Month: June 2011
LOVE THAT HAS NO COMPARISON
Our Adorable Little Stray Puppy, part blue heeler and part dalmatian, etc, etc, etc.
This was written about 4 years ago:
This little stray puppy came to our yard and when Bobby tried to run her off, she was just too little to know what he meant.She was only about 3 weeks old and we think now that someone dumped her out. He had to pick her up and carry her about 2 blocks which was close to where he thought she belonged.
Next day…she was back in our yard. We did not want a dog, so he picked her up and carried her away again. Next day…she was back and she had lain down and gone to sleep before he noticed her. He reached down to pick her up and she got scared and bit him. Third time is charm, they say!
So…we had to keep her up for 10 days. I called the County Health Department and the State Health Department to see who was responsible for keeping her up. I was sure it would be the county but they informed us that we were responsible!
Well, after we had kept her tied and fed and watered and petted about 5 days, I couldn’t have parted with her. We put signs up in all the stores here in our town with her picture on it but no one claimed her. So we have us a little puppy.
She is now about 6 months old. She is not and never was and never will be…worth a dime to us. She takes effort to feed and keep fresh water out. We had to build a chain link fence to keep her in. We had to buy her a dog house for cold weather.
I gave her some old soft towels to lay on in her dog house and she took them out of the dog house and let them get wet and nasty. I cut up two good blankets to make sure she had a dry, clean one every time the weather turns cold or wet. I even ordered her a couple of doggy thermal blankets, for those extremely cold days. We have had to take her to the Vet a number of times for the red mange. We are going to have to take her in a couple of weeks to have her spayed. She has become a high-dollar dog! Like I said, she is not worth anything to us…but we love her so much!
Well, you probably know where I am going with this! There is no comparison to this and God’s love for us, but this does make me think of it. Lately, for some reason, a lot of secular things causes me to think of spiritual matters. Maybe because I’m getting older and drawing nearer to the time when I will see Him face to face.
Our God created us. He loved us so much! But we are not worth anything to Him except for the fact that He seeks pure hearts to love and worship Him. We are totally worthless and even our righteousness to Him….is like filthy rags in His sight. “All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags….” Isaiah 6:4
Why should He love us so much? Enough to let His dear Son die on the cross to cancel out our sins? We know it had to take something very precious, but it boggles the human mind! How pure and holy we should try to be because He deems us to be worth something!
God determined before the foundation of the world that Christ would come to earth and live in human form and that His brutal death on a cross would satisfy, in God’s sight,the worst sins that man could do, if man would repent and obey Him and live faithfully unto death. All inhabitants of the earth will worship the beast—all whose names have not been written in the book of life belonging to the Lamb that was slain from the creation of the world. (Revelation 13:8)
You can read the story line of that cross and that love, from Genesis through Revelation. You can read it ALL in a year’s time…reading 3-4 chapters per day…about 15 minutes of your time. It will mightily be worth your time!
WWJD
WHAT WOULD JESUS DO?
That is a great saying that is making its way onto pencils,T-Shirts,Note pads, etc, as WWJD. It is really thought-provoking and should make us stop and think before we do anything…but I think a better saying would be: WWJWMTD? “What would Jesus want me to do?” For instance:
Jesus could go into a temple and run the money-changers out with a whip. He had the authority to do that for His Father’s house. We do not.
There are many things that Jesus would do that He would not want us to do. He could associate with vile and sinful people and not be influenced by them. We (especially young people) can not.
The Bible lets us know that “Bad company corrupts good character” (1 Corinthians 15:33) and Jesus was strong enough to not fall prey to that. We are not.
He was and is the Great Physician and that is why He spent time with them. He could heal people from their sins.
Once a man who was healed of demon possession wanted to follow Jesus wherever He went. That sounds like a good thing, but that wasn’t what Jesus wanted him to do.
This remarkable setting is in: Mark 5:18-19 (King James Version) And when he was come into the ship, he that had been possessed with the devil prayed him that he might be with him.
Howbeit Jesus suffered him not, but saith unto him, Go home to thy friends, and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee, and hath had compassion on thee.
