Kathryn M. Graves and her husband live in Kansas where he is a pastor. She has a B.A. in Psychology and has written pre-sermon sketches, articles for the Kansas/Nebraska Baptist Digest, and a story in the book When God Steps In: True Stories of Transformation by God’s Grace. Kathryn loves cats, teaching Bible studies, flower gardening, and vacations at the lake.
CBN.com -- Jerry Falwell has passed away. The news flashed across the country and around the world. He was one of the greatest evangelical leaders of our time. As Jerry Johnston stated in an interview with Fox news, many of us wonder who will be the next great leader of his caliber. Not many candidates are readily identifiable.
I remember when I first met Dr. Falwell. He was sitting in the booth for Liberty University at the Southern Baptist Convention. Our family walked through the exhibit because our son was considering the school. I later saw him on a number of other occasions because Jeremy did attend Liberty. I never could say I knew him, but I almost felt like I did, especially after reading his life story.
Jerry didn’t come from a family of preachers as one might expect. His was a family well-known for its business interests, not for its religious fervor. He was just a kid who decided to go to Bible college. But God had plans for Jerry Falwell, big plans.
The Bible says in ,
“But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong.”
This doesn’t mean Dr. Falwell was foolish or weak prior to being called by God, but it does mean God often chooses the least likely in the world’s eyes. Consider David, the youngest of Jesse’s sons. Merely a shepherd when Samuel found him, not even his father suspected God had chosen him to be king.
When I ponder the marvelous things God did through Falwell, I’m certain the man gave all credit to God and rightfully so. But there is a certain quality about one through whom God does amazing things. It is obedience. Neither Thomas Road Baptist Church nor Liberty University would exist today if Dr. Falwell had decided they were impossible dreams or required too much work. God gave the vision and Jerry Falwell put in the long, hard hours.
How many of us either don’t catch God’s vision for our lives or decide we don’t really want to make the sacrifices it will require?
says,
“’For I know the plans that I have for you,’ declares the LORD, ‘plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope.’”
If we would simply get on board with God and do His bidding, we might be amazed at what He would accomplish.
I know the struggle. I’ve been called to write. My name may never be a household word like Dr. Falwell’s, but I still need to obey. In my daily routine, if I let a day go by without writing, it’s usually because I found something else to do. Only God knows the plans He has for me. I can trust they’re for my good because God is trustworthy. It’s a sin for me not to obey since that indicates I don’t really trust God.
Do our daily actions demonstrate trust in God? Will we allow God to fulfill all the plans He has for our lives? Do we even know what those plans are? Take a moment to reflect on Dr. Falwell’s life and on your own. We may not be famous, but we are not insignificant. Join me in the decision to let God have His perfect way. Who knows? The next great evangelical leader may be you.
Kathryn M. Graves and her husband live in Kansas where he is a pastor. She has a B.A. in Psychology and has written pre-sermon sketches, articles for the Kansas/Nebraska Baptist Digest, and a story in the book When God Steps In: True Stories of Transformation by God’s Grace. Kathryn loves cats, teaching Bible studies, flower gardening, and vacations at the lake.
My husband, Bo, picked a tiny screw up from the floor and tried to fit it into the hole on the bicycle shaft. “Are you sure this goes in here?” he asked.
I blew my bangs off my forehead and rubbed my eyes. Glancing at my watch, I groaned.
“What?”
“It’s almost one o’clock and we’re not even halfway finished.”
Bo sighed as he dropped the screw into a pile of unused parts. “We have to get this bike finished before we go to bed. You know how early the boys get up on Christmas morning. We can’t give them the parts and say Santa’s elves didn’t know how to put it together.”
I fished around in the pile of opened plastic bags and metal parts until I found the instruction sheet. “Well, we certainly don’t know how. Maybe we should read these,” I said as I unfolded the paper.
Thirty minutes later, a glittering red bicycle stood in front of the Christmas tree. A great sense of accomplishment filled my weary body. One more to put together, then we could crash into bed for a few hours of sleep before the pre-dawn rush to the tree.
