Hurricane Elsa 2021

 

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Psalm 20:1

Good News Translation

May the Lord answer you when you are in trouble!
    May the God of Jacob protect you!

 

This past summer we had an appointment at the Uchee Pines Lifestyle Center. We spent the week before our appointment visiting relatives in Florida—something we don’t get to do very often. While in central Florida we watched the development of Hurricane Elsa in the Atlantic. It moved steadily west and finally crossed the southern end of Florida. That slowed it down, and it degenerated into a tropical storm. But once it was over the Caribbean, it picked up extra energy and then whirled around like a snake and came back at us, like a vicious adder, to strike the northern part of Florida.

During the actual time it stuck, we had to drive through that northern part of Florida in order to get to our appointments on time. It had rained every day while we were in Florida, but that was simply kids’ play, compared to Elsa.

As we headed north that day, we prayed that the Lord would protect us in the storm. The wind was fierce and buffeted us relentlessly for four hours. It rained and poured as we groped our way north across the heart of the storm.

We have a cap on the back of our Ford pickup where we had a bed ready made for us to simply climb in and go to sleep. Driven by the wind, the rain came in around the edges of the cap and soaked the edges of our mattress and sleeping bags.

But the God of Jacob indeed protected us. Nothing we had was really damaged. We experienced no accident while driving up the freeway with its hurrying cars and trucks, some passing us or we passing them.

Finally, well into Georgia we stopped at a restaurant for some dinner. It was still pouring down rain. They were out of most of the items on their menu. We were served something and started to eat. Sylvia noticed water pouring down an inside wall of the restaurant. I said, “Don’t tell them, or they’ll drive us out!” Then the electricity went out. Probably the rain had short circuited the electricity. We finished the first part of our order. They couldn’t finish the other part because of the power outage.

The manager suddenly panicked at the developments. She phoned the owner who demanded that we evacuate the restaurant in case the flat roof caved in. She told us to leave. When I offered to pay her, she calmed down and told us they couldn’t charge us for all this. We left in haste, thanking the God of Jacob for His intervention.

We found a cozy motel in Cordele, Georgia, and spent a dry night with thanksgiving. Although Elsa had wet our bed in the back of the pickup, it dried out reasonably quickly within the next few days.

Thank You, God of Jacob, for protecting us from the storm and the hazards of freeway driving in it.

 

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[1] https://www.baynews9.com/fl/tampa/news/2021/07/05/tropical-storm-watches-extended-from-bay-area-northward  You can see the outline of Florida in white across the $1.2 billion damage hurricane Elsa. We drove across the main diameter of the storm in a northwesterly direction, from central Florida into Georgia.

God Thunders Marvelously

Job 37:5
King James Version
⁵ God thundereth marvelously with his voice; great things doeth he, which we cannot comprehend.

 

God communicates with us in many ways. Sometimes He roars in such a way that everybody knows He is communicating with us. This happened with the Israelites at the base of Mount Horeb when God spoke the Ten Commandments out of fire and thick clouds of smoke. This happened when Christ was on the cross and darkness enveloped everything as the curtain between the Holy Place and the Most Holy Place ripped apart from top to bottom.

When God spoke to Elijah after the marvelous appearance on Mount Carmel, some powerful events occurred in nature. But Elijah recognized that these were not God’s communications—they were simply sent to see if he was awake:

1 Kings 19:11-13 And he said, “Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the Lord.” And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake: and after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice. And it was so, when Elijah heard it, that he wrapped his face in his mantle, and went out, and stood in the entering in of the cave. And, behold, there came a voice unto him, and said, “What doest thou here, Elijah?”

God was in the still small voice. God spoke to Abraham, maybe 4 or 5 times; sometimes only in a dream. When God speaks to us, it is usually in a still small voice—a voice that we can choose to ignore because it is so small—maybe to our eternal peril.

There’s an old story, probably apocryphal, that I’m sure you’ve heard. Everything had gone wrong for a man. Finally, he said to himself, “Let me see what God wants me to do.” He opened the Bible at random, put his finger on a text and it read that Judas “went and hanged himself.” (Matthew 27:5). “No,” he said to himself “God can’t be talking to me there.” He closed his Bible and opened it randomly again and read, “Go and do thou likewise.” (Luke 10:37). So, he committed suicide.

Consequently, how does one know whether this still small voice is indeed God’s voice? Or is it rather a suggestion from our own inner desires? Or, much worse still, is it the devil making a suggestion?

Isaiah counseled “To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them.” (Isaiah 8:20) If it is against the direct commands in the Bible—it isn’t God speaking. That brings up the question:  How do we know whether it is against the direct biblical counsel?

We need to read the Bible daily to keep reminding ourselves what the Bible does teach!

Please, Lord, keep speaking to us, and help us recognize Your voice and do what You are asking us to do.

 

 

 

 

 

The Universal Conundrum

 

2 Corinthians 5:21

Holman Christian Standard Bible

²¹ He made the One who did not know sin to be sin for us, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.

