Praying by the Book, Part 1--Persistent in Prayer

My husband had brought home a “fixer” bike that came with a four-number combination lock and security chain tightly looped through it. Enter his assistant, the Great Bike Chain Sleuth, aka me. I methodically went through all possible combinations of the six-number reels. You math whizzes, that’s six to the fourth power, or 1,296 possibilities. Actually, I did that three times. Somehow, I didn’t have the winning combination exactly lined up, and the chain stayed shut. Only on the third try—my “entertainment” as a passenger on a long road trip- did it fall apart at 6214.

I looked up, rested my bruised thumbs, and said, “Thank you!”

Diligence. Perseverance. We need them in life’s daily tasks. We also need them in our spiritual lives, particularly in the calling to pray.

I’d like to suggest that a little hand-size notebook that costs about five dollars (or less if you find a used one) may help you be more consistent and fervent in prayer. I started using a home-made “personal prayer notebook” sometime in the Eighties—yes, that era of fluffy hair, huge shoulder pads, and ankle-length skirts. Styles may change, but the need of purposed prayer doesn’t.

Even with the availability of today’s electronic personal calendar and reminder devices, there’s still nothing like the paper version.

Some of you may remember how the personal planner craze of a couple decades ago popularized notebooks that got as big as a book. Their binder rings captured everything from a comprehensive daily schedule to shopping lists, family sizes, wish lists, personal goals (like “get organized”), financial records, addresses and maybe a personal journal. Some included a calculator and ruler. As I browsed office supply stores, I thought a few seemed huge enough for the agenda for the National Security Council of the United Nations!

I never went for the donkey-cart size. I made my own with a palm-size six-ring notebook. Just the basics, ma’am, to survive life with a busy family, which meant a calendar, to-do list, and a place for coupons. I also had one back section for “prayer requests,” all lined up with columns for “date asked, date answered.” But after a few years, that approach to remembering who and what to pray for just wasn’t working for me.

It seemed, too, that my prayer life was dropping to the level of a snack machine. You know the type: insert money, pull a lever, enjoy-empty-calories-that-plunk-into-slot. Plus, to be honest, my lists were getting so long. I was rushing through just to “finish the list,” not genuinely speaking to God about the people and things that I cared about.

For me, the solution came in separating it from the other “organizing” stuff of life. I started another small six-ring notebook, just big enough to fit in the pocket of my Bible cover. With stick-on labels, I divided it into daily sections, Sunday through Saturday, assigning prayer commitments to certain days. In the next few blogs I’ll explain just how it’s set up.

In recent years I’ve been sharing the specifics of this “personal prayer notebook” concept when I speak at women’s weekend events. Many find it helpful and buy up all the little notebooks I’ve created for them. My handouts disappear. What works for me seems to be what other women want, too.

Okay, I’m old-fashioned, still using paper. But it never fails me. It never needs recharging. And I don’t wear out my thumb knuckles looking for elusive information.

Over the next few blogs I’ll cover:
*Setting up a notebook
*Special prayers for your children
*Special prayers for adult family members
*A-Z praises
*Jordan Stones (got you curious on that?)
I’ll try to post them every Monday. Hope after visiting, you’ll forward the link to others.

(Did I say “link”—as in chain?)

DEVO your Bible

You’ve probably heard this saying about Bible reading: “A chapter a day keeps the devil away.”

Well, if you tried that and got stuck in the Old Testament genealogies with all their “begats,” you know that’s not true. Not that you can’t find some fascinating truths in those lists! One of my former Bible school profs, Bruce Wilkinson, became famous for a book on the “begat” that produced “Jabez,” a poor fellow whose name means “pain.”

But if you’re trying to read the Bible and it sometimes seems like you’re checking off a list of what you ought to do, but it’s not getting through to you, take heart.

It was in Bruce Wilkinson’s class on Bible study methods long ago (1977, if you really want to know) that I did a paper advocating a devotional methodology with the acrostic DEVO (the first four letters of “devotions,” if you didn’t notice). I still have the paper I did on it. (Yes, he gave me an A+.) Since then, I’ve had articles based on DEVO published in about a dozen magazines.

Though I didn’t know it then (hey, I’m slow), the Bible reading approach that worked for me is much like that from ancient church history, called Lectio Divina (“divine reading”). Basically, that involves reading a passage aloud several times and thinking it through (lectio), reflecting on the text (meditatio), praying a response back to God (oratio), and resting in God’s presence (contemplatio).

