I watched a film the other day called Julie and Julia which while being a chick flicked turned out to be okay, a bit funny in spots, a bit emotional in others.
But I was uplifted in watching it because it was about a woman who basically blogged her way out of her station in life. Wonder why that appealed to me?
I guess blogging is about as faithfilled thing you can do. You do your work, with me every morning, and it goes out there into the constellations and you have no idea if it's being read or not but you keep doing it because, well, because it's what you do.
When I was sick two days ago and didn't do my routine, up in the morning, coffee to begin with a newspaper, writing a blog then writing on my book, it was as if I had lost time itself.
I read this from the Message this morning which I guess explains why I do what I do better than anything I know.
God-of-the-Angel-Armies gave me this Message for them, for all the people and for the priests: "When you held days of fasting every fifth and seventh month all thes seventy years, were you doing it for me? And when you held feasts, was that for me? Hardly. You're interested in religion, I'm interested in people.
What are you interested in? Is this time of the year one of celebration and parties? Do you love the singing and the brightly dressed and the wonderfully decorated churches?
Or are you interested in what you're always interested in? That being a growing relationship with the son who came, probably not in the dead of winter, so that you would have eternal life with the creator.
This blog attempts to paint pictures of kingdom life, which is about humble loving folks living lives of celebration of the king's life. Hopefully a story here and there touches you. I know the stories I've discovered recently for the book have certainly touched me.
Let me give you a chapter from the book I'm writing called "God on the line" "Answering heaven's call" this morning and you tell me how good God is and tell someone else about the blog:
Chapter 14: The call to help
She was 13, barely old enough to even understand what was going on with being betrothed to Jesus.
She went to the river with her washing that evening, preparing to do as she always did, the work her mother gave her. Being engaged to Joseph wasn't worthy of getting out of the work, apparently.
Mary was nearly done, stretching the fabric after washing it in the waters of the river, laying it out flat and mashing the extra water from them, when the skies above her, the very air around her seemed to grow dark.
She was frightened, astonished even, as a bright light, as bright as the noon sun but sharp as a spear's tip appeared to her right, 10 feet beyond her. It grew in size as she shrank from it.
The light came to form a shape of a man and Mary was scared beyond belief.
But the light spoke, in tones that calmed her, warmed her, made her feel as if she was without care or fear. "Greetings," the light said. "You who are highly favored. The Lord is with you."
Mary's thoughts ran like a sheep from a lion. "What? Favored. Why am I favored. What can this mean.?"
She knew she didn't deserve whatever honor the Lord might be bestowing on her. But the man/light said, "Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favor with God. You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. he will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, his kingdom will never end."
Ohhhh. This definitely was a lot to digest. "How will this be," she asked. "I am a virgin."
Oh, that little detail. Mary didn't ask about the Son, didn't ask about thrones, didn't ask about houses of Jacob. She went right to the question of the day. How as a virgin going to have a child?
"The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be barren in is her sixth month. For nothing is impossible with God."
It was evening as the conversation grew to a close. Mary stared into the sharp light even so.
And she created the first miracle of the Savior of the world. It wasn't a miracle of wine from water, or dead being raise, or limbs being restored or anything wonderfully supernatural though it was just as miraculous as any of the above.
She said yes.
Nothing fancy. She simply said yes to her calling, as specialized as it was. She said yes, to the labor pains to come, yes to the stares, yes to the idle gossip about she and Joseph, yes to the anger of her parents, yes to the long days and nights of isolation from everyone. Yes to the morning sickness. Yes to the hardships to come. Yes to the knowledge that her baby would be more than normal. "Pregnant and unmarried," harrummph. "Pregnant by the Holy Spirit," she's crazy.
She said yes, when so many, many others would have said no. Maybe even, shall we say it, did say no. There's no evidence that someone else wasn't approached first. But Mary said yes, when the odds were impossible. She said yes, when to say no would have been normal and understood.
She said yes, when most of us would have passed on the chance.
She said yes.
That's all that's required of your calling, by the way. You don't have to set up goals, agendas, timelines. You don't have to register with some company. You don't have to do anything but feel the small voice calling you to whatever it is, then say the most wonderful thing in God's kingdom.
"YES."
Yes is what started a nation, when Abram said it.
Yes is what saved a sliver of the world, when Noah said it.
