Remember When?

Memory can be a powerful tool. But right in the middle of the trials and dealings of life, it can be easy to lose focus on where God is in the middle of it.

And when you lose focus on that, pretty soon you can look back on your experiences and all you remember is the bad things!

God says: “Put Me in remembrance” (Isaiah 43:26). That’s important!

I’ve been touched by powerful testimonies of friends.

These spiritual giants I have known have gone through miraculous, deep things where God was transforming their hearts and using them to transform everyone around them.

However, years later, it broke my heart to see how these friends forgot what God was doing.

Pretty soon all that got prioritized in their memory are the hard things, all the afflictions they were going through at the time.

It’s appalling, and incredibly sad.

In the Old Testament, whenever God would move spectacularly in the Israelites’ lives, God would ask them to create a monument to memorialize the event.

You might think this is pretty stupid.

Who would ever forget how God parted the Jordan River miraculously? How the priests took the Ark of the Covenant and took it to the middle of the raging Jordan River, only to find their feet were on dry land?

How, as long as those priests held the Ark of the Covenant as instructed by the Lord, the entire congregation of Israelites passed over to the other side? Who would forget that?

It’s way easier to forget than you’d imagine.

Last year, I saw a friend at Thanksgiving. I told him: “man, it’s been a month since I’ve seen you last.”

“By now, I figured you’d be a completely different person.”

“Why is that?” my friend asked me.

“The last time I saw you, you told me about how Jesus walked into your room a few days before that.”

“I did?”

I stared at him. “Yes–” Had he seriously forgotten?!

“I think I vaguely remember that,” my friend said slowly. “What else happened?”

“Just before I saw you last, you told me Jesus had walked into your bedroom one night, and sat down on your bed.”

“Did he say anything?”

“Yes. He asked you why you didn’t believe you were anointed. Then you told me you responded: ‘why me? What makes me so special?’

“Then Jesus said: ‘why not you? I’ve called everyone. You responded.’ “

“It’s starting to come back to me,” my friend said.

The conversation scared me. As miraculous and incredible as God moves in our lives, if we don’t hold onto it, we can still forget and turn away from God.

Revelation says: “they overcame him(the accuser of the brethren, or satan) by the blood of the lamb and the word of their testimony”.

Our memories make up the building blocks of our lives.

I was going through some trials recently. A freak wind damaged a key piece of equipment I was using. Shortly afterwards, I got into a miscommunication that ended unpleasantly.

In the middle of it, God kept speaking: “Keep Me in remembrance”.

It’s easy for to fixate on the trials of it. But if I do that, those awful things become my memory of it–which again, is one of the building blocks of my life.

God was in the middle of it, but I had to testify of what He was doing.

That’s because God told me to, and obedience to God commands a blessing.

But it’s also because I don’t want to clutter up my heart with bad memories.

What was God doing?

Teaching me to respond correctly, whether I was needing to move quicker than the freak wind or respond differently to my friend to prevent the miscommunication.

The devil wants to rob you of how God is moving in your life.

As God moves, memorialize the event and tell everyone of how big your God is!

God will be honored, you’ll be blessed, and you’ll be shocked by how much more you’ll notice God in your life as you testify of Him!

Giving It All by Percy

 

I was selling something the other day when an old car pulled up. A mother and daughter got out and walked up.

I could tell there was a different spirit on the daughter. A seriousness I rarely see in someone that young.

As I showed her what I was selling, I could tell she didn’t have enough. She looked over her money , shook her head, then looked up into my eyes.

She then said something I’ve heard a thousand times but in a spirit of utter certainty: “I will be back”.

It caught me off guard how much she packed into those words. I knew she was telling the truth. It struck me so much I remarked about it to a friend.

Awhile later, the same beat-up car came back. I prepared myself to sell a small quantity. But I felt the Lord stop me, and somehow I knew they were coming for all of it.

The daughter got out and started handing everything to me.

One dollar bills, five dollar bills, and finally, a medicine bottle filled with ten dollars in quarters.

They had gone and scraped together everything they had.

I was handing over the entire purchase when the daughter ran back to the car.

I was shocked to see her coming back with money in her hand.

With her last few dollars, she was giving me a tip.

As they left, I heard the Lord speaking clearly about the widow in the Bible who gave everything she had.

That’s the heart God is looking for.

The Life of the Hive by A. P.

Yesterday I was looking through the bee hives to assess their needs. It always amazes me how the hive works together continuously for the good of the whole.

While the queen does not direct or make decisions for the hive in any way, she brings stability, calm, and order to the hive.

The first hive I opened it was evident immediately that they were queenless.

Flighty, restless, a different sound to the whole hive, no eggs, no larva, no new growth.

