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The Way to a Man’s Heart

When we were kids in the 1950s, Mama had lots of ideas to keep us busy. We loved to make popcorn, shaking the popcorn in a heavy club aluminum  saucepan with real butter.  In that same saucepan, we made old-fashioned cocoa fudge, and divinity from scratch. We made sugar cookies, peanut butter cookies, and cookies cut out in different shapes.
Mom had a cookbook we loved to read through. I don’t remember the actual name of it, but it had the words on the front, “the way to a man’s heart.” Years later I found that cookbook with the cover ruined by the flood of 1999, but you could still read the words, “the way to a man’s heart.”
Mama sure knew the way to a man’s heart. Her bachelor brothers came to supper many nights, where we ate brown beans, fried potatoes, and cornbread.  In the summer, it was always accompanied by sliced home-grown tomatoes, fried okra, and maybe some green beans in with the brown beans. Dad usually wanted a yellow cake instead of cornbread with his brown beans.

Mama made the best chicken and dumplings, but sometimes she made chicken and noodles, with egg noodles made from scratch. She made the best fried chicken with white gravy, which I never ate, because white gravy gagged me.  There were many things I had to eat that I didn’t like, but she never made me eat gravy. (As an adult I learned to like chicken gravy—my own.)
In all her 25 years of cooking at the school cafeteria, she earned the love and admiration of all the kids who ate with her, not just the young men.  Mama really learned “the way to a man’s heart” which is apparently good cooking, but much more. She put love into her cooking and everyone who ate with her felt that love.
“God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.”  John 3:16 New King James Version
God knows the way to a man’s or woman’s heart—His love.
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Missing Something

 
 
My husband and I have been watching videos about World War II. The series we are watching now is called the Diary of World War II, day by day, from the first day. We are up to 1941, but not the Bombing of Pearl Harbor yet. There’s a lot of information about the war in North Africa that I’ve been surprised to see.  I should have been paying more attention to the teacher when I was taking World History in high school and again in college.
 
For instance, in the early 1980s, not long after I was married to my present husband, he and my dad were talking one day about army tanks and vehicles. My husband had been in the Army for almost 10 years so he had a lot in common with my dad who serve in the Army in two hitches, during World War II and during the Korean War. They were talking about the cliffs of Japan and Dad mentioned that the US and Allies could never have won a war fought on the sea, since the cliffs of Japan faced out toward the ocean. Dad said that the cliffs were full of caves filled with vehicles and arms that would have kept the Allies from taking the country by sea.
 
And then he mentioned the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I said, “What’s Nagasaki?” Dad and my husband looked at me like I was a idiot. “You don’t know what Nagasaki is? That town that was bombed when we bombed Hiroshima?” Somehow I totally missed the story of Nagasaki.
 
What have you missed in your life that is important to know? Is there something that you should have learned in Sunday School that you never picked up? You have to get some things about God straight from the source—God’s Word.
 
“For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.” Hebrews 4:12 NIV.
Go to God’s Word the Bible which has everything you might have missed.
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All Who Sail With You

A great storm came up on the Mediterranean Sea when Paul was being taken as a prisoner to Rome. He had tried to tell the captain of the ship that there was a storm coming, but they decided to chance it and sailed anyway. According to some recent studies, this was the worst storm that ever came on that sea and was recorded by the local historians. This was a killer storm.

As the ship tossed and rolled on the waves, Paul was fasting and praying. He came to the deck and told them, “Men, you should have taken my advice not to sail from Crete; then you would have spared yourselves this damage and loss. But now I urge you to keep up your courage, because not one of you will be lost. Last night an angel of the God whose I am and whom I serve stood beside me and said ‘Do not be afraid, Paul. You must stand trial before Caesar; and God has graciously given you the lives of all who sail with you.’ And I have faith in God that it will happen just as he told me.” Acts 27:21–25 NIV

Some of the men tried to leave on lifeboats but Paul told them “Unless these men remain in the ship, you cannot be saved,” so they cut away the lifeboat and let it fall. Then he urged them to eat, because they hadn’t eaten in 14 days and again he said, “Not one of you will lose a single hair from his head.”

Paul had a destiny and the destiny of all those on that ship with him was tied up with his. Because Paul must live, they would live too. Paul had enough faith for them all.

Who is sailing through the sea of life with you? Your family, your friends, your neighbors. Their destinies are all tied in with your destiny. Remember this promise when you are praying for them.