Yes is what kept the nation alive when it was enslaved and Moses said it.
Yes is what saved the world when Jesus said it in the garden.
YES.
Yes still changes the world, when common folks with common objectives and common sense approach a God with the power to make uncommon their skills and uncommon their equipment.
Karen Lindsey is just such a person.
Oh, she had her share of nos. She felt called to serve, but she had difficulty answering. "I remember growing up and watching my mother and father praying to get through the hard times and I knew I was called to do something. I knew there was something for me out there."
In 2007, God caught up to her. And she said yes.
She was the mother of a teenager and a child eight years younger. When she lost both her parents eight weeks apart, and Katrina hit with all the devastation of not only buildings but also the way it upturned lives, there was a lot of addiction on both sides of her family and her brother, Ronnie, was diagnosed with cancer, well, it was just about too much "That was like the final straw," she said.. She was "maxed out" in time and emotion. She felt like she was about used up. A great light for God was being snuffed out by darkness.
She went away. Literally. She went to a weekend retreat and God came knocking. "It was like a slice of heaven was opened to me. I stopped ignoring that call and said yes to whatever.
"I drove around with a notebook and wrote down ideas as they came to me," she said.
One sprang fully formed. She thought about the well-being of her cancer-diagnosed brother and decided God had chosen a ministry for her. She would call it Ronnie's Life Ministry.
it is a simple service designed to encourage others in time of need. She reaches out to people who are hurting through prayer and personal notes of love and support.
After some deep personal prayer, she took the idea to her home church, standing up in front of the congregation to present the idea.
"I felt that we had to write letters in the U.S. mail to encourage people who had life-threatening diseases," Lindsey said. "I thought, 'what if they get 15 or 20 letters from people they don't even know. What would that mean to people?' I call them now warriors of prayer and pen.
"Ronnie was the first (in November, 2006)," she said.
Within 10 months, 73 people had joined Ronnie's Life Ministry, all as intercessory pray-ers and most as note writers. As of December 2009, they have written or prayed for 680 persons in 34 states and four countries and have 142 persons who participate in the writing and praying.
Here's how it works: Karen learned of a boy named Spencer from a friend and kept up with is condition through caringbridge.org, a website used by parents of hospitalized children to update family and friends on their child's progress. She learned from Spencer's mom that the 13-year-old boy was at Memphis' St. Jude Children's Hopsital battling ALL Leukemia had a passion for baseball.
She shared that info with her system. Soon Spencer Boyer bat was made by the Marucci Bat Company, a Baton Rouge, La. business that makes personalized bats for the major league baseball players. Spencer died with that bat, sleeping with it till his death on June 12, 2007.
His is one of four bats the company has made for persons with dreadful diseases. Maruccie Bat Company got involved because the LSU baseball team, the defending national champion, got involved because one of its players, Alex Edward, Karen's nephew, asked them to. The company made bats for Jackson McCall, a nine year old in Miami with AML, a disease akin to Luke Gehrig's disease that is a terribly, terrible death; for Luke Ramano, a child in California who has passed, and the latest to 22-year-old Taylor Martin, who has fought brain tumors since he was five and who is now praying to die he's so incapacitated.
One call touching another is the theme of Ronnie's Life Ministry.
It's sometimes hard. Karen deals with such turmoil and disease and oftentimes death. "Yes, it's overwhelming at times. When Spencer died it was almost too much for me. You really remember the little ones. You don't forget where you were anytime you get a call."
But what she and her army of praying persons and writing persons don't concentrate on what the tough times will be like. They continue to encourage each other and encourage the ones who are facing death.
About a year ago, Karen, who hasn't worked since her now 16-year-old daughter was born, hired an assistant, Peggy Dupuy. "She does whatever I need," Karen said, "getting things shipped, letters done. She helps with my family as well." Karen says she spends 30 or more hours a week working on Ronnie's Life Ministries. The best thing about having an assistant? Peggy joined St. Timothy's UNC, Karen's home church.
Karen said she has never wondered if she was doing the right thing, or had answered the right call, partly because of this story.
Early in the ministry, Karen heard of child who had a near-drowning experience in Baton Rouge, La. Fifteen minutes under water. He was at the Lady of the Lake hospital in an induced coma. Karen began the Ronnie's Life Ministry procedures. She typed and mailed a letter that introduced herself and told the mother of the child that other letters would be on the way. But she forgot to put PICU on the address and the letter was returned. The other letters from her people had the correct address so those letters, without any introduction, made it through. The mother of the 2-year-old child was shocked as these encouraging letters began appearing.
