Immanuel and the Man on the Moon by Rose McCormick Brandon

 The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel (which means “God with us”). Matthew 1:23

Jesus, our Immanuel, is our very own God to love and cherish. Immanuel knows us, listens for our voice, hears our prayers, revels in our praises. He is always with us – in the uncomplicated days of youth and in the trenches when life gets tough. Wherever we are, He is there. If we could soar to the moon, as James Irwin did, Emmanuel would be there with us.

“I felt the power of God as I’d never felt it before,” Irwin said of his Apollo 15 mission in July 1971. From his vantage point on the moon earth appeared the size of a thumbnail. It reminded him of a fragile Christmas ornament hanging in space. “It was touching to see the earth from this perspective,” he said. Irwin felt God so near He looked over his shoulder expecting to see Him.

Prior to his moon mission Irwin was a self-described “bump on a log Christian.” Afterwards, he formed The High Flight Foundation and devoted his life to sharing the love of Jesus

On the moon Irwin felt inspired to quote from Psalm 121: “I lift up my eyes to the mountains – where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth.”

Soar to the heavens. Immanuel is there. Sink to the depths. He is there (Psa. 139:8). Immanuel, God with us, fills the soul with wonder and takes the fear out of living.

No power can wield any strength against me when He is with me (Rom. 8:31).

Before lifting off the earth to return to His rightful place at God’s right hand, Immanuel spoke these unforgettable words: 

“I am with you always, to the very end” (Matt. 28:20).

Prayer: Today, my Lord, I take time to consider that You are with me, always and forever. I’m never alone.

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Rose McCormick Brandon lives in Caledonia, Ontario with husband Doug. An award-winning personal experience and inspirational writer, Rose contributes to denominational publications and devotionals. She writes and teaches Bible Studies, authors biblical essays and is the author of the Canadian history book, Promises of Home – Stories of Canada’s British Home Children. Her book, One Good Word Makes all the Difference, contains stories of her personal journey from prodigal to passionate follower of Jesus. She is the mother of three adult children and grandmother of four. 

Treasures in the Snow by Rose McCormick Brandon

We glided on the groomed trail, our skis squeaking on the snow. Under the stars on this clear and frosty night, we were caught in a Christmas card moment. Pine trees trimmed with white bordered the trail. Branches swept downward in a graceful arc and crowded us into single file. We huffed up the hills, my three children climbing easier and huffing less than I, and glided thankfully down their other sides.

Our cheeks rosy with health, we occasionally stepped off the path to let others whiz by, sacrificing our momentum for courtesy. One man, a scowl on his face to show he was in earnest about this skiing business, groaned when he passed us on a straight patch. I wonder if he sees the trees, I thought. Or the stars. Does he recognize the snow under his feet as a gift from a Creator with a universe full of design to his credit? Can he read God’s message to him in the aroma of pine, in the moon that makes shadows dance around us, in the untouched snow to our left and right that covers a naked and embarrassed earth with its blanket of purity?

An ancient, man, Job, was asked this question by God, “Have you entered into the treasures of the snow?” He meant, “Do you get it? Do you get the message of the snow?” (Job 38 is a magnificent piece of writing.)

King David of Israel, wrote this:  ^"He gives snow like wool . . ." (Psalm 147:16).  Wool is used to make warm coverings. Snow, like a woollen coat, covers the ground. Every human needs a spiritual covering – a blanket of purity. Everyone who asks receives one. 

Isaiah brings the whole of Biblical thought on snow to a conclusion. “Though your sins be as scarlet,” he wrote, “they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool” (Isaiah 1:18).

Here’s the message of the snow:

Jesus will take your sins far away from you and leave you covered in a warm blanket of purity – you'll be like newly fallen snow, unmarked, as if you’d never sinned at all.

The memory of this golden night on the ski trails at Hiawatha, one of life’s perfect moments, clings to me. We weren’t the best skiers out that night, my darlings and I, or on any night after that, but when others limped home chilled to the bone, we limped pleasured to the core by God’s amazing gift of creation.

