Salty Zebra

  Then the LORD’s angel said to her, “Return to your mistress and submit to her authority. I will greatly multiply your descendants,” the LORD’s angel added, “so that they will be too numerous to count.”   Genesis 16:9-10  In Genesis 16, two women are highlighted: Sarai and Hagar. These two women found themselves confronted with the option to believe and obey God, or not, and they made different choices. Neither was perfect, neither did exactly as she should have, but we can learn from them both.   Sarai was Abram’s wife and had traveled with him across the known world. Presumably, she knew about the promises God had made to Abram in Genesis 12:2,7 , Genesis 13:14-16 , and Genesis 15:4 , but ten years had passed since they entered the land that God had called them to, and still she had no children. It would make perfect sense for her to determine that she couldn’t have children as she was well past the child-bearing age and had not conceived. But this is where ...

  The Lord had said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you.”   Genesis 12:1  This study is focusing on obedience, and Abram, later Abraham, is one of the cornerstone stories of obedience in the Bible. Chapter11 of Hebrews is referred to as the “Hall of Faith.” In it, the author catalogs highlights from the past of people who followed God in extreme situations. Obedience is the result of faith. You won’t obey someone you don’t trust. And, interestingly, obedience leads to deeper faith. When we trust God enough to do what He tells us to, and things work out in incredible ways we couldn’t have imagined, we trust God even more.   I had always remembered the story of Abraham as him being called to leave Ur, his ancestral home, but as I was reading today in Genesis 11, it was actually his father, Terah, that initially picked up his family and moved. He left Ur with the intention of going to Canaan ( Genesis...

  Our lives are lived in seasons. Some long, some short, but all of them matter and affect us in different ways. And in each of these seasons, God is present. He leads, He guides and He uses them to change and influence us. Today, I'd like to tell you about our season with the Beach House.   It started more than a quarter century ago, when we were a young family. We didn't have a lot of disposable income. I wouldn't say we were living paycheck to paycheck, but there wasn't much, if any, left over at the end of the month. Vacations weren't something we really considered. A friend from church had a house out by the Ocean and offered it to us as a place to stay for a week during the summer. I cannot tell you what a blessing this was! I LOVE being by the water. It brings me peace and joy. And being able to take my husband and son out to the beach, dig in the sand, ride in a boat, play a little putt putt golf was such a blessing. Just to relax as a family.  A dream was b...

  On that very day Noah and his sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, together with his wife and the wives of his three sons, entered the ark.  Genesis 7:13  Today’s study focuses on Noah’s wife, though I’m not sure why. The SOAP verse above is one of only a few mentions we have of her, along with her sons’ wives. The Bible says in chapter 7 that they went into the ark, and then in a couple of verses in chapter 8 that they came out of the ark. That’s it. It doesn’t seem as though there is any more significance to it other than that the people went into the ark in pairs, male and female, as the animals did.  So, what can we learn from Noah’s wife? Odds are she didn’t say or do anything wildly against her husband’s mission, because that would likely have been recorded as it was in Job 2:9-10 . We can guess, from the lack of information otherwise, that Noah’s wife and sons supported him in his mission from God to build an ark. That must have been difficult. Noah had heard f...

  Noah did everything just as God commanded him. Genesis 6:22  Peer pressure is a powerful thing. It’s hard to be different, set apart as the Bible calls it. It’s so much easier to just go with the flow, following along with the flow of traffic and going “about” the speed limit. Being that one guy following the rules and going 60 in a 60mph zone is rough. People keep zooming around you. Sometimes they honk. Sometimes you can see the anger and assume the nasty words coming out of their mouths as they slow down next to you to let you know how much they don’t appreciate your choices. Really, they’d so much prefer if you did what they did and kept the freeway smoother and freer flowing. The irony is that the opposite is also true, if they just slowed down and went the speed limit with you it would be just as smooth and free flowing!   Now, the intention of this post is not to preach against speeding. Our vehicle definitely doesn’t stay below 60 on the freeway. The point i...