Always ask: ‘What would Jesus want me to do?’, instead of What would Jesus do? It fits in with the Scripture better and we can find precisely what He would want us to do…in the Bible.
OUR FIRST NEW HOUSE THAT WE ALMOST BOUGHT….
We drove through in 2007 and looked at some of the houses we lived in…in 1959-60. This is the house we almost bought in 1959. I would have flowers and shorter plants there where all the greenery is…too many snakes in the panhandle area.
In 1959 lots of veterans in Texas were taking advantage of the GI bill to build a house. A contractor in our town was building a lot of them. You could sign up for an FHA or a GI bill house. We signed up for a GI bill one. When the inspectors came to inspect it the contractor had them to inspect it for FHA. We checked on the FHA loan and it was 500 dollars more down payment and the payments monthly were much higher. So Bobby told him to re-inspect it GI. He said ok. They re-inspected it FHA again!!!!!
We were urged by the contractor to move into the house but we had not signed the papers yet. We knew later that he was hoping that after we lived in it a while we would not want to move and would accept it FHA. Utility payments, were paid by the contractor until our loan was finalized. Six months went by and he still had not inspected it GI.
One day the contractor came by where Bobby worked and told him to sign the papers that week. Bobby told him he would when he got the GI papers finalized.
He asked Bobby if he would move out of the house, so he could sell it FHA. We knew then that he didn’t plan to ever have it inspected GI. We were really tired of fooling with him so Bobby told him yes, we’d move out that weekend…but only under one condition. That he would sign a paper that we would owe him nothing on the utilities, because it is a lot of expense to move, since we didn’t have a pickup and had to rent a truck for a couple of days. He said “Fine, he would do that.”
Two weeks went by…no signed paper from him. We didn’t move out. He came by Bobby’s business again and said, “I thought you were going to move out of the house.” He actually thought we’d be dumb enough to do that! Bobby said, “I thought you were going to sign the paper stating that we didn’t owe you anything.”
The guy was really angry…he knew he was not going to get anything on Bobby, like he had done on some others. He got out a piece of paper and wrote some stuff down and showed it to Bobby and asked him if that suited him.
Bobby read it and said, “Well it looks okay to me. I will go show it to my attorney and see what he says.” The contractor was super angry then. We knew an attorney in the church we were members of and Bobby showed it to him. He thought it was fine and would stand up in court, if need be.
We moved the very next weekend. We don’t know how many owners the house has had, but someone lives there now. I hope they didn’t see us taking this picture. LOL
So please be careful when you buy a house on a GI bill. If they were doing crooked things like that in the 50’s you can be assured some are even more so now. The VA really wants to help our military who have sacrificed so much to give us freedom, but some contractors will take advantage of you if you let them. We think that would be extremely sad now, when a lot of our future veterans are serving at a dangerous time for our country.
This house below is where we lived before we moved to the new one in the above picture. We drove by in ’07 and took this picture too. It still looks as good as when we lived there in 1959. Some houses were just built well (and also taken care of.)
SUNRISE THROUGH THE CURTAINS
This morning I was up earlier than usual and as I walked through the living room I saw something…a sunrise so beautiful, I had to grab the camera. As I took several pictures I realized the view of the sun was going to be short lived, because clouds were moving in and it looks like rain.
This reminds me of the promise of a savior when Adam and Eve were in the garden and the first sin was committed. (Cloud) After that promise years later, the earth became so wicked (clouds) that the Son promise was clouded over by man. After the earth was cleansed again, by the flood,the promise (Son-rise)was easily seen again.
We can block out the Son-rise for someone and cause clouds in their lives by the things we say and do. We need to be careful.
A few years later, God made a nation from Abraham’s descendents and the Son was shining again in the prophets’ writings. However through God’s nation’s forgetting Him, the clouds came back big time!
After that, in the fullness of time…during the Roman Empire, He founded His church on the Rock, His Son, Jesus. The church grew and multiplied and spread the good news throughout the land. The Son was shining again…but alas! the clouds came back (Have you noticed that man is responsible for these “clouds”?) and the Christians were persecuted on every hand, but the church is founded on the Rock and will not be moved and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it…according to Matthew 16: 18.