Here’s the DEVO approach—preceded by prayer that God will open your heart to understand:
DELIGHT in it. The passage you choose from scripture need not be long. Savor it as you read it, as you might stretch out a bowl of your favorite ice cream with tiny spoonfuls. The famed preacher Charles Spurgeon once remarked, “I would rather lay my soul asoak in half a dozen verses [of the Bible] all day than rinse my hand in several chapters.” You might feel “fed” in a chapter, or a paragraph or even a verse or two.

ENGRAVE it. Long ago before computers there were clay tablets in which scribes twisted sticks to make crude letters. Zoom into 21st century with pens and pencils and highlighters. Interact with something you write down. You may choose to write insights in a journal or write right in your Bible. As a kid, influenced by grade school rules that said NO WRITING IN TEXTBOOKS, I had the cleanest Bible around. Then my life intersected with a godly older woman who personalized her Bible by starring verses, writing dates by them, circling key words, drawing lines between similar words or passages, adding notes from sermons….you get the idea. She wasn’t checking off a reading schedule. She was interacting with the passage.

VERSE it. Go back and choose a key verse of that day’s passage. Decide how it spoke to you. Did it encourage you? Chastise you? Remind you of something to do? Do you need to put it in a bank? (The memory bank, that is.) Keep a supply of 3x5 cards in the back of your Bible to write out those special-to-you verses. Start reading them repeatedly until they become part of your memory.

OBEY it. Close your Bible-reading time with prayer. If the passage prompted a prayer for yourself regarding an area of your life which hasn’t been on board with God, confess it, and ask for help to change. If it reminded you of another person’s need, pray about that. The other morning I was in Isaiah 40. Oh my! That chapter is PACKED with good things. When I read it, it’s like the days we have storms blowing through. There’s sunlight, and then storm, then the sun peeks through again. Here, there’s judgment and hope, hardness and tenderness. I stopped at verse 11:
He tends his flock like a shepherd, He gathers the lambs in his arms and carries them close to his heart; he gently leads those that have young.

A lot of things came to mind—for one, how that passage inspired a magnificent solo in Handel’s Messiah. I thought of the Shepherd Psalm (Psalm 23) and Jesus’ declaration that HE is the good shepherd (John 10). One of my read-again-and-again Christian books is Phillip Keller’s A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23. As a shepherd he brought wonderful insights into each verse.
But mostly I thought of a mom with three college-age kids, left alone after a divorce. I closed my eyes and pictured Jesus picking her up in her trials and sadness, and then scooping up her lambs (yes, as teens/young adults they’re still “lambs”) in one big, comforting hug. I prayed that she would know how close to His heart she really is.

Does that make sense for you? Does it help you? I’ve often shared DEVO when speaking at women’s retreats, where my feedback is always positive. Feel free to give me some feedback, too. Below these blogs there’s always a place to do so.

P.S. I’ve noticed some “followers” from Malaysia. Welcome! At Wheaton Graduate School about 1980 I had a roommate from Malaysia. I still have the “Star of David” pin she bought for me on a Holy Land tour and I’ve wondered through the years what she is doing. I believe her name was Jeanette.

Some burning questions

Hi! I usually aim for something light and hopeful in this column, but this subject weighed on my heart even before the recent news about a Florida church's controversial plan to burn the holy book of another religion. For comment on that, I commend a column by Christian author and pastor James Watkins: http://www.jameswatkins.com/toptentopten.htm#5.
Now, my thoughts....

The magazine’s cover photo is compelling: a woman in Laos cradling her charred Bible. The accompanying story in the September 2010 Voice of the Martyrs explained how villagers who opposed her faith ransacked her home for Christian materials and burned them.

This is not a feel-good magazine. It’s full of reports of people paying dearly for being Christians. This woman is from the Khmu tribe, considered the original inhabitants of Laos but called by other Laotians the khu, a condescending term that means “slave.”

Even though the world looks down on slaves, the Bible exalts slavery as symbolic of living for Christ. The Greek word doulos, which means “slave,” is found more than a hundred times in the most authoritative Greek manuscripts, many times referring to Christians.

Hold on with me. This will get a little technical, but you’ll be glad you did. Translation is a complicated science. Even within language families, the variations and rules are diverse. For example, we might look at the sky and say, “See the bird.” But go a few more layers. What is its specie? How is it flying? Is it male or female and in a certain cycle of life? Would you need the specific word, for example, that names a male red-winged blackbird that soars in mid-sky but is now chirping in the cattails for a female to mate with? Some languages can get that picky.

