The Tiger Hunts in Perfect Peace

That saying is one of my favorites, wherever it came from.  If there is nothing in your world that is bigger and stronger than you are, there is little to fear from any adversary.

There is a scene in The Chronicles of Narnia:  Prince Caspian, that reminds me of this.  Little Lucy, upon returning to the scene of the battle at the bridge over the river, stands alone facing the departing army of the enemy.  She draws her little dagger and smiles.

The Captain of the opposing army does not see Aslan, who is just out of sight.  He only sees a little girl with barely any defenses, standing firm.  In time, Aslan appears behind Lucy and fights in her stead.

Lucy would have been a fool to take that position were it not for Aslan at her back.  How can we stand facing trials, persecution, and danger with only our meager defenses?  The Lion Of Judah stands just out of sight at our backs, and then, when needed, fights for us.  We may be wounded, we may suffer, we may die, we may win, but we can never lose.  We are not alone in our own strength to do battle with life.

Deuteronomy 31:6 (New International Version)

⁶ Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or terrified because of them, for the LORD your God goes with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you."

The shape of things.

One of my favorite things to do is look down at the earth from an airplane window.  The topography fascinates me.  You can see the way mountains rise out of the plains; canyons carved into the land drain into rivers and valleys.  God made an amazing world and I love His creation.

But it is flawed.  As incredible as creation is, it is fallen.

From the book, 'Heaven', by Randy Alcorn:

"We have never seen the Earth as God made it.  Our planet as we know it is a shadowy, halftone image of the original.  But it does whet our appetites for the New Earth, doesn't it?  If the present Earth, so diminished by the Curse, is at times so beautiful and wonderful; if our bodies, so diminished by the Curse, are at times overcome with a sense of the Earth's beauty; then how magnificent will the New Earth be?  And what will it be like to experience the New Earth in something else we have never known:  perfect bodies?"

I love being in the world we have and it constantly reminds me of the Creator.

Psalm 19

For the director of music. A psalm of David.

 ¹ The heavens declare the glory of God; 
       the skies proclaim the work of his hands.


But I am also constantly aware that it is broken and not what it was intended to be.  Just like me.  In God's time, that will all be put right.  The same sin that causes me to fall and fail; that curse that Adam brought down on me brought down creation along with it.

Christ's resurrection has broken that curse, but it has yet to be realized.  There will come a time when it will all be made right again, both the Earth and I.  I can only imagine what it will be like, as I catch fleeting glimpses and shadows of the beauty to come.

Until that time, I will make do with looking out of airplane windows.

Not Home Yet

This is from the daily devotional of Greg Laurie.

Not Our Home

For we speak as messengers approved by God to be entrusted with the Good News. Our purpose is to please God, not people. He alone examines the motives of our hearts.
— 1 Thessalonians 2:4


The story is told of a missionary couple who was preparing to retire after many years of service in Africa. The ship they had boarded to return to the U.S. also happened to be carrying President Theodore Roosevelt, who was returning from a hunting expedition. When they reached their destination and the passengers were disembarking, a crowd of admirers waited to meet the president as a big band played in the background. But when the time came for the missionary couple to step ashore, not a single soul was there to meet them. Discouraged, the husband buried his head in his hands and groaned, "I didn't want a parade, but at least someone could have come to welcome us home!" His wife turned to him and replied, "Honey, we are not home yet."

This world is not our home. And because of that, we should always be a bit disconnected from it, not quite in sync with everything this culture celebrates, because our citizenship is in heaven. As Christians, we have a different value system because we serve a different God and have different priorities than this world has.

Yet some Christians only care about living for themselves, as long as they can get to heaven. What a waste. We should instead be asking ourselves, How can I bring a little bit of heaven to earth? How can I make a difference in the lives of those I come into contact with? How can I make a difference for time and eternity? What has God called me to do? I want to do it in a way that will bring glory and honor to Him.

May we live our lives well and wisely, because they eventually will come to an end. Until then, let's be about our Father's business.

Old dogs and the Master's hand.

