The Storming of Ninevah

I love the book of Jonah. I love the idea of the whale and the boy. I love the prayers. I love the inspiration and courage. I love the fear and rebellion. I don't really care if the fish was a fish or a whale. I don't really care if it was an actual historical event or just a story to explain a concept. I just love the heck out of it.

 A part of me All of me really identifies with Jonah. Sometimes when God comes a calling I want to crawl under a rock and stick my fingers in my ears and sing out loud "la la la la la la la - I cant hear you". Sometimes I want to turn the radio up real loud and pretend I didn't hear him. Sometimes I want to use logic to convince myself why what He wants couldn't really be what is best for me. And sometimes, just sometimes, I want to hop on a boat and go in the other direction. I think most people probably feel this way sometimes. I know for me - my enemy is fear. Fear is what tries to yank me away from God's best for me. Fear of man. Fear of fear. Fear of possibilities. Fear of loneliness. Fear of God.

For a long time I wasn't just a tourist under that rock - I lived there. I was the rock girl. I didn't care that there wasn't any sun there - because the sun was too bright. I stayed under that rock and stuck my fingers in my ears and let fear take complete control of my steps. I am not saying I was happy under that rock, but it was my rock and it was comfortable.

Somewhere after my first missions trip fear started to lose grip on me. The love of Christ started to burn it away. I suddenly became filled with a new courage. I had this picture in my head. It was me being catapulted off the tongue of a whale, like a slingshot almost, flying in a somersault with my fist raised - storming Ninevah. I didn't want to run and hide from the word Ninevah anymore. I wanted to storm Ninevah. I wanted to raise my fist in triumph and speak forth the word of God.

I have told you about my bff anna and how we are tight. We also like to do projects together. We have done most things, from modgepodge to building homemade didgerydoos, to electrical diy projects and pranks.... paintings, clay... sewing... everything. Now one of the things we did at one time was we made some techno worship songs, and named ourselves "storming ninevah". They are kind of lame - anna is amazing but i am not. If you have a jrock account you can listen to them here http://www.jrockboom.com/userinfo.php?user=stormingninevah

So when fear starts to creep up and put its hands around my throat, I try to think about Storming Ninevah. Because as that story showed us, and as experience has shown me, God will do the impossible, all we have to do is show up.

I am putting a picture of jonah and the whale into my memorial box :)

  

The Tip

Memorial Box Monday Edition

So for a period of time I was working for a cable provider as a field technician and really struggling to pay my way. It seemed as if every single week I would run out of money a couple days before pay day and really have to get creative. I would find ways to make groceries stretch, I would find ways to make the bills get paid a month early so that when I was late I was never really late, but could go a couple extra days since I was in actuality a month ahead. I would do things like this because I was in a situation where that was my only choice. Perhaps my eyes were bigger than my wallet as far as choosing housing and all, but for whatever the reason I was low on dough in those days.

So, God used these times to show me in mighty ways how tangible and real He was. I remember many times where I did not have money for gas to get home from work and God would just bring it out of thin air. I would be in my truck driving around and praying. "Please God - help me make my gas last for just one more day". Then I would moments later walk into a client who would hand me just enough money to put gas in my car as a tip. Now, tips were not the norm in my job. Sometimes you would go months without a tip. And I have to say I have never thought to tip the cable man when he came to my house. But every now again, without rhyme or reason, a client would shove money in my hand/pocket/toolbag and insist that I take it. The part that made it so very beautiful to me was when I hadn't had a tip in months, and not necessarily asking for it, just praying God would find a way to provide, and out of nowhere a tip of $10 or $20 to go into my gas tank and get me home and back to work the next day.

God made sure He did this in very obvious ways to me. And often now people think I am insensitive and careless about money. And perhaps sometimes I am (thank the Lord I have a husband who is the exact opposite with money), but it is just something the Lord has taught me not to worry about. The God of the universe has the ability to provide more money than I need, and He has proven to me that he will always take care of me much more than I deserve. So on this memorial box monday I want to make sure that I remember all those times God took care of the little things for me.

²⁵"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? ²⁶Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? ²⁷Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life^[b]? - Matthew 6

This week I am putting a bean in my memorial box. Because God was my provider of gas!

  

The Purple Lion

Memorial Box Monday Edition

The summer of 2008 before we were married, Bryan and I took our youth on a missions trip to Matamoros, Mexico with Adventures in Missions. It was an amazing missions trip and I will always remember some of the things that happened down there. The heat of the summer in Mexico was brutal, but every afternoon when we would start our worship session - the winds that were absent every other moment would pick up and a sweet breeze would flow through the tent on the gateway. There was the craziness of what happened after a drama our team put on... but the purple lion will always be my favorite story.

