Preparing for Purim

A Good Read

So . . . I have had a BUSY day of Facebook. No sooner did I read a link from one friend and share it – another friend posted an idea, prayer, teaching, current event equally pressing. If we were sitting all together in one room – I don’t think I could have fully heard what all my friends were saying!   Reading, one by one though, what they thought was important enough to share, I could hear.

The most galvanizing were reminders from pastors:

·      Christ is in the boat with me – literally and corporately. (The Comforting Presence)

·      How to pray right.  (We Are Praying Wrong)

They enabled me to listen calmly to Israel’s Prime Minister’s address the United States’ Congress. *  Mr. Netanyahu reminded me that tomorrow is Purim – the Jewish holiday of one woman’s courage to thwart a Persian man’s plan to annihilate the Jews.

 . . . Queen Esther exposed the plot and gave for the Jewish people the right to defend themselves against their enemies. The plot was foiled. Our people were saved.

 Today the Jewish people face another attempt by yet another Persian potentate to destroy us. Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei  . . . tweets that Israel must be annihilated -- he tweets. . in English that Israel must be destroyed.

. . .

But Iran's regime is not merely a Jewish problem, any more than the Nazi regime was merely a Jewish problem. The 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis were but a fraction of the 60 million people killed in World War II. So, too, Iran's regime poses a grave threat, not only to Israel, but also the peace of the entire world. 

And the Prime Minister reminded us of how the world has changed since 1979 when

. . .  one of the world's great civilizations [was] hijacked by religious zealots -- religious zealots who imposed on them immediately a dark and brutal dictatorship.

That year, the zealots drafted a constitution, a new one for Iran. It directed the revolutionary guards not only to protect Iran's borders, but also to fulfill the ideological mission of jihad. The regime's founder, Ayatollah Khomeini, exhorted his followers to "export the revolution throughout the world."

He then said:  

Iran and ISIS are competing for the crown of militant Islam. One calls itself the Islamic Republic. The other calls itself the Islamic State. Both want to impose a militant Islamic empire first on the region and then on the entire world. They just disagree among themselves who will be the ruler of that empire.

In this deadly game of thrones, there's no place for America or for Israel, no peace for Christians, Jews or Muslims who don't share the Islamist medieval creed, no rights for women, no freedom for anyone.

So, when it comes to Iran and ISIS, the enemy of your enemy is your enemy.

I think back to two books and movies that changed me: The Diary of Anne Frank, and On the Beach by Neil Shute: an eyewitness account of Nazi occupation, and a frightening real imagination of the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust.

Praying the world’s leaders will quickly turn to God in Christ to calm the storms that threaten to swamp us – and that we -- His church -- will not give up praying.**  

We know that in this way we cannot ever really pray wrong. God hears us, and the distant god of our culture cowers in defeat.

*Benjamin Netanyahu's address to Congress

**Esther 4:14

My Summer Reading: Americans’ Travels

 

If you resist reading what you disagree with, how will you ever acquire deeper insights into what you believe?  The things most worth reading are precisely those that challenge our convictions.  ~Author Unknown

My current read is We Band of Angels : The Untold Story of American Nurses Trapped on Bataan by the Japanese because a few months ago I caught the replay of an interview in 1999 with the author, Elizabeth Norman and Brian Lamb. I haven’t gotten very far, but it is time well spent.  Good biographies can be like tourist guides of all the streets worth seeing in a grand city. They can also show me   back alleys I would not know to venture – Ms. Norman’s book is such a guide, introducing me to women and events about which I did not know.  More on this, later.

I am also reading David McCullough’s The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris – another delightful guide to people, places and times, many of which were familiar, and several others whose lives historians and biographers heretofore ignored. 

Equally engaging were three recorded books to which we listened on our travels to Maryland and back to Texas – and I found some quotes about reading and books that sums up my impression of them:

·      What the Dog Saw :  A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.  ~Chinese Proverb

·      Ford County: Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.  ~Jessamyn West.

·      The Mayflower, (mentioned earlier.)  What the people want is very simple.  They want an America as good as its promise.  

~Barbara Jordan

How grateful I am for good books:

·      Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.  ~Charles W. Eliot

·      It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.  ~Oscar Wilde

·      The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.  ~Mark Twain, attributed

·     
No man can be called friendless who has God and the companionship of good books.  ~Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Gearing Up for a Perfect Summer?

