Our Good Shepherd

                                                                                                        Copyright free image Google

 On Good Shepherd Sunday, we heard Psalm 23,

 sang at least one hymn based on the Psalm, 

and think of the pictures of Christ 

carrying the sheep.

 It is comforting to think of ourselves
 as that lamb, 

safely tucked in the arms 

or draped around the neck of the Shepherd. 

It is a little harder to remember 

Christ’s instructions to Peter,

 “If you love me, feed my sheep.” 

Yes, we are called sheep, 

and it is not a compliment. 

Without Christ, we are the foolish sheep

 who need protection and guidance. 

But with Christ, that is a different story. 

As the workers in the vineyard 

we are to care for each other 

with Christ-like love and concern.

I was thinking about the pictures

of Christ painted

 by artists and poets and then moved on 

to the verbal pictures I carry in my heart 

about the First Person of the Trinity, 

God the Father. 

The first of those pictures formed 

during my high school years 

when an English teacher 

read the poem “The Creation” 

by James Weldon Johnson.

 Once I started to think of the Creator 

in human form, I began to also see Him

 walking in the Garden. 

First, He was in comfortable conversation 

and then in parental confrontation.

 I saw God the Father as a strong protector

 slamming shut the door of the ark

 to protect and shelter Noah. 

But, my favorite mental picture 

of God the Father in human form comes from

 Deuteronomy 33:12 and Hosea 11:1. 

The blessing of Moses to Benjamin 

says that Benjamin is beloved of The Lord

 and rests between His (God’s) shoulders. 

I know many take that to be a physical description

 of the land assigned to Benjamin 

with the shoulders being 

poetic descriptions of mountains. 

I like to think of God the Father picking up

 those of childlike faith and putting us

 on His shoulders just like a human father

 picks up a toddler and perches

 the little one on strong shoulders 

to keep them safe, let them see, 

and keep them from wandering off. 

The closer I get to heaven,

 the more certain I am that heaven

 must feel just like those laughing children

 sitting on dad’s shoulders. 

Think about it, we were in “Egypt Land” slavery 

when God rescued us and led us

 through the waters of baptism. 

Now we are free, 
now we can dance with Miriam,

 sing with Moses, 

and ride on the shoulders of God!

 I like that picture.

More resources: Creation- James Johnson
and here is a reading-
Video- Creation


Thanks to Contributing writer- 
Natalie Hartwig, 
for this Good Shepherd reflection.

Hope Grows HERE- a Devotion

Cultivating Hope

A few weeks ago at church, I mentioned to someone that I tended to be melancholy. “Oh, that can’t be true,” she said. But it is. My natural way of thinking, since childhood, has been characterized by self-criticism and anxiety.

Last year, a wise woman in my Bible study talked so lovingly about her peaceful morning devotions. Her first prayer in the morning is “Good morning, God!” My first prayer in the morning is, “Lord, help me!” 

So a big part of my emotional and spiritual growth as an adult has been learning to cultivate hope. For me, hope does not come naturally. 

That’s why I find this passage in Romans 5 so comforting. It talks about hope as the outcome of a learning process, not as something I should naturally possess. I’m using the Revised Standard Version here, because it was the translation I had in my teens, and when I was thinking about this verse, this is what I remembered.

Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. 2 Through him we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God. 3 More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 5 and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.

“Hope does not disappoint us.” Those are the words that have echoed through my mind as I’ve been looking forward to this retreat. Hope does not disappoint us. 

Have you ever hoped, and was disappointed? I have. It seems like a long time ago, now, but I still remember our long journey of infertility. Seventeen years ago, on Valentine’s Day, I had my first miscarriage. It was devastating. It was one year after a surgery that the doctors thought might give me a chance at pregnancy, and five years after we had begun trying to have children. Like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, “We had hoped…” and hoped and hoped, and had been disappointed.

Eight months later, I was pregnant again. I did everything I could to ignore it. Except, of course, it was all I could think about. I waited with dread for the tell-tale signs of miscarriage. I had dreams of blood. I refused to plan. When I eventually needed maternity clothes, I walked into a maternity clothing store feeling like an imposter. I had scuttled past that store hundreds of times in the previous few years, my heart aching. Actually buying maternity clothes seemed like a monumental act of faith. 

