations in the Evangelical Covenant Church over the past 22 years.
Good Stories
The White Buffalo People
John Sumwalt
Then he said to him, "I am the Lord who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess." But he said, "O Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it?" He said to him, "Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtle dove and a young pigeon." He brought his all these and cut them in two, laying each half over against the other; but he did not cut the birds in two.
When the sun had gone down and it was dark, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, "To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river of the Euphrates...."
Genesis 15:7-10, 17-18
Once upon a time, long, long ago, when the world was young and people lived in caves deep in the bowels of the earth, there was a nation known as the White Buffalo people. The Buffalo people had a covenant with the great spirit Yah. The symbol of the covenant was the white buffalo, a rare creature, a freak of nature which occurred naturally in the great herds only once every several generations. Because of their symbolic importance, a sacred stock had been bred over the years and kept in sheltered glens near the tribal caves. The white bulls grew to be eight feet high and weighed more than 2,500 pounds. When a great white bull bellowed, the whole forest and the prairie around were filled with his mighty voice. The sound echoed from cavern to cavern, deep in the caves where the tribes made their home. As long as the voice of the great bulls could be heard in the nation, the people felt safe and secure. They knew that Yah was protecting them.
Every seven years, the 12 tribes of the nation would gather at the mother cave to renew their covenant. The mother cave was the place where Yah had made the covenant with the earliest ancestors of the nation, Ebrayah and Clarah. Every person in every tribe could trace his or her roots back to Ebrayah and Clarah. So, when they all came together it was a great reunion.
The celebration began with the lighting of the sacred fire. Every tribe brought a log specially cut from a tree in front of their cave. A priest from each tribe, in turn, threw the log representing his tribe into the fire pit and shouted, "This log represents the tribe of Oolah, praise Yah." "This log represents the tribe of Eelah, praise Yah," until there were 12 logs piled high in the fire pit. Then the high priest brought a torch which had been kept burning in the back of the mother cave for seven years. He walked around the sacred logs three times, holding the torch high above his head, and as he walked he chanted:
Fire, fire, breath of Yah,
Burn, burn, reveal your power.
And then, as he lit the sacred logs, the people breathed, "Yah, Yah, Yah," until the flames were leaping high into the sky. When the fire was burning its brightest, they all joined hands and danced around the fire singing:
Buffalo, Come and sing your song.
We are here to greet you son of Yah.
Consecrate the covenant
Green grass, blue skies ever
Praise to Yah, Praise to Yah,
Our almighty Protector, Yah.
They danced and sang until they fell down exhausted. Then came the highest, holiest moment of the gathering.
Twelve priests, dressed in buffalo robes, came out of the mother cave leading the biggest white buffalo anyone had ever seen. He was well over nine feet tall. There was no doubt that he was the biggest and the fiercest creature in all the land. He followed the priests as if he knew exactly what he had to do. When they came to the center of the circle, the buffalo raised his head and bellowed into the night. The sound was so loud that the earth seemed to tremble beneath his feet. At that very instant the high priest raised his spear and thrust it deep into the buffalo's heart, and the great beast fell down dead. Quickly the priests drew their knives and cut the carcass in two. Gently, and solemnly, they placed the two halves side by side on the sacred fire. Then the high priest picked up a flaming torch and marched in a figure eight around the two halves chanting;
Fire, fire, breath of Yah,
Burn, burn, reveal your power.
The grass is green, the sky is blue,
The buffalo people depend on you.
When the chant ended, all of the people came forward, one by one, and knelt in front of the fire. The high priest dipped his finger into the white buffalo's blood and then marked each one's forehead with the sign of the covenant, saying:
Blood brother, remember the promise.
Blood sister, remember the promise.
The last one to come was a little boy named Joshua. His eyes filled with wonder and amazement as the high priest marked his forehead with blood and said, "Remember the promise." As the priest turned to leave, Joshua said very quietly, as if talking to Yah alone, "I'll remember."
To be continued next week. Send your fax number to jsumwalt@naspa.net to receive the music to "The Sacred Fire Song."
Scrap Pile
Encouragement
"Therefore, my brothers and sisters, whom I love and long for, my joy and my crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, my beloved."
Philippians 4:1
When Walt Whitman was a young, aspiring writer-long before he established himself as one of America's premier poets -- he had a very difficult time getting published. In fact, one of his most famous books, "Leaves of Grass," was rejected so many times that Whitman published it himself. Working with a little print shop, he produced 800 copies.