Lately I have been watching my old dog as he deals with getting on in years.  The pup that he used to be is long gone.  He is pretty much deaf, moves slowly, and sometimes gets in the way.  He prefers to sleep now rather than run and just getting to the door to greet me is a chore.

Still, in his heart he remembers the dog he was.  His spirit is willing but his flesh is failing him.  He was and is a good dog.  A 'good dog'.  That says a lot.

When he passes on I know we will say many things about him.  We will remember the things he loved to do, the times he made us laugh and why we loved him for the dog he was.  He was a pound rescue and I think he knows how fortunate a dog he was being chosen to be a part of this family.  In return he was our dog.  He was faithful, he was loyal, he was a hard worker and vigilant for all enemies, both foreign and domestic.  He was not perfect and tended to stray from the path we chose for him if the temptation of a trailside lizard was greater than he could bear.  He could not stand another dog to get near his front yard.  Love thy neighbor was not always the case.

But he knew his master's voice and he responded to the gentle urging of the master's hand.  At the end of the day, when he was in his place on the bed in our living room, a pat on the head would suffice; perhaps a piece of cheese.  And the words most often said were, "Moots, you are a good dog".

A 'good dog'.  For a family pet like him, that sums it all up.  It is all he desires to be and the reward is enough...a calm and loving voice of the one he serves, the touch of a hand, reassuring and gentle; a place to rest in the living room of his family; his daily bread (and a pancake or two). His time is growing short on this earth and when he is no longer in his place next to the TV and he has passed into memory, the best thing I can think to say of him will be "good dog".  Well done, Moots.

In some ways, Moots is a mirror held to my face.  I want to look away as it shows me a shadow of the time when I grow truly old, God willing.  My body is failing too and my time is running out.  And so I wonder - what is it that I want to be said of me by the Master?  This pound rescue that I am is grateful to have been chosen and brought into His family.  I did nothing to deserve it and I often stray from the path following the temptation of the errant lizard.  I often bark at the neighbors.

So at the end of my day, when the last rabbit chase is but a memory and the heartbeat stills, I will follow my nose toward home and the smell of pancakes on the griddle and a promised place of my own in the living room of my Master.  And hopefully I will hear the words that every old pooch wants to hear:  Good dog.

Matthew 25:23 (King James Version)

 ²³His lord said unto him, Well done, good and faithful servant; thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.

Moots, the Dog, stage right.

"...I shall not want..."

I am the poster child for issues with contentment.  I need to learn to walk through this world and not be fooled into thinking the 'next great thing' will bring joy and happiness.

The book I am reading now, Traveling Light, by Max Lucado, takes you through the 23rd Psalm..."The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want."  It brought to my heart something that the Spirit had pointed out before - being content with what God has blessed me with NOW, not what I can obtain in the future.  Why is it that I find myself drifting into the deadly circle of dreaming of more money, a different car, house, etc, losing any joy I might have when those things do not happen, and then feeling discontent with what I have and where I am?  God forgive me for being so ungrateful.  Few things are as ugly as an ungrateful child.  It robs the joy of the giver and the receiver.

I am that ungrateful child.

Becoming Joseph

"...the Lord was with him; and whatever he did, the Lord made to prosper." Genesis 39:23b

I wanna' be like Joseph.  I want to prosper in what I do.  Not always there yet, not quite.  And this is not Creflo Dollar or whatever prosperity-drive-a-Caddie stuff.  I want to be lined up in the tine furrows of God's plow, getting some weeding done and planting good seed.  I will let God tend to the harvest.

Right now, I think I am tending too many weeds.

Fear: calming the storm within

If jealousy is a green eyed monster, then fear is its dark grey cousin.  Not a legitimate fear, like one that keeps you from jumping from an airplane with no parachute, but the irrational fears that creep in and erode the foundations of our peace and joy.

That is me all over.  And over.  If the peace of God passes all understanding, why can't I get on the bus?  the book on my Reading List in the side column by Max Lucado speaks to this type of fear.  It is easier to read about then it is to defend against.  God help me, cuz my armor is tin foil trying to be steel.

Mark 4:35-41 tells about Christ calming the sea.  The passengers on the boat were in fear of their lives in a tangible way...the boat, the storm, the danger was imminent.  But Christ was there.  What could they have feared?  Nothing.