My mother-in-law wanted to throw me a baby shower, and I reluctantly agreed. I asked her to wait until the final weeks of pregnancy, when statistics showed that most babies born survived. Yes, indeed, I had looked up survival rates of pre-term babies on the Internet, and focused on 28 weeks. If I could just make it to 28 weeks, maybe then I could start to think about an actual living baby coming out of this pregnancy. Every so often, I would get on the computer and stare at that chart of survival rates again, counting down the weeks until I would allow myself to hope.

At 28 weeks, my husband finally persuaded me that we needed to buy a crib. Again, I felt like an imposter. I was still afraid. I cried in the middle of the baby store, practically hyperventilating at the hope and faith needed to choose and buy a crib.

At 34 weeks, I went into labor. My daughter, despite being a bit premature, was strong and healthy. She was born one week before the scheduled baby shower. My mother-in-law rescheduled it for a month later, and it became a celebration of our new little daughter. It was perfect.

I share this with you because I think many of us have had experiences which make hope difficult. If you live in this fallen world, you’re going to have disappointments, big and small. But what I love about these verses from Romans is that hope is not something we have to drum up inside ourselves. It is a process, and paradoxically it can come out of the very same suffering that seems like a hope-killer. 

Listen again: we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 5 and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.

This sounds weird to me, but it’s right there in the verse: Suffering is the beginning of hope. How can that be? Well, I can say that during the pregnancy that gave me my first daughter, and during the two more miscarriages that followed, and during the pregnancy and NICU stay of my second daughter, I clung to God as hard as I knew how to do. I could not bring myself to hope for a living child. I couldn’t do it. 

What I could do was hope in the sustaining love of Jesus to bring me through, whatever happened. What I could do is pray my morning prayer all day. Sometimes that’s all you can do. Lord, have mercy. Jesus, help me get through this day. 

I was still fearful. At times, I was fiercely angry with God for putting us through this. But still, I hoped. I hoped that whether we ended up with children or not, that God would still make my life meaningful. Sometimes, often, that hope was an act of the will. It did not come easily. 

But here is the key to this verse. The source of our hope is not our life circumstances. We do not place our hope in our own abilities, our own personality, our own hearts. Our source of hope comes from outside of ourselves. It comes from God pouring his love into us. It comes from Jesus loving us and sacrificing himself so that we CAN hope. Cultivating hope means cultivating our trust and our faith in Jesus. It means hanging on to the light of Jesus, even when our world looks dark. It means enduring suffering with the knowledge that Jesus walks with us, and that he went before us. 

Hebrews says that Jesus, “for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.” That joy is the joy of bringing us into the kingdom. That joy was reconciling us to God and giving us hope. Jesus went to great lengths to give us the one hope that will never disappoint us—himself. Cultivating hope means remembering what lies at the end of our journey, and that is the “hope of sharing the glory of God.” 

As we leave this place, I pray that we leave a little more centered on Jesus, a little more aware of how the Holy Spirit is working in our lives, a little more steeped in God’s love for us. Whether you’re in a season of suffering, or joy, whether you feel satisfied with your life or long for a change, always remember this—Jesus is our hope, and *that* hope will *never* disappoint us.

This devotion was written by Jennifer Gross

 and shared at the Wellspring Women's Retreat- 

Hope Grows Here.

Jennifer is a member of 

Prince of Peace Lutheran Church

 in Springfield, Virginia

 and a contributing writer for

 Journeys of Faith.

Hope Grows Here- A Retreat Response

Devotion Thought and Challenge

Romans 13:8-10      Don't run up debts, except for the huge debt of love you owe each other. When you love others, you complete what the law has been after all along. The law code-don't sleep with another person's spouse, don't take someone's life, don't take what isn't yours, don't always be wanting what you don't have, and any other "don't" you can think of-finally adds up to this: Love other people as well as you do yourself. You can't go wrong when you love others. When you add up everything in the law code, the sum total is love. (The Message Bible)

"Your seven minutes begins now," the facilitator announced. The black and white graphic was on the table in front of me. I read its message silently to myself, "faith over fear." With a black fine-tip marker I added names to the empty spaces in and around the artsy lettering: my husband; our children; a neighbor; my co-worker's daughter; my brother. I selected colored pencils from the clear glass jar and turned "faith" into a word rainbow of promise-red, orange, yellow, green, blue-"over" became purple. I shaded "fear" with a foreboding, gloomy gray and sighed as I reread the message, "faith over fear." 