In order to sell the book he purchased newspaper ads, sent review copies to book critics and prominent citizens, and dragged copies from bookstore to bookstore in a large canvas bag. There is no record that he sold even a single copy.
Yet, worse than no sales was the fact the book was denounced by those who received complimentary copies from the author. "A heterogeneous mass of bombast, vulgarity, and nonsense," wrote one critic. "We can conceive of no better reward than the lash," declared another. Poet John Greenleaf Whittier reportedly threw his copy of the book out of a window.
Then came a letter from the preeminent poet of that day, Ralph Waldo Emerson. The letter contained three short sentences that gave Walt Whitman the encouragement he needed to keep on writing. The letter read:
"Dear Sir, I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift: 'Leaves of Grass.' I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I greet you at the beginning of a great career."
Perhaps it is because modern life is so hectic and strained that the fine and gentle art of encouragement is so often overlooked. Literally, the word means "to put courage into" someone.
By Victor M. Parachin
Thanks to WITandWISDOM(tm) http://www.witandwisdom.org
**********************************************
New Book
The second volume in the vision series, Sharing Visions: Divine Revelations, Angels, and Holy Coincidences, is available from CSS Publishing Company. For more information about the book visit the CSS website at http://www.csspub.com. You can order any of our books on the CSS website (see the complete list below); they are also available from www.amazon.com and at many Christian bookstores. Or simply e-mail your order to orders@csspub.com or phone 1-800-241-4056. (If you live outside the U.S., phone 419-227-1818.) Click on any title for more information.
Books by John & Jo Sumwalt
Sharing Visions: Divine Revelations, Angels, and Holy Coincidences
Vision Stories: True Accounts of Visions, Angels, and Healing Miracles
Life Stories: A Study in Christian Decision Making
Lectionary Stories: Forty Tellable Tales for Cycle C
Lectionary Stories: Forty Tellable Tales for Cycle A
Lectionary Stories: Forty Tellable Tales for Cycle B
Lectionary Tales for the Pulpit: 62 Stories for Cycle B
**************
StoryShare, March 7, 2004, issue.
Copyright 2004 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., P.O. Box 4503, Lima, Ohio 45802-4503.
Stand Firm
After these things the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision, "Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.
Genesis 15:1
Therefore, my brothers and sisters, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, my beloved.
Philippians 4:1
I had a visitation from an angel when I was sixteen years old. That experience anchored my soul through times of turbulence. I was praying at the time, kneeling at my bedside, but I was not sleepy and was fully conscious. The angel's appearance was not what I would have imagined had I been trying to conceive of such a being. I knew, though not a single word was spoken, that it was the angel Gabriel. He stood in the corner of my room, tall, luminous, and commanding. His hands were extremely long, like the hands in an El Greco painting, and his face was gaunt. Probably the visit lasted only a few seconds, but, like other numinous experiences I've read about, it seemed timeless. The appearance was so startling, so completely unbidden, that I can picture it as vividly today as I saw it then. It was a real experience, not a hallucination, and I believe it was intended precisely as an anchor to hold my faith steady through repeated exposures to ideas and philosophies that might otherwise have shifted it.
John Killinger, Ten Things I Learned Wrong from a Conservative Church, The Crossroads Publishing Company, p. 132.
Shining Moments
Deliverance
David Eaton
For he will hide me in his shelter in the day of trouble; he will conceal me under the cover of his tent; he will set me high on a rock.
Psalm 27:5
I grew up on a farm in southern Minnesota. In 1962, my father and uncle shared several farm implements, so we would help each other out. On an October Saturday, I was helping my Dad pick corn on Uncle Jerry's farm. The day was getting late but Dad wanted to finish so he could take the equipment back to our farm to get started picking corn on Monday. (We never did farm work on Sunday, for that was the Lord's Day and a day of rest.) By the time we finished picking corn, it was dusk and our farm was over 2 miles away. Neither tractor had lights so we were in a hurry to get home. With instructions to follow him, I drove a tractor and wagon. I was probably 1,500 feet behind his equipment (tractor, corn picker, and wagon). It was getting very dark, but we were nearing the home place.
As I came around a corner, going full throttle (18 mph) on the John Deere B, (9 year olds love going full throttle), I met a vehicle was coming from the other direction. Its headlights were on high beam and it had stopped on its side of the road in front of me. The light blinded me and suddenly, right in front of me, was the back of the wagon connected to the tractor my Dad was driving, stopped on his side (and mine) of the road! My older brother had come looking for us and had stopped to talk with Dad. Dad didn't realize I could not see his stopped equipment.
