This morning I read a devotional by Andrew Murray (1828-1917), one of the most formative authors in my life. Today’s entry put so well what The Ripple Effect stands for and why it even started, that I wanted to share it with you as is, in Murray’s wonderful words.

“TAKE TIME WITH GOD”

Ecclesiastes 3:1

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven.

It should be the aim of every Christian to set aside a little time each day for quiet communion with God. There is a time for everything. Shall there be no time to spend in the presence of the Creator of all things? No time to contemplate His will and purpose for us? The holy, loving God is indeed worthy of the best of our time. We should live in constant fellowship with Him, but each day there should be a special time of quiet when we are with Him alone.

We need a period daily for secret fellowship. Time to turn from daily activities and search our hearts in His presence. Time to study His Word with reverence and godly fear. Time to seek His face and ask Him to reveal Himself to us. Time to wait until we know that He sees and hears us so that we can make our needs known to Him in words that come from the depths of our hearts. Time to let God deal with our special needs, to let Him shine in our hearts, to let ourselves be filled with His Spirit!

What do you think: Will a quarter of an hour each day be sufficient for this purpose? If you are unwilling to make such an arrangement you must not be surprised if your spiritual life becomes ineffective. Fellowship with God should be your first priority. If you do this regularly, you will learn to value it more and more. Soon you will feel ashamed that there was ever a time when you thought that fifteen minutes would suffice.

Think of the hours a child spends at school to prepare her or him for life. How much longer then should we spend to prepare ourselves for the eternal life?

Lord, it is so easy to find time for my own interests. Thank You that You not only gave me a little of Your time, but that You gave me Your life.

This Ripple is written by Samuel J. Blandina, the very first guy to join The Ripple Effect men’s group in back in 2012.

In mid January of 2019 I was privileged to drive solo through the southwest–southwest Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California—driving almost 10,000 miles in a month’s time, seeing and experiencing the vast, empty, mega awe inspiring geography of this amazing country.

In seeing this, thoughts of smallness, meaninglessness, “We are just dust in the wind” filled me. The scope of the land can make one feel small in comparison. At one point on Dog Canyon Trail in Big Bend National Park, stopping, there was no sound, no wind, no body. The land rose up in front of me, the sun shone down, it was warm. Time, everything stood still. It vividly felt as if time itself STOPPED. Breathing in and out, feeling the breath of God. I wept.

I saw and did so much in that time, but I would find myself saying, “Dude, you’re not being adventurous enough! You should have climbed that mountain instead of driving by it.” I was “shoulding” on myself. “I am not as brave as I think I am.” I was anxious! I had to pause to pray. In that quiet I hear: “When you stopped and prayed and wept you felt Me. Acknowledge Me in all things. No words need to pass your lips, let your heart and being know Me now and in all circumstances. This is prayer.” I wept.

Today’s society can drive one mad with electronic overstimulation, narcissism, consumerism, greed, envy, white noise, propaganda, the daily rat race. We see heroes in the great athletes, the mountain climber, extreme sports participants, etc. We think they are so brave! What great discipline! We are truly brave if we are willing to pursue God in all our being, every moment.

Easy?

Not.

Oh to abandon, to give up the right to ourselves and bring that suffering to the One who suffered all and suffers with us, Jesus. This creates joy. Maybe not so much in us, but we overjoy Jesus when we abandon. “You will be raised up.”

Our life is prayer. And we pray in the name of Yahweh, Yeshua, and Emmanuel, that people, no matter their circumstances—economic, geographical, spiritual—that all would know Jesus as Savior, Master, Redeemer, liberating King, the Way, the Light, the Truth, AMEN.

Let us pray.

1 Timothy 4:7c-8

Go into training in godliness! Physical exercise, you see, has a limited usefulness, but godliness is useful in every way. It carries the promise of life both now and in the future.

To be physically fit, you need to do some sort of exercise-type activity with your body. You also need to eat foods that are nutrient-dense, whole, and good for your body to use as fuel for functioning optimally.

To be spiritually fit, the same principles apply. You must train or exercise, and you will need to ingest that which is wholesome and good for the spirit.

Feeding upon political rants on social media is like the nastiest of hormone and antibiotic injected, GMO infested fast food.

Ingesting Scripture and nature and prayer and silence and encouraging talk with positive people is like the most natural and healthy of foods straight from an organic farm. These are examples of high quality fuel for your spirit to burn for energy. The highest grade fuel is of course God’s grace—a simple reliance on this jet fuel is your best option for spiritual energy—humble dependance and trust in God, God’s grace, God’s goodness and solid character. To trust that the One who is ultimately good is ultimately in control.

Sitting around, neglecting to take on the action of spiritual disciplines in order to grow will, much like neglecting physical activity, eventually cause you to become spiritually flabby, unable to handle even minor bumps in the road.

I am reminded of a Sunday School song we sang as kids:

“Read your Bible, pray every day and you’ll grow, grow, grow…Neglect your Bible, forget to pray and you’ll shrink, shrink, shrink.”

A simple song, yet conveys a profound principle.

Are you growing or shrinking?

Helpful Hint: If you do not have a set time and place for exercise, be it physical or spiritual, it is extremely unlikely that you will reap the benefits of any consistency whatsoever.

We often talk about processing our experiences. Or processing our pain.

