I am a Christian, a retired teacher, a mother and a grandmother. I love to read and I love the Lord Jesus Christ! Unless otherwise specified ,all visual illustrations are from the YOU VERSION APP of the Bible.
Do you remember carrying your children around when they were young? I vaguely remember doing that, but I actually remember carrying around my grandchildren. The youngest is three now, and when he was four months old, I stayed with him for four months to take care of him while his parents worked. And, of course, I had to carry him because he wasn’t walking yet. In fact, he had just started trying to crawl when I returned home again. Anyway, sometimes I was a little afraid to pick up that little one because I am not always steady on my feet, but I prayed that God would help me carry Nathan safely, and He did.
I cannot imagine anyone carrying me these days. I am “pleasantly plump”, elderly with aching bones and don’t like to be touched much, not to mention carried. But the Bible says:
God is carrying me, in His heart and mind, all the time. He is ready and able to sustain me and rescue me, and He is the One who knows me best, since He created me. So, I am content in my Father’s arms.
Of equal importance is that Jesus is our High Priest and carries our names before the Father, right into His presence. Remember when Aaron, the High Priest and Moses’s brother, wore an ephod with the names of the twelve tribes on it. When he entered the holy place, he was bringing them before the Father. So, not only is God carrying us, but His Son carries our names with Him before the Father, letting God know that we are part of the family, grafted in or adopted as His children. What wonderful word pictures I had this morning in my devotional! I am old and gray…God is carrying me! I am a child of the King, and Jesus bears my name before His Father. How blessed I am to be carried, with no worries about God’s ability or stability. He is able and willing!
Do you at times want to lay down the burdens of life and just be carried away to a place of peace and joy? Then, imagine God doing just that. He wants to, and He will, if you will surrender those burdens to Him and allow Him to pick you up right where you are and carry you to a place where He can minister to you. It is in His arms that I find comfort, solace, rest and strength. I hope you find that, too.
Throughout the pages of Scripture, there’s a word that gets repeated:
“hear,” or a related word, “listen.” In the Old Testament, the Hebrew word “Shema” translates into English as “hear” or “listen” and is often used to emphasize the act of listening, understanding, and obeying.
Today’s culture places value on doing many things at once; we often try to listen while focusing on other tasks, which divides our focus. The sound of someone’s voice might come into our ears, but if we’re also scrolling social media, doing schoolwork, or making a meal, we might not fully understand their words.
But in the biblical context, “hearing” does not simply include sound reception; it also involves active obedience and an effort to understand.
In Mark 4:9, Jesus invites us to listen—to hear and obey, encouraging us to pay careful attention to His words: “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”
Jesus isn’t just asking us to audibly hear His words and carry on with our personal agenda; He’s urging us to actively listen and obey, to live by His truth. Listening and obeying are what build our faith in Jesus Christ. Hearing the Word of God should lead to a transformed life marked by fruitfulness.
As you reflect on the idea of listening in Scripture, consider your heart and spiritual receptivity. Are you attentive to God’s Word, allowing it to transform your life, or is your hearing divided, causing you to resist His call?
What I Think
My focus word for this year is “listen” so how appropriate that today’s scripture verse and teaching is about listening actively, a skill that I am working on since that is something God told me I need to cultivate. I am one of those multi-taskers. I scroll through my phone, straighten up something around the house, have the TV on in the background, and all the while my husband is talking to me. I must confess that a lot of what he says is repetitive since he is at the age that he cannot remember saying things previously. But that is no excuse not to give him my full, undivided attention. I used to (before I was prompted by the Holy Spirit to make “listen” my focus word for the year) play games on my phone as we went on errands together, or even long trips. I realized when I was the driver for my husband after his surgeries how lonely it must have been for him for me to always be occupied while he was busy keeping us safe as he drove. You see, after his surgery, he slept, and I had no one to talk to. So, that was the beginning of being prompted to be an active listener, not just of my husband but of everyone.
