“Our Father Wants to Give Us the Best”

“Man finds it hard to get what he wants, because he does not want the best; God finds it hard to give, because He would give the best, and man will not take it.”

So writes the wise old Scottish preacher and author George MacDonald.

It’s true, isn’t it?

Our Father tells us that happiness lies in learning to be content with what we have, whether we have a little or a lot. He tells us to “seek first his kingdom and his righteousness” (Matthew 6:33), and “all these things”—things like what we need to eat, drink and wear—will be ours as well. Do we believe him?

Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase in The Message gets to the heart of this. It’s more than possible for us to be “so preoccupied with getting” that we’re unable to “respond to God’s giving.”

Ironically, as we max out our stress levels to grasp for “bigger, better, and more,” we often settle for far too little—little, less, and counterfeit. Assuming that having “stuff,” and a lot of it, will make us happy, we fill our hands with trinkets and become unable to open our hands to receive the real wealth our Father wants to give us.

We make the same mistake with closed hearts. Our God would fill them, were they open to filling, with the genuine joy he wants to give. It’s a gift beyond price. But too often we choke our own hearts, occluding them with rock-hard resentment. Christ offers to nurture our souls with food that fulfills; we choose to chew a cud of bitterness that poisons our hearts and sickens our relationships.

Our Father tells us to love our spouses with Christlike love, selflessly putting their good above our own so that they live knowing that we cherish them and their trust. United in love and deliciously liberated from fear by vows freely taken and sincere, real love flowers and two become one in soul-filling joy, and the children that come never have to live a single day wondering if they are loved. Ah, God would always give us the best, and this gift is priceless.

But our world, in the name of “free love,” rushes to embrace slavery like an illicit lover. It settles for lust and self-serving lies, a parody of love that takes rather than gives, uses rather than cherishes, and runs from one loveless bed to another. Usually, it’s the women who are cast aside, the children forgotten as the poor excuses for men move on to “father” more fatherless children. Oh, for all of his children, our Father wants so much better! 

God made us. He knows us, and he knows what makes for our genuine happiness and contentment. God knows that if we live our lives, hands and hearts closed, always grasping and struggling to “get ahead” by this world’s standards, we’ll never know peace. God knows that shallow lives are storm-tossed lives with no safe harbor, and so he challenges us to trust him instead by choosing to live joyful, gentle, prayerful lives and thus find a “peace that transcends all understanding” (Philippians 4:7).

Our Father knows that to center on him as our Pole Star is to chart the right course in life. He knows that lives lived in his love, mercy, and grace are lives able to go down deep where real contentment is found, rich and full and forever.

Do we really want the very best for our lives? We have a Father who really wants to give it.

Copyright 2021 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.

You’re invited to visit my website, http://www.CurtisShelburne.com, and I hope you’ll take a look there at my new “Focus on Faith” Podcast. At the website, just click on “Podcast.” Blessings!

Sniffing Out Real News from the Garbage

I’ve never considered myself to be much of a prophet—not in the popular sense of the word.

If you read the Bible books that bear the names of the prophets of old, you’ll find, as my Old Testament professor was fond of saying, “The Old Testament prophets were more ‘forth-tellers’ than foretellers.”

Yes, indeed, some amazing foretelling, by God’s power, is certainly there. But much more involved was “forth-telling,” proclaiming whatever message God gave them to preach, and the forth-telling often caused these amazing God-servants a very high price. It was rarely much fun to be a prophet.

No, I’ve never been much of a prophet, not in the foretelling department. And probably not all that great in the forth-telling department either.

So, recently, I’ve been more surprised than anyone to discover in myself some hitherto unrecognized powers of prediction.

It works like this: if I’m perusing what claims to be news on my iPad or cell phone, and I see a headline, I’m often able to predict fairly accurately what particular news media organization is behind it. Alas, this is no proof of my “predictive” ability; it is a sign of rotten journalism.

I’m not sure that any of us, years ago, knew whether news anchor (and now news legend) Walter Cronkite leaned left or right politically. We just trusted him to give us the basic facts of the news and then let us decide what to make of that information.

But these days, just read the headline, and it’s not hard to figure out with just a couple or three guesses which media outlet is behind it. And I’ll bet my “powers” in this regard are not better than yours. Anyone who sifts through a compilation of media “reports” does this all of the time. We know that most of the “news” reports we hear are at least a little—and often, a lot—skewed by the political perspective of the organizations putting them forward. Unless we possess the mental capacity of an eggplant or just enjoy being manipulated, we’ve had to develop the good sense to know which way slanted news needs to be nudged to be more “bubble in the center” believable—and which needs to be tossed out with the garbage.