And then we have today……and the ‘clouds’ are everywhere. But we read the last chapter of the Bible…Revelation 22…and CHRISTIANS WIN!
©Edna Ingram, September 3, 2009
Jesus Cares
The Bible depicts in several places, Jesus sitting at the right hand of God, (depicts a place of glory and honor) but in Acts 7, when Stephen was being stoned by the Jews for preaching Christ, he saw Him standing at the right hand of God (still a place of glory and honor). He was interested in, and grieved Himself, with what was happening on earth.
But he, being full of the Holy Ghost, looked up steadfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God, And said, Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God. Acts 7: 55-56
I believe that when faithful Christians are grieving and things are going badly that Jesus is standing for us also. I think there are times in our lives where He is not ‘sitting’, but is interested enough in us and our trials that He is ‘standing’. He truly does care!
SUCCESSFUL SOUL SAVING
If you want something so badly and you pray for it diligently, but don’t believe it will ever happen….do you think you will ever get it? James 1: 6-7 “…
But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering. For he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed.
For let not that man think that he shall receive any thing of the Lord.”
In the context, we know it is talking about asking for wisdom in this Scripture, but it also says “any thing.”
We had worked for 21 years to convert my dad, after we learned the truth about the gospel of Christ…but we were so anxious that we really made him bitter against it.
One of Bobby’s old family friends came by one day selling Bibles and a program on Successful Soul Saving. It was a real eye opener for us. It taught, among other things, the concept of believing you get what you are praying for…and it starts with imagining that you have it. That is a very Biblical concept that we have over-looked in the past.
Matthew 21:-23 Jesus replied, “Truly I tell you, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only can you do what was done to the fig tree, but also you can say to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and it will be done. 22 If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.”
We know that Jesus was speaking to His disciples and that this was still the era of miracles, but the concept of believing what we pray for is still true today…as we saw in James 1:6-7.
THE PROGRAM: SUCCESSFUL SOUL SAVING
The part that grabbed my attention was the instructor saying to concentrate on the one person you are most concerned about teaching the gospel. Of course it was my dad. The instruction was to imagine the person obeying the gospel several times a day as you pray for them to understand the truth.
Imagine them walking down the aisle or whatever scene you think will be involved in it. Pray several times a day and imagine them making the confession of Christ and submitting to baptism.
Imagine it so strongly, that you even “see” the clothes they are wearing.Well I did this…and it wasn’t but a few months and it happened!The strange fact about this….After I had followed these instructions for just a little while…I couldn’t even imagine my dad NOT obeying the gospel.
ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF THIS WORKING:
I had a dear Christian friend who had cancer and a few weeks earlier, I had told her about this system and in about a month her dad obeyed the gospel. He had been very bitter against the church.
Just a while later, she was in the hospital for the last time and some of us were taking turns sitting with her. One night when I was with her, I wanted so badly to know if she had used what I’d told her, because her dad had obeyed the gospel so soon…but I hated to ask her when she was so sick…but I did anyway and I’m so glad I did. She looked up and smiled and said, “Yes, especially the prayers and imagining the clothes he was wearing.”
Just wanted to share this and I hope it helps many who are trying so desperately to teach their loved ones. As you can see, it is a Biblical concept. It simply gets your mind working together with your prayers and actions.
CAR TROUBLE???
Wow! Nothing worse than car trouble when you’re on your way to the Grand Canyon. :)) Well not really, but there is a story that COULD be connected to this car! We just had to take Bobby’s picture by this old car. We were in Arizona traveling and Wendell and Kathy were with us. As soon as we spied this old car, Bobby had to get out and look it over…Wendell too.
Along about 1940, Bobby’s dad sold a car to a guy and he never did pay for it. He skipped the country and went to California without paying his dad a dime. They put a trace on the car with the sheriff, and they found it in the desert in Arizona, stripped down. So this could be the car. lol
Not to worry though. The guy had land leased and there was hay on it and Bobby’s dad was allowed to bale the hay and sell it…so he probably got enough for the car.