I also noticed that since I am a Type A personality and have difficulty sometimes with my words (since my stroke), I am often forming a response in my mind while someone is speaking. The Holy Spirit admonished me, reminding me that He will help me speak when it is time, but my job when someone else is talking is to listen attentively and trying to understand what they are really saying, not just their words but their hearts behind the words.
I am discovering that listening is not always automatic or easy. Most of the time, at least for me, I have to discipline myself to focus. One of the things that has helped me is imagining that it is Jesus talking to me. Would I tune Him out, be disrespectful to Him? I hope not…nor should I be so to others. I never know when God might have a message for me in the words that someone else is speaking.
The Scripture today says that “He who has ears, let him hear.” We all have ears, and unless you have a hearing impairment, you can hear. But hearing the words or the sounds of the words isn’t enough. We have to really listen, strive to understand and if the word is from the Lord, to follow through with obedience. I know that I feel better about myself and the other person when I am really listening and responding appropriately to them. God listens to us, and I am sure at some times, He would prefer to tune out our whining, complaining and constant requests. But He never does…He models listening for us. He is always there, always ready to answer and He always understands our needs, our frustrations and our basic weaknesses of just being human. Can we not extend that same grace to the people all around us?
Listening is a skill, but it is also a privilege. Think, if you can, of someone you know with a hearing disability. What they would give for the gift of being able to hear clearly! We have that ability and misuse it or ignore it, in favor of our own selfish desires and needs. I am so thankful that God is leading me this year on a journey of self-discovery as well as finding out about others by really listening to them.
How about you? Do you really listen or are you preoccupied and multi-tasking? Hear…really listen…and then your actions will make more sense to you and to the other people with whom you are interacting.
Imagine a community where honest people work together to fix brokenness. Every person you meet loves you authentically, and you love them in the same way. How would living in such a community change the way you think, feel, and act?
Jesus invites us into that kind of community. In Matthew 5:14, Jesus says, “You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden.”
The Greek word for “hill” can also mean “mountain,” and in the ancient imagination, mountains were places where Heaven and Earth intersected—where people could encounter the gods. The ancient Hebrews understood mountains as unique spaces where God meets with humanity and where both dwell together as partners.
Abraham experiences divine testing and blessing on a mountain. God invites Moses up a mountain to receive instruction. And the prophet Isaiah uses mountain imagery to dream of a day when the Heaven-on-Earth space will expand beyond the mountain, filling the world with God’s Kingdom and vanquishing the darkness of evil.
This makes Jesus’ teaching truly wild! He’s saying that Heaven and Earth reunite through people—through us. When Jesus calls his followers a “city on a mountain,” he’s saying they will bring the mountaintop experience to the world. He’s inviting us to become mobile mountains, creating pockets of Heaven on Earth wherever we go.
We do this by letting go of the old ways of fighting our enemies and picking up the practices of Jesus—feeding the hungry, living justly, and loving people patiently. When this happens, the light of God’s way that leads to true life shines through us, piercing the darkness. So let’s find ways to be mobile mountain communities and participate in making God’s Kingdom shine brightly on Earth as it is in Heaven.
My Two Cents
The imagery in this devotional made me think about mountains in the Bible. Moses received the Ten Commandments on a Mountain and Jesus prayed on a hillside garden and then died on a hill, Golgotha. A mountain seems to be a place to meet God, to get direction from Him or to carry out His instructions to us. Instead, I think many of us, including me, have become immovable mountains. We have God’s truth inside us but we don’t go out to share it. We wait for people to come to us. Jesus didn’t stay on the mountainside praying. He left and went out among the people, ministering to their needs wherever He found them. Note that He found them; that means He was always looking, eyes open and heart ready to reach out and help others. I think we Christians are waiting for the sinful world to recognize their sin and come to us. I just don’t see that ever happening. People need to be told the truth before they can believe the truth. People need to know that there is a place to get closer to God before they can even attempt to do so. I like the line above that says we are to be “mobile mountains.” We bring God to people instead of expecting them to come to us and then we will tell them about God. Not many unchurched, unsaved people get up early on Sunday morning and head to church to hear God’s Word. Thus we need to lose our concept that if we make the church inviting enough, with enough programs and appealing worship, that they will come. It won’t happen…they don’t know what they are missing, and even worse, they don’t care. We need to take the gospel to them! Jesus didn’t say, “Sit in the church and wait for them to come.” Rather, He told us to go. We are to be the ones to carry His message to the world, not sit complacently and wait for a dying world to come to us. Tell your mountain to move…and get going with sharing His love and His sacrifice with everyone that God puts in your path. We can make a difference in the world if we will only realize that we are God’s testimony to the lost people; we are the conduit from them to God, until they come to know God personally themselves.
