Our church has started something that is new to me.  Women sign up to be a Christian "mentor" and others sign up to be mentored.  You submit an experience survey and they pair you up.  It is not random.  People are placed using a number of criteria.  The point is to make a relationship.

Tonight, I will meet the two women that were given to me to mentor.  This is going to be interesting.  From my background survey, there must have been something from my life that will be helpful to these two.  What is it?  I have no idea.  I do know that the staff that paired people up prayed for hours over those decisions.  It was not done lightly.

All of us need people to encourage us.  That is how we grow.  But sometimes we forget that we are the ones who are supposed to be the encourager.  We get so busy with our own problems and frustrations that we look "in" rather than looking out.  There is a world out there and it is hurting.

My life has been a journey.  Yours has, too.  Those experiences are stories worth telling.  They will help someone who is suffering similar road blocks in their life.  I cannot begin to tell you how much it has helped me when someone shared something that had happened to them and how they dealt with it.  We all like to hear a good story.

Not all stories turn out happily ever after.  Suffering is part of life.  And when you have tunneled your way through one of those times with the help of God's grace, you are equipped to help someone else.  And that is what God has called us to do.  Love our neighbors as we love ourselves.

This program may be chancy.  The mentors are not trained professionals.  But we are listeners.  And that is what most struggling Christians need.  Someone to listen.  I can do that.  So can you.

Let your light shine.  
 

       I got through the first five chapters of Matthew yesterday in the class I taught.  In 45 minutes.  (That is a lot of material.)   I never teach a class from the Bible that I don't learn something, or solidify something that I already knew.   Here is the 2 minute version.

        Matthew is writing to Jews.  His primary purpose is to tell them that Old Testament Prophecy has been fulfilled in the person of Jesus.  The King has come.  And throughout the book, he repeats what Jesus had to say about the kingdom.  The kingdom of God.  The kingdom of heaven.  He starts by giving the genealogy of Jesus--His right to the throne.  And then in the last part of the first chapter, he explains that Joseph was not the father of Jesus by telling us about the angel's visit to Joseph.

       In Chapter 2, Matthew emphasizes the Kingship of Jesus through the story of the wise men who told Herod that they had seen a star and were there to worship the new King.  (Herod imploded.)

Matthew starts Chapter 3, by telling the Jews that another of their Old Testament prophecies had come true in the person of John the Baptist.  Matt. 3:3  "For this is he (John) that was spoken of by the prophet Esaias, saying, The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord (the King), make his paths straight..."  (Fulfilled prophecy.  We base much of our faith on it.)

        Chapter 4 concerns the temptation of Jesus by Satan.  Jesus answers by quoting scripture.

Chapter 5 gives us the nine Beatitudes.  The "Blessed are you if...."  And in verse 16 Jesus gives us instructions:  "Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven."  You just got the 45 min. condensed version.

1.  Let your light shine.   2.  Do good works.   3.  Glorify the Father.   (4.  Just do it.)
Thy Kingdom come.

I am going to teach a class on Sunday since my teacher is going to be gone and asked me to fill in.  I am excited about that.  Opening the Word of God in the fellowship of others is always a good thing.  God said, "For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them..."  Matthew 18:20  God will be there.  It is like having a date.  Something to look forward to.  My life is pretty boring right now.  Like I said the other day, I get up with nothing to do and go to bed with it half done.

When my grandson Steven is in town, he usually takes me somewhere.  He called and asked me go go see Star Wars with him the other day.  We didn't get to go, but it was nice to be asked.

I find myself looking forward to the smallest of things.  I have a dentist appointment next week (I'm not looking forward to that) in Claremore, and there is a hole-in-the-wall diner there that makes the best hamburgers in the world.  Greasy browned buns and meat hanging over the edges.  I'm going to eat one.  And to top it off, they peel and slice their own potatoes for french fries.  Yum, yum, yum.  They have been there since the fifties--you know the kind of place I'm talking about.  Six booths and ten bar stools in a room no bigger than my bedroom.

We had a place like that in Pryor when I was growing up.  You couldn't go in, they just flopped a window open and handed you your hamburger.  It was on main street and couldn't have been any bigger than 6 by 10 feet.  Room for a grill and a cook.  Walking distance from school.
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I hope we can eat when we get to heaven.  It sounds like maybe we will.  In the last chapter of the Bible, in Revelation 22:1-2, it says: "And he showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb.  In the midst of the street...was the tree of life, which bore twelve manner of fruits..."  I'm taking it that that means we get to eat.   Hope so.

   

Becky called me this afternoon and said I should come to an estate sale that she was helping Pam (Edmond Antiques owner) get ready for.  I went.  Unbelievable.  These people had inherited boo-coo  antiques from an aunt and packed them away for a million years because they didn't like antiques.  There were boxes and boxes of beautiful things.   I've been interested in things that are old ever since I was in high school.  They represent a discarded past and I think that type of history is interesting.

This was unbelievable.  There were things in this estate sale that I had never seen before, and some things that I had only seen in collectors books.  Beautiful cranberry glass--Mary Gregory, Fenton, Flow-blue, and on and on.  Gobs and gobs of it.  Not to mention carved walnut furniture in every room.  And marble.  No, I didn't buy anything.  Mostly because there was so many beautiful things that I couldn't take it all in.  And I need more stuff like a moose needs a hat-rack.

Women like pretty things.  Most men could care less.  But in our defense, I think God made us that way.  We decorate our homes.  We decorate our walls.  We decorate ourselves.  We love "pretty."