Rose McCormick Brandon lives in Caledonia, Canada with husband Douglas. Her book, One Good Word Makes all the Difference is available at http://writingfromtheheart.webs.com. or by contacting the author at: rosebrandon1@yahoo.ca

Lesson From a Reader by Rose McCormick Brandon

Joan Sepp

A man dropped in to read my articles on Joan Sepp. His reason for visiting was the death of Joan’s husband, Toivo. (Joan passed away a few years ago.) He left this comment – “I had a hard childhood and was often upset when I delivered the newspaper (to the Sepp home). On the days when I was most alone, one of them often met me at the door and chatted with me. I can't even count the number of times I didn't do something rash because these strong people had taken time to speak with me. Whether it was ten seconds, or ten minutes, it didn't matter. They were good people who were tested by tragedy.”

This caused me to think about the invisible people who cross our paths each day. They serve us in restaurants, grocery stores and banks. They deliver mail, parcels, newspapers and fliers, fill our gas tanks, pour our coffee, clean our messes and repair our stuff. They take our complaints, reduce our phone bills, ask us to please subscribe to their magazine, offer us deals on this and that, tempt us to buy chocolate bars and cookies. Mostly, they are front-line people who serve. They don’t control their product. But, often we act like they do.

Jesus was always mindful of individuals whether he found them in the synagogue, begging on the street, fetching water, tending sheep, fishing or collecting taxes. He connected with the person behind the job. Because of His personal approach, lives changed, miracles happened, eternity erased the temporary. 

People mattered to Jesus; they weren’t invisible.

This reader’s comment has reminded me that it really matters how I treat people, whether I meet them face to face, on-line or talk to them on the phone.

I have pledged to be kinder. If a busy man like Jesus always found time for people, can’t I do the same?

Joan and Toivo Sepp lost two children to murder. They suffered many dark days, yet they took time to notice and talk to a lonely paper boy. Their noticing made a difference in his life. “After everything that happened to them,” my reader says, “they still had time for a chubby autistic kid delivering the paper.”

Jesus of Nazareth went about doing good and healing all that were oppressed of the devil; for God was with him. Acts. 10:38

Making it Personal: Lord, forgive me for not following your example of showing kindness to every human being who crosses my path. Make me alert and mindful to do better. 

***

Rose McCormick Brandon writes about personal experiences, her faith and the children who came to Canada as immigrants, the British Home Children. She contributes to publications in Canada, the U.S. and Australia and is the author of Promises of Home - Stories of Canada's British Home Children and One Good Word Makes all the Difference. Find her faith writings at her blog, Listening to my Hair Grow. Visit her website at http://writingfromtheheart.webs.com

The Promise of His Presence by Rose McCormick Brandon

I will never [under any circumstances] desert you [nor give you up nor leave you without support, nor will I in any degree leave you helpless], nor will I forsake or let you down or relax My hold on you [assuredly not]!” Hebrews 13:5(b) AMP

My roommate from college never married. She moved west, away from me, years ago, which meant I didn’t see her for almost three decades. We shared phone calls and emails, talked about my children and her siblings. One day she called to say she’d been diagnosed with Parkinson’s. The disease ate at her life quickly, forcing her into retirement and isolating her. Frequent trips to the hospital, dependence on others for groceries and medications stole her freedom. A frantic worry about the future tinged the edges of her voice. I heard, “What will become of me?” between the lines of our conversations.

Months passed. She talked about her parents and happy childhood memories. About the Bible and how she still enjoyed in-depth study. Instead of anxious worries thoughts of heaven crept into our talks. One day through tears she quoted a stanza of a hymn:

Just think of stepping on shore and finding it Heaven.

Of touching a hand and finding it God’s.

Of breathing new air and finding it celestial.

Of waking up in glory and finding it home. ⁽¹⁾

At the end of this conversation she said, “I want you to know that in spite of my sufferings I always feel the presence of God.”

I always feel the presence of God. Those words calmed my concern for her. In my mind she had one foot in a nursing home and the other in a grave. But God was there in her apartment, sitting on the sofa beside her, reading and praying, sharing her suffering.

