The Dessert Road

Sometimes, (let me change that) A lot of times God ask us to do something that we do not really understand and may not really want to do. I find myself in one of those times right now. It is much like in the book of Acts chapter 8, I read where Phillip is in Samaria and God is doing some amazing things in that area. Phillip was seeing people coming to Christ, the lame being healed, he even led a magician to the Lord. the Bible says "there was much rejoicing in that city." They were preaching the Gospel to many in Samaria but and angel spoke to Phillip "Get up and Go South to road that goes from Jerusalem to Gaza, (this is the Dessert Road), so he got up and went."
Just a couple of observations;1.) Why did this road get the designation of the dessert road? didn't all the roads around there go through a dessert? To me, and I am probably wrong, Isn't that like saying "Take the corn road" to someone in Nebraska?
2.)Phillip just got up and went. Wouldn't be easy to say "Whhaaat? Good things are happening here. I am so comfortable, God is moving and i am a part of it. the people here are great the people are listening to me. etc..." But no. Even though it probably did not make any sense to Phillip, he got up and went. WOW! what faith, what obedience. And I notice that just like Abraham generations earlier, he just got up and walked because that is what god ask them to do.
That is where Velda and I find myself at this time. Now we are no Phillip or Abraham by any stretch of the imagination, but we find ourselves in a similar situation. We have been a part of Lone Oak First Baptist Church for about 15 years. It is the only church home I have ever had. I have experienced God moving and working in unbelievable ways and even on occasion I have been blessed by being used by Him in some small way that He might be glorified through a sinner like me. I have had opportunities of service and blessing that are indescribable. I have had people bless My family, love my family, encourage my family in more ways than I can recall. I would be crazy to leave there. But that is what I must do. Because I know that is what God is asking us to do. No, an angel of the Lord has not appeared to me, but His word has. In fact, I have had to ask His forgiveness for not being obedient to His call. You see He told us this a while ago, but because of our love for our church and its staff and people, we did not want to go and those are all noble things, but disobedience is disobedience regardless of the motive, and disobedience is sin.
People have asked us "What happened?" as if there is some ill reason why we would leave such a wonderful place, and my response is simply this. "God happened." He said walk and we are walking. Don't know why, don't know where, but do know God has a plan and a purpose and we can not wait to discover what it is. Please pray for us as we walk this road, that we will find our way of bringing Him Glory.

Lessons of the Lame

Back in December I had some long needed surgery done on my ankle. Since that time I have pretty much become just a large gelatinous mass whose soul purpose is to consume mass quantities of food and then lie around and hear the fat cells popping into existence like Jiffy pop popcorn burning over a campfire. (Try as I might I have never successfully popped jiffy pop over a camp fire.)
I am trying to workout everyday....on one foot....on arms and upper body, which ironically is the only thing that has had any use in the last two months. Crutches seem to build the muscle under the arm (the pitisamus) and other rarely used unknown body parts. Right now I am just trying to keep from having to buy an entire new wardrobe. To make matters worse, the other day Velda and I go to Wal Mart and I get into one of those power chair cart things and we start rolling down the aisle. I was thinking "Boy I always thought these thing were for the obese, the lazy, or the old people". It was then i realized I was all these things. To make matters worse, I put the thing in reverse and it started beeping. Velda looks at me and said I wondered when you were going to get one of those back up beepers.
Not only am I getting so much mass that it will only be a matter of time before things start orbiting around me, but I am also noticing some other harmful effects. Because I am at home most of the time with nothing to do, I have been doing extra housework, a lot of cooking,and I am doing a Beth Moore Bible study. Let me just put it this way. I have to get back to work soon because I have had enough of my feminine side. I turned on the TV the other day and Oprah was on and I found myself watching it for about 5 minutes before I realized what was happening. I had all I could take and ran from the room before I started having hormone problems. I quickly turned on the XBOX and started shooting some stuff and then followed that up with a couple of hours of Sports Center just to get the testosterone flowing again.
Its not all bad though. God had taught me some things. One is, all that time you say I dont have time to spend with God, will you spend more when you have time or will you fill your time with other meaningless things. I have learned that God provides. All those times i despised my job, i was accumilating sick days that allowed me to not miss a check yet. (Missed out on a lot of overtime though)I learned how hard my wife works as i have seen day in and day out what her days consist of. (She is an Angle) I just pray that as I continue to heal God will continue to conform me to His image. I doubt that Jesus was this fat however.

