The Day After

The Day After

“If you are a big eater, put a knife to your throat.”

Proverbs 23:2 (NLT)

This is a pretty drastic statement in Proverbs about eating.  In actuality, this verse along with other verses is talking about being greedy; not about killing yourself.  People on the whole are generally greedy.  If we have, we want more.  It seems as though we can never have enough to be satisfied.

When we eat too much we pay by either feeling sick or blowing the diet we are on.  Now we are headed into the Christmas season; are we going to repeat what we just did or learn from it? We learn at an early age to want more and more and more. I want to share a poem I wrote many years ago for my children when they were young and it’s about being greedy and what happens later.

A Boy’s Thanksgiving Day

I awoke with a start and remembered, “Hurray”; today is here, it’s Thanksgiving Day!”

Grandma is coming with Aunt Bess and Aunt Kate. They’ll bring something good; I just can’t wait.

I sniffed and I sniffed; oh what was that smell? Down the stairs I ran with a whoop and a yell.

After breakfast they said, “Now go out and play.”  Now how could I do that on Thanksgiving Day?

All I could think of was the turkey and pie, but “Out” said my mother with a frown and a sigh.

I know that they’d think I’d be under their feet, looking and smelling and teasing to eat.

I’m not like that, I just want to see.  Gosh, weren’t they ever little like me?

I went round to the window to peek in a little and wondered was in that big shiny kettle.

Mother opened the oven and pulled out a pan. I got so excited I could hardly stand.

I knew what it was and I wasn’t wrong. That great big turkey looked six foot long!

My eyes got bigger as I pressed hard on the glass.  I went through that window with a terrible crash.

Oh, that didn’t hurt me, but it wasn’t much treat, when Dad finished up, I had to stand up to eat.

The mess was cleaned up; things soon settled down, but the hands on the clock just wouldn’t go ‘round.

‘Toot, toot’ went a horn; It was Aunt Bess and Aunt Kate. I knew I didn’t have much longer to wait.

Finally we gathered around the big table.  I sat down very slowly, the best I was able.

There was turkey and potatoes, squash and pie, rolls and salads; I thought I would die.

We all bowed our heads and gave thanks for the day. I was most thankful, that I can say.

Never a word I said as I ate my dinner.  I just felt fatter and fatter and the turkey go thinner.

Mother said I ate like a pig, but was glad I was quiet, and I bet next week she would be on a diet.

Well after I had my third piece of pie, excused myself and told my Aunts good-bye.

I went up the stairs and lay down on my bed.  I didn’t feel very good from my feet to my head.

Couldn’t understand, I felt good before dinner. It happened about the time the turkey got thinner.

Then in came my mother with a bottle in hand, I had a strange feeling she could understand.

She held my nose;  I opened my mouth; dropped something in; it was castor oil and then she grinned.

“You’ve had a hard day, son,” she tucked me in, "but I understand" and kissed me on the chin.

I felt a little better, but I just want to say, I won’t eat like this again ‘til next Thanksgiving Day.

Praying you had a wonderful Thanksgiving Day and that you enjoy the coming Christmas Season.

The First Thanksgiving

“In everything give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”

1 Thessalonians 5:18

Here we are – a few days before Thanksgiving.  Many of us are busy shopping for turkeys, making pies, baking squash and whatever is needed for a great Thanksgiving dinner.  Family and friends gather around a sagging table; a short prayer is said to thank God for the food and then we dig in.  We all eat too much and that calls for a nap.  Why do we do this every year?

            Our kids know a little about it from school and the teacher explains about the Pilgrims and the Indians and somehow a turkey gets added to the picture.  I found this article on the web and it reminded me about our forefathers and their struggles so in the future people like us could sit around our tables and enjoy all the food.

            There is so much more we should think about and remember on Thanksgiving Day and be doubly grateful to the God who has provided for us.