What do you think? Do you agree that we need to be a mobile mountain?
If you think about your life and how God has been leading you, what comes to mind? For me, I have a lot of questions about why God led me to certain places instead of others. For example, we had orders to go to Japan. The children were excited, my husband was anxious to get there and start his new responsibilities, and I was resigned about moving again but looking forward to a new adventure in a foreign land. We had sold our car, packed up all of our belongings and the military movers had come and put everything into large crates to be shipped overseas. Then, the memo came from command; my husband and children could go to Japan but I was not allowed to accompany them because of my health issues. The closest hospital to our new base was too far away for them to risk sending me there. So, prayer and discussions followed, and my husband reluctantly turned down the orders. That is how we ended up in northern Maine. Let me tell you that this southern girl thought I had died and gone to hell and it was a cold and barren place.
On the way to Limestone AFB, I was driving one car with my daughter and my husband was leading us in the front car with our sons. He says jokingly that you can see the brake skid marks on the pavement all the way from the south up Interstate 95. To say that I was an unwilling participant in this little adventure is putting in mildly. The highway ended an hour from the base, so on our journey into what I considered a wilderness of trees and cemeteries (honestly, that was the view for miles and miles), we had to stop for gas. When my husband came to my car window to ask how I was doing, I remember his asking me how I was doing. He had a big smile on his face, and I burst into tears. Having passed numerous cemeteries, I sobbed,”The only reason people come here is to die!” He talked quietly to me, comforting me and letting me know that God was with us.
When we arrived at our duty location, it was the beginning of September, and it started to snow. I got the kids settled into their new schools, worked every day on unpacking boxes and making our base housing as familiar to the children as possible, with all of their favorite pictures in their rooms. As I did this, I kept looking out the window and it kept snowing. After settling in, I started looking for a teaching job. Certified in Spanish and history, I was not too hopeful that I would find a job in the one high school in Aroostook County, but when I applied, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the one Spanish teacher for the county was retiring at the end of the year, so I applied. And I ended up getting the job.
My next obstacle was driving in the snow. I am from the south, and where I came from, there is no school when it snows. An inch? No buses would run. In Maine, we had almost two hundred inches of snow the first winter I lived there. In fact, I could reach out our second story window and touch snow, not drifted snow, but snow that had freshly fallen and that’s how high it reached. The children were adjusting well, with gym classes featuring skiing and snowmobiling, and they were loving it. I, on the other hand, was terrified to drive in it. So, I prayed and asked God to help me be safe and not hurt me or anyone else. My husband’s one piece of advice was not to touch the brake. Knowing that I had signed a contract and would be teaching in the fall, I started to venture off the base and drive a little. One bright sunny day, I went to the Ames Department Store. It was about half an hour away, I didn’t see any chance of snow even though it was March, so I was confident that the roads would be plowed and safe. I had finished my errands in town and started to get into my car when the snowflakes started falling. The March snow in Maine was often a wet snow, heavy and very slick. Before I could get halfway home, the roads were covered and I was a nervous wreck. I remember heading downhill on the road and the car started to slide. I had no idea what to do, but I remembered my husband’s admonition not to touch the brake. So, I took my foot off the pedals, my hands off the steering wheel and prayed, “God, you need to take over because I have no idea what to do.” Guess what? I slid nicely to the side of the road into a snow drift and the car stopped. After I cried and thanked God, I backed up very slowly and went home very slowly praying the whole way, aware that I was a menace to others who knew what they were doing.
