A Rainy Saturday

I love waking up on Saturday morning to the sound of rain and a cup of tea. It seems right. I guess western Washington is a good place for me to live. Anyway, I was continuing to read Jeremiah and was struck at how brutal life was during those days and at the stubborness of the people. I live on a fairly calm little island here; while I may not like some decisions of government here, it is fairly stable and there is no warring king trying to take over. I have never been exiled to a foreign land. I have not seen the mass slaughter of people I love. That does not mean that those things do not exist in my world. Jeremiah faithfully gave the word that God gave Him to a stubborn people who did not listen to him. He was put in prison and attempts were made on his life. I know that people knew he spoke the truth because he was approached by them to hear what God told him. People would listen and then disobey. I was thinking we are often like that. We hear God's word faithfully preached on Sunday, we enjoy hearing it, we know it is true; then we go live our own lives during the week. It is no wonder that in the 2,000 plus years since Christ there are still people waiting to hear the gospel, there are still captives awaiting their freedom, there are still poor waiting to be fed with both bread and the good news. I am not doing my job. Today I am going to leave my quiet home and go buy gifts to put in shoeboxes to send to poor children. It is a very small thing and it occurs to me that I need to find a concrete way to remember the poor and oppressed every day and not just at Christmas. I will be working on that this year. I guess I want to challenge us to hear the word of the Lord, to obey that word and mission that He has given us, to "lose" our lives in order to look at the world around us. It will take deliberte eyes to see what God wants us to see and deliberate motion to do what He wants us to do. I don't believe, however, that there is anything greater than the peace that comes with the obedient life.