Snarls

I so look foward to seeing Jesus. He gave Himself for our sins, that He might deliver us from this present evil age, according to the will of God and our Father.

Right out of the chute in Genesis the emotional roller coaster begins.  I agonize with every mother whose kids have hated and murdered each other, every woman who was ripped away from all that she has known and watches as her man pounds their tent pegs into the hard ground of unfamiliar territory; whose husband sleeps with his concubines and maids even if she has encouraged it and it's lawful.  I even agonize with Eve about the grief she endured when one son killed the other, though she brought it on herself.

I remember a hot summer day when our Doug was fifteen and Jeff was eleven. Like most brothers they were wrestling.  Jeff was no match for his big, muscular brother. I called Ted at his office and screamed at him:   "You've got five minutes to get home and take over raising these boys! I've never been a man and I don't know how to make one!  If Doug kills Jeff, it's your fault!  I quit!" Ted came home.

What a mess it has been since Paradise was lost. I remember well as a young fisherwoman how frustrating it was to cast out my line only to have it "birdcage"  into a tangled ball of filament. Finally in frustration I would just cut the line. God hasn't cut the line yet, but He will. Once He sent a flood that drowned all but eight people. Next time He will swoop a remnant into a safe ark in the clouds while the left-behind world attempts to unsnarl the mess man has brought upon himself. He has given man every opportunity to repent, be forgiven and clothed in the righteousness of Christ.

..and now, Lord, what's the next step for me?  I will wait upon You before I cast my line. .

Guide me Oh, Thou Great Jehovah; Pilgrim thro' this barren land
I am weak, but Thou art miighty, Hold me with Thy powerful hand.
Bread of Heaven, feed me 'til I want no more!

Open now the crystal fountain whence the healing waters flow
Let the fiery, cloudy pillar lead me all my journey through.
Strong Deliverer, be Thou still my Strength and Shield.

Love, Jo

The poised fork

Dear one(s),

What do I look forward to this year? ...same as last year: The privilege of watching in wonder as the Spirit of God speaks through the Word of God and changes the next two generations from the inside out.

There are a couple of things I know for sure.  1) Fear and faith cannot coexist. 2) The best is yet to come  Here's an old but goodie joke:  A lady with a maid was dying. Her request to her maid: "Be sure and put my very best fork beside me in my casket. When I was a little girl growing up my mother always said,  "We have dessert tonight so be sure and keep your fork because the best is yet to come!"   

In one of my Ted's visits to people in a nursing home a 90-year-old came to know Christ. Ted's words: "Now you can know that if the Lord takes you tonight you will go Home to Heaven to be with Him forever".   Her quick response: "That sounds pretty good,  but I'm in no #%*  of a hurry!" Neither am I,  but my fork is poised and ready at any time. .

My weakened will, Lord, thou canst renew
My sinful nature Thou canst subdue
Fill me just now with power anew
Power to pray and power to do!

Living in Thee, Lord and Thou in me
Constant abiding, this is my plea
Grant me Thy power, boundless and free
Power with men and power with Thee.

Love, Jo

Stand up!

This blog goes out in increments, beginning with hundreds on Friday and continuing through Monday.  I have to do it that way or my computer goes on strike and my daughter and husband spend hours on the phone with voices who talk them through tedius instructions about how to  get back in the good graces of the carrier who owns us.  Yesterday I was accused on Email by a Friday reader of being a "whiner".  It was a  miserable day until I went to the Apple Shed and cut loose entertaining a restaurant full of people who had had bad days too. The toe-tappers and I kept going until the cook finished his clean-up job and handed me a tip for making his day...so the day ended well,  after hours of being tempted to deep- six this chapter of the "Life and Times of Ted and Jo Stone"  and stick to telling you just the pretty stories.

For some time I have been pressed by the Holy Spirit to address the plight of faithful Jesus-servers who have  been accused, sentenced and hung....without mercy and with no visible justice in sight. My counsellor son and I concur that many such who come to us leave the ministry and never attend a church again.  I am well aware of immoral,  popularity-wealth-seeking pastors and wives, but I am not talking about those today. Where can a sincere, hard-working, humiliated, dehumanized pastor go?  Where can his wife go?  She is cut off from her friends in the church who act weird toward her now because they are confused...and why wouldn't they be?  Somebody who should be telling the whole truth isn't. I know full well that the "whole truth", motives and all will only be revealed at the Judgment Seat.