Not many months later she stepped into Heaven and found herself breathing celestial air in God’s forever.

“For the Lord your God will personally go ahead of you. He will neither fail nor abandon you (Deut. 31:6).” You can count on Him to be there in your tomorrow. That’s a promise. 

(1)     Finally Home by Don Wyrtzen

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Rose McCormick Brandon writes books, articles, biographies and Bible lessons from her home in Caledonia, Ontario. She's married to Doug, has three adult children and three grandchildren. Rose is the author of One Good Word Makes all the Difference, Promises of Home - Stories of Canada's British Home Children, Vanished, He Loves Me Not He Loves Me. She presently knee-deep in writing a daily devotional book. 

Loose Ends by Rose McCormick Brandon

Readers and movie goers like conclusive endings. The enemy gets shot. The central character lives happily ever after. The story strings all come together in the end. A neat bow is tied. The reader closes the book with a happy sigh. Their beloved character is avenged and safe.

 In real life, loose ends abound. Prisoners falsely accused languish in prison. Justice systems set the guilty free. Dictators flourish. Innocence is quashed. We long for God to swoop in, gather history’s loose ends and tie them in a neat bow – in our time. Sometimes He does. But, more often than not, we have to live with loose ends.

 Eugene Peterson writes, “It takes maturity to live with the loose-endedness of life. But if we refuse to live with it, we exclude something that may very well be essential and dear: the hazards of faith, the mysteries of God.

            Scriptures teaches us to commit our way, our stories, our lives, to God. That means leaving the dangling strings tied to His fingers. Completion is a God word. Only He can provide it.

Commit your way to the Lord [roll and repose each care of your load on Him]; trust (lean on, rely on, and be confident) also in Him and He will bring it to pass. (Psalm 37:5)

What strings dangle in your life? Are you obsessed with a neat and predictable ending to life’s troubles? Today, tie your loose ends around God’s fingers, allow Him to gather and tie them, in His time.

He has set a time when all your loose ends will be gathered. Commit the dangling strings to Him.

Lord, how badly I need you to make me content with the unfinished business of my life. Today, I tie the loose ends of my life around your creative fingers. Do what pleases You. In the interim, I remain your humble servant.  

***

Rose McCormick Brandon is the author of Promises of Home - Stories of Canada's British Home Children, One Good Word Makes all the Difference, numerous magazine articles and personal stories for compilations like Chicken Soup for the Soul. Rose writes two blogs, Promises of Home and Listening to my Hair Grow. Contact her at: rosembrandon@yahoo.ca 

A Time to Gather Stones by Rose McCormick Brandon

We will use these (twelve) stones to build a memorial. In the future your children will ask you, ‘What do these stones mean?’ Then you can tell them, ‘They remind us that the Jordan River stopped flowing when the Ark of the Lord’s Covenant went across.’ These stones will stand as a memorial among the people of Israel forever.” Joshua 4:6,7

The Israelites were nearing the Promised Land, nearing fulfilment of the promise given to Abraham centuries before. God stopped the flow of the Jordan River for them to pass over into the land. He instructed Joshua to gather twelve stones, one to represent each tribe, and create a monument that would stand as a reminder to future generations that God Himself made a way for His people to claim their inheritance.

Stone monuments dot the landscape of our country, including some on Parliament Hill engraved with scripture. Over the east window of the Peace Tower: He shall have dominion also from sea to sea (Psalm 72:8). The south window: Give the King thy judgement, O God, and thy righteousness unto the King's son (Psalm 72:1). The west window: Where there is no vision, the people perish (Proverbs 29:18). Other scriptures appear in the Memorial Chamber and on the bell. 

Gravestones fill our cemeteries. Some with telling words, like Fanny Crosby’s which bears the words of one of her famous hymns: Blessed assurance, Jesus is Mine. O what a foretaste of glory divine. 

Each of us must build a memorial. Something that testifies to future generations that Jesus Christ revealed Himself to us, that we experienced the miracle of salvation and were transformed by it. It need not be made of stone. One man left a letter to his grandchildren expressing his desire that each of them would love the Lord Jesus. Today, his great-great-grandchildren have copies of his letter. Meaningful words scribed with love near the end of his life when he was about to cross over into the Promised Land.