While serving with another mission group years ago, I remember hearing of a well-meaning but naive elderly woman who wanted to help Bible translation efforts among tribal groups. She said if they’d just send her the dictionary for a language, she’d sit down and translate from her beloved English-language Bible. It just doesn’t work that way. Languages have different grammar rules and layers of words for concepts.

That’s especially true in translating New Testament Greek into English. The King James Version, for example, uses only one word, “servant,” for several very different Greek words, depriving us of a deeper understanding of the text. Some words it translates “servant”:
*diakonos--one who serves or ministers (like the helpers who drew water in John 2’s water-to-wine miracle).
*therapon—derived from therapeuo (“to serve, to heal”—origin of our word “therapy”) and considered a term of dignity and freedom, used only once of Moses, faithful as a servant of God (Hebrew 3:5).
*huperetes—an “under-rower, underling” (like the high priest’s guards in Mark 14).
*oiketes—a “house-servant” (“a servant can’t serve two masters”--Luke 16:13).
*doulos—one who serves under bondage, a slave. Doulos comes from the verb deo, which means “to bind, be in bounds, knit, tie or wind,” and used of those bought for a price. The closest words in English are “slave,” “bondman,” or “bondservant,” all used in newer translations. The First Century doulos held a lowly position, serving completely at the will of the master. Its frequent use in the New Testament reflects how slaves comprised half the population of the Roman world.
The Voice of the Martyrs article suggested that the first translators of the New Testament (from Greek to Latin) toned down the shocking term “slave” for the more socially acceptable “servant." Even today, servant is a more pleasant term, making us think of Fifi the laundress, Helen the cook, or Jeeves the chauffeur.

But doulos-servanthood is more intense, costly, even darker, a difference you won’t catch unless you read a Greek New Testament or do a word study. It’s also the role believers assume in love for Christ, who paid the price for them on Calvary. In the Upper Room before His crucifixion, Jesus told the disciples to expect persecution, as no servant (doulos, or slave) is greater than his Master (John 15:20). In many of his letters, the apostle Paul referred to himself as “Paul, a doulos of Christ Jesus.”

For the Khmus, persecution is losing homes, being beaten, having Bibles burned. Asked how they felt about that, they said their persecution is just what Jesus said would happen in the Bible, and their suffering proves He is God.

What more can I say, except ask if my faith hears the call to be a doulos for Christ?

Vaporized

It happened here in my kitchen--a reminder that life is brief.

A few Saturday mornings ago, I opened my E-mail and discovered a writing friend from long ago was coming through the middle of the state. Could they swing by, about noon that day, so she could see me? We’d met at the Mount Hermon Christian Writers conference the year she was honored as its outstanding new writer. She has several books behind her now plus speaking here and abroad.

Noon…that calls for lunch. I decided chef’s salad would be a good choice, especially since we were having a mini-yard sale. I put four eggs on to boil and set the timer for twenty minutes, taking it with me to my writing corner.

About fifteen minutes later I smelled something bad and followed my hunch to the kitchen. While the eggs were happily rolling in boiling water, the red-hot burner had melted a hole in a plastic container of Stevia, a natural sugar substitute, sitting about six inches away. Stevia had poured out of a half-inch hole and headed right to the burner.

While I pulled away the mess with a damp cloth, I realized I was feeling very, very sick. After opening windows and turning on fans, I went outside for fresh air. Soon, my husband came in and discovered my mess and me sick. He called the Poison Control Center and they researched Stevia. It’s a plant sugar, so shouldn’t be toxic. But I took to bed by an open window like a lady of old on her fainting couch.

I was still pretty puny by the time my friend and her husband arrived. They’d gotten plenty of fresh air en route…on his motorcycle. As they pulled off chaps and got alerted to my “incident” (which really seemed insignificant...burnt sugar?) she graciously came in the kitchen and helped me pull together a salad. By then the odors had dissipated.

Later, I mentioned my feeling so silly about my cooking incident to my daughter…who mentioned it to her husband…who asked, “Was it odors from the melted plastic?” That seemed far-fetched until I did a little search on the ‘net and came across dire warnings about a toxic substance called dioxin released by burning plastic. So maybe there was a real reason I got so sick….

But the bigger perspective? I have it above my sink, just an arm’s length away from the stove, There I hung some calligraphy done years ago for me by the husband of my girlhood Camp Fire leader. (We’re talking ancient history.) Using a translation he especially appreciated, he chose an old-style alphabet for this from Psalm 90: “Our lives are over in a breath; Teach us to count how few days we have and so grain wisdom of heart. Let us wake in the morning filled with Your love and sing and be happy all our days.”

