Caroling, Caroling

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I did something I haven’t done in a long, long time. Not since college. Maybe even high school. I went caroling, complete with printed sheets of lyrics and everything. Just like it was back in the late 1900s.

It’s been that long.

Back in the day, we’d all gather together and carpool from place to place with our arsenal of festive seasonal classics. I’m sure we were joyful and triumphant in our attempts to pull off the carols and jingles. We probably came closer to making a joyful noise than anything else. I couldn’t tell if the guy next to me was trying to harmonize or was just really off-key, but it didn’t really matter in the end. A good time was had by all.

Tonight, we started off visiting the house of a deacon who very recently had been fighting for his life. It was heartwarming to see him standing in the doorway, a sort of miracle in itself, with his wife wiping away tears of gratitude as we sang loudly and zestily (if not always in tune or in the same key).

Then we headed over to my pastor’s parent’s to do more yuletide crooning. They’ve both had health issues and have had a rough 2022, but they were both pleased and grateful to see us gathered in their front yard, singing about those herald angels.

The last stop was the next-door neighbor who was a founding member of Brentwood Baptist Church along with her late husband. She lost him around this time last year, and I’m sure she was thankful for the company. Christmas is a beautiful time, but sometimes I forget that it’s not the easiest season if you’re missing a loved one.

I snapped a picture of this forlorn little reindeer in one of the yards. Hopefully, someone got a good snapshot of all of us singing in different keys and sometimes different verses at the same time. The Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir we were not.

But I’d do it all again tomorrow night if I could. In fact, I hope this caroling thing becomes another tradition that I can look forward to through the spring, summer and fall.

The Most Reluctant Convert

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I did something that I rarely do these days — I went to an actual movie in an actual movie theater. It’s been a while.

Normally, I like to wait for it to hit streaming services because few films are worth paying the current price of movie tickets. But in this case, I made an exception. I wanted to support a faith-based film from a group that I’ve grown to respect as I’ve gotten to know about them, the Fellowship for Performing Arts, led by one Max McLean.

The film is centered around the story of C. S. Lewis’ 10-year journey from atheism to Christianity. Without giving away too much, the narrative device they use to tell the story is unique and compelling. I feel like Mr. McLean masterfully portrayed the title character and the filming locations gave the production a note of authenticity.

But what captivated me most was the way the movie used Lewis’ own words. I believe a lot of the narrative came directly from his autobiography Surprised by Joy. For once, it’s a faith-based film that actually succeeds at being a good film first, and without being preachy or didactic.

It will make you want to dive deep into the writings of C. S. Lewis, both apologetic and fiction, as well as possibly leading you to check out some of writers who inspired him such as George MacDonald and G. K. Chesterton. I can’t recommend it highly enough for anyone who wants a quality movie about the nuances of faith and intellect.

Do Thou for Me

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“Do Thou for me, O God the Lord,
Do Thou for me.
I need not toil to find the word
That carefully
Unfolds my prayer and offers it,
My God, to Thee.

It is enough that Thou wilt do,
And wilt not tire,
Wilt lead by cloud, all the night through
By light of fire,
Till Thou has perfected in me
Thy heart’s desire.

For my beloved I will not fear,
Love knows to do
For him, for her, from year to year,
As hitherto.
Whom my heart cherishes are dear
To Thy heart too.

O blessèd be the love that bears
The burden now,
The love that frames our very prayers,
Well knowing how
To coin our gold.  O God the Lord,
Do Thou, Do Thou” (Amy Carmichael).

There are times when we simply don’t know how to pray for a circumstance or a loved one. Try as we may, the words will not come.

I think even then God hears the groans and sighs of our petitions and knows what they mean. He hears the deepest desires of our hearts and knows best how to grant them.

Even when we have words, they aren’t always the best ones. Sometimes, we ask without such a limited point of view. Sometimes we ask selfishly. Sometimes we have too small a view of God and ask too little.