I had just enough time to make one hard attempt to disengage the hand clutch -- but it wouldn't disengage. I was standing behind the steering wheel -- much like a ship's captain -- when I felt the tractor being steered through my arms. My tractor and wagon entered the ditch, missing the stationary wagon by a foot, drove parallel to the wagon, corn picker, and tractor and came up out of the ditch, missing the front of my Dad's tractor by a foot! After returning to the roadway I once again attempted to disengage the hand clutch, and this time it released easily. My Dad came running and, with frantic tears in his voice, cried out, "Are you all right?" Can you imagine what had gone through his mind and heart through all of this? Calmly, I assured him that I was fine, but had lost my cap in the process.
Upon further review, some very interesting facts turned up. It was understandable to just miss the back of the stationary wagon when I entered the ditch, because I had reacted as immediately as I could. But why did I miss the front of the tractor by only a foot when coming out of the ditch? That question wasn't answered until the next morning when my Dad went back to look over the scene in the daylight. Had I stayed in the ditch one second longer, I would have hit a field road culvert, connecting a farmer's field with the road, and certainly would have flipped the tractor over. He also discovered a barbed-wired fence on the field side of the ditch that could have caused me injury or worse if my tractor had veered too far to the right. And, it would have taken a professional stunt driver to have entered and left the steep ditch at just the right angle to avoid tipping over.
Anyone investigating this scene would have been foolish to suggest that it was skill, or even luck, for a 9-year-old boy to have maneuvered a tractor at full throttle through all of this while standing up! I knew that, through the power of God, Someone else had driven that tractor into and then out of that ditch, though through my hands and arms.
My mother was the first to interpret that God had a special plan and purpose for my life. He had preserved me in a special way and I had profoundly experienced His presence. Maybe that was the day, way back 40 years ago, that I first began moving away from being a farmer and toward becoming a minister....
David Eaton is pastor of Zion Covenant Church in Ellsworth, Wisconsin. His father, Kenneth Eaton, at the age of 78, is still farming the land mentioned in his story. David and his wife, Shawnee, have three sons, Tim, Kyle, and Scott. David has served four congregations in the Evangelical Covenant Church over the past 22 years.
Good Stories
The White Buffalo People
John Sumwalt
Then he said to him, "I am the Lord who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess." But he said, "O Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it?" He said to him, "Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtle dove and a young pigeon." He brought his all these and cut them in two, laying each half over against the other; but he did not cut the birds in two.
When the sun had gone down and it was dark, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, "To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river of the Euphrates...."
Genesis 15:7-10, 17-18
Once upon a time, long, long ago, when the world was young and people lived in caves deep in the bowels of the earth, there was a nation known as the White Buffalo people. The Buffalo people had a covenant with the great spirit Yah. The symbol of the covenant was the white buffalo, a rare creature, a freak of nature which occurred naturally in the great herds only once every several generations. Because of their symbolic importance, a sacred stock had been bred over the years and kept in sheltered glens near the tribal caves. The white bulls grew to be eight feet high and weighed more than 2,500 pounds. When a great white bull bellowed, the whole forest and the prairie around were filled with his mighty voice. The sound echoed from cavern to cavern, deep in the caves where the tribes made their home. As long as the voice of the great bulls could be heard in the nation, the people felt safe and secure. They knew that Yah was protecting them.
Every seven years, the 12 tribes of the nation would gather at the mother cave to renew their covenant. The mother cave was the place where Yah had made the covenant with the earliest ancestors of the nation, Ebrayah and Clarah. Every person in every tribe could trace his or her roots back to Ebrayah and Clarah. So, when they all came together it was a great reunion.
The celebration began with the lighting of the sacred fire. Every tribe brought a log specially cut from a tree in front of their cave. A priest from each tribe, in turn, threw the log representing his tribe into the fire pit and shouted, "This log represents the tribe of Oolah, praise Yah." "This log represents the tribe of Eelah, praise Yah," until there were 12 logs piled high in the fire pit. Then the high priest brought a torch which had been kept burning in the back of the mother cave for seven years. He walked around the sacred logs three times, holding the torch high above his head, and as he walked he chanted:
Fire, fire, breath of Yah,
Burn, burn, reveal your power.