One of the things that AIM does is on the last day of a missions week they let your group have a prayer time and you can break out of the standard projects if you feel the Lord leading you to something. Bryan and I were with the same group, along with about 10 youth and we were very excited for this day. After a time of prayer our AIM crew chief asked us to one by one explain what God showed us during the prayer time.

We went around sharing what we saw and when they got to Bryan he nervously said that he saw a purple lion. Well of course we all chuckled at Bryan and probably joked about what an imagination the boy has. He nervously laughed and I am sure he was embarrassed that the rest of us seemed to be hearing from God and he didn't. Well,  we came to a consensus that we wanted to help a particular dog that we had all come across that week.

The dog in question was a chow-mix that seemed to have gangrene or something on its leg. The leg had been swollen and smelled bad enough that we could tell it was pretty bad. We wanted to find the owner and see if we could take the dog to a veterinarian and see what we could do to save the leg.

We had been working the street this dog lived on all week. We had been picking up trash, rebuilding a wall on a house on the street, helping out at the church on the street, doing vbs on that street, serving food to people and walking around the neighborhood talking to people. We hesitated once we found out that the dog owner was a woman who had turned our group away and wouldnt have anything to do with us, but we pushed forward with our plan.

When we told her that we wanted to take her dog to the vet and see what we could do for the leg she said yes and she would go too. So we loaded up the dog (Fify) into the back of our van, and the woman wanted to sit back there with him. Our guide brought us to a local vet and he examined Fify. He quickly told us there was nothing he could do and even if he tried to heal the infection the dog would likely die and suffer much more. So he asked if we wanted him to put her down.

  

After conversing with Fify's mom she agreed it was the best to do. They put Fify down and we loaded him back into our van to bring him home to bury. We also picked up a chihuahua that the woman named Taquito to replace her Fify. All of us were very sad that we were not able to help Fify and there were many tears the whole way back.

Once we returned Bryan and some of the boys dug a grave for Fify and made a cross to mark the spot. While they were digging we chatted with the woman, who for the life of me I can't remember her name right now. Where she had before not wanted to speak a word to us foreigners, she now spoke, cried, and entrusted us with her story. She told us about being married to someone who was wrapped up in a drug cartel and living a scary life. She told us her children had all gotten wrapped into drugs and she had lost them. She told us about ancient aztec relatives who had buried treasure in some mountain and she wanted to go look one day for it. She told us about her faith and we told her about ours. She told us about the things that kept her from believing in Christ and we tried to help her with those issues. In the end we left her with a bible and she said she wanted to read it.

The best part of the day though came after Fify was buried and we were playing with Taquito and chatting with her. Bryan looked down at some point and noticed something that caught his eye. He showed me and we both started laughing. There on the side of an old paint can outside the woman's house was a purple lion. Bryan had been teased for seeing such a funny thing in his prayer time but here it was clear as day, and certainly much more clear than anything the rest of us saw during prayer time. I hurried to take a picture of the purple lion so that Bryan would always remember the day the Lord showed him the lion. And how fitting that the image was the Lion. It is times like this that God reminds us that He is God and we are not - and that as crazy as things might sound when he tells them to us - if we follow His will it will all turn out the way He wanted.

I am putting a picture of the purple lion to remind us of the time God showed us a purple lion. And to remind us that when God leads us it might sound crazy to some but if we follow it will all turn out. Kind of like our adoption story - everyone may think we are crazy to adopt a child when we could more easily biologically birth one - but when God leads - we will follow.

Matthew 8:18-20
When Jesus saw the crowd around him, he gave orders to cross to the other side of the lake. Then a teacher of the law came to him and said, "Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go." Jesus replied, "Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head."

The Proof

Many people seem to think that the only way to prove or disprove something is with the sense of vision. When I was in grade school I learned that we have five senses: smell, touch, vision, hearing, and taste. I also learned that they were all equally important. At some point science and atheism seemed to convey that sight was the only true measure of something’s validity. There are many problems with this idea. Does that mean that if we were all blind that nothing could ever be tested true or false? Does this mean that a blind person can never truly know truth because they can never see it? If we were going to stick with that theory, that vision is the only defining sense, then we could use the argument that if we look at the world around us and see the creation then we should see God in that. I know everyone wants to see a picture of someone who looks like a man, but much larger with a bearded grandpa looking face seated on a throne in the clouds smiling down on us. But can’t we see God in the creation, and often in people around us? I once heard a story that went something like this…

If you were in a museum and saw a beautiful painting hanging on the wall would you not assume that someone made that painting? Now I would imagine that if it were just splashes of paint on a canvas then maybe you could think it was accidental and that nature caused it. Maybe the winds knocked a can of paint over on top of this canvas, but if I was referring to a painting that was done in great detail and absolute perfection. Could you look at something like this, with a scientific mind, and just say that it was a coincidence that a paint of color would fall into this canvas and create such a masterpiece? It often takes a more scientific mind to see God then to see the theories objecting to God.