In Jan Karon’s Mitford series, Father Tim Kavanaugh always has his go-to prayer, or “the prayer that never fails,” as he calls it. The prayer goes “Thy will be done.”

You can never go wrong with leaving the matter in God’s hands.

Stolen Wisdom

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I ran across another gem of a post on the social medias today. Specifically, it was the Facebooks. There’s so much wisdom in it that I’m going to copy it and share it as is. It’s called “Habits I Stole from My Grandma that Make me Disgustingly Calm & Unbothered.” Of course there will be a link to the actual post after:

“1. Wash the stress off in the shower, then leave it there. She said your bed is for rest and your shower is for release — never mix them up. Let the water carry the day’s weight down the drain, step out, and start clean. Some things are meant to be rinsed off, not slept with.

2. Move slow, especially when everything feels fast. She walked slow, spoke slow, poured her tea slow. Rushing tells your body there’s an emergency even when there isn’t one. The calmest person in any room, she said, is almost always the one who simply refused to hurry.

3. Say your no plain, with nothing after it. No apology, no explanation, no reason someone can argue with. “That doesn’t work for me” was a full sentence to her. She said every excuse you add is just a handle for them to pull. Give them nothing to grip, and they let go.

4. Keep a little money tucked away that’s only yours. Not for secrets — for peace. She said a woman with her own quiet cushion never stays anywhere for the wrong reason. Calm isn’t just a feeling, she told me. Sometimes it’s a small amount saved that nobody can touch.

5. Don’t argue with anyone who needs to be right. You can’t reason a person out of a story they’ve chosen to believe about you. So she let them keep it and kept her own peace. Unbothered, she said, isn’t winning the fight — it’s quietly deciding not to show up to it.

6. Eat something warm when the sadness comes. Not for comfort — for the body. She said a cold meal on a cold mood makes both of them worse. Warmth is the oldest signal there is that the danger has passed and you’re safe now. Let your body hear it and settle.

7. Leave while you’re still enjoying yourself. She ended the call first, left the gathering early, walked away from talk that only circled. Staying past your limit, she said, is exactly how resentment is built. People remember the woman who left while things were still good.

8. Treat other people’s panic as their weather, not yours. Their urgency is a report on their own planning — it’s not an alarm your body has to answer. She paused before absorbing anyone’s emergency, and most of the time, she simply chose not to pick it up.

9. Keep your hands busy when your mind won’t quiet. Knead the dough, tend the garden, fold the washing slow. Idle hands, she said, let worry take the wheel. Give the restlessness something useful to do, and the storm inside quiets while something small gets made.

10. Set the grudge down — you’re the only one carrying it. The anger you hold punishes you, not them; they sleep just fine. Letting it go, she said, wasn’t forgiveness for their sake. It was finally unclenching the hands you’d kept in fists for years. Set it down.

11. Sit in the quiet every day, even for a few minutes. No radio, no chatter, no phone — just you and the silence most people run from. She said you can’t hear your own life over everyone else’s noise. The answers you keep searching for are already waiting in the still.

12. Keep one small ritual that belongs to no one but you. Tea at the same hour, the same slow evening walk, the same quiet moment before bed. Never shared, never explained. A truly unbothered woman, she showed me, always keeps one room that only she holds the key to.”

Living Is Believing

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“When a truth of God is brought home to your soul, never allow it to pass without acting on it internally in your will. Record it with ink and with blood–work it into your life. The weakest saint who transacts business with Jesus Christ is liberated the second he acts and God’s almighty power is available on his behalf” (Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest).

My pastor once said that if you don’t live it, you don’t believe it. If you say you have a private faith, but it doesn’t affect the rest of your life, then it’s not faith at all. Faith may be personal, but it is never supposed to be private. People should be able to tell by how you live.

Something else I’ve heard from the pulpit is that you need to take what you just heard in a sermon and immediately apply it to your life. Otherwise, it stays in the room, and you walk out unchanged. If it’s more head knowledge that has no effect on your behavior, you basically wasted an hour of your time.