Tonight I speak to convicted drunk drivers, something I do every month as part of my “giving back” after surviving being hit by a drinking driver in 1997. That night, my life could have been over in a breath. I also realize how few days we have in eternity’s perspective. None of us can presume to live to old age. The time to love God and others is now.

How can I put a sweet ending on this? Well, it did involve “sugar,” or at least a sugar substitute! And trust me, it no longer sits on the stove where it was so handy to add to a cup of java. One time of being a dizzy graying brunette is enough. And by the way, my friend’s signature book and speaking topic is rising above your fears. Is that a funny coincidence, or what!

Hen-ce forth and never more

Sunday morning, en route to a bran muffin, I heard clucking outside the kitchen window and was shocked to see a reddish brown chicken strutting around the fenced back yard.

We do not live in the country. We’re surrounded by houses, except for a vacant lot behind us where a tree removal service dumps wood to cure and later sell for firewood.

Our cat was hugging the back door, desperate to get in and afraid of this beast that outweighed and could outpeck him.

I thought of that ancient Chinese proverb: “You cannot prevent the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from building nests in your hair.” In our case, we couldn’t prevent a chicken from strutting through the open gate to our back yard—or so I assumed, because our fence is five feet tall. I couldn’t imagine this plump lump flying any higher than a foot.

I put some wild bird seed in a cup, make sure it had water, and realized that other than visiting some nearby urban farms, there wasn’t much I could do until Monday. Urban Farm #1 had a burro and goats, but no chickens. Urban Farm #2 boasted a horse, goats and chickens, but not reddish brown ones.

On Monday I entered an ad in Craigslist, and immediately got scam Emails inviting me to amazing business opportunities (I forgot to disable the Email reply feature). I sent another ad with photo to our local newspaper, but it wouldn’t run until Tuesday. Then I called the Humane Society with a “found animal” report. After causing the officer to laugh hysterically, I got the report filed.

In the meantime, Henny Penny (as I was now calling the chicken) was wearing trails into our back yard as it paced back and forth. And our cat was the one jumping the fence as soon as we let it out—to get as far away as possible from this intruder on his territory.

On Tuesday morning, as I hung up laundry, Henny Penny kept coming near me. Finally (as an experienced petter of cats) I leaned over and stroked its back. Immediately it squatted as though wanting more. I realized this had to be a pet—but whose?

My husband took a call from a man whose friend had told him about the ad. He asked if he could have the hen, since he lost four chickens to a dog attack. When he arrived, we realized he lived just around the corner, beyond the tangle of blackberry bushes and underbrush. This hen had survived the massacre of its family and managed to get over the fence to our yard.

Lured by chicken mash, Henny Penny (real name “Kibbles,” because it likes dog food) was grabbed and taken home.

Well, the sky didn’t fall while Henny Penny paced our back yard, and I’m glad the story had a happy ending. I never thought I’d foster-care a chicken, but I was reminded of the observation of Proverbs 12:10: “A righteous man cares for the needs of his animal.” It makes me think of Eden and the perfect relationship and sweet companionship that Adam and Eve had with all of God’s creation.

Will there be animals in Heaven? As scripture speaks of the new heavens and the new earth, I ask why not? If they were in His original, perfect plan, why not again? By the way, Henny Penny didn’t leave an egg—or at least I didn’t find one in places where it nested. But who knows, next spring, when I’m cleaning out winter yard debris….

Defense mode

One piece of enduring advice from ancient King Solomon is to go on fox-watch. I don’t mean watching Fox News, nor the whole fox-and-hound thing like British monarchs. Instead, we’re warned, “Catch for us the foxes, the little foxes, that ruin the vineyard, our vineyards that are in bloom” (Song of Solomon 2:15).

For a long time, I thought that verse a bit strange. Then I learned it comes from the realities of farming grapes. In spring, fox and jackals sneak into the vineyards to burrow under the roots of the grapes, undermining the plant root system.

The context is Solomon’s love poem for this little maiden who has the king loopy-in-love with her. The common interpretation is this: don’t let anything undermine your marriage. Like, is the foot of the bed a magnet for his dirty laundry? Trap the complaint fox! Does she have enough shoes to open a store? Trap the gripe fox!

May I be so bold as to offer an alternative to the fox analogy? Drum roll: Bait the ants.