TRAINING….
We have these two little pets that we wouldn’t take anything for. We didn’t really think about getting a bird when we got Baby Bird. Our little female cockatiel had gotten egg bound and died after we had her for almost 10 years and we were so attached to her that we had decided to not get another one. When we first got her we left her cage in one place and after several months, we wanted to re-arrange the room and we turned her cage to face a different direction. It took her 3 days to adjust to that quarter turn.
After she died, my sister went to buy herself a little baby cockatiel and she told her daughter that she couldn’t buy herself one without getting us one…so that’s how we came to have Baby Bird. He was only 3 months old when we got him. They are social birds so we put his cage in the dining room so he would have a central place and could see in several directions. We decided that since the other one had trouble getting used to being changed around…that whenever we’d go into another room, we would just take him in his cage with us. (Sad mistake!) We were training him without realizing we were doing so. Also, when we are getting ready to eat a meal he sits in his cage and hollers until we get to the table…then he will start eating his food. He won’t eat until we get seated at the table.
Our little dog is the one that was about weaning size when it was dropped off on our block. Bobby carried her off for two days and put her down near the house we thought she came from….but the third day when she came back, she was asleep when he started to pick her up to carry her down the street.. She was startled and bit him on the hand. We called the state health department and they said to keep her up for ten days to check whether she had rabies. We didn’t want a dog…we had no place to keep a dog…but when that time was up we were smitten! We were too attached to give her away.
Her training took on this form: She can sit or stand on command and turn around while standing in order to get a treat. We also trained her to jump through a loop. But the main way she is trained: When we are just going outside to see her in her pen, we don’t say anything until she comes out of her doghouse and we usually take her treats, or are going to change her water or feed her. When we are going somewhere and she hears us going out the door and saying: “Be a good little dog, Gabby.”…she knows we are just leaving and she doesn’t have to come out in the cold or heat, whichever the case may be. It is purely amazing how you can train these little animals.
“…Even when I am old and gray, do not forsake me, O God, till I declare your power to the next generation, your might to all who are to come…” -David, in Psalm 71:18 
Children are amazing too. They are like little sponges soaking up and learning everything in their environment, especially examples people set. What a great responsibility parents have! And…sometimes like our little bird, we are training them when we are not aware of it. When we are not as noble as we should be, our children are watching. When we mis-represent the truth in order to make ourselves look better…our children are watching. When they see us putting God second…or third or maybe not at all…they are watching. What we tell them is not nearly as forceful and effective….as what we are showing them by our example. Blessed are those parents…who realize this when their children are small. And how very blessed are their children. -Edna L Ingram, 08/2008 “…Even when I am old and gray, do not forsake me, O God, till I declare your power to the next generation, your might to all who are to come…” -David, in Psalm 71:18
HAPPY FATHER’S DAY, BOBBY.
Friendship is a lovely word,
On this we all agree.
But the word is not as lovely
As what you mean to me.
You gave my life new meaning
And made the gray skies blue,
And Christ who is our Helper
Has made our lives anew.
We learned the truth together
And gave our lives to God.
The way has not been easy
But together we have trod.
You bring out all my good thoughts
And the rest we both destroy,
You also helped me train aright
Our little girl and boy.
The kind of friend a wife needs
Through the years . . . is hard to be,
But thank you, Dear, for being
That kind of friend to me.
©Edna L. Ingram
GUILT????
Do you feel a little tinge of guilt when you get a ‘religious’ forward and it says “If you love God, send to 10 people” or “If you are not ashamed of Jesus, forward this on” and you choose to not forward it?
We should not feel guilty. I used to…or I probably would not be writing this! (smile) Most generally I have noticed that although there is some good in the message, there is also a paragraph or two of false teaching.
If I read it and don’t feel good about forwarding it, I don’t feel guilty about deleting it. What they say and whether I send it on or delete it, is no deciding factor of whether I love Jesus or not.
Jesus gave us ways to show our love for Him and forwarding an email is not one of them, do you think? It is so easy to click that forward button but really loving Jesus and obeying Him is not that easy and is not that quickly done.
familyties8 