That, friends, points to a sorry state of affairs regarding journalism. Add in a social media-fed willingness to seek out and gorge ourselves with the slants and the flavors of the partial or total falsehoods we and “our bunch” most enjoy believing, and it’s a downhill spiral.

Peruse the compiled “news” stories on, say, Apple News or Flipboard or any other such compilation, and you’ll see some serious news items (but watch the bias), some frivolous news items about the latest celebrity marriages, failed marriages, and meltdowns, and more than a few “stories” so silly that they’d sully the National Enquirer. They’re all tossed in there together. And we must make a choice as to what matters and what is just salacious, stupid, voyeuristic, foolish, and insulting to the intelligence of the average 10-year-old. Only a very foolish person indeed would believe that it all is real, that it all matters, and that it all is equally important.

The media need to do a better job. We need to push for it and expect it. And we need to grow up, occasionally try thinking a rational thought, and be less willing to dance puppet-like as idea-barren politicians and loud media pundits derive power and ratings by pulling our strings.

It’s a wretched mess; allowing myself to “feed” on it can make me sick and cynical. I think a prescription for better spiritual health for me is this one: I need to spend more time bathing my soul in the written word of the One who “changes not,” no matter the day’s latest headlines. I need to spend more time talking to the One who knows us completely, who knows our every need, and who is always ready and willing to truly quench the thirst of parched souls.

His message is real news, good news, and filled to the brim with truth that we’ll never find on MSNBC, CNN, or FOX. I’m no prophet, but I predict that, focusing on our Father’s good news, we’ll find real joy. And the subscription is free.

You’re invited to visit my website, http://www.CurtisShelburne.com, and I hope you’ll take a look there at my new “Focus on Faith” Podcast. At the website, just click on “Podcast.” Blessings!

Copyright 2021 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.

“Step Out of the Traffic!”

“Be still, and know that I am God!” says our Father through the psalmist’s words in Psalm 46. And he continues, “I will be honored by every nation. I will be honored throughout the world” (46:10).

As usual, I love the way Eugene Peterson captures the feel of this in his Bible paraphrase The Message: “Step out of the traffic! Take a long, loving look at me, your High God, above politics, above everything.”

If I’m never still, I’m never fully honoring God as God; I’m trying to be him (and running myself and those around me into the ground). I’m acting as if, feeling as if, scurrying about as if, were I to stop scurrying, the world itself would stop spinning.

God knows us so well!

Why does he tell us to be generous with our money? Because our souls prosper when we acknowledge in practical ways that our money is not ours; we are simply stewards of blessings given by the Father who owns “the cattle on a thousand hills.” We’re to hold onto money loosely lest it hold onto us mercilessly. We break the hold of this potential idol by giving away, in ways that honor our King, more of it than we can easily afford to give. And our checkbooks (or debit or credit card receipts) write the story of our priorities.

It’s the same, you see, with our time. It is no accident that one of the Big Ten commandments is that we “remember the Sabbath.” (And to those who say this commandment no longer applies, I’d say, show me another of the Ten we can break without doing real harm to ourselves or others. In this universe, the principles behind them all are as unbreakable as the law of gravity.)

A lot is going on in this commandment that tests our priorities and reveals who or what we worship. Yet again, it’s part of the exam the Great Physician performs on our hearts. More is at work here than I begin to understand, but part of it surely is telling us that our regularly slowing down to rest and honor God reminds us that our trust—and our real worth—is in him, not in our ability to “produce,” though, ironically, we’ll find that we do our work far better if we’re not doing our work all of the time.  

“Work is not always required,” wrote the wise old Scottish preacher and writer George MacDonald. “There is such a thing as sacred idleness.” Oh, yes! And it honors God. But, oddly enough, taking time for regular rest almost always requires from us more discipline than refusing to rest. We too often take the easy way out. We hurry and scurry and run, along with the rest of the rats, a race that often seems devoid of much lasting purpose. Accolades can be genuine honors. They don’t always mean that we’re becoming strangers to our families and trading our most precious relationships for trinkets. But they easily can. And they’re poor but ruthless gods.  

Too often we find ourselves mindlessly rushing along “in the traffic.” Maybe if we run fast enough, we won’t have time to think about the troubling reality that we don’t know where we’re going. Maybe we won’t have to ponder the high price we’re paying—and forcing our loved ones to pay—as we live life so badly out of balance that a wheel or two is bound to eventually come off.