Was my Maine adventure a pleasant experience? Not at all! But I made good friends there with other base wives, used my crocheting skills that the wives at the Arkansas base had taught me, and I learned to lean into God. He kept providing for me in situations that seemed hopeless. One of our neighbors, a nice older lady named JoAnn, was teaching math at the same school where I taught. She offered to drive me to school every day so I didn’t have to be so stressed about winter driving. Another new friend named Joyce invited me to her house at least weekly just to get out and have coffee or tea. We even went to Canada together one weekend. (Canada was actually the closest place to shop for decent clothes for our children.)
Why am I telling you all of this? Just to let you know that I learned a lot about myself and my relationship with God from my “wilderness” experience in Maine. God did not take me immediately to the place I wanted to go (South Carolina), but I did get there eventually. Maine was a long way from home, but the four years I spent there were a school for the rest of my time as a military wife. I learned to use resources that the base provided, not to be afraid to tell people that I needed help and to always have an attitude of prayer because I never knew when the snow might start falling again.
Moses did not get to go right to the Promised Land using the shortest route possible. Instead, he went through the wilderness. And when the Israelites disobeyed and rebelled, they ended up spending forty years there, even though the journey was really only a few weeks. Paul did not go straight to Rome. Instead, he was taken prisoner, shipwrecked and finally ended up where he wanted to be all along. We have a lot of epistles penned by Paul that tell us about his experiences getting there.
My point is that we don’t know what God’s plan for us is, but He does. We don’t know why things happen the way they do, but He does. In trusting God in the wilderness, I have found that He is with me in the oases, too. He walks with me on the mountaintops and in the valleys. I’m not fond of the valley experiences, but I have learned to depend more on my Father in heaven and know that whatever I am going through will not be forever. He may be taking me the long way, but I can trust that He is always leading me in the right direction, home to Him.
Yesterday was my every six month visit with my primary care physician. One of the things that I do when I go to the doctor is tell him how I have been physically for the previous six months. Achy bones, visits to the ER, consultations with specialists, lab tests and results and blood pressure are all topics that I tell him about. Wonder what he would do if, after telling him all I had to say, I picked up my purse and walked out of the exam room? I think he would be concerned about my sanity for one, and he would probably insist that I sit back down and listen to what he has to say.
Sometimes, I think I go before God and tell Him my list of complaints, maladies and wish list, and then, before He can say a word to me, I get busy doing something else. Not very respectful, is it? God wants us to learn to listen to Him just as we listen to our doctors and others that we trust to take care of our physical body. God is taking care of our body, soul and spirit, so the least we can do is take the time to hear what He has to say.
God speaks to us in His Word, but we have to apply it to ourselves personally and ask the Lord to help us make His Word and its truth a daily part of our lives. We cannot know God’s teaching and commands if we don’t habitually and faithfully read and study His Word.
If I went into the doctor’s office, told him my problems and then told him that I knew just what he needed to do to make me better, I don’t think it would turn out well for me. One of us in that office has a degree in medicine and I’m not the one. It’s the same with trusting God. He is the only One who knows everything, sees everything and can point me in the right direction. I go to God in prayer daily, and I am training myself to be still after I pray and to just listen. God will speak to my heart if I will be quiet and let Him know that I am willing to hear what He has to say.
Taking up my cross daily means a daily denial of “me first” and consciously making decisions that put Jesus first. Sometimes, it means that I don’t get the things done on my “to do” list because Jesus points out to me the needs of others and that takes precedence. Jesus is first, others are next. I am last in my own list of priorities. It sounds like it’s backwards. But if you think about being on an airplane when the oxygen masks descend, you are always told to take care of the child next to you first (or the elderly person) and then put on your own mask. Others first…they yourself. I think I have shared it before, but there is an acronym for the way we are to make choices in life: JOY= Jesus first, Others second, and yourself last. That’s where you can find the joy in serving that God means for each of us to have and the denial of self in our choices.
I had a milestone anniversary this week! On Thursday, January 23rd, I celebrated ten years of being a stroke survivor! Praise God that He has kept me, is keeping me and will keep me…until He calls me home!