My train of thought was interrupted by the time keeper. "That was seven minutes," she announced. Unlike seven minutes stuck in traffic or the seven tedious minutes of a poorly run meeting, this block of time flew by. I had become completely immersed in the words, what they meant in relationship to the people whose names I wrote down, and in choosing meaningful colors to uncover a deeper connection to the message. Essentially, I was coloring a page from an adult coloring book (the new trendy elixir for unraveling stress), an activity I had previously deemed unproductive. I failed to see its purpose, my task-oriented mindset left wanting.

This experience was different. As part of a day-long Hope Grows Here women's retreat, I opted to attend a "Break-Through" session titled, Visual Prayer. The objective was to learn about another way to quietly pray while keeping our hands busy and our minds focused. It worked for me. Each of the names I wrote down represented some kind of fear with which I was wrestling, but after dedicated time centered on those words, "faith over fear," I felt more at peace and able to surrender my concerns to God. My eyes did not need to be closed, nor my hands folded. No pun intended, it was an eye-opening experience.

The presenter was quick to emphasize that Visual Prayer probably wouldn't work for everyone. "This is just one option, one possibility," she said. As an example, she talked about an elementary math teacher tasked with helping a room full of students to work independently while problem solving, the end goal for all to arrive at the same answer. Teachers adept at recognizing different learning styles, know that the journey to the same destination can be different and they will teach to a child's strengths, setting them up for success. 

I asked my daughter about this. She teaches 4^th grade "compacted" math and agrees how important it is to accept different learning styles or "multiple intelligences" as labeled by researchers. She explained to me that some people are visual learners, "like you, Mom." Others learn best when they are actively doing something or manipulating objects. Hearing the how and why may be the key to unlock knowledge and skill for another. She understands how her students learn best. She not only wants them to know, for example, that 2+2=4, but more so, she wants each of them to understand why and to identify how they can apply their knowledge in everyday life. One of her favorite quotes about teaching and learning comes from the book, Educating Esme. "31 children, 31 possibilities." I imagine Christ feels the same way about all of us.

We are possibilities. Christ encourages, "Break-Through into something new or different." He gently reminds, "Faith over fear." He nudges, "I'm right here with you." 

Today's challenge-"Don't run up debts, except for the huge debt of love you owe each other. When you add up everything in the law code, the sum total is love." New math, old math, compacted math ... visual learner, learning by doing or listening ... what works for you? No matter how we pray or worship or serve, "the sum total is love." Do we understand why? How do we apply this knowledge every day of our lives? Hope Grows Here.

Dear Lord, 

Help me to enthusiastically seek opportunities for learning and loving. Help me to be faithful. Work through me to cultivate hope. Where I see a challenge, let me instead discover possibilities. Amen

This devotion was written by Mary Jo Anderson and originally 

appeared on the website for Good Shepherd Lutheran Church,

 Gaithersburg, MD.

This Frontline Devotion is reprinted here
 with permission from the author.

Hope Grows Here- Women's Retreat

St. Andrew Lutheran Church,

 in Silver Spring, Maryland 

hosted the Wellspring Women's Retreat event 

on Saturday,

April 14, 2018.

 About 125 women gathered to 

be encouraged, learn together,

sing and worship,

and make connections.

Keynote Speaker- Connie Denninger

shared the struggle for "meaningful and reliable"

prayer time, as well as time in God's Word. 

Visual Faith Ministry brings together 

some of the tools and resources 

that have changed the story.

 We talked about some of the fears 

that steal JOY and rob us of hope.

We have a Vision Problem.

We don't keep our eyes on Jesus.

We have a spiritual amnesia problem.

We forget God's faithfulness to us.

When the Lord is 

my LIGHT and SALVATION-

whom shall I fear?

And when fear takes a back seat-

there is HOPE.

 Morning sessions included 

a variety of topics and choices.

Visual Prayer packets were take-home 

encouragement to help us remember-

FAITH OVER FEAR.

 HOPE GROWS HERE

because of what Jesus 

has already done in our lives.

Thank you to the planning team and the 

WELLSPRING ministry

 for offering this wonderful event for women.

Voices- Liv & Hal

As a follow up to the March for Our Lives, 

I was recently introduced 

to the sister duo- Liv & Hal.

They are high schoolers that attend

 St. Matthew Lutheran Church.

 They are alumni of 

St. Matthew Lutheran school

  in Walled Lake, Michigan.

This talented pair of siblings

 are song writers and musicians.

They recently wrote a song 

to share their response to the

 March for Our Lives
events around the United States.
                                                                         

Here is their YouTube link:

Give them a listen and a like.

 And subscribe.

Liv & Hal

A blessing to hear a God-given talent

 used to express such heart-felt emotion.