This Home's Story

I love living in a town that has a lot of old restored homes with great stories.  Driving through "old Victoria," seeing some of the painstaking work that has gone on and hearing about some of those stories is a part of life here.  There is something all those home stories have in common - they all go back to the original owner and builder.  Whether that is an interesting person or a largely forgotten person, every home has a builder and every home has a story.

This past week on our mission trip, we started building a home.  It will not qualify for something in "old Victoria."  We did not get as far on it as we would have liked because of the rain but we started a home and we started a story.  I wonder what that story will be fifty years from now?  No doubt the story will go back to builders and the owners.  But what else will it tell?

It is not a fancy home or one that inspires to beauty.  It is a simple home in a poor colonia not far from the border but it has more than pier and beam foundations, it is a home built on love.  The love people have because God has changed their lives and has given them an opportunity to pass that love on in very real ways.

The story of the home on 4 Mile Road in Penitas, Texas is also the story of a home being filled with love.  I did not have to be around the family (Pablo and Lily's) long for me to tell that love was making a difference.  I went from watching their children's behavior at the build site to seeing the behavior of a rowdy bunch of kids at the church at which we worked.  It was a stark contrast.  Pablo and Lily's kids know that they are loved, they are beginning to learn how to show it and share it.  The other kids from the colonia largely showed that the do not know that kind of life changing love.  I hope we were able to give them a taste.  Lily and Pablo's family have a feast by comparison.

In some ways we have established a small beach head for a family to grow in love in a place where is seems to be in short supply.  We can pray that it overflows into their colonia, their neighborhood, because it is a desperate need there.  Thank God that with Him, there is always enough for every home to have a story about His love.

for the journey...

Tim

The Toughest Job

What is the world's toughest job?  Watch this video as people hear about it and discover what it is (hint: it is not being a pastor).  Also notice the impact it  has on them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HB3xM93rXbY

for the journey...

Tim

Everlasting Love, Eternal Prayers

This week I lost a cousin and her husband, Margaret and Frank Hendrix,  in a tragic accident.  A blown tire in an oncoming truck only took an instant to cause the collision that ended their lives, but they live on in a better place with their Lord.

There was a very nice article written about their lives in the local paper.  My cousin, Margaret Ann (as a cousin I have the right to use her first and middle name just as she had the right to call me Timmy) was a long time elementary teacher here in Victoria.  The paper interviewed several former students about her life and her impact.  In the article, one former student related the following encounter she had with Margaret Ann long after her elementary years that led Margaret to pray with her former pupil.

"I was going through a divorce at the time, and it  had been a bad day for me," she said.  "I was trying hard not to cry, but she gave me a hug, told me to let it out, and as I cried, [Margaret] prayed over me.  I can't put into words what that single act of kindness meant to me."

Long after we are gone, what will remain at work in this world?  The love we showed and the prayers we prayed.  How and who we loved remain because people and love are eternal (1 Corinthians 13:13).  The prayers we prayed also outlive us because they touch the eternal.

The day they died was a pretty normal - until the accident.  The day Margaret prayed with her student was pretty normal for her as well - that is the kind of person she was.  Yet both of those days now are now marked in eternity; one in tragedy, one in kindness. 

On normal days, we do eternal things.  We love people who live eternally.  We offer prayers that live on in eternity too.  We may never see those moments coming or even recognize them when we are gone but they come none the less.

Today and everyday, we can love and we can pray and we can touch eternity?  How have you done something eternal this week?  Join me Sunday as we talk about the places in life where, "All we can do is pray."  We will find those are not moments of powerless but of touching eternity.

for the journey...

Tim

 

Glitter

I see traces of it more this time of year than any other - except perhaps Valentine's day.  I saw it on someone's sleeve.  I saw it the other day on the carpet at the church.  I was talking with someone and noticed a single flake of it in their hair.  Another person I spoke with briefly had a speck on their face.  I looked in the mirror this week and found a flake on my face. 

Glitter.  It is everywhere at this time of year and when we brush up against it or touch something that has glitter on it, chances are it is going to stay with us, even if it is just a speck.  It is not a bad thing when you think of it.  It is rather nice to begin to look around for it and see traces of it.  Glitter is a happy thing.  It brings sparkle to plain old paper or bland plastic ornaments.  So seeing it around is not a problem.  Start looking around and you will see what I mean.

