SATURDAY, MARCH 20

James 1:19  Everyone should be quick to listen.

A few years ago my young friend Maggie invited me to go with her to Quarton School for Friend’s Day.  She showed me around her classroom and the other rooms in her school.  We went to the library and joined her second grade classmates as they sat on the floor and listened to the librarian.

She held up a small journal and told them to carry one with them all the time.  “Everyone has a story to tell,” she said.  “It’s important to write down your stories, to keep a record so that you will remember and then be able to share your stories with others someday.”

Everyone has a story to tell.  In our fast paced, almost out of breath days, it can be hard to slow down and just listen to those around us.  Fred Rogers said, “The purpose of life is to listen – to yourself, to your neighbor, to your world, and to God and, when the time comes, to respond in as helpful a way as you can find – from within and without.”

We can begin by asking ourselves at the end of a day, “Who have I listened to today?  What did I hear?”  We can ask God to help us slow down, to be receptive to others, to hear their stories.  We can expect God to tap us on the shoulder and say, “Listen.”

Prayer:  Dear God, put wonder in our hearts so we don’t miss opportunities to listen and care for others.  Amen.

Jane Haggerty

FRIDAY, MARCH 19

John 5:30  And Jesus said, “I can do nothing on my own initiative.  As I hear, I judge; and my judgment is just, because I do not seek my own will, but the will of the one who sent me.”

Such a challenge Jesus presents to those of us who want to follow what he teaches and at the same time, what a relief to be grateful knowing that God created us and God is directing each of us to be the piece in the puzzle that each of us is meant to be.

Jesus giving God credit is as important to us as it was to Him.  Each of us is a person whom God created, and it is God who directs and controls our lives, as God directed and controlled Jesus’ life.

How grateful I am when affirmations appear that I am where God wants me to be and doing what God wants me to do.

“Ordinary” and “trivial” are words that accompany most of us on our journeys through life, but knowing that God directs what we do convinces us that everything we do is much more than ordinary or trivial.

To be grateful to God every second of every waking day is the ultimate expression of love, and how can it be otherwise when we watch tomatoes appear from flowers, butterflies morph to dust, human beings create computers and understand algebraic topology?

To wake to the surprises each day has a chance to present to us is a gift of God.

We make the best choices of ways to use the moments and hours of that day when we trust in God to open our eyes to the moments and give us direction during the hours.

We look for signs. They come at us as harsh realities sometimes, gentle nudges other times, comforting affirmations, but always, always reassurance that we are loved by God who created us and never leaves us alone.

Prayer:  Please God ,help us to know you are with us every moment of every day.  Amen.

Pat Olson

THURSDAY, MARCH 18

Psalm 32:1-2  Happy are those whose sins are forgiven, whose wrongs are pardoned.  Happy is the one whom the Lord does not accuse of doing wrong and who is free from all deceit.

Psalm 63:1  O God, you are my God, and I long for you.  My whole being desires you: like a dry, worn-out, and waterless land, my soul is thirsty for you.

I am approaching this Lenten Season feeling sort of sick to my stomach.  Will a good dose of repentance cure my queasiness?  There are many sources of my ailment – some minor contributors, some major.

The minor ones, similar to that yucky feeling after smelling rotten eggs, are just that, minor.  Such as an airline which aggressively charges for luggage over and above the ticket price, but loses all aggressive behavior when it comes time to find luggage which they have lost.

The major ones feel to me more like an immediate need to get off a wave-tossed ship.  Knowing I won’t be reading a Lenten devotion authored by Mary Austin, is one such seasick feeling.  Another major contributor to my stomach ailment is the devastation which occurred in a mere 45 seconds on January 12, 2010 in Haiti.

I ask again, will a good dose of repentance cure my queasiness?  How do I ask for forgiveness?  Do my sins include not doing enough?  Not letting go?  Failing in listening to God for guidance?

Prayer:  O God, help me to prepare for Easter by repenting during Lent.  Please give me the guidance to know how to repent and become closer to you.  Amen.

Julie Wagner

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 17

Matthew 25:15  He gave…to each according to his ability.

In Costa Rica, near the Arenal volcano, there is a path 6” wide that extends as far as you can see to an anthill that contains about 8 million ants.  The Queen ant lives off a fungus that is formed from the leaves of only one kind of tree.  These “tree cutter ants” go out each day, get a chunk of leaf much larger than themselves, and carry it on their backs to the anthill.  All along the path other ants are scurrying back and forth, keeping the path clear.  What you can’t see, is that on the back of each carrier ant is a smaller ant, whose job it is to clean the piece of leaf before it goes into the anthill. You just can’t take your eyes off this convoy.  Jobs are basically assigned according to size and strength.

I see this display of teamwork… peace…equality... and I realize these ants are my teacher.  Each ant is necessary to the process.  If God designed a plan so wondrous for ants, imagine God’s plan for us!

Prayer:  Gracious and Wondrous God, help and guide each one of us to find that unique place where we fit into your beautiful design of the whole.  Amen.

Joanne Blair

TUESDAY, MARCH 16

Proverbs 3:25-26  Do not be afraid of sudden fear, nor of the onslaught of the wicked when it comes; for the Lord will be your confidence and will keep your foot from being caught.