Sometimes God answers our prayers right away, but I have found that most times, I am waiting for an answer and feeling a lot like David in Psalm 13 when he asked God this question. He didn’t expect a reply from God. Instead, he kept on being faithful. I think David knew that the answer would come in God’s time.
Sometimes it does feel as though God has turned away from us, but He never does. He is watching us all the time while we deliberate how we will respond to his delay. He is looking for people who will be faithful.
We have to keep trusting and in that trust, we need to rejoice. We are not rejoicing because all of our prayers are answered right away. I have said it before, and I repeat it here again. God is not a magic genie who instantly grants our requests. He has a reason for all He does and He has a plan for us. We rejoice because we know ultimately we have salvation and will live with Him for eternity. I keep reminding myself that this life is temporary. The aches, pains, heartaches and trials will all pass. God and salvation are forever!
While we wait for an answer, a good use of our time would be to praise God and remind ourselves of all that He has already done for us. God has been good to me! My life is a living testimony of His goodness, grace and mercy, and for that I can sing even as I wait. So, how long? As long as it takes. Because when the answer comes, I can rest fully assured that it will be the right answer at the right time and for the right reasons.
If you are Biblically literate, then I am sure you know the story of Joseph and how he ended up as a slave in Egypt after his jealous brothers sold him. The finality of the story is Joseph forgiving them and saying this to them:
I did not make a mistake. I put Joseph’s words with a cross background because Jesus could have said the same thing and it would have been true. The people who crucified Him (all of us, because we would have most likely been in that mob and because we are ALL sinners), meant Him harm. Harm being a euphemism for death. They wanted to kill him and get Him off the earth and out of the way of their plans to keep on sinning.
But God and Jesus had other plans. When He was resurrected, He showed everyone that they had actually helped God carry out His plan of redemption through their evil obsession with killing Him.
How many times have others offended me or harmed me? How many times has God turned it around for me for good? Too many times to count, but I am sorry to say that, unlike Jesus and Joseph, I did not recognize what they did as something that God could use for my good. Today’s devotional opened my eyes to a new perspective about people who are against me. What do you think? Is this true for you, too? No matter what, God’s plans will not be thwarted. He works for our good and continues to work out His purpose for our lives.
My prayer is for the healing of our nation as we turn back to God. We need to look forward and not back, forgiving as the Lord forgave, and pray for our new leaders. The new President may not be the one you wanted in office, but he is the one that God allowed to be there, so the commandment is to pray for those who lead us. It doesn’t say to pray for those you like and agree with…pray for the leaders.
I spent the last four years praying for President Biden even though he was not my choice. I believe God had a purpose in allowing him to be in office. And since I don’t have God’s mind, I cannot tell you what that was. But I prayed, sometimes begrudgingly and sometimes half-heartedly, but I prayed.
Today is a new day and a new administration. I hope that you will join me in praying for President Trump and his family, for Vice President Vance and his family. May all they do be for the good of the nation and the people that God loves.
God’s attribute of omnipresence means that there is no where I am that He is not already there. I can’t run from God, hide from Him are escape Him. I don’t recall ever really wanting to be away from God, but I do recall times when I thought He was far away and not listening to my pleas for help or safety. But that is a lie from Satan, the one who does not have the powers of God and envies God, so much so that he tries to get us to believe lies in order to turn us away from God.
With grandchildren getting ready to graduate from college and high school this year, I am looking at the world and thinking what a scary time it is for them to live. But God has assured me and continues to let me know that He is watching out for them and He is there, right where they are. He was with Tyler on his trip to Europe, even while protests were happening in Germany. He was with Isaac when he had to have cancer tests again, the kind that make him nauseous. God is there because He chooses to be right there with us. He created us and loves us enough that He won’t step away and leave us on our own.
It has taken me a long time to come to the realization that God does not just take off when the going gets tough. He is right there, walking alongside me in the hard times as well as in the times of rejoicing. He comforts me so that I can comfort others.
As a finite being who can occupy one space at a time, it is hard for me to comprehend that the God of the Universe can see all of His creation and be present with every one of us all the time. That is part of the mystery that is God and knowing that He is God allows me to accept and just know in my heart that He is there, all the time.