I wonder if our glitter "infections" can't tell us something about the love of God we should be carrying around too.  Most of the people that I have seen glitter on are unaware of it yet it was obvious to the observant. It brings a brightness to us even if it is unintentional.

God's love in us usually works that way too.  When we really truly have it, it is something that becomes a part of us and yet we are unaware of it, though others see it clearly.  The way we share God's love is the same way that glitter is transferred to us - we touch it and it stays with us.

So this Christmas season, take some time to allow God's Word and God's story of his love to touch you.  If it really is something we touch, it will linger on us in a way others can see.  We will work on that love this Sunday.  I hope to see you there.

Merry Christmas,

Tim

Keeping On

Gid Prather was a Deacon and a Sunday School teacher in my first church.  When I started there, he had already taught elementary children in Sunday School longer than I had been alive.  Gid did not start teaching until he was in his forties - after his own children had grown past the class he taught.  I knew that was rare and unusual.  It was also rare and unusual for anyone to do what he did in teaching children well into his eighties.

Gid had his share of trials.  He and his wife lost a child because of a mistake a doctor made as their infant son was being born.  He raised two daughters, then lost a grandson who died in his arms after and accidental shooting on a hunting trip.  He grieved those boys all his life but he kept on loving and teaching children.

After seeing his perseverance, I wanted to know how he did it, so I asked him what was the secret of teaching children in Sunday School for over forty years and not giving up?  He thought about it - he had seen a lot of other teachers come and go.  After a good pause he said, "I don't know.  I just love them..."  He went on to talk about how he prepared each week and prayed for the kids.  He told me the secret even if he said he did not know.  It was in that phrase, "I just love them..."

The secret to keeping on in anything in the Christian life, especially the things that can wear us out, like teaching children for forty years, is love.  Paul wrote, "Love never fails."  That phrase means it never runs out of resources.  When we learn to love, we learn to last.

I hope you will join me this Sunday as we begin a new sermon series with another phrase from Paul, "Let us not grow weary in doing good..."  Paul had a few ideas on keeping on.  Let's come to learn how to do just that.

For the journey....

Tim

Family Reunion

I recently attended a family reunion that was the first of it's kind.  Maybe it is best not to call it a RE-union if it is the first one, but that is really what it felt like.  There were over 3,000 people there -  cowboys and Koreans, Filipinos and Haitian Creoles, Hispanics and Arabic speakers,  African Americans and about "any kind" of Americans you can imagine.  There were 64 different languages spoken in all.  What kind of family am I talking about?  Well, its not the Williams family but the Texas Baptist family - at the first every "Family Gathering" of all the different Baptist families in Texas.  We met in San Antonio and worshipped and prayed together.  It was a really great time.

One high point for me was hearing Pastor Earl Grant, an African American pastor from San Antonio preach on 1 Peter 2:9-10. "But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation a people belonging to God..."  Though the whole message was good, one line of the sermon stood out to me, "You do not have value on your own, but you have great value because you are owned."  I like that.  I like belonging to that kind of family and being owned by God.  I hope you do too because that is a glimpse of the family of God - that is a taste of the greatness of His love by which He 'so loves' the whole world.

For the journey...

Tim

12-21-2012

If you are reading this, then the world did not end - not yet at least.  Yes, this is the day the Mayan caledar pointed to as the possible end of time, but obviously we go on.  Experts on all this tell us that the Mayans, who began counting time on August 11, 3,114 B.C., divided time up into 144,000 day periods.  Today is the end of the 13th such period and there was a stone tablet discovered in the 1960's that predicted that one of the Mayan gods, Quetzalcoatl, would come to earth and time would be no more.  He appears to have missed his appointment.

Do you remember all the fears about Y2K and the year 2000?  I can still recall vividly that I had some people set up a meeting with me to question why we were not making preparations as a church - such as storing food and fuel.  Y2K was a big let down too to those who were expecting the end.  It seems we, Mayans or Baptists, are not good at predicting the end.  Jesus said we would not be.

