O give thanks to the LORD, for His steadfast love endures forever. -Psalm 107:1, ESV
Oh, that men would give thanks to the LORD for His goodness, And for His wonderful works to the children of men! -Psalm 107:8,15,21,31
Let us come before His presence with thanksgiving.
Be thankful to Him, and bless His name.
-Psalm 95:2;100:4
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We call it our “round rock,” although it isn’t completely round. We hauled it all the way from New Jersey when we moved here because it meant something special.
Rocks were rare in our garden there. So it seemed a remarkable discovery, and because it was a novelty we used it as a sort of garden ornament. Here, we grow rocks! No kidding! You think you’ve got them all culled out of a plot, and next spring, up they spring, working their way to the top as if they could float!
But we still keep this rock as something special. It’s a reminder, that “thus far has the Lord helped us,” giving us confidence that He’ll help us along till the end. I think its name could be Ebenezer (1 Samuel 7:12).
That said, skip with me to my friend Pam’s most recent post, about other “Ebenezers” and a great new Thanksgiving/Advent “dare” idea that came to her as she was doing her own similar reflecting.
By the time I read her post, I’d already written the first two paragraphs above and taken the shot of our Ebenezer. (My picture was for the Scavenger Hunt Sunday photo search and share, which I decided not to share after all—no photo captures worth it!) And at the very time I clicked the link to read Pam’s Ebenezer post, I was pondering how to make our family Thanksgiving just that, what its name says.
It’s like pulling teeth. Or a kite that won’t fly, no matter how hard you run with it. Last year we got as far as cutting out leaves and stamping Thank You, God on them, but in the busy of fun and family never wrote our thank-you’s on them, let alone talking about them!
But this Ebenezer idea just might soar. (Can rocks fly? Well, anyhow…)
I’m about to go searching on our rocky ground. Or, if I get desperate enough, across the road and up and down the creek bed. I’ve often thought of adopting an Ebenezer stone to sit as a paperweight atop my desk, to remind me. How about an Ebby for each family member to take home? How about writing something on those paper leaves left over and tucked away from last year? Like how “this far the LORD has helped us…” in the varied aspects and adventures of 2013… And maybe even a “Rocky Ebenezer’s Notebook” for keeping track of “Ebenezer moments” in the coming year?
Yes, it’s worth a try…
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Maybe you’d like to take up the Ebenezer Dare in your own way? If so, it would be nice if you let Pam know, in a comment or link to her blog. And a specially blessed Thanksgiving to you!
“Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you.” John 14:27
Mid-November, and I am on the front porch. Bright sunlight, warm air. I sit in jeans and cotton mock neck, light shirt, and my old moth-holey “writerly” sweater. After last weeks frigid, snow-clad, even icy days, how delicious!
I sit, and with me sits the vase of still surviving mums that porch shelter and cold outer air must have worked together to preserve all week. Now and then a sparrow or a chickadee drops by, winter friends on nearby branches.
It’s getting late, and I have an errand to run, paint for the mudroom, but this is rare opportunity to grab, for a bit of outdoor sitting and semblance of stillness.
Semblance, because heavy machinery rumbles around me, both north and south on the road, and a chorus of yellow lights are flashing, and now a distant loudspeaker squawks, and male voices exchange blurry words. And here comes the traffic guy in helmet and bright-light chartreuse, strolling the edge of the blacktop, carrying his “stop” and “slow” sign, now stationing himself at the end of our driveway…
But only momentarily. Thankfully, he moves on.
Someone’s pounding or chopping across the way, and inside, dear husband’s running the shop vac, sweeping up plaster dust.
But it’s still still in the inward sense for me, as I savor another unexpected late-summer flashback.
It’s like a momentary peek from heaven beamed down through cloud cover like happens now and then on autumn Earth. And even when resounding “boom!” of gunshout startles and jerks my pen into a scribble on my page, I think of heaven’s peace, Christ’s peace, which the child of God can enjoy, even amid earthlife’s hubbub.
“Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you.” John 14:27
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[This post continues the last one, How Darkness Defines the Light—and What About When There is No Light?]
After that talk, later in the day, I’m searching for a book—unaware my search has a reason related to the message I’ve heard and the questions that still haunt me.
Only God knows that. I just think I want this particular book because I’ve read it quoted on other blogs lately, and think it would make good devotional fare.
But the book is hiding, as light often is, and it takes effort, time, and teamwork from Husband to ferret it out of the “wrong spot” on the shelf.
I decide to start in on it now, and turn to its devos for the start of November, hoping the whole rest of the book isn’t prereq for their reading. And there, what do I read as skim November’s first entries, but… “PARTAKERS OF HIS SUFFERINGS” (!) After this title lies the rest of the answer still evading me… And it’s glorious, filled with… holy light! So, I share here with you a slightly edited version:
“PARTAKERS OF HIS SUFFERINGS”
Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest.
Rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ’s sufferings. —1 Peter 4:13
If you are going to be used by God, He will take you through a multitude of experiences that are not meant for you [meaning for your personal benefit] at all; they are meant to make you useful in His hands, and to enable you to understand what transpires in other souls so that you will never be surprised at what you come across.
Oh, I can’t deal with that person.
Why not? God gave you ample opportunity to soak before Him on that line, and you barged off because it seemed stupid to spend time in that way.
The sufferings of Christ are not those of ordinary men. He suffered “according to the will of God,” not from the point of view we suffer from as individuals. It is only when we are related to Jesus Christ that we can understand what God is after in His dealings with us. It is part of Christian culture to know what God’s aim is. In the history of the Christian Church the tendency has been to evade being identified with the sufferings of Jesus Christ; men have sought to procure the carrying out of God’s order by a short cut of their own. [But] God’s way is always the way of suffering, the way of the “long, long trail.”
Are we partakers of Christ’s sufferings? Are we prepared for God to stamp our personal ambitions right out? Are we prepared for God to destroy by transfiguration our individual determinations?
It will not mean that we know exactly why God is taking us that way. That would make us spiritual prigs. We never realize at the time what God is putting us through; we go through it more or less misunderstandingly; then we come to a luminous place, and say – ‘ ‘Why, God has girded me, though I did not know it!”
“The grass has to stand very still as it holds its precious “weight of glory”—and so has the soul on whom the dew of the Spirit comes. …As easily as this dew, His dew is brushed off—some of us know it to our cost. An impulse of impatience, a sense of hurry or worry allowed to touch us, a mere movement of the self-life against His checking and [it] is gone, and our soul stands stripped and bare. Noiseless must be His Holy Habitation within us.
–I. Lilias Trotter, quoted in A Blossom in the Desert,
compiled and edited by Miriam Huffman Rockness
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