The author of The Perfect Summer: England 1911, Just Before the Storm, constructs a window into life 100 years ago, so we may glimpse the aristocracy and commoners; artists, writers, politicians, suffragettes, and laborers living through the great British heat wave. (Book review) Throughout her anecdotal album of how the rich and famous coped, and how the not so well-off suffered, Juliet Nicholson draws from the news but, writes as if drawing from prominent people’s diaries. The reader may savor the gossip Ms Nicholson dispenses. Yet, the reader who knows how the lives of all these people will be irretrievably altered weeps. How important would the distress of heat and drought seem, if people knew what August 1914 would bring? She describes the young men attending parties and balls as unaware how soon they would be canon fodder.

I was vexed reading how carelessly those with wealth and privilege chose to live; Some of my vexation was tinged with jealousy. All things being equal, would I have been so different?

Where was the church in 1911? Parts of her were battling Islam in British Guiana the New York Time reported in the fall of 1911.But Ms. Nicholson did not report this. She reports very little of the church – visible or invisible. A remnant is not always so easy to spot among such glittery social fabrics – or bolts of social misery.

Where is the church today? – Where am I? The upheaval in Egypt shows an ongoing battle with Islam. (more info) I pray this generation’s remnant will be clearly visible – wherever we are! And I pray my courage will not slide either.

The summer of 2011 is a few months off; will a heat wave try us as it did the Brits a century ago? One hundred years ago, some warned – but none could imagine the coming carnage and chaos. We have more access to news of world events – events that might alter our comfortable world. So, in one sense, we are more aware – but how well do we understand our times?

" . . . If you grasp and cling to life on your terms, you'll lose it, but if you let that life go, you'll get life on God's terms. (Luke 17:27-37 The Message)

Lord, I believe – Help Thou, my unbelief!

“Nobody Expected the Spanish Inquisition” (Monty Python)

We are still hampered by ice and cold – as news reports detail riots in Egypt, demonstrations in Yemen, and a cyclone in Australia. I watch on TV in comfort and relative safety. The end of the world hardly seems probable – but we are twenty-four hours closer to it than we were yesterday.

I grew up amidst fears of a nuclear holocaust; “On the Beach” was a movie that haunted my imagination for decades – until all the players who had bombs seemed to learn how to play together. But now new players have joined the game – and I have begun to think a bit more about how quickly life could change – or end.

Have you considered from how much you have been shielded – just today? Each day I am stunned!

Over centuries, floods, hurricanes, earthquakes and man-made cataclysms have destroyed millions upon millions of souls. Christ described two times that people were caught unaware – in the days of Noah and in the days of Lot when disasters destroyed them all. (Luke 17:26-29) Our hope is God, who knows how to rescue us! (2 Peter 2:6-7)

Some people lived through the holocaust, the bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima; some survived the 2005 tsunami, and 9-11. But His plan of a rescue doesn’t mean my life won’t change, though my life is spared. In the 6th century BC, when the Babylonians marched the women of Zion into captivity they lived through a horrific siege – never to participate in Temple worship again.

When Isaiah saw the coming Babylonian exile, he urged the people to look away from disaster and consider God:

And He will be the stability of your times,
A wealth of salvation, wisdom and knowledge;
The fear of the LORD is his treasure.
(Isaiah 33:6)

Recent news has reminded me of “Fire and Ice” – a poem by Robert Frost, who pondering the end of the world, wondered whether it would be preferable to die by fire or ice – passion or hate?

When my world is upended, it doesn’t matter how I will die – how shall I then live?

Noah and Lot did not expect a flood or a firestorm; yet, in their own ways were preachers of righteousness in a world very much like our own – though our sin seems on steroids! The women who were marched to Babylon didn’t expect that would happen in their lifetime. But they kept their faith in the coming blood sacrifice.(Isaiah 53) And they trained up the generation who went back to Jerusalem, rebuilding the walls and eventually the Temple.

Tomorrow when I open the papers, the news may be as unexpected as street riots in Egypt, the 1933 hurricane that reshaped waterfront property in Annapolis, or the planes that hit the Towers and the Pentagon on 9-11. Or, I may get unwanted news about loved ones or my own health.

How shall I then live?

But how can people call for help if they don't know who to trust? And how can they know who to trust if they haven't heard of the One who can be trusted? And how can they hear if nobody tells them? And how is anyone going to tell them, unless someone is sent to do it? (Romans 10:14-15 The Message)

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