             Many Americans think of Thanksgiving as a wonderful time to celebrate getting out of school for a long weekend, and eating a great dinner. Or, maybe they think it is the start of the Christmas holiday season. What is the real meaning behind Thanksgiving? Catherine Millard writes:  We can trace this historic American Christian tradition to the year 1623. After the harvest crops were gathered in November 1623, Governor William Bradford of the 1620 Pilgrim Colony, “Plymouth Plantation” in Plymouth, Massachusetts proclaimed: "All ye Pilgrims with your wives and little ones, do gather at the Meeting House, on the hill… there to listen to the pastor, and render Thanksgiving to the Almighty God for all His blessings."

            This is the origin of our annual Thanksgiving Day celebration. Congress of the United States has proclaimed National Days of Thanksgiving to Almighty God many times throughout the following years. On November 1, 1777, by order of Congress, the first National Thanksgiving Proclamation was proclaimed, and signed by Henry Laurens, President of Continental Congress. The third Thursday of December, 1777 was thus officially set aside:   for solemn thanksgiving and praise. That with one heart and one voice the good people may express the grateful feelings of their hearts, and consecrate themselves to the service of their Divine Benefactor;… and their humble and earnest supplication that it may please God, through the merits of Jesus Christ, mercifully to forgive and blot them (their manifold sins) out of remembrance… That it may please Him… to take schools and seminaries of education, so necessary for cultivating the principles of true liberty, virtue and piety under His nurturing hand, and to prosper the means of religion for the promotion and enlargement of that kingdom which consists of 'righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Ghost'…"

            Then again, on January 1, 1795, our first United States President, George Washington, wrote his famed National Thanksgiving Proclamation, in which he says that it is…our duty as a people, with devout reverence and affectionate gratitude, to acknowledge our many and great obligations to Almighty God, and to implore Him to continue is… our duty as a people, with devout reverence and affectionate gratitude, to acknowledge our many and great obligations to Almighty God, and to implore Him to continue and confirm the blessings we experienced…"

            Thursday, the 19th day of February, 1795 was thus set aside by George Washington as a National Day of Thanksgiving.

            Many years later, on October 3, 1863, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed, by Act of Congress, an annual National Day of Thanksgiving "on the last Thursday of November, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwells in the heavens." In this Thanksgiving proclamation, our 16th President says that it is… announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations are blessed whose God is the Lord… But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, by the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own… It has seemed to me fit and proper that God should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and one voice, by the whole American people…" 

            So it is that on Thanksgiving Day each year, Americans give thanks to Almighty God for all His blessings and mercies toward us throughout the year.  Let’s remember why we have the freedom today to be blessed.  However, we must realize that as we look at our nation today, we see a great division in our country.  As we think about the first thanksgiving, we see a very grateful people who have survived only by the Grace o God.                                                                                                               One of my ancestors came to America on the Mayflower, Edward Samuel Fuller.  If he hadn’t trusted God and took the risk of coming here, I would not have been alive.  I am thankful for my ancestors and for God Almighty for keeping them safe. Being thankful isn’t just about how much money you have or the big house you own; it’s about everything in your life that God has provided including your family.

            This country is so blessed and we should be thanking God for it, not devising ways to tear it apart.  If we as a nation want God to keep blessing us, then we need to be giving Him thanks for all we have here.  Remember, on Thanksgiving Day, to thank God we live in America.

            

Going to America

Going To America

The LORD had said to Abram, "Leave your country, your people and your father's household and go to the land I will show you.  Genesis 12:1 NIV

[A True Story about my daughter as printed in Guidepost magazine, His Mysterious Ways, 2013]

In 1952, Rev. Walter Teeuwissen was kneeling in prayer at his home in the Netherlands. During this time the Lord gave him a vision of a small church with a white steeple rising above the treetops in a village in the USA.  The following morning he told his wife they were leaving their homeland and going to America.  Not yet knowing the purpose of God’s calling, they were obedient and a short time later arrived in New York City.  From there, he called on a minister he knew, who told him of the need of a pastor in a small town in Michigan.  

