Tag: The Holy Bible

Fly, Bumblebee

Fly—just as if it doesn’t occur to you that you cannot.

When I was a child, one of our neighbors had a ceramic kitchen plaque that told about the bumblebee being scientifically unable to fly because of its wing-to-body-size ratio. The plaque went on to conclude, “The bumblebee doesn’t know this, however, so it flies anyway.” Odd that these many years later, this memory still often comes to mind…

What thing has happened to you which makes you feel disqualified from your destiny? Is it a moral failure? A betrayal? Is it financial/asset loss? Bad decisions? Recurring weaknesses? Lack of education or credentials? Insecurity? Inexperience? Divorce? Has the enemy attacked your health?

Perhaps one day heaven will reveal why, but it’s ironic how some of the believers who’ve most successfully prayed for others to receive healing find themselves (or perhaps a close family member) bound by a chronic physical ailment which remains unhealed—much like the Apostle Paul, whose deliverance ministry to others didn’t exempt him from that persistent “thorn in the flesh.” Just as I’ve heard people mock someone who teaches on healing but still wears eyeglasses; or who has had to live with recurring cancer, or has had a child born with a birth defect, I wonder if Paul too had some accusers who were quick to point out his own unanswered prayers in progress.

Now is a season where the devil’s minions are attacking the body of Christ with accusations of unworthiness and disqualification. Many are torn between persevering and instead going underground, or even giving up altogether. Many mature saints find themselves now battling depression and despair; and moreover, some have had to rebuke the spirit of suicide in their own lives.

My word to you is DO NOT ABANDON YOUR POST! If you have undealt-with sin, confess and forsake it. Repent. Hold yourself accountable. Then get back to what God has assigned you. If it isn’t a sin issue but an attack against your character, your ministry, your family, your health or whatever, then dig in your heels and stay the course. I’ve had some nuisance illnesses and injuries over the past year or so for which the enemy has taunted, “Yeah, you teach on healing, but you can’t get healed yourself. You should just shut up because you make God look bad!” You may as well know this: in the same area God has gifted you also lies the potential for your greatest personal battle. You can be sure the devil has studied your weaknesses, and has mapped-out the places in which you pose the biggest threat against darkness. Don’t be moved by this. God’s power within you (not your own goodness or skill) qualifies your fragile earthen vessel to be a container of His treasures!

Don’t despair! Be like the bumblebee who is oblivious to the scientific arguments of its accuser. You may never soar with the agility of the butterfly, bumblebee, but you stay airborne anyway. Abraham “considered not his own (90+ year-old) body” when it came to believing God’s promises. When the accuser of the brethren tells you that you need to just crawl off and hide, to sit down, to silence your testimony, you tell him, “I DON’T CONSIDER IT! I CAN DO ALL THINGS THROUGH CHRIST WHO GIVES ME STRENGTH!”

If God has called you, He has also equipped you…even if your wings appear too small to hold up the burden you’re bearing! Fly, child of God, fly! 🐝

“If you only look at us, you might well miss the brightness. We carry this precious Message around in the unadorned clay pots of our ordinary lives. That’s to prevent anyone from confusing God’s incomparable power with us. As it is, there’s not much chance of that. You know for yourselves that we’re not much to look at. We’ve been surrounded and battered by troubles, but we’re not demoralized; we’re not sure what to do,  but we know that God knows what to do; we’ve been spiritually terrorized, but God hasn’t left our side; we’ve been thrown down, but we haven’t broken.” 2 Corinthians 4:7-9, Message Translation.

The Right Angle

Your eyes are like a window for your body. When they are good, you have all the light you need.  But when your eyes are bad, everything is dark. If the light inside you is dark, you surely are in the dark.  (Matthew 6:22-23 NCV)

glassesI recently found an almost absurdly simple gadget that compensates for, of all things, eyesight deficiencies.  It’s a pair of glasses (the cheapo plastic ones) whose lenses are completely black except for tiny holes spaced out over the entire surface of each lens.  Now, being very, VERY nearsighted (and most recently, adding the need for bifocals too—how can one be nearsighted AND farsighted?!!),  I was skeptical.  But to my surprise, when I popped out my contact lenses and put these glasses on, I could see!  Not 20/20, mind you, but this old girl normally can’t see more than a precious few inches in front of my face before everything morphs into one blurry blob.  I could actually SEE!

There are some claims that, if these strange glasses are worn for a certain amount of time each day, and in conjunction with certain other eye exercises, one can actually reverse his or her declining vision and eventually no longer need eyeglasses.  You retrain your brain and your eyes to do what they were meant to do all along.  Now, I don’t know if that’s true, but their theory makes sense, considering that the most common vision problems are usually caused by the eyeball becoming elongated rather than round.  The “mirrors” get out of line, kind of like when you get behind the wheel and someone else has the mirrors configured in a way which doesn’t work for you!  By merely changing the angle and intensity at which light enters the retina, suddenly the focus is corrected.  It’s the same principle optometrists use when they determine the strength (the percentage of “bend” in either convex or concave lenses) of your eyeglasses; and corrective surgery goes after the same goal—to restore the angle at which light enters the eye.

In our ever-shrinking world, we have “light” coming at us from all directions—half truths, humanistic worldviews, deceitful marquis messages of so many different, seemingly good things that our eyes are continually scanning and taking in.  And while the little fragments of Confucius, Buddhism, Humanism, Hinduism, Taoism, Intellectualism, and even the Koran may contain some truth, when we combine all those “isms” together, they form a ‘pr-ism’ which scatters our vision every other direction instead of toward the undefiled, unadulterated truth of God’s Word.   When we try to take all of those other things and roll them up into one big religion or paradigm (even trying to mix it with Christianity) it just doesn’t work…and the worst part is, most of what we absorb turns our focus back to our finite life here on earth instead of pointing toward eternity.  Could it be we’re so full of other influences, trying to mix it all in so as not to miss anything, that our vision has turned to blindness?  New Age, old lie.

We need God’s Word.  We need God’s Word exclusively.  God’s Word is perfect and entire, and it needs no special adapter to make it fit.  When our vision is corrected by its complete truth, we can see clearly.  We focus on the right things and we think beyond this short life into a much more vast period of time—eternity.  Is it narrow?  Oh yes.  It’s as narrow as those tiny holes in that pair of glasses, but when we allow our spirit and soul to acclimate to its perfect guidelines, we are receiving LIGHT from a different angle—from a SINGLE angle.  It sharpens the lines instead of blurring them.  It changes our perspective and our perceptions, and aligns them with absolute truth.

I don’t know about you, but I need to see clearly.  I’ve wrapped my toes more than once around a coffee table leg or bedpost in the middle of the night, stumbling for the bathroom without my glasses on.  I’ve made some major life blunders out of lack of focus, too—painful ones.  I’m in an ongoing process of retraining my eyes and brain to see my life and all that’s around me from a different perspective—God’s—and while it’s unconventional to say the least, it brings glorious light into my spirit from the right angle.  Anything less would leave me groping in the dark.  Anything less, I would surely be lost.

Oh, be careful, little eyes what you see.  There’s a Father up above, looking down in tender love, so be careful little eyes, what you see.