Our Father knows that we desperately need to take some regular time (a little daily, weekly, etc.) to breathe eternity into our souls.

And when we have an option to take longer times off, sometimes we need weeks (or more) that are richer and deeper than just expensive opportunities to run faster in our play than we normally run in our work. Surely they occasionally need to be times intentionally devoted not just to diversion, but to real rest.

It was also George MacDonald who so wisely wrote: “The lightning and thunder / They go and they come: / But the stars and the stillness / Are always at home.”

Most of us have lightning and thunder aplenty. Let’s learn to honor God by regularly allowing him to spin the world without our help. Let’s trust him enough to bask occasionally in the glow and beauty, the rich meaning and deep well of wisdom, found in “the stars and the stillness.”

Seeking that kind of rest is, ironically, often as difficult as it is necessary, but it is deeply rewarding. And we can be sure that our God who himself “rested” after his work of creation, will bless us as we seek to honor him in rest.

You’re invited to visit my website, http://www.CurtisShelburne.com, and I hope you’ll take a look there at my new “Focus on Faith” Podcast. At the website, just click on “Podcast.” Blessings!

Copyright 2021 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.

Red River Rocking and the Community House Porch

It’s so good to be back!

I’m sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch of the Red River Community House, Red River, New Mexico. It’s a Sunday evening, Labor Day weekend. This morning I sang and preached at the RRCH. Usually we’d do a concert in the afternoon, but COVID-19 resurgence concerns made that probably unwise this year. I’m just glad to be back at all. No surprise, Labor Day weekend 2020 was pretty much completely cancelled.

I’ve tried to look back a bit. If my calculations are correct, my wife and I have been coming here, generally to sing, preach, and sing some more, for eight years, minus the better-forgotten 2020. And for most of those years, we’ve been back to lead the Christmas Eve candlelight service at RRCH.

And more. The older bunch of our grandchildren learned to ski here. Watching their daddies teach them, I remembered teaching their daddies. But their daddies are better skiers than I am, and they became pretty good at skiing backwards (the daddies). I never did that. Not on purpose.

I remember getting ready for a sweet ski day. At the rented cabin (we graduated from mid-sized chalets to large houses as “we” grew), pandemonium would reign as we geared up for the day and got the little guys all buttoned up and weather-proofed.

“Ski school!” I always suggested to my sons. You’ll get to actually ski while they get expert training. You’ll get plenty of time teaching them anyway. I know you love them. It will drive you crazy, though, not to point it down the hill at speed. But the teaching will pay big dividends one day. It’s worth it!

“PawPaw,” the voices would implore, “will you ski with me?” “Oh, yes!”

One day I was about twenty yards behind one of the sweet grand-girls heading down the hill. We were moving kinda fast. “You okay, Brenley!?” I yelled. No reply. Just a happy dance on the skis, and on she flew.

I’m afraid I’d hurt my back if I tried to do a happy dance, on skis or off. I knew then, though, what was going to happen. One year, in a few down the line, I’d be gearing up, and I’d hear one of the grandkids quietly say to another, “Ya know, we ought to ask PawPaw to ski with us today.” A “pity” vote. That kinda hurts. But a “love” vote, too. And that’s what matters.

I’m rocking on the RRCH porch this evening. It’s still, and the sun’s going down. Here comes the wonderful coolness. Earlier a deer loped down the middle of the main street. The mountain above town is green and lush with vegetation. I admit, I tend to like it better when it’s white. But that will come.

And that’s sort of the point. I’ve sat on this porch in Red River time and time again. In seasons of joy and, yes, seasons of sadness in our own lives. I’ve not found many truly hard times yet that the mountains didn’t make just a little more bearable, but I’ve shed some tears right here. More times, I’ve smiled sweet smiles here with dear people that I love, and in these mountains, my soul sings.

I love mountains. I love porches. And I particularly love this one. Since 1940, this place has been a meeting place to share in, yes, community, and family, and faith, and worship.

God bless the wise people who conceived and built this good place. I don’t know a tenth of the names and a hundredth of the faces, but, as I sit here, sweet faces flash through my mind. My family. My brothers and sisters in Christ who carry on the great work of this place and have blessed me by allowing me to share along with them our deepest hope.

I think “place” matters to God. And in this place my heart smiles.

You’re invited to visit my website, http://www.CurtisShelburne.com, and I hope you’ll take a look there at my new “Focus on Faith” Podcast. At the website, just click on “Podcast.” Blessings!

Copyright 2021 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.