Hammer Time

As a part of my job, i get the wonderful opportunity to do some amazing things. One of them is occasionally I get to spend all day operating a compressed air jack hammer. I know, I know, you are all thinking, "you lucky dog you.", but it is not quite as glamorous as it may sound. Sure, on the back ache and pain reliever commercials it looks great, but you can't believe everything you see on T.V. It really is quite tasking. Despite its apparent technical difficulty, when you spend as much time as I do operating one, it takes very little mental capacity to bust concrete into small pieces. As a result, my mind usually tends to wander. I find myself contemplating life's small mysteries like, "I wonder what is for supper tonight, why do some people say supper and others dinner, chowder is a funny word, if ants could talk would they still call their father's sister Aunt, Is that something shinny, wasn't Jack Nicholson in The Shinning?" you get the idea, not a whole lot going on in the upper room of the Rikel cranium.

Today, however, was different. The concrete I was pulverizing was being replaced because the people who originally poured it, poured it on mud. The most important part of constructing with concrete and almost everything else is a good solid foundation. So, concrete is usually poured on a good base of compacted aggregate. Now I am no engineer, but I learned enough about mud as a kid trying to catch tadpoles in our farm pond to know that something that will squish between your toes is probably not a solid foundation, although it is good for grossing out your older sister.

As i continued to hammer away at the concrete, I was reminded of Jesus talking about the wise man who built his house upon a rock and it stood against the storms and waves, and how the foolish man built his on sand and it came crumbling down. I am sure from the outside, both houses looked pretty much the same, but it was what was underneath that made the difference. i think that is the way we are a lot of times. People can look like they are as solid as concrete on the surface, but that is just a facade. Underneath their foundation is not built upon their relationship with Jesus. It is built on Pride, Materialism, Greed, Selfishness, and when things hit us we begin to crumble. I know there has been times when my foundation has not been made of what it needed to be and God took His jack hammer and pounded away what seemed to be a good surface until he got to my foundation and replaced it with "The Rock" a is in the process of building the man He desires me to be. One set upon the rock. And just like the concrete I will pour onto that solid base tomorrow, I may get run over, beat on, stormed on, but I will not be moved.

Crazy Man

About 10 years ago I was walking down the street in Nashville Tennessee after just coming out of a Promise Keepers event. I had just had an incredible experience with the presence of God. As we walked out of the arena, we were faced with the usual protesteors and demonstrators on the sidewalks. Feminist, Pro-Choice, pro-life, save the ameoba, all sorts of people trying to shout out what they thought I needed to hear. I however breezed right by them all and continued my stroll back to the van. As we walked past a Bar and grill with a little live country music spilling out into the evening air. I looked through the window at the people dinning and socializing and I thought, I wish all these people could experience what I had just experienced. So distracted by what I was thinking, I forgot to look ahead at where I was walking and quickly found myself about to run face first into someone. thanks to perifial vision, I was able to stop just in time to prevent knocking some unsuspecting soul to the concrete. As i looked up at my near victim, I saw a man standing on a crate with a bible in his hand. As if that was not enough to make me do a double take, the guy looked just like the crazy old Parson on one of the Poltergiest sequals. He was wearing a plain brown suit with one of those little string neck ties with some kind of big coin looking buckle around his neck. (Never understood those little things) He wore one of those" Little House on the Prairie" flat rim western hat, with kind of gumball machine center. (Not quite a Hawse Cartwright 10 galloon, but similar) He had long skinny teeth with a noticable gap between his front two, only to be highlighted by the fact that one of them was half missing. He looked at me with one eye, mainly because he had one of those crazy Marty Feldman eyes that just sort of revolved around like it had a mind of its own. He raise a bony finger toward my face and said "You will never be able to keep any promises (Going with the whole Promise Keepers theme) unless you Repent and Believe. Repent I say and be truly saved." I remember thinking "what a wacko" and just proceeding with my trek back to the van. Something about that man has always stuck in my mind. I remember thinking that he was over the top and no one could everpossibly take him seriously.
Now fast forward to present day. I was doing a little reading the other day about John the Baptist, and how he was quite the ecentric. the whole camel hair wardrobe, diet of locust and honey, living in the wilderness preaching "repent and be baptized." Who could ever take him seriously. Then I got to thinking about Paul. Whipped repeatedly, beaten, stoned, snakebit, shipwrecked, imprisoned, and the list goes on. I wonder if anyone ever had a near collision with him on the streets of Jerusalem and thought "What a wacko. Matthew - Tax collector, Peter - Fisherman, Elijah - taking on all the prophets of Baal and talking trash, running from Jezebel, being fed by Ravens, drought causing, dead child raising bonifide wacko. Noah - boat builder on dry land, flood predicter in a time that had never seen rain, STRANGE!
It seems all these guys in the Bible who were used by God to do great things, all seemed to have one thing in common. They probably looked off their rocker to the people around them. Despite being odd however, they all spoke the truth of God in their lives and God used them to fullfill a purpose. The funny thing is, I find myself wanting to be a lot more like the guy standing on the crate in Nasville, who at least was telling people how to experiencing God by repenting and believing than the guy walking down the street wishing people could experience God and doing nothing about it. I have become uncomfortable being the "run- of- the- mill Christian."mainly because I dont belive such a thing should exist. i no longer will be satisfied with not doing something about it. I think that following God will make you look like a crazy man. i believe it will make you be outside of the box, that you may actually end up standing on it shouting "Repent and Believe!"
So if you see me in the coming days and years doing something and you think "Paul has finally gone off the deep end." you are probably right, but thats ok. I would rather be nut from the tree of life, than a fungus on the trunk that just sits there and leeaches off the tree.
I guess I am just a crazy man

