Got up early to travel to Rome...that is Paul's book to the Romans.
Rich, life-giving, spirit-empowering, direction producing, truth from God.
My sabbatical has been such a delightful opportunity to just spend time soaking deeply in mass quantities of scripture...without any thoughts of "how will I teach this" or "how can I use this to hep others" or "what pressing problem in my life or our church is this giving me insight to"....it's like Holy Bible Hot Tubbing! I feel my heart warming. I feel my spirit loosening up. I feel my mind becoming both emptying and filling up at the same time with a relaxation that goes to core of my being.
Climbed a high ridge called Attridge and spent time in prayer and journaling...it was cool how a large doe (...as in a doe a deer a female deer...for the city folk) was lying down in some blueberry bushes just 30 yards away...she didn't think I saw her so she was just lying there chewing her cud.
Chewing the cud, or ruminating as it is also called, is when a cow or other animal like a deer, eats, swallows, and then recalls their food from their stomache to chew on it some more. Sounds gross...but is it? We only get to taste our food, enjoy our food once...a big bite, a quick few chews, and boom, we are done. Not the deer...it savors a meal more than once!
Meditation in the Bible has the idea of "chewing the cud"...to receive a truth, then recall the truth, then review the truth over and over so to be reshaped by the truth, so to end up rejoicing in the truth even more!
Sabbatical is giving me time for something I stink at when I am at home...meditation!
Spent a lot of time with Deb analyzing our family budget to plan out how we can do more for the kingdom in the coming decade.
Then Deb's computer partially crashed...none of her documents are available and it's wigging out in several other ways. Spent four hours in a technical wrestling match in which I was soundly defeated....so the problem continues.
How can the sweetness of a morning with God turn into an evening of wrestling with a demon possessed computer? At midnight Paul sang in prison...at midnight I screamed at the computer...I guess I need to "chew some more cud"!
1 comment:
Larry, thanks for sharing your experiences, I enjoy reading here every once in a while.
Maybe I can help with the computer woes!! When turning on the computer, do you have multiple user logins? If you save files while in one it may not be accessible from another. (many people have an icon/login for each person in the family, etc). One way to avoid a problem like this is to always back up files to a flash drive. Hope that helps!
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