“God has graciously given you the lives of all who sail with you.” Acts 27:24 NIV
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Your Recreation

 
When I was a kid in school, I loved recess, almost as much as I love reading. I loved the merry-go-round.  I ran as fast as I could go, pushing it around and round, and then jumped on to ride. I loved to ride bikes, racing down the street with the wind blowing in my hair. I got my first bicycle for my 8th birthday, a used girl’s bike that Mama bought for $10 from the neighbor girl up the street.
 
Most of the time though all I did was read. I devoured every book I found. I read at least 3 books a week from the library in addition to school-assigned reading. I read the writing on the back of the cereal box while I ate breakfast. I read as we drove along the highway going to my grandpa’s house.
 
Several years ago, I took my 11-year-old grandson with me to a doctor’s appointment and when the doctor asked me what I did for recreation, I had to stop to think for a minute, but my grandson piped up, “Facebook, Mimi.” Really, he thought all I did for recreation was Facebook?
I used to work on computers for other people. I watch TV while I play around on the  computer, reading my email and communicating on Facebook but I wonder, is my only recreation Facebook? Pretty sad, isn’t it?
I read the Bible on my computer, too. I also have the Bible on my cell phone and on my Kindle Fire, but I have at least 10 real leather Bibles of different translations. Reading is one of my recreations too, but my grandson considers that as schoolwork or part of my work as a writer, and not enjoyment.
There is a balance though. Paul himself said, “For bodily exercise profits a little: but godliness is profitable for all things, having promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come.”  I Timothy 4:8 NKJV

Exercising the physical body has value, but we must pump our spiritual muscles too so they won’t shrivel up and waste away to nothing.

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Wishing Your Life Away

“I can hardly wait till the weekend.” “I wish my vacation would hurry up and get here.” “When these kids are grown…” “When I retire…” The old-timers used to say you were wishing your life away.

“In the morning you shall say, Would that it were evening! And at evening you shall say, Would that it were morning!”  Deuteronomy 28:76. King James Version.

This is one of the curses that God said would come upon the Israelites when they disobeyed God. God was not the one cursing them; they were bringing it upon themselves because of their disobedience. Their sins took them out from under the umbrella of the blessings of God and opened them up to the cursing.

God could not bless them because of their attitude of rebellion, which showed in the way they talked. At one point they said, “We wish we had died in the wilderness rather than live like this,” so God told Moses, “They shall have what they say. This generation shall wander around until they are all dead in the wilderness, then the next generation will go into the promised land.”

Don’t waste your life; don’t waste all those precious moments. You can live in the ‘promised land’ now. Live each day to the fullest, savoring every moment. Treasure the days of your life. Love your kids, from the first day of diapers, through school, Little League, piano lessons, junior high, proms, graduation.

Value your moments together. Tell them you love them every day. Make each day count. The day will finally come when the kids will be grown and gone, you’ll be retired, and you may find yourself wishing for the past.

Don’t wish your life away.

 

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Total Makeover

Make-overs are all the rage these days. Make over your home, your garden, your hair, your clothes. Some people need a major overhaul, a total make-over, from their hair to their homes to their lives.

I had a major over-haul in 1975, when I rededicated my life to the Lord Jesus Christ and asked Him to change me, because I had made a wreck of my life. I needed someone to take control of my life and work out all the kinks, to show me what I was born for, what my life meant. It wasn’t just my looks, although the Lord surely changed those too, but my attitudes and thoughts and feelings were all scrambled up, until I truly didn’t know what I wanted or how I felt.

He didn’t change me overnight like they do on those TV makeover shows, but little by little, my life started getting better. Oh, there were still bad times, when I regressed, two steps forward, one step back.

One day years later while I was blow-drying my hair in front of the mirror, I started singing a little song, “Little by little He’s changing me, line upon line He teaching me,” My heart leaped in my chest and I started to cry. Jesus really had been changing me, while I wasn’t looking. Jesus was making me into what He had intended for me to be all along.

II Corinthians 5:17-18 says, ” Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold all things have become new. Now all things are of God who has reconciled us to Himself through Jesus Christ. . .”

The moment you ask Jesus into your heart, you are born again and become a new creation, a new creature, a new species of being that hasn’t been known of before. Your spirit is changed and made new, but it takes a while for that change to work its way outside. I am just now beginning to be the woman God wants me to be.

Jesus changed me from the inside out.