Christ is as present in this Christ follower as he was in that boat.  He is not worried.  Why am I?

Not the end, but the road...

"This life therefore is not righteousness, but growth in righteousness, not health, but healing, not being but becoming, not rest but exercise. We are not yet what we shall be, but we are growing toward it, the process is not yet finished, but it is going on, this is not the end, but it is the road. All does not yet gleam in glory, but all is being purified."
— Martin Luther

Excellence worth striving for.

"We are what we repeatedly do, Excellence is therefore not an act but a habit."  Aristotle

If we are what we repeatedly do, then I strive to repeat being a man of prayer; a person seeking to reflect the Christ within by the way I walk through the world; a man after God's own heart.  I seek to repeatably be useful and usable for the purposes I cannot always understand.

And, if in the end I am excellent by habit, let it be excellent before God and His glory, not of my own, lest I should boast.

Honey Bee Polka

"Honey bee dancing, perhaps the most intriguing aspect of their biology, is also one of the most fascinating behaviors in animal life. Performed by a worker bee that has returned to the honey comb with pollen or nectar, the dances, in essence, constitute a language that “tells” other workers where the food is. By signaling both distance and direction with particular movements, the worker bee uses the dance language to recruit and direct other workers in gathering pollen and nectar. " From the net

I like to watch the different science channels, Discovery, Smithsonian, etc.  However that requires I wade through all the religious indoctrination of Mr. Darwin and his ilk.  Time and time again we hear how this evolved and that evolved over zillions of years to be what it is today, and isn't that amazing?   Expert scientists attest to the complex way that nature has ordered herself, all with no master at the helm...just monkeys at a keyboard with time on their hands.

More a matter of the heart than of intellect, denying God as the creator and master of creation allows one to operate detached from any compulsion to a God and His will.  If you accept there is a God, then it stands to reason that one should find out what He wants from you....why you exist at all.  If He has rules, you would then have to consider the fact that you are not living by them, therefore, you are, in the end, accountable to that God.

Can't have that.  Darwin and the Science Channel make no such demands of moral accountability.

So all this occurred to me as I was looking at a honey bee on the ground outside of work.  There are commercial hives near there and there are thousands of bees flying to and fro getting the honey-dos done.  I thought of how that bee finds a flower and brings that message to the waiting colony back at 'Da' Hive'.  And I wondered...if these bees took millions of years to figure this out, how did the first bees do it?

For example:

Millions of years ago, bee number 12 comes back to the hive after striking it rich juuust over the next hill.  He points to the hill, but no one can see anything, so they are less than excited about it.  He thinks about doing the bee mime act.  Marcel Marceau Bee gives it a shot and only conveys the impression that he is behind an invisible door, pulling on a rope no one can see.  If only he had white bee gloves.

A few thousand years later, another bee comes to the same situation and, still having no white gloves or little French hat, comes up with the dance idea.  Unfortunately he is a lousy dancer and lacking any sense of rhythm, he cannot for the life of him make anything coherent out of it. He feels embarrassed and vows never to go to the prom where this horror would be relived in front of his peers.

How about if the bee is like my wife and cannot remember the names of any streets or roads?  She can get ya' there, but only if she drives.  How does that fit in?

Or maybe the bee has a lousy sense of direction and while he can dance like Fred Astaire with a road map in his hand, he mistakenly wiggles his butt North, when he wanted to point South.  An entire squadron of bees is never heard from again as they fly off to their doom.  I have a friend like that...cannot hit his 'south' end with both hands.  Sad.

Or how about this.  God, the creator of the the bee, the flower, the earth, the universe...He gave the bee what it needed just like He gave the flower, the earth, and the universe what it needed, right from the beginning.

No dancing lessons required.

Romans 1:20 (New International Version)

²⁰For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

The eyes of Christ

I have the selfish tendency of walking through life in an uncaring manner, being judgmental and fearful of others.  Or even worse, indifferent.  Indifference is more often the case.  It is so easy to be all about my stuff and my cares and my agenda that my eyes glaze over and pass on by.

