God and Medicine - Lyn Kublick

I spend a lot of time walking in the past. It is where I get the inspiration to write. Many think of the early days as a relaxed and simple time and in some ways this is true. However, it was often a very difficult place to live.

The picture, to the right, is of my Aunt Bessie. Unfortunately I never was able to know her because she, and her younger sister Vivian, died of Typhoid Fever forty years before I was born. Their mother, a recent widow, ran a boarding house to support her five children. It was believed that the sickness came from "bad" well water. Doctors did all they knew to do, but it was not enough. Prayers were said, but they weren't answered as the supplicants hoped.

Today this story would probably end differently. God has helped scientists and doctors to develop many skills in the last hundred years, and typhoid no longer carries a death sentence.

We do still face numerous trials, including illnesses, that can not be easily resolved. We must still rely on prayer, knowing that God is ultimately in charge of our lives. His plan for us is perfect. Despite repeated tragedy in her life, my grandmother continued to cling to her faith and rely on God's wisdom in all circumstances. There are many people today who walk away from Him when His plan doesn't suit their personal design. They have come to expect instant results and immediate gratification in many areas of life. When things go wrong they assume God isn't listening.

It can be difficult to remember that while His ways are not our ways, His plan for our continued growth is the perfect design. Reliance on Him, and His grace, is the only was to find peace now and life eternal.

"Why should the Devil have all the good music?" - Bruce Atchison

"You mustn't listen to that ungodly racket," elderly Christians often admonished me when I was a teen. Those church members had absolutely no grounds for concern. My commitment to God was so strong that I often sang along with the radio, replacing the secular lyrics with praises to Jesus. Those elders never understood that rock music fed my soul in a way that Christian Contemporary Music utterly failed to do. In my upcoming How I Was Razed memoir, I tell how I found a record that provided me much-needed encouragement in the spring of 1978. Though the manuscript still needs extensive editing, here is how I discovered that the Devil didn't have all the good music after all.

-------------------------------------------------------------

To keep from sinking into the depths of despondency, I borrowed records from the Edmonton Public Library's downtown branch. After a hard day of visiting firms and filling in application forms, I made a point of stopping there on my way home. Among the secular records, I found an album called Bootleg by Larry Norman. I had heard of this Christian rock star while attending high school but I couldn't afford to see him in concert. When I put the first disk of the double LP on the turntable, I felt like the ugly duckling discovering he was a swan all along. Here was somebody actually playing serious rock music with lyrics about Jesus. Songs like I Think I Love You, Ha Ha World, What Goes Through Your Mind, Blue Shoes White, and Why Don't You Look Into Jesus? "fed" my soul. Larry's tunes had none of the condescending attitude of Sister E's "young people's" LP, or the corniness of Sister R's "spritely tunes." Though "home taping" is technically theft, I recorded the songs I liked best and listened over and over to them. Three decades later, I bought the album directly from Larry's Solid Rock label and asked the Lord for forgiveness.

-------------------------------------------------------------

Please visit the Larry Norman website to learn more about this remarkable Christian rock pioneer. Though he died on February 24, 2008, his music lives on. As for information about me and my books, Please visit my Inscribe writers group page.

Change - the Price of Survival - Karen Toews

We recently purchased a piece of land and true to form, my husband had printed out house plans for my input before our signatures were barely dry. After 36 years of marriage, with eight different houses, we were able to agree on an initial draft with little grief or personal compromise. A week later while digging for the required soil test, my on-site contractor husband phoned me. They'd hit bedrock two feet down. Unless we were okay with living in an elevator-like structure, our plan needed to be changed.

Monday, April 19th I couldn't resist watching the Boston Marathon. Recognizing landmarks of the final mile through Commonwealth Avenue and Boylston Street, I could imagine how runners felt, battling through fatigue to the finish line. Two years ago we were positioned on Heartbreak Hill cheering on a friend as he conquered that challenging course. Nine years ago I ran it myself, euphoric with relief and the reward of feeling totally spent. My heart and mind would love to repeat this accomplishment but the physical realities of age with niggling injuries will probably prevent that from happening. I've had to change my running game.

I'm Alberta-born and raised: my prairie soul is imprinted with dark loam, wide skies and vacations in the Rockies. Three years ago, we made a cross-country move to the Maritimes. Two kids and six grandchildren living in Ontario and Maine influenced that decision - shared by our desire for adventure and a sense of God's leading. Everything was new: community, jobs/careers, east coast culture, church. We felt God's direction for us to belong to a fellowship of a denomination different than the one we'd been members of for our entire lives. This is a wonderful, growing experience, learning and appreciating creeds and prayers and readings - a change in our previous ideas about faith as experienced by other believers.

Often we aren't given a choice about change; sometimes we do have an option. Like my daughter-in-law who significantly changed my grandson's diet, which has resulted in remarkable improvements to his health and development. Or how consistent physio exercises are gradually changing my glut muscles to release pressure on my sacroilliac joint - a half marathon might be in my future, after all!

The call for change is one that keeps my life moving forward - whether I welcome it or it backs me into a corner, I have to decide how I'm going to handle it. And the only way for me to survive change, is to embrace the One who never changes.

"I the Lord do not change..." Malachi 3:6a (NIV)

Karen Toews
http://www.toewsontherun.com

Cry of the Earth - Lynda Schultz

The crew of the Starship Enterprise is trapped on a planet where every wish is granted, where every convenience is available. It’s a gilded cage, but still a cage. Captain Kirk wants off (Yes, that’s actor William Shatner who is apparently on someone’s short list for Canada’s new Governor-General) but the robots who have taken him captive feel that humans shouldn’t be allowed to run the universe; they are far too flawed to be trusted with such a responsibility.

Pretty smart robots.

April 22 celebrated Earth Day. The movement’s official website made this astonishingly frank statement: “Forty years after the first Earth Day, the world is in greater peril than ever.” Uh-ha, what’s wrong with this picture? No improvements at all? Sadly, the robots were right; we are too flawed to be trusted with such responsibility. The problem is that God gave us the task to care for His creation.

Psalm 8 says: “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens…When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him…You make him ruler over the works of your hands; you put everything under his feet: all flocks and herds, and the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, all that swim the paths of the seas.”

My commitment to taking better care of my environment lacks panache. I have good intentions, but my carry-through is not so wonderful. It appears I am not alone. That failure reminds me again that the crisis in creation is a living (or dying) example of the need for redemption and our incapacity to fix what we’ve broken. We don’t even have the will, let alone the might. Paul writes in Romans: “…the creation was subjected to frustration…has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time…we ourselves…groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our…redemption” (Romans 8:20, 22, 23 NIV).

The nasty truth is that all our efforts (and we should make them) will be fruitless in the end. Redemption belongs to the Lord—redemption of the soul and redemption of the planet. The good news is that redemption is sure: “the creation will be liberated from it bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God…for in this hope we were saved” (Romans 8:20, 24 NIV).