The good news is that God is looking for a saint who is ready and willing to obey. You don’t have to have perfect motives or perfect results for it to count as obedience. You just have to be willing to step out in obedience to put into practice what you’ve learned.

Jesus says that the one who hears the Word without obeying it is like people building houses on shifting sand. It won’t last. But if you go out and obey what you’ve heard, you’re building your house on a solid foundation. No amount of storms or winds can tear it down when Christ the solid rock is the foundation.

So the takeaway is this: if you don’t live it, you don’t believe it. If you believe it, you will live it.

Stones

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I heard a very cool story in my life group tonight. It started when a group of believers was building a church in Russia. They didn’t have an abundance of money or resources, so they were using stones from a Gulag from back during World War II. The were using the stones that had formerly been part of a prison.

One of them discovered a letter inside of a cannister amidst the stones and took it to one of the Russians because they couldn’t read the writing. The Russian, who was a pastor, immediately started crying. He said that the letter was from a believer who had been forced to build the Gulag from the stones that had formerly been his church building.

He had prayed that one day those very stones would be used for God and for a church again. Little did he know that 70 or 80 years later, his words would prove to be prophetic.

The Bible says Jesus that the stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone. That was a prophecy about how the Messiah who was rejected by the religious leaders ended up being the foundation of the Church that is still going strong 2,000 years later in spite of all the attempts to eliminate God and faith.

I think G. K. Chesterton said that Christianity has died and risen many times over the centuries because it has a God who knows the way out of a grave. We may seem defeated at times. We may feel overwhelmed. But God has not stopped working on our behalf and we can be assured that the ultimate victory that matters has already been won.

We as believers are a Church of living stones, rescued from bondage and our own prisons. We were held captive by sin and the enemy but we are now free in the Lord and God’s own hands and feet to our world.

The Official Room in the Inn Prayer for Year 41

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“God of Welcome-
Help us to recognize you
in the sharing of both guest and host,
in the laughter around the table,
in the tears we cannot explain,
in the grace we do not expect,
and in the transformation we find in ourselves.

Amen”

It’s hard to believe that Room in the Inn has been in existence for 41 years. It all started in 1985 when Father Charles Strobel saw people sleeping in their cars in the parking lot of his church. He decided to open the doors to the sanctuary and let these people spend the night inside instead of out in the cold.

Fast forward to 2026 where almost 200 churches are involved in ministering to the homeless population of Nashville. And it all started because of the faithfulness of one individual.

Sometimes that’s all it takes.

Another Spurgeon Prayer for this Sunday

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“We have no merit, no claim, no righteousness of our own. Dear savior, we look up to you. Oh, that some might look for the first time, and those of us that have long looked would fix our happy gaze again upon that blessed substitutionary sacrifice wherein is all our hope. Dear savior, we do take you to be everything to us, our sin-bearer and our sin-destroyer. We do not have a shadow of a shade of hope anywhere but in you, your life, your death, your resurrection, your ascension, your glory, your reign, your second advent; these are the only stars in our sky. Amen” (Charles Spurgeon).

That’s my prayer every Sunday — that many people will hear the gospel and believe. That many people will become disciples who make disciples and not just seat warmers. That God would call out missionaries and ministers to take His gospel to the ends of the earth. That we would fall more in love with the gospel and the Jesus of the gospel every single day until Jesus comes back to take us home to stay.

Trust over Clarity

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“When John Kavanaugh, the noted and famous ethicist, went to Calcutta, he was seeking Mother Teresa … and more. He went for three months to work at ‘the house of the dying’ to find out how best he could spend the rest of his life.

When he met Mother Teresa, he asked her to pray for him. ‘What do you want me to pray for?’ she replied. He then uttered the request he had carried thousands of miles: ‘Clarity. Pray that I have clarity.’

‘No,’ Mother Teresa answered, ‘I will not do that.’ When he asked her why, she said, ‘Clarity is the last thing you are clinging to and must let go of.’ When Kavanaugh said that she always seemed to have clarity, the very kind of clarity he was looking for, Mother Teresa laughed and said: ‘I have never had clarity; what I have always had is trust. So I will pray that you trust God.’”