The time to gather stones is now. Stones of deeds done in the name of Christ. Stones of loving God and forgiving people, of being filled with the Spirit, reading and obeying His Word, prayer, encouraging others, living in peace, forgetting the past and moving forward, spreading the gospel, honouring Christ daily and finally, dying with His Name on our lips.

Think about the faith legacy you will leave. Will it be of stone? Wood? Words? Whatever it is make it meaningful.

Prayer: Father, guide me on this issue of leaving a faith legacy. Let it be something that will testify to future generations that I followed You.

* * *

Rose McCormick Brandon is author of One Good Word Makes all the Difference and Promises of Home - Stories of Canada's British Home Children. Her articles and devotionals are published in many Christian magazines and in collections of inspiring stories like Chicken Soup for the Soul. She writes two blogs: Promises of Home and Listening to my Hair Grow. 

The Princess Bride and Psalm 22 - Arends

In On the Joke of the Bible

Why we can't get the New Testament without the Old.

Hi All - Here is my latest CT column.  As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Carolyn Arends | In the June 2012 issues of Christianity Today, posted online 07/02/2012

My kids finally saw The Princess Bride, a movie their dad and I have loved since our college days. There is something wonderful about watching your favorite people watch one of your favorite films. In this case, the added bonus was observing the light come into their eyes as they discovered the origin of several quirky things their parents routinely say. "Hey!" they shouted with a shock of recognition when Westley first said, "As you wish"—a line they've heard their father utter hundreds of times. Vizzini's "Inconceivable!" produced a similar response. By the time we got to the ROUS (Rodents of Unusual Size), our kids were grinning with the particular delight of cracking a previously mystifying code. They were in on the joke, and they liked it.

Language is much more than grammar and syntax. It is layer upon layer of collective memory and shared meaning, so that simple phrases like, "Houston, we have a problem," "Et tu, Brute?," "Remember the Alamo," or even "Yada, yada, yada" can carry worlds of meaning. You can't master a dialect without also learning the culture in which it is embedded.

In my quest to learn the "Gospel Language," I have often been oblivious to the shared experience assumed by the biblical writers. Jesus and his earliest followers were Jews; they held in their collective memory a particular story of a particular people, loaded with mutually understood points of reference. When I've read the New Testament only dimly aware of the symbolic world of the Old Testament, I've barely skimmed the surface of an ocean of meaning.

Certainly, I've grasped that Jesus' choice of 12 disciples has something to do with Yahweh's calling of the 12 tribes of Israel. But until recently, I remained oblivious to the way his baptism and desert temptation evoke the foundational story of the Israelite Exodus through Red Sea waters and into the wilderness. I've been duly impressed with the Lord's ability to command the stormy waters to be still (Matt. 8:26-27), but I've missed the Israelite shock at this man from Nazareth doing something that, according to the Hebrew Scriptures, only Yahweh can do. And although I've understood some of the significance of Jesus' transfiguration right before the eyes of Peter, James, and John, I've forgotten that the Israelites had been waiting since the Exile for the Shekinah—the visible glory of the Lord—to return.

Maybe the most significant reference I've missed has to do with Jesus' final words on the cross. That awful cry—My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?—has haunted my struggle to understand exactly what transpired (Matt. 27:46; Mark 15:34). Was Jesus, for a devastating moment, utterly alone and without hope? How that cry is processed has all sorts of implications for theology—not least for the way we conceive of the Atonement and of the relationality of God's triunity. More personally, it shapes the way I perceive my own experiences of abandonment.