I will reach 'way back to the days before we were married for this illustration that our Lord always has purpose for pain. Soon after Ted and I were removed from the world we had known we were placed in a Christian school.  I went first and Ted followed a semester later. I then believed that all of Christendom contained no darkness because "in Him there is no darkness at all."   I knew only the people in the music department of our school when Ted arrived;  therefore I arranged for him to room with the school quartet... the fellows who combed the nation each summer for new students. After the first night at breakfast in the school cafeteria Ted was more quiet than usual. "What's the matter with you?" "Uhh, I will be finding another place to live today!" This two-year veteran Navy man who had been jerked as a medical corpsman into the realities of the horrible effects of homosexuality, venereal disease,  and multiple sex partners replied: "I don't want to tell you this. ...but these four guys are homosexuals!"  I didn't exactly know what that meant, but I knew it wasn't holy.  I  grabbed Ted's arm and pulled him to the Dean's office where my Irish temper shot through the roof.   The Dean's face turned ashen and then he said, "Oh, I can't believe that is true! They're such nice fellows. Let me call the head of the music department!"  He did. ... same response plus this request:: "Let's keep the lid on this." I smelled the sulfur.

What were those two men afraid of?  They knew that if the word spread to the contributors that the school quartet were homosexuals, the donors wouldn't "don" any more. ...and the school was broke! ...going belly up.   If it did those two men would lose their jobs.  I  have met those two men (and women)  in ministries ever since with different faces in different places. God was warning us early on to be on the alert for the money and power-seeking people who quietly run the institutions and operate out of fear.  Unfortunately they do not show their dark side until the barn door is shut and there we are: vulnerable.   These people will pull out every mask and trump card in their arsenal to guarantee their status...and job.

Many Christian laborers suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.  Years after Ted and I were treated with masked meanness by church leaders in Houston I went into a depression. There had been no place to safely express my frustrations, grief or anger. I absorbed it all into my soul;  Ted ignored it all. I heard a woman Bible teacher on TV this week say she was in shock because she had just learned that her former pastor's wife had committed suicide. ...no surprise there. I had seriously considered it. There is help out there, but not from the leadership that knows what they have done,   hide it and remain unrepentant.

Boy howdy, am I ever careful where I give my widow's mite and plant my behind to worship my Lord.  Even then I keep one foot in the stirrup. Go on!  Picture that!  Are there churches and missions with integrity?  Of course.  God hasn't pulled the plug on the visible church ...yet, but it's not lookin' good. We have sold out to Babylon. ...so what do we do? Here's one thing:  If you smell sulfur as you see a fellow laborer being mercilessly beaten up, don't just stand there. Fight for him or her.  Like Moses, you may have to run for your life,  but God will protect you,  show up in a burning bush and give you a fruitful ministry you won't believe!

Stand up, stand up for Jesus, Stand in His strength alone
The arm of flesh will fail you; You dare not trust your own
Put on the gospel armor, each piece put on with prayer
When duty calls or danger, be never wanting there. 

Love,  Jo

Light versus Darkness

December 26th, the day after Christmas. I am in the middle of reading "Unbroken",  the biography of Louie Zamperini.  When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on Sunday, the 7th of December in 1941 I was thirteen years old.  Clearly I remember our student body being assembled to hear the pronouncement by President Roosevelt that our nation was at war with an East Asian country half way around the world.  None of us could have imagined what that pronouncement would mean for us as a nation and as individuals.  My brother Bob soon was in the Air Force,  sent to the Fiji Islands in the South Pacific for the rest of the war.

When our country was drawn into the European war scarcely a family was spared the agony of worry and loss. Reading "Unbroken" is bringing up many emotions.  We learned from Bob after the war that one day when he was cleaning his gun, he had left a shell in the chamber which went off and shot him. The next day his squadron of seventy-five flew a mission from which none returned.  He alone was spared as he lay in a makeshift infirmary in bandages. He was assigned to a new squadron.