This week, the odometer on my truck hit 111,111.1 miles.  I watched for that moment, it came and went and  nothing happened.  It seemed significant to me but no one on the road I was driving seemed to notice.  We mark time like my odometer, we can count how far we have come but we do not know how long we have left.  We know that time, like my truck, will some day come to an end, but we can never be sure when.  The only thing we can know is who will bring it to an end.

Which brings me back to the Mayans.  Why did they start counting time on August 11, 3114 B. C?  We started counting our time when Jesus was born.  We can count how far we have come since Jesus was born but not how long until he returns.  We can also recount many of the acts of his love but we cannot count how much more love he will show us. We can know that he will keep loving us.  His love can transform how we look at time.  We know that he came to earth out of love and we can know that he will return to earth for those he loves, living and dead.  When we begin to see the unmeasureable scope of his love, it makes this day and any day, even the day he comes back again, less scary.  What is 12-21-2012?  It is another day to measure how far we have come by his love.

"And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge - that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God."  Ephesians 3:17-19

For the journey...

Tim

Feedback

I rarely get responses to my blog.  Sometimes I wonder if people feel like it is a sermon and they are just supposed to pray at the end and go home.   But when I do get a response, especially a very important one, I feel like sharing it with everyone.  Here's one I got from last week's blog about when to honk when someone is not moving at a green light.  Bob Tate emailed me this after that blog.

My Dad was in the hospital just days before we found he had a stage 4 brain tumor. I had been up visiting him and really didn't realize how bad the news would soon be. As I left the hospital parking lot I was following another car who had also been in the hospital lot. When we reached the first signal light it was red....when it turned green the person driving the car in front of me didn't move.....I gave them the Christian 15 seconds before I honked. The driver seemed to come out of their cloud and moved forward.

Weeks and months had passed and Dad had passed away holding my hand in the same hospital. It was just him and me until I left and went to my car to go home and be with my family.  I don't remember much about the short drive home.....but at the first traffic light someone honked at me just like I had done nine months before......the light was green but I didn't react......I was still thinking about my Dad and my Mom and how we were going to handle things now that Dad was gone.  I don't honk much anymore, because when I do that memory flashes back and I am reminded how impatient we are.  We really don't know what is on a person's mind at a red light do we?

Bob said it well.  We never know what that unmoving person at the green light is thinking or experiencing.  It is always better to err on the side of patience.  It is no wonder to me that the first thing that 1 Corinthians 13 says that love is, is patient.

For the journey...

Tim

Seven Billion

According to the U. N. there are now 7 billion people on planet earth.  I am number 3,005,575,982.  No kidding.  In trying to wrap my mind around this number I found a website that lets you find where you are in this astronomical number, that's how I came up with that number.  I am not making this up.  I also found a way to picture 7 billion.  One billion pennies (stacked neatly) would make blocks as big as five school buses. So thirty five school bus sized stacks of pennies would be 7 billion.  That is still hard to wrap my mind around.

I remember standing on the 11th floor of a hotel in Manila, Philippines in August of 2001.  It was my first big overseas mission trip and I was looking out at how vast a city Manila was, in every direction, as far as my eyes could see there was a teaming city full of people.  I had been on four different islands in the Philippines, I had seen thousands and thousands of people in this place I had never thought much about before.  For someone who had grown up in Hope, Texas, it was hitting me how big the world was and it was hard to wrap my mind around the size of the world.  It was so much bigger than I had ever thought, I felt very small that day on the balcony.

Trying to wrap my mind around seven billion makes me feel very small too.  But take another perspective on that number - God knows and loves every single one of those 7,000,000,000.  He knows the number of the hairs on their heads. He can hear all seven billion pray (if they would).  He has a plan for each one of them and has created each one like no one else who lives now or ever did in the past or ever will in the future.  And here is the big thing - Jesus died for the sins of every single one.  That is how big the love of God is for each one of us.  He loves all of us as if there were only one of us.  That is even harder to wrap my mind around.

I did find this verse that does help.  Read it carefully because you might hear it again Sunday.  It helps me put all of this in perspective.  "But to each one of us grace has been given as Christ apportioned it."  Eph. 4:7.  Oh, how He loves us.

For the journey...

Tim