My best friend used to poke me in the chest with his finger and it made me so mad I could have slugged him. I’d yell, “Don’t poke me!”. I began to ask myself why it bothered me so much to poked in the chest and came to this conclusion. As I grew up when my dad did not like what I was doing or had issue with me he would narrow in on my chest with his big strong fingers and thump me in the chest. It hurt. Both physical pain and the mental pain that goes along with not meeting the standards of the one you loved the most. It was a negative experience that upset me. It was locked in my subconscious.
Proverbs 1:7 declares; “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge;” As with my father what I believe today is that the “fear” described here is the same kind of honor that drove me to want to please my dad and upset me when I fell short. It is the kind of thing that Christ Followers need to drive into their subconscious so that it will lead them to repentance. It is one thing to confess your sin, admit you have not measured up. It is another to repent, to move in a different direction, to make your actions measure up to the one you love. Fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.

Understanding a promise is a wild revelation. Have something come out of the Word of God and stick in your being, hide itself it that place where you know things, is life giving. God’s Word makes those promises come alive with the stories of the saints and how God moved to fulfill the promises He makes. In todays reading from our life journal we hear the story of Solomon unfold. Of the abundance and peace that follow his reign and his life. How not just he prospers but how all around him prosper. Solomon asked for wisdom and God was so pleased He gave him wisdom and all the other things he could have asked for and much more. The part of todays reading that I love and fills me with faith is “The LORD gave wisdom to Solomon, just as He promised him;”
LORD, give me some of that.

The man who leads our drama department has written the drama’s for the series we are in called “Letters From The Cross”. This weeks drama is of a man sharing for the first time with his wife that he was beaten and brutalized by his father. As we were talking about it he confessed that it was easy to write because he had lived it. That inspired me to share some of the things that I remember from my own childhood that have to do with my dad and his treating of me and my siblings and mother. “Father Issues” is what we call them. They play such an important role in our lives and in particular in the way we see God. They fog the picture of the true father heart of God and his character and love for us. Today in our Life Journal in 2 Thess. 2 Paul is reminding the receivers of the letter how they had treated them as fathers treat their children. His great concern for them. I wonder if they had father issues and couldn’t see it.
The key piece of my Christian journey that has allowed me to move on with my own father issues have to deal primarily with the acceptance of my father as a sinner. Someone put it this way, “We are sinners raising sinners”. My dad had father issues too. Wonderfully I had a moment when I was able to go to my dad and forgive him and ask him for forgiveness. It changed my life and changed his too. God used it to transform my dad into someone who until his death wanted to make sure his children knew he loved them. I am following his example.

Two blind men are sitting on the side of the road and hear that Jesus is passing by and start crying out, “Have mercy on us son of David.” The crowd that is following tries to quite them. But they own’t be silenced. They cry out all the more. There are always things that try to silence us. Things we feel or sense that keep us from crying out all the more for the things we want or need God to do for us. We feel unworthy, so we stop crying out. We don’t see progress, so we stop crying out. I could go on but that is not the point of this story. Nor is it the reason the story is in our bibles. The story is there to encourage us to keep crying out! Jesus stops and asks, “What is it you want me to do for you?” Then he heals them. The point of the story…don’t stop crying out!