hearing from friends

I remember what a joy it was to reconnect with classmates from the Naval Academy that I hadn't seen in decades, let alone years.  Thirty years before we'd all gone through an intense experience together that welded friendships.  Time, careers and circumstances had separated us all.  Somehow we reconnected and began to meet on occasion.  The first sight and first words exchanged with my old friends were as sweet as honey.  It was good to be reunited.  I am thinking this morning of how the Lord must love it when we come to Him.  He has gone through the most intense of experiences and then allowed us to participate, by faith, with Him.  We are welded through that union into an eternal bond.  Yet, somehow, we neglect the exercise of this hard-won relationship.  How He must love it when we come to Him in conversation, through prayer, to share our hearts and express our love.  This past weekend our daughter Meredith, who is carrying her third child, called and told us she feared she'd suffered a miscarriage.  We dropped to our knees and talked earnestly with our Savior about this.  We knew He is the only one who authors and sustains life.  We also knew that there was nothing we could do to "fix" the problem or preserve that life ourselves.  We also asked many friends to pray.  Yesterday our hearts rejoiced to hear that the child lives and has a strong heartbeat.  All is well.  How He must love for us to come to Him and lay our hearts before Him.  I hope we can do this much, much more!

 

John 7:37 On the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, "If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink.

 

blessings,

Rob Smith

thriving in dry places

We were very impressed with the cactus plants we saw in Arizona a few weeks ago.  The largest are called Saguaro.  They can grow to heights of 20-30 feet and live to be 200 years old.  The Saguaro is the state flower of Arizona!  I had a personal run-in with one of the smaller cactus bushes.  On a hike with my daughter, Bethany, I barely brushed against a cactus and a section attached to my shorts.  When I brushed it off with a stone, it flew down into my foot.  We took about 20 minutes removing cactus spines painfully one at a time and gained a healthy respect for this plant with its highly effective defense system.   The cactus plants look very unusual so they can thrive in an unusually dry environment.  They store water from infrequent rains in the thick stem (like a trunk).  The stem is like a big sponge and has a waxy outer coat to prevent water loss.  When infrequent rains come, the shallow root structure helps to collect moisture from the ground surface.  The Saguaro can absorb about 800 gallons of water from infrequent, but intense, rains.  Instead of making cholorophyll in leaves, which lose water, it makes it in its thick stem.

The Saguaro cactus was made to thrive and live long in a very dry and very hot environment.  Sometimes we, too, live in difficult times.  We may feel tested by extreme trials and pain and we may need to draw on the spiritual "water" within.  Like the Saguaro, we need to absorb the living waters that the Lord provides through His word and His presence, so that we can thrive in the desert heat of difficulty.  We even need to form spines to keep unwanted thoughts and attitudes from attacking our stems and robbing our strength.

 

Psalm 68:7-10 God, when you took the lead with your people,
      when you marched out into the wild,
   Earth shook, sky broke out in a sweat;
      God was on the march.
   Even Sinai trembled at the sight of God on the move,
      at the sight of Israel's God.
   You pour out rain in buckets, O God;
      thorn and cactus become an oasis
   For your people to camp in and enjoy.
      You set them up in business;
      they went from rags to riches.

 

blessings,

Rob Smith

Got you covered

We know that the sacrifice of Jesus' life on the cross of Calvary covers our sins.  I am reminded that Jesus continues to cover us as we walk daily.  Our skin is an apt analogy for this covering.  We don't often think of our skin as a body organ, but it is.  It covers our vulnerable inner body and protects it from infection, insulates from cold, cools when over heated, and gives us the capacity to touch and sense our outer world.  Although our skin may appear to be something static...like a rug on a floor...nothing could be further from the truth.  Every minute of every day we shed about 40,000 dead skin cells and replace them with new ones.  Most of the outer layer of skin is constantly at work producing a fresh covering.  Our middle skin layer contains the nerve endings that help us navigate our world and avoid dangerous extremes of temperature.  Our inner skin layer provides insulation.  The skin helps the body maintain a constant 98.6 degree temperature, regardless of our activity level or the weather around us.

 

All of this reminds me of the dynamic work of Christ who lives within us today.  His covering is at work to shield us from the damage of sin.  His presence provides us with the capability of touching our world and of sensing danger to our spiritual health.  His spirit helps regulate our spiritual temperature and keep us on an even keel.  Our inner person is able to navigate in a tough outer world because of His living cover.

 

Exodus 26:14 "You shall also make a covering of ram skins dyed red for the tent, and a covering of badger skins above that.