As I remembered that long-ago Christmas Eve and the shouts of pleasure from our two boys the following morning, I realized failure to read the instructions cost us several hours of sleep and caused a great deal of unnecessary stress, much like when I fail to read God’s instructions in His word. I’m sure we were not the only parents up late trying to figure out how to put something together without reading the instructions first. Likewise, I’m not the only Christian who ever failed to read God’s word before trying to live my life.
The first were the Israelites. They had the Ten Commandments, but they still tried to do things their own way. God would remind them of their need to turn back to him. They’d repent and try again, but sometimes the consequences of disobedience were harsh.
In the thirteenth chapter of First Chronicles, we read about David’s decision to move the ark to Jerusalem. He didn’t make sure it was carried the correct way, resulting in the death of one man. David waited a while before he tried to move it again. This time he followed the instructions and it turned into a happy celebration:
“Then David said, ‘No one but the Levites may carry the ark of God, because the LORD has chosen them to carry the ark of the LORD . . .’” I Chronicles 15:2
In the New Testament, all the churches Paul wrote letters to had problems stemming from failure to follow God’s directions. Consequently, in each letter, Paul wrote instructions for them to follow. His words are meant for us, too, because as "> OPEN VERSE IN BIBLE (nlt) says,
“ . . . the gospel preached by me . . . came by a revelation from Jesus Christ.”
How cool is it that we have all of God’s written instructions in the Bible? We don’t have to wait for somebody to read it to us or wait for a letter from a mentor. We have it all at our fingertips, just like Bo and I had the instruction sheet with us the whole time. We may think we don’t have time to read the Bible, but if we did, we wouldn’t have so many mistakes to correct. Sometimes we’re just lazy. We’d rather get a good night’s sleep. In the end we experience sleepless nights spent in worry.
When all else failed, Bo and I read the instructions. There weren’t any serious consequences for us with the bicycle, but there can be in our lives when we fail to read God’s instructions. That’s why I now spend the first part of every morning studying my Bible for the directions God gives.
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Kathryn M. Graves and her husband live in Kansas where he is a pastor. She has a B.A. in Psychology and has written several pre-sermon sketches, articles for the Kansas/Nebraska Baptist Digest, and a story in the book When God Steps In: True Stories of Transformation by God’s Grace. Kathryn loves cats, teaching Bible studies, flower gardening, and vacations at the lake.
My neighbor, Edna, found a stray kitten on her porch a few months ago. She already had three grown cats, all of which hated the kitten, so she called me and asked me to take him. I love cats, but hadn’t had one in several years and didn’t think I wanted another one. However, when I heard his baby meow over the phone line, my heart melted.
I don’t know where he had been before Edna’s, but he came to me full of insecurity. He keeps looking for places to hunker down where he can feel secure. One of his favorites is under the shower curtain. I have a curved shower rod and when not in use, the curtain hangs outside the tub, bowing out in the center with the hem dangling a few inches above the floor.
The kitten, Theodore, crouches under the center section. The funny thing is the shower curtain only covers his ears and eyes, leaving his whole body exposed and his whiskers poking out. But he feels safe under the flimsy fabric.
I am reminded of how we can be like Theodore. We look for security in flimsy things, too. My husband and I, seriously concerned about providing enough money for our retirement, invested in the stock market. Having money socked away makes us feel better about the future. But markets have a history of softening, declining and bursting like a bubble. We really don’t know how much money we will end up with.
Some people collect things, even when they can’t afford to. I am reminded of the commercial in which a man who has a huge, fake smile plastered on his face lists all the possessions he owns. At the end he says, still smiling, “Can’t somebody help me? I’m in debt up to my eyeballs.” Surrounding ourselves with a lot of things may feel good for a while, but even if we can afford them, we can’t take them with us when our life is over. We’re simply covering our eyes and ears to the truth that they can’t provide the kind of security that lasts.
A job seems like the answer for many. They spend years training and preparing for their dream job – the one that will make them rich and famous. Someone said fame is fleeting. They were right and jobs can be, too, in our world of layoffs, outsourcing and corporate corruption.
Some search for security in relationships. My mother felt secure in her marriage until it fell apart after 33 years. Marriage is great, and we should feel secure in our marriage relationships, but we are not guaranteed tomorrow. My husband and I have been married almost 29 years and if there ever was a solid marriage we have it, but our health is not promised to last forever. One of us will probably pass away before the other. If marriage were the only thing lending me a sense of security, I might one day be lost without it.