Unwelcomed, a gazillion sugar ants have moved in to taunt us. At first there were just a few, like the 12-man search party Moses sent to check out Canaan. Surely, like the Israelite spies, our ants saw giants (people) roaming around the kitchen. But this was a land of milk and honey. Or at least honey. Dried fruits in bags of trail mix. Friskies left in the cat’s dish. And breakfast cereal, which, even though supposedly oat-healthy, in small print admits to sugar in the manufacturing process. Cheers.

As soon as a few hundred more invaded, I battened down the hatches. Anything with a remote hint of sugar went in a canning jar. Plastic pour bins containing cereal got an extra seal with plastic wrap.

The kitchen started looking like a mine field with those little black disk ant baits. We loaded up on ant antidotes. My husband sprayed, powdered, and spread nuggets of disgusting stuff touted to send ants back to Ant-arctica. (Cue card: laugh.)

Every morning, we thumbed dozens of ants to smudged oblivion on the kitchen counters. The dried fruit armored against attack in canning jars seemed to be holding defense….until the morning my husband decided to go for a handful of his favorite trail mix.

Let’s just say as many ants as people at Chelsea’s wedding reception were having a gala among the nuts and dried fruits. I checked the lid. It was a one-inch turn from “tight.” Advance spies apparently figured out that they could crawl along the screw lines of the jar and enter the forbidden territory. Overnight, they were in full attack.

Well, I just dumped half a canning jar of trail mix into the garbage. It wasn’t worth trying to pick the ants out, no matter how much that stuff costs.
There’s got to be a lesson here, right? I think I found it in some notes I wrote in my Bible next to Solomon’s little-foxes verse. The great Bible teacher H.A. Ironside identified some spiritual foxes as:
*Carelessness
*Neglect of the Bible
*Neglect of prayer
*Neglect of fellowship with people of God
*Vanity, pride, envy, evil thinking, impurity
Each time we engage in one of those negative activities, it may seem a little thing. But like the ants in my kitchen, they’ll multiply until they make life miserable—for you and the ones you love.The defense mode? Each one’s opposite.

So, look to the ant (another Solomon saying, Proverbs 6:6). Better yet, I say, look forward to winter when they fade away for a long winter’s nap!

For crying in the sink!

My late father never used foul language, but he did have a few expressions of frustrations. One was “Horse feathers!” and the other was “For crying in the sink!”

Well, Dad, the other day I was crying in the sink. Copious tears. And I hadn’t broken a dish or cooked a wretched dinner.
My husband had just sold a bike he fixed up, and in the door along with payment came two large onions. A tip from the buyer? Sometimes, I just don’t ask. Because I don’t use onions much in cooking, I chop them up and freeze them in egg-size portions to use as needed.

As so, weep, bawl, buckets of face-dribblers, I was rendering those big white tear-jerkers to freezable portions.

If you really care to know, we cry when chopping onions because they produce the chemical irritant known as syn-propanethial-S-oxide, which stimulates the eyes' lachrymal glands so they release tears.( For you avid chemists, learn more at: http://www.loc.gov/rr/scitech/mysteries/onion.html.)

I’d been thinking about crying lately, anyway, as I mull over writing something on the blessing of tears. Revelation 21:4 has lodged in my heart in recent weeks: “He will wipe every tear from their eyes.” The scene is Heaven. No more death, mourning, crying or pain, “for the old order of things has passed away.”

My prayer notebook has a few tear splotches on it. I’m going to more funerals where tears leak unashamedly. Some early mornings when I rise to hear the birds and listen to God, tears come. I think of the perfect place, the “abode” (the accurate meaning of the Greek mone in John 14:6, not “mansions”) that God is planning.

I dug a little deeper into the verse and looked up the Greek word we translate as "wipe away," exaleipho. It comes from two words, "out" and "to anoint," and means "to wipe out or away." This is the picture it provides me: Yahweh, the Sovereign of all time and place, comes to me. With the fingers that created a universe, He cups my face and thumbs away the earth-stains of tears. He whispers, “No more tears. Come to My joy and peace.” Every tear, gone.

And once the vision blurred by pained tears is cleared, I will stand amazed at what I never knew.

In the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis, there’s a conversation that always made me think of arriving in Heaven. Lewis had the talking unicorn in The Last Battle declare, “I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now.”

For crying in the sink? Not at all. For crying for joy? Maybe.

And here’s my trivia question: Will there be onions in Heaven?