The next hive had decided that they were over crowded and needed to swarm, possibly to take stress off of the resources, reduce overcrowding and so on.

The third hive was totally packed with bees, honey and brood wall to wall top to bottom!!

Yet, they had not swarmed, which is amazing to me!

We were able to make a new hive from that super full one which is always a fun thing to do. We also had some queen cells in the hive that swarmed that we moved over to the queenless hive for them to raise a new queen.

Even in nature some receive and others don't, some grow while others struggle, some are healthy, others not so much.

It is amazing and perplexing.

The other day we had a swarm. The bees landed in a tree too high for us to reach even with the tractor bucket so we were forced to just watch and wait.

Eventually, the swarm took off, we chased after it far into the woods.

We were hoping they would land again so we could gather them into a new colony.

They kept going too far and too fast.

The strange thing was they left nearly half of their cluster in the tree!! To my knowledge they are still there, clumped on a branch, no home, no queen, no vision, no purpose.

A head scratcher for sure!!

Usually, when they swarm they all move together, communicating with the scouts about where to go for a new home.

The Precious Fruit of the Earth by Amber

For the past several weeks, I’ve had a scene return repeatedly to my mind.

It’s one that continues to stir me, inspire me, and simultaneously break my heart.

It’s that of an orange tree, gloriously laden full of fruit, nearly ripe, beautiful.

And yet, scattered around it on the ground are the fruits that fell away before it was ready.

I have this urgent cry in me, crying out that we stay on the tree until we are ripe.

This image was brought about from a conversation I had a couple weeks ago, fellowshipping about getting ready and what that meant.

It was shared that God’s timing is perfect, that He is looking for the precious “tree ripened” fruit of the earth, and He won’t harvest us until we are ripe, perfect, or in other words, mature.

Wow, I thought.

Of course that makes sense.

Tree ripened is by far the best, why would He settle for anything less, when we know the difference as well?

The next word shared was such a powerful, simple revelation:

To be tree ripened, we must stay on the tree.

I think in myself I have wondered before how we would get there; how would we manage to get all the way to that finishing line, ready, ripe?

And yet the answer is obvious:

STAY CONNECTED TO THE TREE OF LIFE, for life.

A fruit doesn’t grow itself. It doesn’t know the nutrients it needs. It just stays connected, and receives.

I was spurred by these topics to look up the process of fruit and how it forms.

A fruit tree sets on many blossoms and, once they are pollinated, they move on to the next stage in which fruit begins to set on.

During this stage of formation and development, the tree is delivering a rich cocktail of nutrients to progress the growth.

A fruit that stops receiving the nutrients halts and falls away.

The ones that survive this falling away and continue growing. Now they enter the next and final stages, which involves increased color, sweetening, and softening of the insides.

Only then, remaining on the tree for the fullness of time, is a fruit tree ripened.

This also spoke to me:

“Patience, and let patience have her perfect work, that we may be perfect and entire, lacking nothing.”

Our faith may be tried, but yet let us remain on the tree until we receive that sweetness of the final stage.

We are all different fruits, but we are to be connected to the same tree.

When pestilence comes, the immune system delivers a response to fight it, because it’s not just a random branch.

That’s OUR branch, OUR hand, OUR foot. That’s who will fight for us when we need lifted up.

I see this clearer than before. Not to just hope an affected member gets better soon, and not to think it wouldn’t also affect me.

Because that’s my body too and infection can spread fast. Nothing is benign.

I also learned about grafting. How wild that is!

I had heard about it before, but it speaks new things to me.

Grafting is done because it is insured to produce the exact fruit you desire quicker and hardier than its seed counterpart.

Which, because its genetic makeup shares similarities to a human in terms of two genetic parents, is a gamble.

Sure, its DNA is the same in the course that indeed it will be AN apple.

But the genetic mixup means it will be a lottery in terms of which variety, known or unknown, might come through.

Starting from seed is further complicated by the fact that the tree may be enormous and the fruits small, bitter, or inedible altogether.

Because of this, grafting is almost exclusively done for the continuity of an orchard.

To graft, one selects a strong rootstock, often specialized for disease defense, desired flavor, and quality of fruit.

A compatible scion is picked next. This will be the top of the tree and variety of fruit grown.

A fresh cut is made in each, and they are banded and joined together. This provokes a healing response to grow around their injuries, creating a strong union bond that will remain for the rest of the tree’s life.

This grafting process can be done many times.

It can even be done with different fruits so long as they belong to the same family. There even exists a “Tree of 40 fruits”, with all kinds of stone fruit varieties.

It spoke to me how the body of Christ is like this, and whosoever will yield themselves will be grafted in, one body and one tree, in Christ.