But as the old sayings go:  "Pretty is as pretty does."  And you have heard people say:  "She is pretty on the inside as well as the outside."  Both sayings concern the heart.  The attitude.  The thoughts.

We need to make sure that we decorate the walls of our heart with the same attention to detail that we spend on the outside of our world.  "For the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance..."  Galatians 5:22-23a

We can all work on those attributes.  I've got a couple of them down.  I'm so-so on a few of the others.  But long-suffering?  Well now.  That's a different story.  Patience may be a virtue,  but it is not a virtue that I seem to have much of.  My spiritual work is cut out for me.  How about you?

So.  Ken was boiling, and every day he got madder and madder.  He was reassigned as the Operation Officer for the group as I recall.  Which should have made him happy.  But no.  It didn't undo all the bad things that had occurred.  Losing the squadron under the dishonorable pretenses of a Colonel who had lied was almost unbearable for him.  Losing 52 friendlies because the pilot, the man that replaced Ken,  didn't have any experience in the airplane, was even worse.  You just don't send someone into a fight the first week they are in-country that doesn't know what they are doing, especially when they are unfamiliar with the plane they are flying.  

So I wrote him and told him to get his Bible and a pair of scissors and for him to cut Romans 8:28 out of his Bible and throw it in the trash--because it certainly wasn't working for him.  I said that he needed a Bible that didn't have that verse in it.   Romans 8: 28  "And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose."

He wrote me back and told me that I was right.  That we don't always see the big picture, and that he couldn't see it right now.  He was too angry.  He also said that he had told the Group CO that he could take his airplanes and shove them where the sun didn't shine--that he was through flying.  (His words, not mine.  I'm not a Marine.)

All of this happened at the end of six months in Nam.  He spent the next six months directing sorties, and when he came home, he said that it was the best thing that could have happened because it gave him time to mentally download some of the horrors of war before he came home.  He didn't have to be in the middle of the fire and destruction.  He already had over 100 missions anyway.

He spent twenty one years flying for our country, and was hit seven times in Korea and once in Viet Nam.  All of it under the protection of God himself.  "...according to His purpose."  He served as a deacon, a youth director and a Bible teacher for the next forty-four years.  He was my hero.

I am a random Bible reader and I write all over the pages.  Down the margins and the space between chapters.  It is rather like a diary.  I found a note in my Bible that I wrote to Ken while he was in Viet Nam concerning a certain scripture that applied to a problem Ken was having.

Ken had been given command of VMA 311 in Viet Nam--an A-4 squadron.  (He had been the commanding officer of another A-4 squadron for two years in Laurel Bay, S.C.  So when he went to Nam, he had a lot of hours in the A-4.)   Getting a squadron of your own during conflict, well, that was as good as it gets for a fighter pilot.  The highlight of his 21 year career.  He was ecstatic.

Two weeks later, he had to take a damaged plane to Japan and was gone from his squadron for a couple of days.  During that two days, the Commanding Officer of the group transferred the squadron a old buddy who had just checked in.  Ken was furious.  Raging mad.  The CO told Ken--when he returned from Japan--that the general had approved the change, which turned out to be a lie.

A couple of days later, General Anderson had Ken to dinner at the O-Club and asked him what he was doing in Saigon.  "I'm here by your directive, sir."  To which the General said, "What do you mean?  I thought you were at Chu Lai commanding 311."  The General knew nothing at all about it.  Heads rolled.  But it was too late because that week, the replacement CO for VMA 311--who had been given the squadron by his old pal (even though he had no experience in the airplane), killed 52 friendlies.  He and his buddy who lied were to blame for the lives of 52 Americans.  I thought Ken was going to implode.  He had spent three years commanding an A-4 squadron stateside and had over a hundred missions in Korea.  The deaths of our ground troops was unbearable to him.  The fact that a Marine Colonel had lied was unforgivable.  He was angry, beyond consolation, and his letters home were full of it. 

Continued.........





  

When a man bought a shirt in the 40's, it had a one inch wide neck-band connecting the shirt to the collar.  If you couldn't afford to buy a new shirt every time your husband's collar became frayed (which no one I knew could) you learned a trick.  When we first got married, Ken and I were in that "no money" position, so his mother taught me what to do.

You take a razor blade and disconnect the collar from the neck-band, then you turn the collar over and reinsert it into the band and sew it all back together.  The frayed side is now underneath and doesn't show.  I turned many collars when we first got married.  And made children's clothes using fabric from adult things that had worn out elbows and knees.  Amazing what you can do when you have no money.  Today, we just throw things out.  Back then, everything was re-purposed.

I was really proud of the first Sunday-suit that I made for Scott (yes, I made some of his clothes, too).  It looked professional--if I do say so myself.  Problem was, when he put it on, I had put the buttons and buttonholes on the wrong sides.  I had never made a man's shirt or jacket from scratch before and I honestly didn't know that men and women's clothes had buttons and buttonholes on different sides.  Needless to say, he wouldn't wear it.

Most people in the 40's and 50's didn't have very much.  But since everyone was in the same boat,  it felt normal.  We never went hungry and we were never unbearably cold in the winter.  Summer, however, was a different story.  I didn't know anyone that had air-conditioning.  Everyone sweltered.  Now, when I say my prayers and get to the thanksgiving part, I have "Thank God for air-conditioning" on the list.  I do hate to sweat.  I don't want to go back to the good old days.

1 Timothy 5:8 (KJV)
But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith...1 Timothy 5:8a   I guess that means we are to keep at it using whatever we can muster.