   The coolest things in my life have often started with a little idea and rolled from there. Back when I was first diagnosed with a brain tumor and had to undergo multiple surgeries, my sister-in-law sent me a couple of shirts in the mail. It was a sweet and thoughtful thing to do, and I bet she had no idea what it would lead to!   I wore the shirts she gave me to appointments with the intention of keeping life a little lighter. I knew it would brighten my spirit and hoped it would give the nurse, technicians and doctors I interact with a smile as well. And it did! I bought a few more shirts along the way. Sometimes they had to do with brain tumors, sometimes EDS (Ehlers-Danlos Syndromes), sometimes they just expressed how I was feeling.  It got to the point that when we hit a roadblock or a new challenge in my health journey, my husband would say, "It's time for a new shirt!" I had collected shirts about MRIs, shirts about brain tumors, shirts about EDS, shir...

  God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways.   Genesis 6:12  Sometimes God tells you something you don’t want to hear, something that seems so difficult, so counter to the way things look or “should be” that it’s tough to believe. This happened several times in the Bible: He told Gideon that they would defeat the armies of Midian with a small rebel band, He told Mary that she would have a child even though she was a virgin, and He told Noah that He would destroy the entire earth with a flood.   Noah probably knew that the earth was corrupt and violent, he lived in it. He saw it every day. But, just like we see and are used to the sin and corruption around us, I bet he was too. It was normal for him, expected. Yes, he may have seen it as wrong, but it also probably just was . How accustomed have we become to the sin around us, normalizing it, accepting it? What do you watch on TV, that you know is wrong, but you...

  This is the account of Noah and his family. Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked faithfully with God.  Genesis 6:9  Before whom do you long to be seen as great? Your friends? Your family? Your boss? Your pastor? I read this verse this morning and my first thought was, what an incredible eulogy! Oh, to be known this way, but I think the key to it comes in the verse before this, Genesis 6:8, “But Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD.” As we read and learn about Noah, he wasn’t well loved and liked among the people in his generation. At best, people probably thought he was a weirdo. At worst, a lunatic. Had he sought to be well liked and loved by his peers, this would be a very different story. Instead, Noah was well liked by God, and why? Because he was righteous, blameless and he walked faithfully with God.  What does it mean that Noah was righteous? That he did not sin? Certainly not! But Noah sought to do right be...

  The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled.  Genesis 6:5-6  Our verses today share that, at the time of Noah, “every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time.” Do you think God feels the same way now? If not, what’s different? I’d like to think that humanity has come a long way from this place. We have good people that love God and do good things all over the world, from the Billy Grahams and Luis Palaus to the Sunday school teachers and church janitors. But, if I’m being really honest, there are still evil thoughts and inclinations in my heart all the time.  I rarely act on them, mind you, but yesterday was an example to me of how, even as a new creation redeemed by Christ, I am definitely NOT perfect. I wa...

Image created with the aid of Gemini's Nano Banana 2 and Microsoft Designer    Have you ever heard someone say, "Sweet Baby Jesus!" or refer to His mother as the "Virgin Mary"? Oftentimes, we take an image, an impression, of someone from a particular point in their life and then apply it to them as a whole. Sunday morning, during worship, God impressed upon me the idea that we tend to "live" in one of the mindsets of the days of Jesus' crucifixion. On Friday, Jesus was executed on the cross. On Saturday, He lie dead in the tomb, and on Sunday, He was gloriously resurrected. Whether intentionally or by default, we operate with one of these perspectives.   Friday was a dark day. Our LORD was tortured mercilessly. He fulfilled all of the prophecies about Him and He gave up His Spirit, dying the death that we owed. It is a day for which I will be forever grateful, and one that I must remember, but it was not the end! Think about it. How often do you se...