And then, as he lit the sacred logs, the people breathed, "Yah, Yah, Yah," until the flames were leaping high into the sky. When the fire was burning its brightest, they all joined hands and danced around the fire singing:
Buffalo, Come and sing your song.
We are here to greet you son of Yah.
Consecrate the covenant
Green grass, blue skies ever
Praise to Yah, Praise to Yah,
Our almighty Protector, Yah.
They danced and sang until they fell down exhausted. Then came the highest, holiest moment of the gathering.
Twelve priests, dressed in buffalo robes, came out of the mother cave leading the biggest white buffalo anyone had ever seen. He was well over nine feet tall. There was no doubt that he was the biggest and the fiercest creature in all the land. He followed the priests as if he knew exactly what he had to do. When they came to the center of the circle, the buffalo raised his head and bellowed into the night. The sound was so loud that the earth seemed to tremble beneath his feet. At that very instant the high priest raised his spear and thrust it deep into the buffalo's heart, and the great beast fell down dead. Quickly the priests drew their knives and cut the carcass in two. Gently, and solemnly, they placed the two halves side by side on the sacred fire. Then the high priest picked up a flaming torch and marched in a figure eight around the two halves chanting;
Fire, fire, breath of Yah,
Burn, burn, reveal your power.
The grass is green, the sky is blue,
The buffalo people depend on you.
When the chant ended, all of the people came forward, one by one, and knelt in front of the fire. The high priest dipped his finger into the white buffalo's blood and then marked each one's forehead with the sign of the covenant, saying:
Blood brother, remember the promise.
Blood sister, remember the promise.
The last one to come was a little boy named Joshua. His eyes filled with wonder and amazement as the high priest marked his forehead with blood and said, "Remember the promise." As the priest turned to leave, Joshua said very quietly, as if talking to Yah alone, "I'll remember."
To be continued next week. Send your fax number to jsumwalt@naspa.net to receive the music to "The Sacred Fire Song."
Scrap Pile
Encouragement
"Therefore, my brothers and sisters, whom I love and long for, my joy and my crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, my beloved."
Philippians 4:1
When Walt Whitman was a young, aspiring writer-long before he established himself as one of America's premier poets -- he had a very difficult time getting published. In fact, one of his most famous books, "Leaves of Grass," was rejected so many times that Whitman published it himself. Working with a little print shop, he produced 800 copies.
In order to sell the book he purchased newspaper ads, sent review copies to book critics and prominent citizens, and dragged copies from bookstore to bookstore in a large canvas bag. There is no record that he sold even a single copy.
Yet, worse than no sales was the fact the book was denounced by those who received complimentary copies from the author. "A heterogeneous mass of bombast, vulgarity, and nonsense," wrote one critic. "We can conceive of no better reward than the lash," declared another. Poet John Greenleaf Whittier reportedly threw his copy of the book out of a window.
Then came a letter from the preeminent poet of that day, Ralph Waldo Emerson. The letter contained three short sentences that gave Walt Whitman the encouragement he needed to keep on writing. The letter read:
"Dear Sir, I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift: 'Leaves of Grass.' I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I greet you at the beginning of a great career."
Perhaps it is because modern life is so hectic and strained that the fine and gentle art of encouragement is so often overlooked. Literally, the word means "to put courage into" someone.
By Victor M. Parachin
Thanks to WITandWISDOM(tm) http://www.witandwisdom.org
**********************************************
New Book
The second volume in the vision series, Sharing Visions: Divine Revelations, Angels, and Holy Coincidences, is available from CSS Publishing Company. For more information about the book visit the CSS website at http://www.csspub.com. You can order any of our books on the CSS website (see the complete list below); they are also available from www.amazon.com and at many Christian bookstores. Or simply e-mail your order to orders@csspub.com or phone 1-800-241-4056. (If you live outside the U.S., phone 419-227-1818.) Click on any title for more information.
Books by John & Jo Sumwalt
Sharing Visions: Divine Revelations, Angels, and Holy Coincidences
Vision Stories: True Accounts of Visions, Angels, and Healing Miracles
Life Stories: A Study in Christian Decision Making
Lectionary Stories: Forty Tellable Tales for Cycle C
Lectionary Stories: Forty Tellable Tales for Cycle A
Lectionary Stories: Forty Tellable Tales for Cycle B
Lectionary Tales for the Pulpit: 62 Stories for Cycle B
**************
StoryShare, March 7, 2004, issue.
Copyright 2004 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., P.O. Box 4503, Lima, Ohio 45802-4503.