Some people live in war-torn countries and believe if they only had peace, they would feel secure. Unfortunately, military peace doesn’t always bring personal security.
In the parable of OPEN VERSE IN BIBLE (nlt) Jesus said if we build our houses on the sand, then when the rain comes, everything will be washed away. But if we’ve built on the rock, our house will hold up against the worst of storms. Jesus is the rock and the house is our life. Whatever plans we make for our future need to be prayed over and Spirit led. When we hunker down on Jesus our Rock, we really are secure. Anywhere else is behind a flimsy shower curtain.
Copyright © 2010 Kathryn M. Graves. Used by permission.
CBN.com -- I sat in front of the television on Saturday, May 5th, watching the coverage of the tornado aftermath in Greensburg, Kansas. The pictures caused me to relive memories of a similar day almost exactly eight years ago in my town of Haysville, Kansas.
It was May 3, 1999, the day a huge, F-5 storm hit Oklahoma City. The early evening had been stormy, but that’s not unusual for this time of year. My husband, Bo, had gone to a meeting at church, two miles east of our home. One of our sons lived out of town at college, and the other, Jeremy, attended a class in the neighboring town of Rose Hill.
I took advantage of the rare quiet to sit in the living room and read a novel. Hail began to fall about 8 p.m., turning the sky an ominous color I’d never seen before. Alert, but not alarmed, I headed to the basement family room and turned on the T.V.
A weather alert interrupted regular programming, so I sat down. The first reports of a large tornado in Oklahoma City were coming in and things didn’t look good. Then the weather man got a new bulletin. Concern filled his eyes as he reported a tornado on the ground south of the Wichita metro area along I-35, moving north. His next words propelled me into motion. “An official warning for Sedgwick County has not yet been issued, but if you live in Haysville, take cover now. This tornado will hit you if it continues its current path.”
I grabbed a flashlight and the cordless phone. Never having lived through a tornado before, I failed to get anything else. I wore tennis shoes, jeans and a lightweight shirt, but no jacket. Thinking back on our family discussions, I decided the safest place in the basement was the exercise room since it contained no windows. A long table ran across the back of the room for crafts projects and an old, upholstered chair sat in front of it. I crawled under the table, pulling the chair toward me for covering. I cradled the phone in my hands while listening to the T.V. I could no longer see. The last thing I heard was a tornado warning issued for Sedgwick County.
Then the power went out. The basement pitched into blackness. That’s when I knew the storm had hit. I turned on the flashlight for comfort. Almost immediately I heard the sirens on emergency vehicles. As more and more sirens kept coming and didn’t stop for probably thirty minutes, I knew it was bad. I wondered if Bo was safe. I hoped Jeremy was alright and glad he was not in Haysville.
By the next day, the picture emerged. The tornado had roared between our house and the church, leaving five people dead, destroying most of the businesses in town and a large number of homes. It continued into Wichita, where it killed three more, leveling a path half a mile wide. It was later labeled an F-4.
The recent weekend of tornadoes in Kansas, floods in Missouri, and wildfires on both coasts, combined with my memories of the Haysville tornado, turned my thoughts to the stormy nature of our lives. We are not immune to trouble and sorrow.
says,
“These things I have spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace. In the world you have tribulation, but take courage; I have overcome the world.”
No matter what happens to us, Jesus is there to go through it with us. He remains in charge, even if it doesn’t seem like it. He still loves us, even when we feel abandoned. The Bible tells us in that absolutely nothing can separate us from the love of God. Whether the storms and dangers we face are physical, emotional or spiritual, we can rest in knowing Who is in control.
My family and our town were forever changed by the storm. Moving on was a long and often painful process, but we can look back and see the hand of God at work. He has indeed overcome the world.
Kathryn M. Graves and her husband live in Kansas where he is a pastor. She has a B.A. in Psychology and has written pre-sermon sketches, articles for the Kansas/Nebraska Baptist Digest, and a story in the book When God Steps In: True Stories of Transformation by God’s Grace. Kathryn loves cats, teaching Bible studies, flower gardening, and vacations at the lake.