  To the woman he said, "I will greatly increase your labor pains; with pain you will give birth to children. You will want to control your husband, but he will dominate you."   Genesis 3:16  In the last post, we looked into how sin is essentially believing someone or something else over God. We might believe we know better, or that the powers of this world are more powerful than God, but the truth is we’re wrong. No one is wiser, no one is more powerful, no one has better thoughts or intentions for us. And when we choose someone or something else over God, that’s sin. Sin separates us from God because we have chosen something over Him, we have chosen to follow another path than the one He placed us on. It never works out well. In that choice, that sin, we experience spiritual death, the separation from God. That essential part of us that lives on forever is now dead. Our body may still be walking around on earth, our heart beating, our mind thinking, our mouth talking...

  And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”   Genesis 3:11  When God came to meet with Adam and Eve in the Garden that evening, He knew what He would find. He was not surprised. Saddened maybe. Disappointed perhaps. But not surprised. And yet, when he calls them to Himself, He asks them two questions. What we need to realize is that these questions are not for God to understand the situation, but for us to.   “Who told you that you were naked?” They had been naked from creation and had never known it. Nothing on earth wore clothing, so naked was the standard. In order to realize that they were naked, in order to feel the need to cover themselves, someone had to have pointed it out to them. They had to listen to someone other than God, and believe them over what God had already taught them. And in that lies the problem. They were given an alternative viewpoint from what their creator and fri...

  When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.   Genesis 3:6  Adam and Eve catch a lot of flack for their choice in the Garden and how it has led to all of humanity being slaves to sin ever since, but if we’re honest, I’m not sure any one of us would have done differently. Sure, with the benefit of hindsight we can say that we would choose to obey, but they didn’t have that. That’s a key fact we, as humans, tend to overlook. You don’t know what you know until you know it. Before that, we’re all ignorant.   Just imagine Adam and Eve bopping around in the Garden of Eden. Every day is wonderful and fresh and new. They have the animals. They have each other. They have God walking with them every evening. How cool is that? At this point in human history, there is no sin . Realistically, we can’...

  That is why a man leaves his father and mother and unites with his wife, and they become a new family. The man and his wife were both naked, but they were not ashamed.   Genesis 2:24-25 NET  Can you imagine being naked and not ashamed? I can’t. As a distant concept, maybe, but I don’t think it will ever be my lived reality on this earth. Why do you think they were able to be this way?   At first, you might argue that they were made by God and there was nothing in them to be ashamed of. They didn’t have a bulging belly or cellulite or blemishes. They had never gotten a bad haircut or dye job. No wrinkles, no gray hair. All the things we count in ourselves to be “bad” they didn’t have yet. This is because they were made by God, but wait, so were you and I! God made each one of us, formed us in our mother’s womb ( Psalm 139:13 ).   Also in their favor was a lack of comparison. Eve was the most beautiful woman on earth, because she was the only woman on eart...

  And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”   Genesis 2:16-17  These verses describe the institution of human agency. God could have made us as automatons that would blindly obey Him, but He didn’t. He gave us choice. He gave us independent minds that could understand our options and weigh our decisions. Later this week, we’ll look at what humanity did with that gift (spoiler alert, it wasn’t good), but for today I want to focus on the gift itself.  Why did God make us with the ability to choose for ourselves? Well, I’m not God, so I can’t speak for Him, but I have a pretty good guess. I wrote a long time ago about how forced love isn’t love at all. If you were to use a love potion, as happens in movies, on the person you desired and they instantly became infatuated with you, you’d know they didn’t re...

   God's timing is... eerily perfect. I got home from my radiation therapy setup appointment, and this study was in my mailbox. At no point in my past did I think that God would lead me into a season of brain radiation, but here I am. So, here comes the test of if I will truly follow God into whatever season He leads me into...  Obedience to God is not something we do to earn our salvation or atone for our sins. It is not a burden placed upon us, but rather the product of a grateful heart overflowing with joy and love of its Savior. The commands of God are not harsh or heavy. They were given for our benefit and blessing. In this next study, Where He Leads I Will Follow , we will look at key figures in the Bible, their decisions about whether or not to obey in pivotal moments in their lives, and the outcomes of those decisions. Looking at the list in the Table of Contents, if I didn't already know the stories of these brothers and sisters of mine in the past, this would al...