dar334

Jim is working today and the weather isn’t the kind I’d want to be outside in.  It’s late morning, in fact in 10 minutes it will be early afternoon, and I’m still in my jammies, sitting in my Quiet Room, looking outside.  Pondering.  My current cup of coffee is lukewarm, but I’m still sipping away at it, the only noise I hear is the humming of the air conditioner and the dehumidifier.  I turned on a small oscillating (thank you spell check) fan and the occasional breeze from it is refreshing.  There’s a load of laundry waiting in the washing machine, but if I put it in the dryer it will need to be folded ….. that isn’t scheduled in my next hour so there it sets.

I receive daily emails from Bible Gateway.  They include suggested scripture reading from the Old and New Testament.  Neither take very long at all to read, unless you’re like me and you have to read the study note, then go back up and read the scripture again, then research something that popped out to you because it peaked your curiosity.  All the while you’re doing this, that AADD you suffer from sees a robin which in turn  ….. apparently causes you to hit something on your laptop to cause your typing to be highlighted!   TRAIN OF THOUGHT GONE!  Ah – hah, it’s fixed, now where was I?

This mornings scripture reading from the emails for the last two days didn’t trigger any pondering, nor did the suggested scripture writing for today.  We are finished with Finding I Am by Lysa TerKeurst and Jonah by Priscilla Shirer hasn’t began yet.  So I reached over and picked up (I just figured out what’s causing the highlighting and I’m feeling quite proud at the moment) Fervent by Priscilla Shirer.  I picked it up at Family Christian Book Store because of a 50% off any item offer I didn’t want to lose.  I had heard good things about it so it’s now in my growing Christian library.  It was in this book I found my blogging idea.  For those unfamiliar Ms. Shirer’s writings, she is a firm believer in prayer and the fact it is Satan causing all the problems.

She writes:  ‘So we should not be surprised when Satan thwarts our unity as believers, in all kinds of different pairings and places where we interact with fellow Christians.

He’ll do it in your local church.  He’ll stir up a faction who thinks the pastor is woefully deficient in his preaching or his time management or his leadership style or his bedside manner.  He’ll create a stir over how loud they play the music in worship or how often someone’s wife or daughter is allowed to sing solos.  He’ll divide old and young, traditionalists versus progressives, private school kids from the public schoolers.  Instead of people being able to freely exercise and emphasize their various spiritual gifts for the good of the body, he’ll cause folks to see one person’s ministry as being a direct competitor of another’s.  Division, disharmony, friendly fire.  They’re breaks in the line of our peace.’

Okay dear friends, this is where the God moment comes in.  Believe it or not.  Before I even began typing what Ms. Shirer wrote, even though I had read it, early on in typing this post, I went in and got another cup of lukewarm coffee.  As all the thoughts were racing around my head, I decided I wanted a closing line.  Something I end my blogging with, my salutation.  I thought about Frasier’s  “I’m Listening”  Paul Harvey’s “……the Rest of the Story”, the and Pastor’s “Shalom”.  And off goes the pondering …….. What does ‘Shalom’ mean?  After finishing copying what Ms. Shirer had written, the moment I typed that highlighted word up there, the word peace, my AH-HAH moment happened.  Shalom means PEACE!  Then off to my old friend google where I found the definition:  Shalom:  used as salutation by Jews at meeting or parting, meaning “peace”.

Sadly, churches have factions.  Sadly, in my opinion, Ms. Shirer could have been writing about most of us.  Our Pastor ends his letter in our monthly newsletter with the salutation ‘Peace’, we need to make that happen.  Ms. Shirer would want us not to pray that they lower the volume of the music, or Pastor to take less time with his message, but to be fervent in prayer to remove Satan from our local church and it’s members.  It will start here, in my Quiet Room.

Still pondering ……

dar