Hope is everywhere we look, but many of us are looking in the wrong place and to the wrong person for hope. For me, hope is found in the sparkling eyes of our grandchildren. They are hope for a bright and promising future. Hope is found in the rose bush that is currently dormant. It will bloom again in the spring, but right now it’s just waiting for its time. Hope is in the cardinals that hop around outside my window. They trust in their Creator to provide for them, and sometimes we help out by putting out bird seed for them. Hope…it’s in the trusting and waiting that hope is really found.
God is the God of hope. As we trust in Him, then we can have hope and the bonus of joy and peace. Thursday was a hard day for us here at the Watts household. We were awakened before six with the carbon monoxide detector beeping because the electricity had gone off. We waited quietly in bed for a few minutes, hoping it would flash back on, but since it didn’t, I got up and called Dominion Virginia Power. I went through a bunch of automated hoops and was ultimately told that I was the first one to report an outage and there was no estimated time of restoration. Knowing it was in the low teens outside, I fed our cat and went back to our warm bed. About nine, I got up again to a much colder house (it was about 58 degrees at that time, according to our thermometer on the wall of our bedroom), so I got my phone and checked the outage map. No info there, so I called Dominion again. This time, there was a technical issue, so I got to talk to a live person. She was very considerate and kind and said she did not know an estimated time of restoration but there were others out in our area. A few hours later, I checked the outage map again, found out that in our rural area, there were 160 people without electricity and the technicians were out trying to find the problem. The estimated time of restoration was by one o’clock. So, I bundled up and sat in my chair to take my blood pressure so I could take my morning meds. That done, I took my bundled self back to bed, with the temperature in the mid 50’s in the house now. I fell asleep for about an hour, got up and checked the outage map again. It had changed slightly. Now, only 111 were without power, so some had their problem fixed, just not us. I contacted the people in our small group from church and asked for prayer. Harry had surgery on Wednesday and was not feeling well enough to venture out to someplace warmer. So, we stayed in and bundled up as much as possible. One friend from church offered to let us come stay with her, which was very kind and offered hope (just in case Dominion couldn’t get the power back on that day). I was sitting in my chair with four layers on (blankets and jackets plus clothes and winter underwear) when I suddenly saw our digital frames come on. Then, I heard the heater start. Praise God! Our electricity came back on at almost exactly one p.m. Wonder how Dominion did that? So, I waited until the house got over 60 degrees and started to shed layers. I turned the breaker back on for the water heater. (Did you know that when the electricity goes off you are supposed to turn off the breaker for the water heater so the element doesn’t burn up? A good plumber friend told us that long ago when we first moved into our countryside dwelling.) Anyway, by 3 p.m., the house was warm, the hot water was restored, the electronic gadgets had been reset and I was finally able to do my online devotional. The plan is always to do my devotionals first thing in the morning before I get distracted or busy, but Thursday was a crazy day. Taking care of Harry, electrical issues, electronics issues and the cat kept me busy for a while. So, what does all of this have to do with hope? I HOPED that the power company would get the electricity back on soon and be safe as they worked. In fact, I prayed for the safety of the linemen that were out in the very cold weather trying to help me and 159 other families. I had HOPE that if our electricity did not return before dark, we could go to Bonnie’s house, about fifteen minutes away, and have warmth and light. Through it all, I had HOPE that God was with us and would keep us safe. And He did! We were not particularly comfortable in our many layers, but we were safe and warm enough that we could fall asleep in the middle of the crisis. I have to confess that I was not feeling especially joyful, but I didn’t feel frantic or out-of-sorts which is my usual go-to mood when things don’t go as planned. Instead, I felt peace, knowing that God was in control, of the weather, the electricity, the linemen and us as well as all the others in the same powerless condition as us.
Once the power came back on and I was doing my devotional, a truth struck me. We are all powerless without God, unable to function as we should and to carry on with our daily life because we aren’t plugged into our power source. He is our only source of hope in a life that has some unexpected surprises sometimes.
Vickie's Book Nook and Meditation Corner 