 

blessings,

Rob Smith

matters of the heart

Tonight I've been watching one of my favorite movies: "Superman Returns".  There's something I love about Superman.  He has a great purity and he lives to serve others and save mankind from disasters.  What stood out to me tonight was his personal vulnerability...not to Kryptonite, but to heartache.  There is a scene in the movie when Superman realizes that Lois Lane is disenchanted with him.  He has been busy rescuing folks from all kinds of spectacular dilemmas and he is idolized, adored and esteemed as a hero by millions.  Yet, he is lonely and his heart longs for the affection of Lois.  In the despair of unrequited love, he soars up into space to look down on the entire globe of Earth.  You are aware of his tremendous powers and superhuman capabilities.  Practically nothing can hurt him and there is almost nothing he can't do with his physical powers.  Yet somehow his extraordinary characteristics only heighten his loneliness and this seems magnified by the backdrop of the blackness of space.  The thought occurs: our greatest needs, our greatest joys, our greatest challenges and our greatest victories occur on the most personal of scenes: our individual hearts.  I think part of the good news, here, is that with the presence of Jesus in our heart every man, woman and child has the potential to exceed even Superman's powers.  And we each can play a role in rescuing others from the despair of a lonely heart.

 

2 Corinthians 3:2 You are our epistle written in our hearts, known and read by all men; 3 clearly you are an epistle of Christ, ministered by us, written not with ink but by the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of flesh, that is, of the heart.

 

blessings,

Rob Smith

seeing mountains from above

On the flight west last weekend we flew over all kinds of terrain and saw farmland, rivers, desert and mountains.  It seemed especially interesting to fly over mountains.  It occurred to me that mountains are normally seen from below...from the surface.  That viewpoint inspires awe as we crane our necks upward and are awestruck with the lofty peaks.  Mountains seem to represent the large problems and challenges we face.  The effort required to climb to the top is something like the difficulty we face in many of life's trials.  We sometimes speak of the dark days of life as "walking through the valley".  But I realized that, in the Lord, we rise up and are carried as passengers in a jet.  It can become possible to look down at mountains that way.  They are still impressive from above and it is a joy to be carried over them.

 

Isaiah 49:11 I will make each of My mountains a road,
      And My highways shall be elevated.

 

blessings,

Rob Smith

time window

Yesterday we visited the Grand Canyon.  We walked along the rim and flew over the Canyon in a small plane as well.  I've never been exposed to anything that so overwhelmed my vision.  This massive gorge is ten miles wide, a mile deep and 270 miles long!  The views were so stunning that they had an unreal quality, as if they were somehown painted on a vast canvas.  I suppose you could study the Grand Canyon for a lifetime and not begin to probe all the lessons to be learned from it.  But what struck me on reflection was that the Canyon gave a view into the distant past.  In a sense, God was providing a "Cat scan" of how He assembled the earth's crust.  Layers of rock carried evidence of fossilized life from long ago and showed the canyon had once been ocean bottom.  The Lord did so much work to build the foundation of our planet so that we, who walk on its surface, might thrive.  When it comes to the Grand Canyon, words really have not been invented to capture the beauty on such an immense scale.  When it comes to our Lord, we are also challenged to find words that capture His great design and the lengths He has gone to fashion our earthly home.

 

Job 38:4 " Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?
      Tell Me, if you have understanding.

 

blessings,

Rob Smith

to another level

Today, we drove from Phoenix north to the lovely canyon area known as Sedona (Arizona).  In Sedona, there are massive red stone walls, mountains and buttes that surround you like Gulliver's Travel guards over Lilliputian people squeezing between their toes.  What struck me was the dramatic changes in elevation.  Phoenix lies at 1,000 feet above sea level.  The high temperature over the past few days has been in the upper 90's there.  As we moved north, the elevation climbed as well.  We didn't cross mountain ridges, the entire table of land moved to a higher plane.  By the time we reached Sedona (perhaps 100 miles above Phoenix), the elevation was 5,000 feet for the basic land level.  The massive stone outcroppings rose yet above this.  The thought I had today was that the Lord can take us to a new level in our lives.  We don't have to always go up one side of the mountain, crest and tumble down the far side.  With the presence and the opportunity for ongoing trust we have in Father, Son and Holy Spirit our lives can move upward to a whole new level (and from there we can still view the dramatic mountains of God!).  By the way, when we reached Flagstaff today, there was snow still on the ground from an early morning snowfall and the temperature is expected to drop to the 30's tonight!  We went from summer to winter in less than 4 hours!

 

Psalm 125:2 As the mountains surround Jerusalem,
         So the LORD surrounds His people
         From this time forth and forever.

blessings,

Rob Smith