When he and his wife came to the village limits and looked down the hill, they saw a white steeple rising above the trees and he immediately recognized the place as the one in his vision.  He and his wife were soon accepted as the new ministers of the First Presbyterian Church of Hesperia, Michigan.

            I was brought up in the church and now married and attended it with my husband and two children, Sheryl Ann, age 4 and Debra, 1 ½ years old.  My mother, who lived nearby, was an elder in the church and made sure my eldest daughter attended Sunday School when she was able.

          Sheryl Ann had been ill most of her four years.  At six weeks old she contacted meningitis, which left her in a weakened condition and by age four, had been in the hospital thirty-five times with pneumonia.  At seven months, she was still not able to sit up by herself and after taking her to the University Hospital in Ann Arbor, the doctors there told us she had also had polio.  We never knew for a certainty whether it was the meningitis or polio that crippled her back and left her with severe scoliosis.  She was fitted with a back brace and then began the months of therapy along with her many trips to the hospital.  Most of the time she needed oxygen in order to breathe and this continued year after year.

The summer before her fourth birthday, she became very ill and we took her to a nearby hospital.  In those times parents could not remain overnight with their child as they now do and so we were sent home.  Early the next morning her father left for work about 40 miles away and I was taking care of my younger daughter, when the phone rang.  It was the doctor at the hospital and he told me I should come right away, because Sheryl Ann was failing very quickly.

Family members took my youngest child and I drove to the hospital to find my little girl in an oxygen tent, lying on large ice packs.  She was so still and her skin was so transparent, you could see her veins standing out.  There was a small trickle of blood coming from her nose and blood in both ears.

The doctor came and stood at my side and told me her temperature had been so high for such a long time that I shouldn’t wish for her to live because she would be in a vegetative state.  I was very young myself and my mind couldn’t accept that my little daughter was dying.      Shortly after, my husband arrived and we just stood by her bedside unable to even talk.

Then my father and mother arrived at the hospital and upon seeing Sheryl Ann in such a condition, my mother suffered a heart attack and was immediately hospitalized.  By then I think I was in shock, but what followed will remain as vivid in my memory as the day it happened.

Someone had called Rev. Teeuwissen and he walked into the room behind the doctor and heard the doctor say after examining my little girl, that it was over and how sorry he was.  There was no sound in the room except that of the oxygen going into the tent.  My husband and I stood with our backs to the wall, stunned beyond belief, but Rev. Teeuwissen walked to her bed and reaching under the tent, took my daughters hand and in his broken English lifted his head toward heaven and began to pray.  I looked at this man calling on God to bring life back into my child and I saw a glow around his head and over his tear-soaked face.

Suddenly, he beckoned me to the bedside, “Vanda, Vanda,” he called to me, not able to speak my name clearly.  As though in a dream, I walked over to the bed and looked at my child, who a minute ago was no longer breathing.  As I watched, a rosy, pink color began slowly coming creeping out from under her little gown and moving into her neck and then her face.  Her eyes fluttered and then opened and she looked at me and said, “I want a drink of water, Mama.”  

I shall never forget that moment; Rev. Teeuwissen was praising God and we were all crying and laughing at the same time.  The doctor came running into the room and the first thing he said was, “This could only happen through God.”  My father, who I always thought was an unbeliever, because he never went to church, told everyone he met he had seen a miracle of God.  It wasn’t the end of illness for Sheryl Ann who was to undergo years of braces, corrective shoes and several spinal surgeries and fusions, rods in her back, but the hand of God was upon her and brought her through all of it.  

            Today, Sheryl is married to a minister, Pastor Verne Wright and they have two grown daughters and five grandchildren.  Sheryl has traveled on mission trips to Viet Nam and several trips to the Philippines, sharing the message of Christ’s love.