Hope and Change

Well the long Presidential campaign is over and not a minute too soon. There is no doubt that this years election brought to the forefront some of the problems that our great country faces. At least one hurdle has been cleared and that is the election of an African American to the highest office in the land. What a day to be proud of. I must say many of the things that Barrack Obama campaigned on, I am in favor of: Health care, education, helping the middle class and the poor, making our country strong, being good stewards of our environment. I only differ in the way that these things should be handled and is why I could not vote for him. However now that he will be president and is going to try to empliment his policies I have a suggestion, here it is. "Oprah, if we are going to start this whole redistibution of wealth thing, I would like to encourage you to go ahead and get a headstart, and I would like to even cut out the middle man and allow you to just send me a check for some of that wealth you have that needs to be spread around. I know I haven't worked for it, earned it, or deserve it, but i believe that if you would just send me about $100,000.00 it would give me the HOPE I need to make a CHANGE in my life and stop having to break my back everyday for a measly $32,000 per year. Seems FAIR doesn't it?"
"HOPE and CHANGE". That used to mean to me "I HOPE I can find enough CHANGE in my couch cushions to buy a Soda." Now it means what people are looking for in a President. (I wonder how many twins will be born in the next few years that will be named HOPE and CHANGE.) I just want to go on the record as saying if you are looking for HOPE or CHANGE in any man, you are looking in the wrong place. Our HOPE should be in God. Our HOPE should be in His Glory, His Salvation, and His unfathomable love for us. His promises that He will never leave us or forsake us, that if we seek His Kingdom and His righteousness all the stuff we tend to worry about will be taken care of. And the only true CHANGE is the CHANGE that comes from allowing Jesus into your life and create in you a new creature. The CHANGE that America needs is for His children to allow Him to transform them and start not just saying I am a Christian, but start living that way and knowing His word and obeying it. I can say all day long that i am a conservative, but am I living according to those principles and showing that they work? In the Same way, I can say I am a Christian, go to church, attend Sunday School, give to the Church, but if I ain't livin' what it's teaching, No one in their right mind would believe it is real.
Where does your HOPE lie? I Know my King will always be on His throne and His plans and policies are perfect and he will never fce re-election. The CHANGE I am looking for is the transformation in my life and others as I allow God to form me into the person He created me to be, so that I may be effective in bringing His HOPE and CHANGE to a lost world.

I Left My Heart In Zambia

This is worship in a small village called Nashoongo. I think its cool. I had the honor to preach in this little mud hut church, as well as present them 2 Bibles from our church to theirs. 1 for the men and 1 for the women. They had began this church, had begun meeting, and even formed a choir, yet had no idea of who Jesus really was and what salvation really is. We taught them several stories from the Bible like Nicodemis, Parable of the sower, Good Samaritan and others to explain who Jesus is and what it means to be a Christian. They were so open to the Gospel and eager to learn. There were 7 who accepted Christ this day and many have since and have been Baptized. Pray that they will continue to grow strong in the Lord.

What Was I Thinking?

As I write this this blog post I keep asking myself "What were you thinking?". Earlier today, My family attended a Sunday School party at the lake, where we had fun and frolicking in a couple of boats on the water. Now for some people this would be no big deal, however for me and my infinite lack of wisdom and discernment, this was a time of being drug through the water on a giant inner tube at 35 mph. Actually, the being pulled through the water is not the bad part, it is the being thrown off the tube at just under the speed of sound and skipping across the water like a 240lb halibut on acid. At the time I was having a blast, and of course all that man ego stuff kicks in and you feel it necessary to conquer what ever the tube of doom can throw at you. You say things like "Faster, sharper turns, and I think I can stay on no matter what." I think about it now and wonder why? I feel like I went over Niagara Falls in a barrel filled with anvils, only to be pulled to shore by a 7 foot physical therapist named Helga and twisted into a pretzel as she repeats in a heavy Scandinavian accent "Yoga is good, no?" I feel like I was eaten by wolves and crapped over a cliff. I feel like the only surviving member of the parachuteless sky diving club.
You know that is the way sin is also. You think "This is a blast", and you are really not thinking about the consequences. Things like pride, ego, or selfishness kick in and before you know it, you are making poor choices. But eventually your sins catch up with you and you pay the price and inevitably ask yourself "What was I thinking?"