I've known, in a vague way, that with his cry Jesus was quoting the beginning of Psalm 22, a passage so familiar to his friends that to utter the first line would have been tantamount to reciting the entire thing. Psalm 22 is an anguished prayer of David, spoken as a godly sufferer awaiting deliverance. It's the most frequently quoted Psalm in the New Testament. And its parallels to the Crucifixion are chilling:

A band of evil men has encircled me,
they have pierced my hands and my feet.
I can count all my bones;
people stare and gloat over me.
They divide my garments among them
And cast lots for my clothing. (vv. 16b-18, NIV 1984)

The psalm is so shot through with suffering, it's hard to imagine any more appropriate reference Jesus could have made. But it's essential to know that the only thing in Psalm 22 that runs as deeply and vividly as the speaker's pain is his unshakable hope:

You who fear the Lord, praise him! …
For he has not despised or disdained
the suffering of the afflicted one;
he has not hidden his face from him
but has listened to his cry for help. (vv. 23a, 24, NIV 1984)

Both Matthew and Mark note that some of the onlookers misunderstood Jesus' cry, mishearing the Aramaic word for "my God"—Eloi—as Elijah. I wonder if, in including that detail, they aren't cautioning us to pay attention to exactly what Jesus is saying.

The Cross is a mystery, and no human should expect to understand it fully. But if we want to be conversant in the language of the gospel, we need to be able to say at least this: At Calvary, Jesus felt the deepest level of anguish ever known, and yet he could still, in his Psalm 22 declaration, point to the presence, faithfulness, and anticipated deliverance of his Father—the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the God of our salvation.

Copyright © 2012 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

 

Words Immortal - M. Laycock

While attending a trade show recently I entered a draw at a booth advertising photos put on canvass. I won a 40% discount on a 12x18 canvass and the woman told me I could send them any photo I wanted and any wording I wanted to be put on the photo. "You can even put a poem you wrote on it if you like," she said, showing me an example. "It will be immortalized." My ears immediately perked up. I liked the sound of that.

It was a few days before I got around to picking a photo. I scanned through some of my writing to find something appropriate but couldn't settle on anything. Then I began to think about that word 'immortalized.' Wow. A big word. A big concept. Then I chuckled at myself. Yes, it appeals to my writer's ego to think that my words might last forever, but I know the concept is flawed. A printed piece of canvass may last longer than a piece of paper but it cannot be immortal. Only God's words can and do make that claim. The prophet Isaiah tells us, "The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God stands forever" (Isaiah 40:8).

I saw proof of that fact in Jerusalem a few years ago. I was stunned to silence while walking through The Shrine of the Book that houses the Isaiah scrolls found in the caves of Qumran near the Dead Sea. It was awe-inspiring to see those fragments of scripture penned so long ago, amazing to think that though the parchments are fragile and disintegrating, the words themselves have survived and will survive, forever.

There was another book on display that day, one that literally made me catch my breath. Encased in glass and set in a prominent place is The Aleppo Codex. This manuscript was created in about 920 A.D. and is the oldest copy of the Hebrew Bible in existence. It is also the first manuscript to be bound the way books are bound today, rather than rolled in a scroll. In essence, it is the first book.

The history of the Aleppo Codex is intriguing and speaks to the zeal of the Jews for preserving God’s word, and to God’s zeal for doing the same. Though it has been stolen, ravaged in riots, almost destroyed by fire, and lost entirely, (in fact a chunk of it is still missing), the book has survived.

There was something stirring about seeing it. I wanted to touch it, but of course the glass prevented that. But I still had a sense of profound connectedness. Here was an ancient object, words copied by a rabbi centuries ago, that is still used today to teach about God. These are the same words that are in the various copies of the scripture I have in my own home, the words I can sit and read any time I want to. These are the words God has given us to teach us about himself. As I stared at that first book, the feeling of being connected to those ancient people and to God himself was deeply moving.

The experience has given me a new awe for this thing I do called writing. No, my words will not last forever but God has given me the skill and will to write because He has purpose for my words. What an amazing thing God gave us when he inspired those men long ago to create an alphabet. What an amazing thing that God continues to call “scribes” to record and create, using the tools of writing, all to his glory.

I sent the photo away to that company to make the small canvass with words on it. But they aren't my words. I chose a passage of scripture instead.

****

Marcia's second novel, A Tumbled Stone has just been released. Visit her website - www.vinemarc.com