Now back to this sensing thing, if we were to dispute the idea that sight is the only measurement that we can use to say whether something is true or false then we could acknowledge the importance of other senses as well, then. Now, the bible teaches us that once we believe and accept Jesus as our savior and are redeemed by that faith, that the holy-spirit comes and lives in our hearts. This is where the sense of touch comes into play.

If you are not a believer then you cannot measure this feeling, but as a believer I have measured this feeling and can honestly tell you that I feel the Lord touch me all the time. He fills my body with compassion for people that I would have once looked down on. He fills me with love for people who I would have hated before him. He has definitely changed the way that I look at things in the world around me, and has turned my life 180 degrees around to a place where I have everything I could have ever wanted. But if you are looking for a physical touch for me to feel, then I would have to say that when I spend time with the Lord I can feel him physically touching my heart.

Now on to the sense of hearing. I can physically hear the Lord speak to me. Most of the time it is to my heart, and it is the voice in my head. But there were times where I could hear the audible sound of him speaking to me, if I am not listening to the voice in my heart.

So there are three senses we now have covered. If you were a blind man and made a new friend, and he spoke to you and you could feel him touch your arm at times when he was trying to make a point or when he was holding you if you were scared, then you would probably not have a doubt in the world that this man existed. Am I right? So why would you have so much trouble believing that God exists, if people were to tell you that you could experience Him in this way?

So you won’t take my word for it then? Well, ok. I can understand that as the person I was 10 years ago would not have believed me either. You need proof you say? Ok then. I will give you proof.

When you are in history class and you read about Napoleon Bonaparte, do you ever wonder if they are making him up? Do you ever wonder if the textbook is lying about him and that he never walked a day on this earth? Would you be surprised to learn that there is more proof that Jesus was resurrected from the dead than any proof that Napoleon Bonaparte ever walked a day on this earth? It is true.

How do you know that anything that happened before you were born is true? Even after you were born for that matter, if you were not on-location then there is no way to know if what people are telling you is true. Correct? You see news broadcasts where these people tell you that there is a war going on, but it could be a fraud. It is quite possible that there is no war going on, in fact, if you have not been to Iraq there is a possibility that Iraq itself does not exist. [disclaimer: this is stated as an example and is not meant in ANY way to speak with anything but respect towards our war efforts especially those of soldiers on the ground]

So how do we know what is true and false that other people tell us. Well there are a couple ways. First of all you have to scientifically and logically decide what sources you will trust and you will also need to use your discernment. What is more logical? That the universe was a perfect coincidence or that it was made by someone. Think about that.

The next thing is that you have to have faith. Facts will never convince you, but knowing the facts may allow you to give in to what you have known you have been heading for, the truth. Once you realize that Christianity is not some crazy cult or a bunch of people who are building their lives on something that is wrong, and you are shown that it is an intelligent deduction based on the facts, then you can really start to understand.

The bible. Well. I remember a long time ago debating with my little sister, who is an agnostic, and she told me “well the bible is just a bunch of letters written by man”. Well this is partially true. And that is the most amazing thing. If you were to read the bible front to back you would notice something, at least I did. Though the books were written hundreds of years after each other they all carry the same tone. If you were to read a book written by 100 different authors all living at different times throughout history, don’t you think that it would not flow well and that it would seem choppy with many different writing styles, and writing “voices”? Well when I read the bible from the beginning to the back I notice the same author using the same words. The Lord tells us the same things and discusses similar topics over and over using different illustrations. There is definitely one voice speaking through all those scribes. If you do not believe me, then read if for yourself and prove me wrong.

So, back to the bible just being stuff that was written down a long time ago by men. What are we saying here? Isn’t every historical document just stuff that was written down a long time ago by men? What makes the bible any less historical than your textbook that you read in your world history class? Actually, the bible is much more of an historical document, but they probably are not going to teach you that in any public school. The first thing you should know is that we have copies of some of the books in the new testament that date back to the first century. Now I would think if I wrote a journal entry tonight about what I did today it would be a whole lot more accurate than what I wrote in a year from now regarding what happened today, and so on.

So, if your history book is written in the past ten years and is simply a reproduction of what other books have said in the past, and so on, would not the biblical books that we have from the first and second century be much more accurate representations of the events going on during that time? Or would you discount it just because people have told you that it is hogwash? Another point I would like to make is in regards to its opposition. The bible portrayed events that happened during a time. The people who could witness truth or false regarding these events were alive when the books of the New Testament were being copied and sent around. If it were all “hogwash” would not people of that time have disputed it as such? Especially if they have proof. Would not the Guards at the rock where Jesus was buried have produced the body if it were all “hogwash”? The bible was written by people who were there, not just someone who heard about the story. Paul (aka Saul) put his life and reputation on the line when he wrote his letters. Would he have done that if he knew it was hogwash?