 

I was talking with someone recently about sin in the world and our individual sin. The conversation came around to the fact that God made a plan for sinners. That plan was that Christ would assume our sin. Since He had no sin of His own, He was not alienated from God. Since we have sinned, we have earned exactly one thing—death. There was no way around this. Sin is simply rebellion against God. Since God has given us life, our rebellion means we automatically reject the life God equipped us with. We must automatically die.

Christ—Who is God—decided before there was any sin and before man was created, that man was His responsibility and that He would actually bear our sin and take our just reward—death—if man were to sin. Since He took our death, we don’t have to die.

Because of this gift, Christ—God—considers us to be righteous in His eyes. Therefore, this gift has actually made us righteous. We have only to accept the decision God made in our case before we existed.

My friend responded that there was no way he could accept this. It defied logic. He had sinned; therefore, he must reap the result, namely death. The Apostle Paul faced this same logical conundrum. He exclaimed in Romans 11:33:

³³ Oh, the depth of the riches

both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God!

How unsearchable His judgments

and untraceable His ways!

God, the cosmological supreme court, has made this decision. We cannot do anything else but accept it with gratitude and not die or suffer the consequences of refusing to accept His gift.

Thank You, Lord, for the infinite grace You extend to us!
 

 

Worry About the Future

 

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Matthew 6:34
King James Version
³⁴ Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

 

We had a much-loved teacher of creative writing at our Goeske Senior Center. When the COVID-19 struck us in 2020 she started teaching us using Zoom. This continued through January of 2021. Since the class was virtual, the students didn’t have to be local, nor did they have to be older than 50. She gained several international students. She was having a bit of trouble with one of the international students trying to dictate what she should do. This added to her already stressful life. She was a cancer survivor, and her health was already tenuous. Then in February we lost all contact with her. Her landlord found she had passed away in her own apartment.

I chatted with several of her students, and they all wanted us to continue as a workshop. So, I got a Zoom account and contacted those I had e-mails for. Since then, we have met virtually. Inlandia Institute works closely to promote the fine arts in the Inland Empire—a group of inland suburbs of Los Angeles.  They have taken us under their wing and are helping support us.

My wife, Sylvia, is a gifted writer and poet and has also been a strong supporter of the workshop. Monday, amongst her many projects, she was worried that she wouldn’t have something written for our workshop. After the workshop on Tuesday, she came in to me and mentioned that her blood pressure was 199/68. Those numbers don’t mean a lot to me, but I do know that the 199 is way too high. We quickly dashed down to a local urgent medical care. They were extremely helpful and got her to a doctor who prescribed some medicine to, hopefully, lower that number.

I couldn’t help but think of this verse where Christ warns us about worrying about the tomorrow because tomorrow has enough worries of its own. In this case it certainly did. We covet your prayers for her healing.

Oh Lord, I pray for Your healing hand on Sylvia and for Your continuing support of our endeavors.

 

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[1] https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/high-blood-pressure-why-me-201605029288

Serengeti National Park

 

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Psalm 104:24-25

King James Version

²⁴ O Lord, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them all: the earth is full of thy riches.

²⁵ So is this great and wide sea, wherein are things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts.

 

We were poor. All of the other missionaries at Ikizu Secondary owned a car. We could not have afforded to put gas in it, even had we owned one. So, we had to hitch a ride anytime we wanted to go anywhere. From my meagre earnings I had managed to buy an SLR camera and a 200 to 400 mm zoom lens.

We lived on the northern edge of the great Serengeti National Park. Often on a Sabbath (Saturday) afternoon or a Sunday, I would talk with one of the other missionaries—never the Kings who had no sense of adventure—about what we might do. The only real entertainment within driving distance—the Serengeti.

I would almost always ride shotgun while Gary or Fritz or George or Dave or Bob drove. I seemed to have a sixth sense when it came to the trackless steppe county of Africa. Even though the grass was four feet high, and the bush and trees grew with no pattern, I always knew the most direct route to the only ford across the Grumeti River and the way home. There was no GPS in those days.

Upstream or downstream, the Grumeti housed the great crocodiles and even greater hippos. We would often risk life and limb by stealing on foot through the dense brush along the river to snap pictures of the crocs or hippos. Of course, this same thorn brush often hid the lions and leopards awaiting their prey. Hunters claimed you could always smell a lion from 20 feet away by the foul smell of rotting flesh caught between its teeth. I was fortunate not to have ever gotten that close on foot. Every year we got reports of someone’s having been carried off by a lion or disemboweled by a leopard.

Out on the plains we saw the great animals, 5-ton elephants flapping their ears to drive off the tsetse fly, tall giraffes delicately picking off the leaves from between the vicious thorns of flat-topped acacia trees. When we were lucky, we would arrive to experience the hundreds of thousands of wildebeest and zebra during their annual migration towards Lake Victoria. They left the plains totally denuded of grass and blotched with pungent manure. Then we could see the smaller animals: warthogs running with their tails pointing straight up, maybe the sneaky jackal. Always we saw various stately antelope that varied from the eland, as great as a bull moose, to the terrier-size tommy (Thompson’s gazelle) with its perpetual-motion tail. 

