Category: Christianity in America

As I mentioned in a previous post, several years ago my husband was in the hospital with kidney stones, pneumonia and a rapid heart beat. He went in on a Saturday. While sitting in church that Sunday, vacillating between steeling myself for the possibility of single-parenthood and hoping that my husband would come out OK, the pastor shared that someone had received a word from God that God was going to heal someones heart.

I wept inside with relief. That word was for my husband! After church the kids and I went to the hospital to visit him. He was doing much better. I don’t remember if his heartbeat was all the way back to normal, but within the next day or so, he was able to come home and was back at work within the week.

The next Sunday during the opening worship songs, I felt compelled to let the pastor know about my husband’s healing. My pastor was thrilled to learn of it, sharing that he had felt called to talk to the congregation about healing again this Sunday if he heard some confirmations of healings from previous words given.

So share what God has done for you – had I not shared, words of healing for others may not have been shared that Sunday. I am so thankful for the person who shared the word for my husband’s healing – I had been too overwhelmed to pray for him much myself.

Thanks to all of you who bolster my faith!

The Bible makes it very clear that God considers Israel to be the center of the world. Since Christ came, all people are considered equal in God’s eyes, but the Bible still talks about how Jerusalem will be a central part of the end of the current ball that we call home.

Growing up I was taught about the world from an America-centric world map. You know, the one where North and South America are in the center and poor Asia is chopped in two, its pieces clinging to the east and west edges. I’m happy to report that most of the time my kids are taught using maps with the Amricas on the west edge, as they ought to be.

While reading a magazine article about the Middle East the other day, accompanied by a world map with the prime meridian running down the center, I was suddenly struck by how close Israel is to the geographic center of the world.

If the Atlantic Ocean were not there, and the Americas were butted up to Europe and Africa, the prime meridian would be a lot closer to Israel than its current English location. And if the continents were centered on the globe from north to south, rather than their current configuration of favoring the northern hemisphere, then the equator would be pretty close to Israel, too.

I guess it should come as no surprise, but I am still amazed. God truly thinks of everything to get our attention and help us understand His ways.

I got a real kick out of this line in the front page article of our local paper, the St. Paul Pioneer Press:

“More and more environmentalists and scientists talk about the planet as a complex system, one that human beings must aggressively monitor, manage and sometimes re-engineer.”

I don’t know about the whole “re-engineer” idea, but the “manage” part sure sounds familiar:

Then God said, “Let us make human beings in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

So  God created humans in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

Genesis 1:26 – 28

That term, “rule,” sounds a little harsh, unless we remember what God means by that.

Jesus said to them, “The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those who exercise autority over them call themselves Benefactors. But you are not to be like that. Instead, the greatest among you should be like the youngest, and the one who rules like the one who serves.”

Luke 22:25 – 26

Several years ago we planned to take a family trip to China to visit friends, so had to get new passports for our kids. However, after turning the house upside down several times we could not find the kids’ birth certificates. Before I got around to getting new copies, we decided that then was not the best time to go, so scrapped the idea of updating the passports.

Fast forward a couple of years, and listen to my daughter whine at me about how her good friend at school goes to Mexico over spring break, and why can’t she go to another country for vacation? I explained that to go out of the country she would need a new passport. “Then get me one,” was her reply. So a month or so ago I promised her that I would go get new copies of her and her brother’s birth certificates so that we could get updated passports. I told her that I didn’t think we would go to Mexico anytime soon, but could go to Canada. She thought that would be fine.

So as not to be chastised when I picked her up after school, I dutifully made my way from school to the county courthouse. On the way to the courthouse, I passed by another  location of a restaurant that my husband and I had just tried several weeks before, and had loved! I thought of friends who  lived in the area that we hadn’t seen in awhile, and decided that I would invite them to meet us at that restaurant for lunch.

I got the birth certificates, drove home and immediately got onto my email to send an invite to our friends. They were available, which brings us to today (well, technically yesterday, since it is now past midnight).

While enjoying lunch together, my husband, who is an electrical engineer by training, shared how God had helped him fix an electrical problem with the neighbor’s car earlier in the week. Our friend’s perked up, “Really? We have a possible electrical problem with our car that we were told may be very expensive to fix, so were just praying about how we could deal with it. Would you come and look at our car?”

Since we had nothing planned for the afternoon, no problem. So my husband worked on the car with the guy, while I sat inside chatting with the gal. Somehow she and I got on the subject of me being a retired technical writer, so she asked if I would be willing to read their newsletter and edit it. Well, ok. I enjoy doing that, so she went and got it.

Several hours later, with the car running, the newsletter edited and a lot of fun conversation along the way, it was time for my husband and I to go. We had a houseful of friends coming over for a Christmas party this evening. As we were heading out, the guy mentioned that he would like to get the newsletter into a great looking format. I have no skill in that area (as you may have noticed from my near-total reliance on the formatting ability of the WordPress team) but I have a friend, we’ll call him M, who is quite talented in graphic design who was going to be at the Christmas party tonight!

The guy was thrilled with that possiblity. After asking M’s wife if he actually had time to work on such a project, and getting her ok to talk to him about it, I approached him. M was thrilled to use his skills to help the guy and in turn to network with the guy, as they both are in similar lines of work – bringing the Gospel to people both here in the US and around the world.

I’m thinking angels took those first birth certificates!