Now let me bring your attention to a quote from Revelations. This is in chapter 22 verses 18 & 19.

I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: If anyone adds anything to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book. And if anyone takes words away from this book of prophecy, God will take away from him his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book.

Now, followers of Christ and people who produced versions of the bible believe every word in the bible. If that is true and they read the words listed above from chapter 22 they must fully believe that they were copying accurately or be punished in the way above. That kind of makes me not want to ever think about ever copying the bible, as I would rather not risk that kind of danger. However these early scribes would take the copying of such documents very seriously. They would copy in longhand word for word as they read the original (called the autograph). After they copied and read word for word they would have a proofreader read it again word for word. If a single mistake was found, instead of correcting the document, they would destroy the document and start over. It often took a scribe an entire year to make a copy of the bible.

That brings me to another point that has been well taught by my pastor, Brett Watson. I had never thought about this until he told us this one Sunday morning in a classroom at the Red Cross. He was referring to the objection of the resurrection whereas the disciples of Jesus stole his body in the night and hid it. He told us to think about that for a minute, put ourselves in these men’s shoes. I had followed this guy around who claimed to be God and was doing miracles and then he was killed. When he was killed he was offered many opportunities to deny his deity and be set free but would not do that. I knew this guy pretty well and so lets say that I would steal his body from the tomb in the night. Now lets understand that the guards would have been put to death if they lost the body. The Pharisee’s knew the prophecy that Jesus would rise from the dead, everyone was talking about it and waiting to see if it would happen. Knowing their expectations, they probably expected him to jump out of the rock, but on a sword and start killing Romans for them, but regardless they were aware of the prophecy. So these guards were told that if they let anyone pass this rock, or remove this rock, or move the body then they would be put to death. But lets say that even though their lives were on the line they allowed themselves to fall asleep, which is highly unlikely. And then I, a disciple of Christ, came in the night and stole his body from the tomb. Lets say I hid it to noone could find it and got away with it. Jesus told me that if I followed him that it would not lead me to an easy life, but lets say that I even ignored that and thought that I would benefit in some way, monetarily or stature wise. Now, lets think about what came of the apostles. They lived in poverty, they were constantly running for their lives, put into jail, suffered horrible deaths, and were scoffed at by anyone high in society. So, let’s say that I had hid Jesus’ body and then I went around the world proclaiming the gospel. There is no way anyone on the planet would endure the sufferings and the martyrs deaths that the apostles died, all for a lie. So then you would have to proclaim every single one of them a crazy person. But even a crazy person would not endure sufferings that they could get out of by admitting to a lie. The apostles did what they did, not to gain for themselves. The messages that they taught were ones of love and forgiveness. Does this sound like the acts of a madman? In addition, if you were to read the books of the New Testament, which were written by them, you would know that these were men who were of proper and sound mind.

Now lets think about one of the most pressing pieces of evidence. Fulfilled prophecy. I can tell you that out of all the religions in the world not a single one aside from Christianity can claim a single prophecy fulfilled, aside from those that could be controlled. For instance, if Mohammad said he would go to a city, and then he went there. Christianity can claim hundreds if not thousands of fulfilled prophecies. And I am not referring to coincidences. Jesus may have been able to know the scriptures to know that he should ride into town on a donkey on Palm Sunday, but there is no way that he could control hundreds of the prophecies around him, concerning his ancestors, the place and circumstances surrounding his birth, and other things that happened to him out of his control.

Now Josh McDowell has an amazing image of this for you. He had logicians figure out the probability of someone fulfilling only eight of the prophecies that Jesus fulfilled. Now understand that Jesus fulfilled hundreds, and if you read the Old Testament and then you read the new testament you can see this for yourself. So McDowell discovered that the chances of one man fulfilling eight prophecies from the Old Testament was 1/100,000,000,000,000,000. To give you an image of this ratio we need to understand the size of the state of texas. It is pretty much ginourmous. If you were to cover the state with silver dollars, two feet deep and have a blindfolded man reach down and grab one of the silver dollars, then that would be the same chance that Jesus Christ fulfilled just eight of the prophecies that he fulfilled. Is that enough proof?

The bottom line comes down to faith. Paul tells us that it is by grace through faith that we are saved and that is the only way to be redeemed by God. So these facts and logics will only help you realize that Christians are not fools but believe in a scientifically viable Messiah, not give you faith. But if you have any question about it pray about it, ask the Lord to show himself to you, and I promise He will, just maybe not always in the way you expect. Jesus was never one to stick to mediocre human expectations.