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​“Who moved my seas?”

2/27/2019

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Unhappy with your circumstances? Don’t just sit there—change!
 
That was my #1 takeaway from Chris Carrillo’s latest sermon for the folks attending the Christian Music Hour at Care-age of Brookfield. And it was another exceptional message, indeed.
 
Basing it on Exodus 14:15-20, Chris illustrated his talk with an allegorical tale entitled ”Who Moved My Cheese?” It was an engaging story of two mice named Sniff and Scurry, two cautious little men named Hem and Haw, a great hunger for cheese and a very challenging maze.
 
But there will be no spoilers in this post. Hear for yourself our favorite preacher’s advice on moving forward without fear:
If you’re reading this via email, please click on the title above to be taken to the audio file. And if you’d like to hear more of these inspiring talks, visit our Messages from Chris Carrillo page.
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The importance of question #3

2/21/2019

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In the summer of 2000, just months after Marcia Clark’s book had destroyed my O.J. theory, I began putting that silly theology of mine – as well as my mother’s faith – to the test.

At first my investigation was scattered. I didn’t have a clue how to approach this enormous task, so I just kept reading whatever looked interesting. In addition to bulldozing my way through much of C. S. Lewis’s fiction and non-fiction, I devoured a chaotic array of books from the library and bookstore of the church with the warm congregation and uplifting worship music. And I began immersing myself in my new study Bible, a fat volume with overview essays, charts, and maps as well as endless footnotes explaining what various verses mean to our lives today.

I read all these things and started to see my ideas as pretty weak – and pretty childish, based as they were on a spurious combination of fantasy and wishful thinking. And I started to gain some confidence that my mother’s faith could, after all, be true, that there really might be a heaven and that we might actually all be together again someday. Maybe I could even bank on it.

But I couldn’t be 100% certain, could I? 

And so I worried, intermittently but intensely, that it was all a myth some ancient leaders had cooked up to keep the masses in line. Or, as some of my fellow feminists would have said, a myth cooked up by men to keep their little women barefoot and pregnant and home.

Which meant that I had yet to set the whole question of atheism permanently aside.  A distressing realization: I had toyed with its negative brand of absolutism for too many years already. And as someone had said, you can’t prove a negative: Even if you know 99% of everything there is to know in the universe, how do you know that God isn’t in that last 1%?

Besides, atheism no longer had any appeal for me. I figured that marrying Dave had put the kibosh on my last remaining need for a godless universe devoid of moral absolutes.
But at first, all I had to prove God’s existence was C. S. Lewis’s argument about our instinctive understanding of a universal moral law – what some people refer to as the “argument from conscience.” It was a good argument, but I couldn’t accept it as conclusive evidence.

I kept going around in circles.

Did science eliminate any need for a Creator?

Did near-death experiences render atheism obsolete?

Might all religions be true, in their own way?

Could it be that my home-grown philosophy was right after all?

And so I returned to Square One.

It reminded me of my single days, when I would spend hours wondering whether some guy was telling me the truth or not, weighing and re-weighing the evidence, agonizing over what to do about each of three or four possibilities. I still hadn’t learned to think linearly, it seemed. 

(Was my circular thinking evidence that the eastern thought was true, after all?)

And then somewhere along the line I read that, centuries earlier, the world’s foremost philosophers had narrowed all these big questions down to the three biggest questions – the only ones that really matter:
 
1. Where did you come from?
2. What are you doing here?
3. Where are you going?
 
I had at least two answers: Science had solved #1 (from prehistoric chemical soup) and Betty [Friedan] had taken care of #2 (to become independently wealthy, protect my dignity and promote the sisterhood).

So #3 was the only outstanding issue.

Where are you going?

I’d once sidestepped this question by telling myself that writing the Great American Novel would assure my immortality; it would buy me a place in the hearts and minds of the intellectual elite for centuries to come, even if it didn’t reveal where I would be during this posthumous adulation.

But now my final destination had become enormously important, related as it was to the final destination of everyone I’d ever loved.
​
Especially my mom.

--From Heaven Without Her, pages 97-99
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Do you believe in fairy tales?

2/13/2019

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The feminists of the ‘70s talked about moments of epiphany that they – we, actually – called the “click.” They were moments when we realized that reality did not match the feminine ideal, supposedly. But in practice it meant the increasingly frequent realization that we were in the presence of a male chauvinist pig or one of his drones.  

Well, I’ll tell you – a feminist “click” is nothing compared to the epiphanies that become practically a daily occurrence for a new Christian intent on learning about her Lord just as quickly as possible. 

Many of my clicks have come from a piece of scientific, historical or cultural information. For instance, one day not long ago I was lunching at a Chinese restaurant with some friends. We each had a “Chinese New Year” placemat, and while everyone else was busy looking for their birth years and those of their mates, I amused myself by looking at the animals chosen for the Chinese zodiac:

Dragon

Rat

Ox

Tiger

Rabbit/cat

Goat

Monkey

Rooster

Dog

Pig 

Snake 

Horse

I looked again at the first animal: Dragon. 