As the sun sank towards the lake in the west, we would drive back home, enriched by the vista of God’s varied handiwork. Back at Ikizu, missionaries gathered as Sylvia or Charlotte played hymns on the piano and we hand cranked vanilla ice-cream and popped corn, renewed for a new week of endless work.

Thanks, Lord, that we have never gone wanting and for the enjoyment we have received in spite of periods of poverty.

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[1] https://www.exploring-africa.com/en/tanzania/western-corridor-and-grumeti-reserve-western-serengeti/south-grumeti-river

Chris Oberg

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Isaiah 58:10

Christian Standard Bible

¹⁰ and if you offer yourself to the hungry,
and satisfy the afflicted one,
then your light will shine in the darkness,
and your night will be like noonday.

 

Chris Oberg has been our lead pastor for 13 years. This is a long time for an Adventist pastor to remain at the same church. But where could she go? This church is one of the largest churches in the South-Eastern Conference of the Adventist Church. Most other conferences are not hiring female pastors.

She has long fought for the acceptance of women as equals in the sight of God and especially in the the church. One would expect that, of course, because of her gender. She has become more and more interested in helping the unfortunate, the discriminated against, the impoverished in our community. She took in the LGBTQ+ community and created a place for them to worship and be accepted. She assigned a pastor to foster a separate building for health and wellness.

Chris resigned her post as lead Pastor of the La Sierra University Church to promote the cause of the less fortunate in our Riverside area. The last count of homeless in Riverside County found 2,884[2] individuals. There are many more who are desperate for the bare necessities of life.

Now with this new move, she should be fulfilling the prerequisites of this promise in the book of Isaiah, and we should see her career blossom and her fame grow. Her work should become known everywhere, even in the dark places of this world. Go for it, Chris!

We pray for God’s guidance in pursuing her new mission. We also pray for the choice of a new pastor for our church!

 

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[1] https://www.adventistreview.org/141510-16

[2] https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/health/2020/12/28/riverside-county-homeless-point-time-count-canceled-2021/4066741001/

Pray for Our Government

 

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1 Timothy 2:1-2

Good News Translation

2 First of all, then, I urge that petitions, prayers, requests, and thanksgivings be offered to God for all people; ² for kings and all others who are in authority, that we may live a quiet and peaceful life with all reverence toward God and with proper conduct.

 

First of all, I want to thank God that we are living a quiet and peaceful life. This past summer we left our home for over two months and had no fear that anyone would break in and steal. We parked in Walmart parking lots all over this country, climbed into the bed of our pickup, and slept soundly in the full knowledge that God would look after us. I walk my dog, Katie up and down our streets near home at all hours of the night and day and fear no evil. We have been spoiled because we have done this all our lives. I remember walking from Nyamuswa to Ikizu in “the heart of darkness” of Africa at about 2:00 in the morning without fear.

We had a blatant liar as our president for four years. I followed him on Twitter and was stunned by the out and out lies he told. The first thing our Jesuit president did when he went to the climate conference in Europe this month was to visit the Pope. Now is indeed the time for every Christian, no matter what your denomination is, to pray for our government that we may continue to live a quiet and peaceful life.

We had our governor ban all meetings in churches in 2020. Our church responded without a murmur, shutting us out of the church and adjacent schools. I was stunned again. We have been championing religious liberty and yet knuckled under without so much as a whimper? There were several churches in our area, however, who continued to meet in defiance to the governor’s command. They filed a lawsuit against the governor that went all the way to the Supreme Court. Praise the Lord! The Supreme Court ruled that the governor had breached the separation of church and state clause of our constitution and exonerated the churches. The governor never apologized, but he quit mentioning churches in his lockdowns.

Again, it is getting more and more urgent that we do pray for our rulers “and those who are in authority that we may live a quiet and peaceful life with all reverence toward God.”

O Lord, in the face of global crime and corruption, grant us continued peace and quiet that we may share Your love with others and live with reverence for You.

 

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[1] https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2021/10/29/video-pope-biden-meeting-2021-241750

Joe Corson

 

Hebrews 11:1

Holman Christian Standard Bible

11 Now faith is the reality of what is hoped for, the proof of what is not seen.

 This summer we stopped in to see my former college roommate, Joe Corson. I had last seen him about 2 years earlier. When we left him at that time, he was unable to walk due to his weight. It seemed that every organ was shutting down, but his faith was strong. He knew that Christ had died to save him.

 I said with sadness to Sylvia when we left: “This is the last time we will see him! He has deteriorated so much!”

 Then he got medical help. He received both physical therapy and occupational therapy. When we saw him this August, he had lost 93 pounds. He was full of vim, vigor, and vitality. He had plans to resume his quilting, at which he had to stand for fairly long periods of time. He showed me a movie he had taken of three bears—a mama and two cubs—attacking his backyard bird feeder.

 Then he got a urinary infection, and it took him. His son found him dead last Sabbath morning. But he died and full of belief in his salvation and the soon coming of the Lord!

 It is nearing our time now. I'll be 80 in January; but I too believe that in spite of all my inadequacies, Jesus has saved me.

 Thank You, Jesus Christ, for Your marvelous unexplainable love and mighty power. Come quickly, Lord Jesus!