It seems to be a given today that our society expects parents to have unconditional love for their children.  It may be an unfair burden we place on our human nature and a reminder that God is in charge.  The concept comes to us from the parable Jesus told of the return of the Prodigal second son, the gratitude his father had for his return, and the bestowing of gifts the father gave to the returning son.  We need to remember this is a parable, and the way I read it, Jesus is talking about God’s unconditional love for us.

We have no idea why the son wanted to leave the father’s home, why he requested or demanded his share of the family fortune.  We do know why he returned home, though, because he’d lived a lascivious life, squandered the money, was hungry, and regretted his sins against heaven.  Maybe the father welcomed him home because during the time of the son’s absence he realized he’d treated him unfavorably, maybe he recognized in his son some of his own failings, maybe he’d lived with unimaginable guilt as to why he’d acceded to his son’s request when he knew he wasn’t ready to leave home.  Whatever the reasons for the departure or the welcome, they were human reasons made possible by God’s unconditional love for both the father and the son; love that enabled the father to forgive and the son to repent.

We do the same denial of our human nature when we pretend we can eliminate fear.  Fear, like anger, happens.  It is an undeniable aspect of our genetic structure.  It causes our body to produce chemicals that protect us as well as misguide us.  Fear is.  I would go so far as to say fear is God given.  It reminds us how precious life is.

What this Bible passage may tell us is that it is OK to acknowledge fear as it is OK to acknowledge that one of our human inadequacies is to be capable of unconditional love however worthwhile the striving for it may be.  Reassurance, though, comes from acknowledging that only God is capable of unconditional love.  Knowing and trusting in the unconditional love God has for us is what will keep our feet from being caught, keep us going forward toward living the life God has in mind for us.

Pat Olson

MONDAY, MARCH 15

Matthew 27:28-31  And they stripped him and put a scarlet robe upon him, and plaiting a crown of thorns they put it on his head, and put a reed in his right hand.  And kneeling before him they mocked him, saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!”  And they spat upon him, and took the reed and struck him on the head.  And when they had mocked him, they stripped him of the robe, and put his own clothes on him, and led him away to crucify him.  

There’s nothing dainty about Good Friday.  I was a little surprised recently when I Googled “Crucifixion Re-enactment” to find that re-enactments of the events of Good Friday are pretty frequent among some Christian groups around the world.  They take place in Mexico, Syria (Damascus), Australia and other places – quite prominently in the Philippines.  These pageants get down to the nitty-gritty about the human agony and suffering of Christ.

Somewhere today there is a young Filipino man who has been preparing himself mentally and training physically to enact the role of Jesus on April 2, 2010, maybe before a Super Bowl-sized crowd.  It’s the opportunity of his lifetime and he’s not in it for the money.  Mel Gibson might have been in it for the money, at least in part, when he produced The Passion of the Christ.

Some Christians disparaged the Gibson movie as being anti-Semitic.  I think the aversion of many of those critics was really about getting too close to the intense physical suffering our Lord had to endure and God had to permit for our salvation.  I identify more with the young Filipino who may actually have spikes driven through his palms than with the tut-tutters of Gibson’s movie.

We’ve done a lot of dramatizations of scripture at FPC, but I don’t think we’d try doing Good Friday.  If we did it, we could start the dragging of the cross at Pleasant and Lincoln and wind up at a make-believe Golgotha in our church parking lot.  Likely objections from the neighbors might cause us to move the ceremony to Skyline.

Prayer:  Heavenly Father, we humbly thank you for the three greatest events in human history, which we celebrate as Christmas, Good Friday and Easter.  Help us especially to remember the day on which your Son our Lord was tortured and crucified for our sake.  Amen.

Stan Evans

SUNDAY, MARCH 14

Matthew 13:31-32  Jesus told them another parable, “The Kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man takes and sows in his field.  It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it grows up, it is the biggest of all plants.”

Ramen Slaw

On page 40 of our 175th Anniversary Collection of Shared Favorite Recipes I am proud to be reminded of my Dad’s efforts in the late 1960s thru the 70s.   When he retired from First National City Bank, Wall Street, NYC, he became determined to make a difference in our world efforts toward peace.

The Presbyterian Church USA sponsored a group he founded called “Emerging Economies.”  Their purpose was to enable under-developed third-world countries to resist the spread of Communist encroachment, and to develop economic sustainability.

He, A. Eugene Adams, and my step-mother, Ruth Harris Adams, who was a renowned pediatrician from Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, traveled to several of these countries to make that difference.  Dad’s thinking was that churches should invest a part of their national endowment money in socially conscious projects and companies around the world, instead of just buying stocks and bonds in the US market.

In South Korea he found Sam Yang/Ramyon, a company that had just started to make instant noodle soups, and who needed expansion capital.  The soups were inexpensive, nutritious, easy for working people to fix, and filling – a delicious meal in a packet.  There was nothing like it in Korea at that time.

Emerging Economies invested in Sam Yang/Ramyon which went on to become one of the largest corporations in the Korean economy.  As they say, the rest is history.

Investing in developing noodle factories was only one of many ways in which my Dad and Ruth devoted their time, energies, and personal monies toward improving the economies and the health care of the under-developed countries they visited.

Prayer:  Help me to sow seeds of hope and promise where I walk each day, I pray.  Amen.

Janet Munson