A while after the letters began appearing, on what was planned as a family crawfish boil in Baton Rouge, Karen told her family they would take a side-trip to the hospital. On a whim, just before their car was to pull out from their house, Karen said, "Wait, I want to take Sam (Seidel) something.
"I ran into the house and we had a bag of stuff animals we had just returned with from Universal Studies. My husband had won them. I grabbed two turtles and took off. When I got into the car, I asked my kids if they wanted to present them to Sam. My 12-year-old Abby (at the time) said yes. My 4-year-old said no, understandably.
"We went into the PICU unit with the one turtle and we were searching for Sam when two women stopped them. They asked where Abby got the turtle she was carrying. When told they came from Universal Studios, they were disappointed. They had hoped they were locally produced and bought. One woman explained that her son was using one of the turtles to support his little legs and it fit perfectly. They had hoped to be able to buy another to help him.
As soon as the woman said that, Karen ask, "Are you Kahne?" the name of Sam's mother that
Karen knew from the website. Karen pronounced it the say it was spelled, but the woman responded that she was indeed Connie (but spelled Kahne).
Karen could barely talk as she blurted out, "the turtle is for Sam. That's who it is for."
The mother, taken aback, asked, "Who are you?
Karen said, "I'm from Madisonville and ..."
Kahne said, "Madisonville? Ronnie's Life Ministry? Thank you for all those cards."
In the hallway of the PICU two strangers cried tears that only God could bring. Karen said the mother took her and Abby back to the cubical that housed Sam who was on a ventilator.
"It was so quiet, all you could hear was the psssh, phhhhht, pssssh, phht as the ventilator did its work," she said. "A little blond head, with hair flattened and dishelved, when that sheet was pulled back and he just lay there."
A little blond head, a little bit of emotion and Karen, filled with the energy of the Holy Spirit, went home that night and wrote a story of Precious Sam and His Turtle.
The closing of that poem is this:
God's servant prayed and spread the word that God is alive.
She told everyone that we must listen for His instructions.
We must follow them. We must pray.
For we all know that turtles are slow.
But slow and steady wins the race.
For God told us to wait. And we will surely follow.
Precious Sam rested. His family waited.
The host of angels danced.
God provided the miracle.
If the story ended there, surely that would be enough. But it doesn't end there.
Karen knew that she had to find more turtles for Sam, and kids like Sam, so she went to the website of KellyToyUSA and located the turtle. She sat in disbelief at the name of the turtle on the website.
It was SAM.
She wrote and asked the company to sell her some of the turtles. She said that she knew the company only sold in bulk to places like Universal Studios, but she told the story of little Sam and hoped it would make a difference. Time passed and nothing occurred. Karen remembered there was a West Coast office of the company as well as East Coast, and she tried again. The letter wound up in the hands of a mother of a two-year-old whose greatest fear was that the child would drown.
Karen is about to order a fourth round of turtles, at 96 turtles a pop. The turtles have made their way to orphanages, to Iraq, across the country as Karen hears of kid's difficulties.
She, like Mary, never worries that it might all become too much for her, never worries that the call was made to the wrong person, never worries about what will come.
"I've learned that I'm an instrument of God. I can pray, I can spread the word, and if me give a glimmer of hope to anyone, this is so vital.
"I believe this life is temporary, and that when someone we're encouraging does die they're in a beautiful place, a better place and a better circumstance than what they face here on earth.
Knowing that helps me make it through."
Asked if she wants it to keep growing or it might get to simply be too much she answered,
"Larry Madden (a retired minister who has been very helpful to the RLM) and I say, "Infinity and beyond like the Buzz Lightyear saying.
"Sometimes I wonder about what I'm doing because is have two children and a husband and I'm doing all these other things. But they are so full of faithfulness, I never worry about them. I can hear my mother up; in heaven saying, 'Karen, you had better put your family first,'
"But there is just so much to do and we are encouraging so many people."
Whenever one asks the Lord for ideas, it seems the Lord provides. Truly God calls in so many ways. A little bit of encouragement is not too much to ask.
Sam, by the way, has improved greatly and the prayers and encouragement go on.
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