But, the eyes of Christ.  They missed nothing as he walked this earth.  I was not there, of course, but it is obvious from what we can read and what we can know about the attributes of God, that His gaze was piercing and kind, looking past the masks we all wear and into the heart.

The woman at the well.  The accused woman.  The rich young man.

I cannot look at a man's heart.  But I need to see my fellow man as Jesus saw them.  I need to be compassionate and patient.  I need to care enough to know that they need to hear the truth in a kind way.  I need to care about their lost state more than I care about my fears of being transparent.  

I need to care, period.

Treading on serpents.

Mark 16:18 (New International Version)

¹⁸they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well."

There is a group of folks, mostly centered in rural areas of the US, that have taken this passage as a directive to handle deadly snakes as an example of faith or God's power, or something.  They dance and sing and play around with rattlesnakes, almost in a trance state.  That has more of paganism then Christ in it and in my mind does not really prove much in any case. I doubt they drink poison.  Quaffing a tumbler of cyanide would be more impressive and substantive.


The other day I joined my wife as well as Sophie the Superdog and some others for a hike in a local woodlands park.  It is full into snake season here and I have already seen three rattlers.  Concern for the dogs drove some of the conversation that day as we walked...snake bit dogs are not a good thing.


I turned back early to do some things at home and walked alone back to the car.  Nearly there, in a wide section of road, a remarkable thing happened.


I kicked a rattlesnake.


I am pretty well trained at looking where I walk and scanning the trail ahead, likely a habit of years and years of trail riding on mtn bikes.  But I was off in some other place with my thoughts that moment and my eyes were high in the distance.  Out of my peripheral vision, and straight down, I caught a shape on the ground that seemed out of place.  As I stepped by, I felt a 'thump' on the bottom of my right foot (shoe) that caused me to pause and see what I had just found.


There, crawling across the road was a 6" to 8" rattler.  He or she was not even upset, not rattling with the two buttons it had nicely in place, and not even looking miffed.  Can a snake slither casually?  This one was.  I had just whacked it on the head with my shoe, or maybe it had actually struck out at me, but if so, it sure was not expecting another fight out of me.


I walked over and looked at the snake as it passed off the road into the grass and said, "thank you Lord".  I was unusually calm.  I mean, the snake was not at all bothered and it seemed reasonable that I, being a mature adult, should display at least as much poise as a young rattlesnake.


I turned and walked away and thought of how God watches over us and shows us grace.  That could have been a very different outcome.  But the God that is big enough to create the universe and calm a sea can keep a snake from harming me.


I mentioned it to a co-worker and he said the typical response to a story like that - "Boy, you sure were lucky".  I think not.  I have struggled with the question of how much God actually puts a hand in as far as details of everyday life.  Is there really even any room for luck or chance?  I do not know.


But I know this as much as I know anything at all...it was God's hand that spared me on that trail.  I cannot prove it, but I know it.  But life demonstrates this as well:  It does not always work that way.  God's people get cancer.  They struggle.  They lose jobs and lose loved ones.  The difference is in the Christ follower's faith and certainty that we do not know the future but we serve the one that does.


God is good and merciful and watches over foolish sheep like myself; the Good Shepherd is on guard.  But if I had been bitten, and I had suffered...it would not have changed God's goodness or his grace or his love.


My circumstances do not dictate God's character or limitations, but offer an opportunity to glorify Him regardless of the outcome.

So dawns a new blog.

Lately I have felt a need to express feelings and thoughts that do not really fit in my other blog(s), those being more cycling related or what have you.  Citizen of Heaven blog is not a boast or a brag, rather a place to begin from and a direction of movement; a line in the sand; a compass point where North is relative to a hope of heaven, a citizenship not of this earth.

And with that, I move forward for the time I have in this place, much like Reepicheep as quoted above and here below, with my nose pointed to the horizon.

"While I can, I sail east in the Dawn Treader. When she fails me, I paddle east in my coracle. When she sinks, I shall swim east with my four paws. And when I can swim no longer, if I have not reached Aslan's country, or shot over the edge of the world in some vast cataract, I shall sink with my nose to the sunrise..."