            Recently, after returning from one of the trips, she was showing pictures to the church and telling of the hurting people she had ministered to.  It was then I came to the realization that an amazing thing had taken place.  God had called a man from the Netherlands all the way to a small town in Michigan to pray life into a dying child who would one day travel the world bringing the hope of Jesus Christ to the lost.

When my mother passed away in 1991, we found a picture of Rev. Teeuwissen on his bicycle. He had returned to the Netherlands a short time after Sheryl was healed and wrote to my mother to tell her that he had Sheryl’s picture on his desk and he rode his bicycle all over the Netherlands telling everyone how God brought this little girl back to life.  

Sheryl Ann, her husband and a team of 17 from their church just returned from a 2-week mission trip in Nakuru and the surrounding area in Kenya, Africa. If Rev. Teeuwissen could see Sheryl today, he would be amazed by this beautiful woman who serves God with her whole heart.  She is the Praise and Worship leader at her church, Shiloh Tabernacle in Muskegon, Michigan. No one hearing her can believe she sings so beautifully and with such volume because she really has but one lung.

            God weaves our lives together in such an amazing way; we can never begin to imagine what far reaching effects it will have.  I only know this; His pattern for each of our lives is beautiful and all things really do work together for the good.

And we know that all things work together for good to those who 

 love God,  to those who are called according to His purpose.  Romans 8:28

Examine Your Heart

Examine Your Heart

“For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Matthew 6:21

Are you constantly thinking about money; enough to pay your bills but still wanting more?  Perhaps you deal in stocks and bonds and are agonizing over the stock market every day?  Do you find yourself getting deeper and deeper in debt? That can be enough to worry and worry about it.  In fact, it can take over your heart to a point it drowns out the voice of God speaking to you in your heart.

Did you know God created us so we would never have to worry about material things?  If you doubt that, read Matthew 6:26-34.  First he tells us that God will provide us with food. “Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?” Then he tells us that worry itself cannot change anything. “Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature?”

Then in verse 28 he tells us about our clothing. “So why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?”  God goes on to tells us that we shouldn’t worry about food, drinks or clothing because he already knows what you need.  It isn’t always what we want, but it is always what we need!

He tells us that if we seek God and try to live in his righteousness, he will give all these things to us (vs 33).  This is the time to examine your heart; to see where your treasure is, because then you will understand what shape your heart is in.  When we talk about our treasure, we aren’t talking about riches. A treasure can be something as simple as a collection of old buttons, or rare coins.  It can also hold what is the closest to your heart. For some people it really is all about money or things.

Many years ago when I was a young mother, I took on the job of paying the bills.  It was very difficult, because there was never enough money to go around.  I would sit at my kitchen table and go over and over the bills trying to manipulate what little we had to pay everything.  We had very little as far as household things, and we had a very sick child with Polio and thousands of dollars in doctor bills.  I worried until I made myself physically ill, but it didn’t do any good.

Years later when I had given my heart to Jesus, I learned to give all of me to the Lord.  My children were grown with children of their own when I finally realized what the treasure of my heart was.  It wasn’t money because I would never be wealthy; it wasn’t what I had in ‘things’, it was that God loved me so much he gave his only Son, Jesus, to die on the cross for my sins.  How amazing is that?  Then I learned to tithe and no longer ‘rob’ God (see Malachi 3:8).  From that time on God has provided for us.  It is so amazing to see how He has worked in our lives; we will always be thankful to Him for what he does daily in our hearts and in our lives.

There are two scriptures you should write down.  One is in John 11:22, “But even now I know that whatever you ask of God, God will give you”.  The other is in Matthew 21:22, “Whatever things you ask in prayer, believing, you will receive.”  Use the faith God has given you.  Ask God and believe he will give what you ask.  He does not lie; He wants to help you because he loves you.  Personally, I want God to take hold of my life and lead me where he wants me to go.  I want to believe every word he has said and to have the faith to believe it.

Examine your heart and you won’t have to search for the treasure because you already have it.  Give your heart to Jesus and become His treasure.