I’ve always thought it would be nice for God to lay out my next five years in a detailed plan complete with charts and graphs. I’d at least like to know where I will be then.

But God’s reply is, “Trust me. Take the next step and trust me. I’ll show you the second step after you take the first.”

We often miss the next steps because we’re unwilling to obey what we already know and take that first step of surrender and obedience. Until then, we will be stuck. More knowledge won’t replace putting into practice what we’ve learned up to this point.

I’m all for the next Bible study and the latest teaching, but it’s pointless unless it becomes more than head knowledge that fails to affect my daily life or change my behavior.

It all starts with trust. I believe God enough to take Him at His word and do what He says. Then He promises to lead me to the next step. It all begins with a “Yes, Lord. What was the question?”

A Daily Prayer from Spurgeon on Halloween Night

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“We have proved the power of Jesus’ blood for daily cleansing; we have proved the power of his divine Spirit for daily teaching, guidance, and sanctification; and now we want no other rock to build upon, than that which we have built upon; we desire no other hope, nor even to dream of any other, but that hope which you have set before us in the gospel, to which hope we have fled for refuge, and which hope we still have, as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast.

You know with what heartiness, and depths of truthfulness, we can say, ‘Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.’ We again declare that all our hope is centered in the atoning sacrifice, and in the risen savior, who has gone into the glory as the testimony of our justification, and of our acceptance in him.

Amen” (Charles Spurgeon).

Just a note that the actual prayer has nothing to do with Halloween or anything spooky. It was a beautiful prayer that I ended up posting on a day that just so happened to be Halloween. Pure coincidence.

Vacay Post

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I am currently on vacation, so this post will be brief. Plus, my trusty old iPad is currently sitting at 13% battery.

I’m thankful for every opportunity to get away for a few days and experience new things along with revisiting some old memories.

The last time I was in Chattanooga, I was much younger. I frankly don’t remember much, but maybe the next day or two will jog those dormant memories.

So far, I’ve walked a lot and eaten a lot. I’ve taken a few pictures that I hope will jog further memories down the road.

Right now, I’m very thankful for my life. Every day and every breath is a blessing and a gift.

More to come later on my vacation— hopefully.

By Another Name

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“‘It isn’t Narnia, you know,’ sobbed Lucy. ‘It’s you. We shan’t meet you there. And how can we live, never meeting you?’

‘But you shall meet me, dear one,’ said Aslan.

‘Are—are you there too, Sir?’ said Edmund.

‘I am,’ said Aslan. ‘But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there’” (C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader).

I’ve heard about a new Narnia adaptation coming from Netflix. I’ve heard a few things that make me less than hopeful, but I hope they get this one thing right. Aslan is a type of Christ. He’s not just a magical lion who can talk. He’s the son of the Emperor.

I know it’s not an allegory per se, but fits. Jesus is the Lion of Judah, and Aslan is the lion from Narnia. That’s one of many reasons why I have read and loved the Narnia books for so long.

Please, Netflix, don’t mess this one up.

Speaking to Yourself

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“‘If you want to claim credit, claim it for God.’ What you say about yourself means nothing in God’s work. It’s what God says about you that makes the difference” (2 Cor. 10:17-18, The Message).

Sometimes, we can be our own worst critic. It’s amazing how we speak to ourselves in a way that we would never tolerate coming from someone else. But somehow it’s acceptable to be abusive to yourself.

What ultimately matters is what God says about you. That’s why it’s vital to have daily time in the Word of God so God can speak a better word over you than you speak to yourself. God’s words trump any words from anybody else — even you.

What does God say about you. He says you are fearfully and wonderfully made. Chosen. Loved. Redeemed. God’s masterpiece. Beloved. There are so many other words to discover if you will only open up your Bible and start reading.

Let God’s voice be the first thing you hear in the morning when you wake up and the last thing at night before your head hits the pillow. His is the voice of truth.