My stomach flip-flopped, just as it had when Paul Newman and Julie Andrews had seen the second bus following them in Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain. 

How is it, I wondered, that the ancient Chinese had chosen 11 real animals, and one mythological critter?  

I remembered hearing, too, that all major cultures have dragon myths (not to mention “great flood” myths), and that ancient dragon images have been found all over the world, from Babylon and Egypt to China; they’ve been found drawn on Viking ships, shown in relief sculpture in Aztec temples, and carved into bones by Intuits. And when I thought about all the dragon drawings I’d seen over the course of five decades, they all blurred into just a few types of creatures.

But of course, scientists have managed to explain these similarities away. Because of course the alternative is unthinkable: We couldn’t possibly admit the possibility that these dragons had actually lived with man, that they were in fact dinosaurs (a word that wasn’t invented until the 19th century), that – horrors! – maybe “millions and millions of years ago” was nothing more than the opening words of today’s adult fairy tales.  

Click.
______________

Excerpted from Heaven Without Her, pp 122-124
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The cost of complaining

2/5/2019

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about complainers. You’ve probably known some in your life: You walk into their presence and before you even sit down, you’re getting the low-down on everything that’s gone wrong in their lives – things that are clearly someone else’s fault.

As I type these words, I’m getting flashes of my own predilection for complaining: Yesterday's traffic was monstrous,  I’m so tired of winter, the dog kept me awake half the night, there’s cilantro in my salad – you name it, I can come up with a complaint.

It’s a habit I’d better begin eliminating immediately. Because while my life is full to overflowing right now, if I live long enough there may come a time when I’m facing hour after empty hour. And if I’d like to fill at least some of them with unpaid companionship, I’d best learn to be a source of happiness to others.

I’m reminded of this every time I visit  friends at the nursing home. Just about everyone living there for the duration has some measure of trial and sorrow in his or her life. Some may have more pain than their neighbors, others may be more disabled physically or mentally, and many have outlived all their friends and relatives.  Yet such circumstances seem to have little impact on where these individuals land on the happiness index; some wallow in misery, while others radiate joy, regardless of their personal tribulations.    

To make sure I’m not offending anyone, I'll use some examples from the way-distant past.

A woman I’ll call Gladys always seemed to be a happy camper. She was 98 when I met her. Childless and widowed, her mind was no longer as sharp as it must have been once upon a time, but we always had wonderful visits. She liked to talk about God and gardening, about the perfectly lovely food she was enjoying here, about this or that  aide who had gone out of her way to be kind to her next door neighbor that morning, about the beauty of the spring blooms or autumn leaves or pristine snow outside her window. 

Gladys and I also talked at length about the good old days. When asked, she didn’t mind sharing experiences from her past. But she was never self-focused. Even though her short-term memory was often on the fritz, she always managed to ask me about something important in my life, from our progress with a kitchen remodel to the health of a sick old dog. How she managed to recall such details week after week, I'll never know. Perhaps she jotted down a few notes after I left, and reviewed them just before my regular weekly visit. Or perhaps she asked the Lord to help her remember. 

You can probably understand why I loved visiting Gladys, and how sad I was to learn one day that she had died. There was no drama in her departure: One night she’d simply gone to bed with “a little stomach ache,” and never woke up. This surprised no one. She hadn't been one to complain about her health. I even commented on that once; she said that she would have to be one ungrateful old lady to complain about anything in light of all the blessings the good Lord had showered on her throughout her life. 

Then there was Clara, 87 when I met her.  

Clara was one of the most unhappy women I’ve ever known. A professing but apparently non-practicing Christian, she too was widowed. But unlike Gladys, Clara had two children – a son who dropped in for a quick visit every week, and a daughter who showed up once or twice a year.

I could certainly understand the daughter’s point of view. With Clara, the complaints started before you even put your purse down, and ended only as you were walking out the door. Look at the messy job her aide had done with her bed this morning! You wouldn’t believe the slop they had served in the dining room this week! Old Eva across the hall snored all night long again! Wouldn’t you think someone with half a brain would come visit her now and then? 

Surely Clara said something nice about someone in the four years I visited her, week after miserable week. But I honestly can’t think of a single example.  I can’t even remember her smile; it’s quite possible that I never saw it.  

Clara died a long and lingering death, having given anyone who would listen a detailed play-by-play of her illness for the last three years of her life. I went to her funeral at a nearby cemetery. There were 50 seats in the hall she’d chosen for her service, the same hall that had been packed for her husband’s funeral five years earlier.  Alas, this time there were only four of us in attendance: her son, her daughter and son-in-law, and me. 

Sadly, people like Clara are often bitter to the bone. There is hope for them, of course – but they have to be willing to acknowledge their own imperfections, to repent, and to receive the free gift of eternal life. Then, prepare to be blessed: Complaints seem to be few and far between from those who are pointed toward a glorious eternity!  
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    Kitty
    Foth-Regner

    I'm a follower of Jesus Christ, a freelance copywriter, a nursing-home volunteer, and the author of books both in-process and published -- including Heaven Without Her. 

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