travelmonkey4christ

No, it is not yours to open buds into a blossom. Shake the bud, strike it, it is beyond your power to make it blossom. Your touch soils it. you tear its petals to pieces and strew them in the dust, But no color appears and no perfume. Oh, it is not for you to open the bud into blossom. He who can open the bud does it so simply. He gives it a glance and the life sap stirs through its veins. At his breath the flower spreads its wings and flutters in the wind. Colors flash out like heart longings, the perfume betrays a sweet secret. He who can open the bud does it so simply Tagore

Frequent encounters with God will keep any flame burning. When camping overnight in the mountains the temperature drops as the darkness descends. The experienced camper will build a fire for the night near a large rock if possible. Then when he is ready for sleep he will lay his sleeping bag down between the fire and the rock (which is now heated from the fire) so he gets warmth on both sides! The fire is God’s presence. The rock represents other people in your life who spend time in the presence of God. Nothing replaces the personal time you spend in God's presence but the reflected heat from your relationship with strong believers is a welcome compliment in keeping God’s passion in your life!

We have just come back from ministry time with Aboriginals in the Halls Creek area of Western Australia. One of the areas we visited was at Debbie's camp (a group of houses in an area which comprise a people group) and she produced old photographs from a book showing her mother emerging from the Great Sandy Desert in 1967 - her first sight of white people. They had been forced out of the desert because of near starvation, and had followed a plane trail to the nearest settlement. Amazing - just 40 odd years ago. On Wednesday we ministered together, Carolyn and I, to the women (complete with kids running around - good that this does not worry us in the slightest and God moves in spite of noise!) Carolyn ministered on Isaiah 61:1 and 2 and felt to emphasise the "binding up the brokenhearted". She had made some cut out hearts with a word or two on each on things that break our heart. Loss of dreams - Grief through loss of a loved one - Loss of Relationships. Then I ...

One of my favourite writers is Henri Nouwen. In his book, "Turning my mourning into Dancing", he says: "If God is found in our hard times, then all of life, no matter how apparently insignificant or difficult, can open us to God's work among us. To be grateful does not mean repressing our remembered hurts. But when we come to God with our hurts - honestly, not superficially - something life changing can begin slowly to happen. We discover how God is the One who invites us to healing. We realise that any dance of celebration must weave both the sorrows and the blessings into a joyful step... Gratitude in its deepest sense means to live life as a gift to be received thankfully. And true gratitude embraces all of life: the good and the bad, the joyful and the painful, the holy and the not-so-holy. We do this because we become aware of God's life, God's presence in the middle of ALL that happens..."

The third and last servant was Onesimus, or the “non-believer working for a believer” . Here is a servant, a non-believer, who is working in the household of a Christian. Although the name Onesimus means useful he is the opposite of his name. Onesimus is quite useless! He doesn’t do his tasks with skill or dependability, he steals and he plots. Whatever Christianity he is exposed to at his master’s house seems to have no impact on his life. Eventually he executes his escape and flees to freedom – a path that coincidently leads him to Paul. We don’t know how he first heard Paul speak. Since this is around the time of Paul’s house arrest, it is possible Onesimus simply got curious about a crowd gathered at an open window and joined in to listen. The result of listening to Paul’s message about Jesus is that Onesimus becomes a Christian himself. What a transformation! He did not simply have an intellectual assent to the Message, Onesimus experienced a total life altering transformatio...

Last Sunday I spoke about the Lesson of the Three Servants. Jesus said in Matthew 20:28 “The Son of man did not come to be served but to serve!” In the Books of 2 Kings ch 5. We get a glimpse of two very different servants. The second servant was Gehazi, or the “believer working for a believer”. Gehazi was the servant of Elisha the prophet. He represented outwardly the faithful servant – putting on a show both for his master and others. He was an Israelite so he knew about the Living God. Gehazi had witnessed the power of God through Elisha. But in this passage in 2 Kings we see Gehazi’s reaction to his master refusing the incredible riches offered to him by Naaman after he received his cure from Leprosy. Gehazi was incredulous! To just say no to so much wealth was unthinkable to him. He immediately hatched a plan to gain some of the riches for himself without his master ever knowing. Of course Gehazi’s concept of God was fatally flawed. Sure he understood God’s vast, incredible ...

Last Sunday I spoke about the Lesson of the Three Servants. Jesus said in Matthew 20:28 “The Son of man did not come to be served but to serve!” The question is what kind of servant are we? Whether we are a believer or non-believer we are all servants of someone . In the Books of 2 Kings ch 5. We get a glimpse of two very different servants. The first servant is a believer working for a non- believer. When I get to heaven, this is one of the first persons I want to find. She was a girl captured on one of the Syrian raids of Israel. We don’t know whether her parents also were taken, killed or still living in Israel. What we do know is she was taken to a foreign country against her will and forced to work in the household of the commander (Naaman) of the forces that attacked her homeland. She is in this position when she overhears her mistress lamenting about her husband’s diagnosis of Leprosy. Her response is one of the most amazing I have ever witnessed. Most of us in the same pos...