prophets

Snow, Season Shifts, and Such, Savor and Savior it

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Ah, snow… 

It’s a known – “watch the weather” – so I did – and it was more beautiful than scary. I do love snow, so while I really was on a mission to strategically get through it, I did stop occasionally to admire it. (And I packed winter gear for sure – boots and winter coat were donned!!!)

The journey started at 40 then 37 degrees then 33 for a while, 32 just a moment, then down the mountains 33, 37, 40…. rain-snow-rain. So I had fall – winter – fall seasons, and because it was almost 70 last week, forsythia flowers were blooming up at mom’s – spring sprung twice as a surprise each of these recently warm years… I thought how great the northeast has stockpiles of salt deposits – how fittingly convenient… salt melts snow….

The hills surrounding got 4 to 12 inches of snow, but the valley got rain, lots that the minor gorge creek at the bottom of the road was pouring down in volume. 

The trip through mountain elevation caused me to see up to 8 inches of big fluffy snow at one point, but I didn’t stop for that photo, because the roads were really good, salted, and there was a gap of precipitation, and the height of day is when my Dad always preferred me to get through the mountains. I was subaru-safe and slowed down. It is nice to be up home this weekend, pre Thanksgiving moments with my mom, brother, and today planning work at my aunt’s farmhouse (only 4 inches snow there)… it’s normal to keep going in snow…

The snow sandwiched in the middle of my seasons did get me thinking of Christmas, it seemed not out of place then in the moment, otherwise I am so NOT ready to switch my palette of life of browns and yellows, faded red oranges to WAY TOO BRIGHT red and green,  not until after Thanksgiving. So right now preferred browns and yellows in my sights added in white. Christmas is coming, but savor THIS season first, whatever the temperature.

However slow or fast this Christmas season comes, it’s not a delay of understanding the REAL SEASON SENSATION – that is of course the story of Jesus coming – advent starts soon. Well 9 months before Jesus’s birth we are also clued into a preparation story, mary with Jesus is prepared by Elizabeth and cousin John the Baptist, and dad Zachariah having to wait to get his voice back. Ah, many a waiting story…. In Zachariah’s account in Luke, is like spring inside fall (forsythia not overrun with snow) reading about Jesus Savior as hope, in the song of Zachariah, Luke 1:67-75, we see a people who saw the glimpse of the new within the old season. We savor THIS Savior season.

So yes, we can glimpse this season shift in Luke’s gospel account, the crucial connection between old and new testaments but one long journey for Jesus and David’s line…

It’s like snow in my fall, spring in my step, and the real WARM UP to the season!

Zechariah’s Song

His father Zechariah was filled with the Holy Spirit and prophesied: “Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel, because he has come to his people and redeemed them. He has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David (as he said through his holy prophets of long ago), salvation from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us – to show mercy to our ancestors and to remember his holy covenant, the oath he swore to our father Abraham: to rescue us from the hand of our enemies, and to enable us to serve him without fear in holiness and righteousness before him all our days.

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THEN SPEAKING OF JOHN THE BAPTIST v76-80

And you, my child, will be called a prophet of the Most High; for you will go on before the Lord to prepare the way for him, to give his people the knowledge of salvation through the forgiveness of their sins, because of the tender mercy of our God, by which the rising sun will come to us from heaven to shine on those living in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the path of peace.” And the child grew and became strong in spirit; and he lived in the wilderness until he appeared publicly to Israel.

AMEN AMEN 

Unroll Sweet Jesus!

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Sweet Jesus. 

I didn’t unroll the Smarties – the candy – but I unrolled my SMILE – how adorable – it’s a Torah scroll from a girl scout event, Thinking Day, and an older troop representing Israel as their country to study and present, made up these mini Torah from the sweet Smarties wrapped in a paper showing the Ten Commandments as two tablets. I quickly paid my quarter and thought so deeply of both the meaning but also that a church faith item was shown and shared at a secular event. Good to open an opportunity to think at “Thinking day”.

This was no sugar rush, this is God-gifted goodness in thought, and I pondered the deepest of meanings here:: Jesus IS the sweet core of the tablets and the fulfillment of the LAW AND THE PROPHETS. Good God!

Then the next day a church window caught my attention, what beautiful light shone through the stained glass window of the tablets portrayed. The windows so beautiful in the church building and isn’t that so appropriate of our beautiful LIGHT of the world, Jesus, illuminating His Plan to satisfy what man can not achieve, total coherence and coverage with all the laws. Jesus is our Light to elucidate our wrongs and fill the spaces of darkness with LIGHT, a LIGHT that eliminates the sting of death and illuminates a forgiveness which brings LIFE. 

This is probably easy for us to now see, but be ever so closer to the events of Jesus’s day and Jesus, in His hometown, was shunned, shocking the people who remained sure He was being blasphemous in self by speaking eloquently from the Torah scroll, from Isaiah, that He Himself was filled with the Spirit of the Lord to proclaim freedom and healing. That He was the Healer. That they needed Him.

We need Him too – and pray we know it. And that we feel it. And that we follow Him. And we love Jesus even more for Him gifting Hope. And thank God for we can’t make this journey by ourselves. Jesus must fulfill our lives with forgiveness to bring us to the everlasting life. Like the man who puzzled at the keeping of the laws of Moses, Jesus looks at us and loves us and knows we are in need of His completion to make us from part to whole. 

And while He already accomplished this, we know that this is unrolled to each of us in a journey that takes our whole lives – it takes one sweet candy at a time – it takes one step in front of the other – and sometimes we are simply carried. We know that we must wait and watch the unveiling of Jesus in our lives, just as the spring unveils itself – like the first flowers and the progression further into later flowers and then fruits. Let us savor the spring that comes from the winter.

Unroll Sweet Jesus into your life. 

And start smiling. 

Amen 

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Luke 4:14-30

Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about him spread through the whole countryside. He was teaching in their synagogues, and everyone praised him.

He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. He began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his lips. “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” they asked.

Jesus said to them, “Surely you will quote this proverb to me: ‘Physician, heal yourself!’ And you will tell me, ‘Do here in your hometown what we have heard that you did in Capernaum.’”

“Truly I tell you,” he continued, “no prophet is accepted in his hometown. I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed—only Naaman the Syrian.”

All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. They got up, drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him off the cliff. But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way.

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Mark 10:17-31  The Rich and the Kingdom of God
As Jesus started on his way, a man ran up to him and fell on his knees before him. “Good teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

“Why do you call me good?” Jesus answered. “No one is good—except God alone. You know the commandments: ‘You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, you shall not defraud, honor your father and mother.’”

“Teacher,” he declared, “all these I have kept since I was a boy.”

Jesus looked at him and loved him. “One thing you lack,” he said. “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

At this the man’s face fell. He went away sad, because he had great wealth.

Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God!”

The disciples were amazed at his words. But Jesus said again, “Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

The disciples were even more amazed, and said to each other, “Who then can be saved?”

Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but not with God; all things are possible with God.”

Then Peter spoke up, “We have left everything to follow you!”

“Truly I tell you,” Jesus replied, “no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age: homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields—along with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last first.”