Do we know what we mean by this?

To process something is to develop it, we might say. Like in the olden days of going to get your film developed. For you young’ns out there, you’d have to take the canister of film out of the camera and then to a “fotomat” to drop off for developing.

Now we don’t want to just take a bunch of pictures and never develop the film, for then we would not be able to see and admire the photographs of the images we set out to capture. They’ll just sit in the dark, in that little canister. (Like snapping thousands of digital pix today with your phone, never to be taken in or actually observed)

Along these lines, we don’t want to simply take on experience after experience, information on top of information, not really processing any of it. We can become spiritually bloated, unable to digest the ridiculous amount of stimuli we’ve ingested.

But when you’ve processed your day, or “developed” it, you can then truly see it, learn from it, admire it, or make realistic plans to change course where needed and act differently next time.

Our experiences, what we take in, are like snapping pictures—either digitally to be viewed later, or more descriptively, captured to negatives for later processing.

At the end of each day or experience, it’s very helpful to go over the events and process/develop them by simply soaking in them for a while. Think of those red rooms like you’ve seen in movies where you must soak the paper in that solution for the image to appear. You soak in your experiences, and they start to develop into a form which can actually be observed.

We can then properly give thanks for them, ask forgiveness where needed, allow joyful experiences to transform us more into unconditional love machines; or perhaps sit with pain in a way in which we are not merely hurt by it, but learn from it, transcend it, and become better because of it. And this because we have walked through it to the other side.

But without developing, we cannot see or process accurately. As has been said, if we do not transform our pain, we will surely transmit it.

Without the stillness of focused attention, it is very unlikely you will grow and mature as a human being. You won’t develop because you don’t process your experiences…you don’t develop the film of your life so that you can actually observe it and see what is really going on.

Like that descriptive visual of red room developing, it is quite efficacious to soak our experiences of the day in the solution of our open, listening mind for review and reflection. My wife tells me that for the first stage of that kind of film developing, the room must be completely dark. If that door opens during this critical time, development cannot happen. I see this as being free of outside voices in order to authentically process. Only you can process your life, and it can’t be effectively done with distractions, with the door wide open to so many opinions and “shoulds”. *

Perhaps the red light could represent the Holy Spirit, illuminating just what she would have us see. Being still, away from the noise of the world, reflecting on life with the Holy Spirit, is one of the healthiest ways we can spend our time, in my opinion. For this is how we process experience, grow as a person, and develop the film of our life in order to observe it accurately, and move forward, toward God.

*There is of course a need for wise council in our lives, but I do not see that as the same as processing as I’m using it here.

Yesterday, as I was washing dishes, I came across something caked on a bowl pretty good. Which required me to scrub harder. Then grab a more abrasive tool for the cleaning job in order to make the bowl beautiful again, clean, fit for use, to be “worthy” of what it was designed for.

Immediately the Spirit showed me the obvious metaphor.

In this Lenten season of purification and simplifying of our life, we think of how God desires to cleanse us of that which hinders from full flourishing and effectiveness in the Kingdom.

This cleansing can be fairly painless if we are open, willing to change, and hold everything with an open hand trusting God to know better than we do what is best for us.

But, the tighter our Kung-Fu grip on things, on ways of thought that are not helpful, the harder Yahweh has to scrub. And if we really don’t want to let go, God may use more abrasive (and therefore more painful) tools to get us clean, fit for Kingdom use, worthy of our design.

Let’s say your “caked on food” is daily self-loathing. This requires an obvious focus on…yourself, which necessarily diminishes your awareness of others and their needs around you. Hence, you are not fully available for the Master’s glorious use in the beautiful Kingdom of God. You are unfit (much like how eating donuts everyday makes you unfit for daily exercise). So that self-loathing will need to be removed. Somehow.

Note that when we talk of being worthy, we’re speaking of condition—being of worthy condition for something—not value and worth as a person. You are of immense value and worth, or else Jesus wouldn’t have died for you, and God wouldn’t bother scrubbing you.

My child, don’t make light of the Lord’s rebuke, or grow weary when he takes issue with you; for the Lord disciplines those whom he loves, and chastises every child he welcomes.

~Proverbs 3:11-12/ Hebrews 12:5b-6

The love of God is all. This new day is what He brings, a day full of blessing, provision, of Himself. This is my all in all. How wonderful are the gifts of YHWH. How beautiful is His creation, bestowed upon us who do not always notice, who do not always appreciate, not only His gifts, but more importantly, Himself.

May we thank Thee, Oh God of bountiful greatness. May we thank Thee for Thyself.

Unless a grain of wheat falls in the ground and dies, it will not bear fruit.

There is no real growth without some form of pain it seems. We are called to growth, so it would follow that we are called to suffering. But not pointless suffering. Suffering for the sake of being conformed to Christ, our destiny.

In many ways, our suffering can be cut from years down to months, or even days, depending upon our level and immediacy of surrender.

Not all is within our control of course.

Yet we do possess at least a modicum of control, and it is there where we must, sooner or later, give our consent.

Hammering and chiseling itself is unpleasant. But when done with intention, for a specific purpose and outcome, it results in (what was there all along) unfathomable beauty.

~Written at The Oaks Academy Saturday School Parent Choir Seminar March 5th, 2016.