Bob was never the same after the war. He had always been untrusting of people.  Now he was bitter, unforgiving and vengeful. When I became a Christian and my life and purpose for life dramatically changed  he laughed and repeatedly tried to shame me for believing there is even God.  Christ? ...no way could our Lord's suffering compare to his, even if Christ actually existed.  He hired a private detective to prove that the Christians who had wrapped me in Jesus' love had a sexual motive for reaching out to me. In an authoritative voice he declared that the missionaries on the Fiji  Islands destroyed the "pure culture" of the nationals.  I, this young girl who had adored this brother above all others in my family was devastated.   I was forced to distance from him, attempting again and again to connect with him when we moved years later to California. He used Ted and me each time as he did others, expecting everyone to repay him for what he had suffered.  He broke my parents' hearts and their bank account. I kept trusting that some way, somehow, he would come to know Christ. Much later,  he walked forward in a Ben Lomond, California church and accepted the Lord.  The pastor wrote to tell me and I was so excited.  He would not, however continue to go to the church and as far as I know he did not read the Bible. He chose to remain a victim.  In Heaven he will be like Jesus. So will I, and we will,  at last enjoy sweet fellowship.  I have much to look forward to... and I do.  My parents are there, having come to know Him in their mid 70's. You who are the "first-reborn" in your families, never stop praying and believing that God is at work. You are the Light, perhaps the only Light in their world that is so dark. I understand discouragement and weariness, however, which drive us to the Word for reassurance and strength to keep on making whatever sacrifice must be made in order for loved ones to believe that Christ loves them enough to have made the ultimate sacrifice for them. The word "love" without sacrifice means absolutely nothing.

Because dear Billy Graham, President of our Christian school came as often as he could to report to the students about those who were coming to Christ in the Crusades, we heard about the conversions of many like Louie Zamporini.  Now as  I look at dear Karen and Tomo, the beautiful Japanese women who are part of my life,  I wonder:  "Were some of your relatives those who were led to Christ by this amazing man named Louie Zamporini who refused to remain bitter and vengeful but replaced both with grace and forgiveness?"

Yesterday, on Christmas Day,  I was enfolded in the warm embrace of precious ones:  Dee, Brent, Lexi and youngest granddaughter Madi.   I fell into bed last night,  a blessed elderly lady whose early life was empty and dead.. and then, at nineteen years of age,  was given these simple but powerful words that gave me fullness of joy and life:  "This, then, is the message which we have heard of Him and declare unto you,  that God is Light and in Him is no darkness at all." 

No darkness have we who in Jesus abide; 
THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD IS JESUS!
We walk in the Light when we follow our Guide
THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD IS JESUS!

Ye dwellers in darkness with sin-blinded eyes;
THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD IS JESUS.
Go, wash at His bidding and light will arise
THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD IS JESUS..

COME TO THE LIGHT, 'TIS SHINING FOR THEE
SWEETLY THE LIGHT HAS DAWNED UPON ME
ONCE I WAS BLIND, BUT NOW I CAN SEE
THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD IS JESUS.

Love,

Jo

Hello, Husband

My dear husband of 65 years...today.  As on the night of our wedding in Minneapolis, Minnesota, there is snow a blowin ' here on our mountain. The hardy Scandinavians who graced us with a beautiful wedding and reception filled the church.

I am so curious about so many things.  What do you look like? The Word tells me you do not have your glorified body yet because we will all receive those at the same time. All of our immediate family will be there. Our preferred Exit Plan would be to zoom in simultaneously, but as you always said: "We aren't in management!" Do you know what is going on down here or would that taint Heaven? What are you doing? When our remaining family was together for my 86th birthday last Sunday we wondered if you and Doug are buzzing the Planets as you "buzzed" our houses when you flew over Bear Valley. You always told people: "When you read in my obituary that I have died, don't you believe it! I will have just begun to live!" I surely would like to know what that  "living" looks like. ...

You were such a shy young man when we married. Your disciplined study of the Word of God and your belief in what you read made you bold.  You were a hard worker all your life and I admired that so much. You lived and breathed II Timothy 2:2.  No matter how much pressure was put on you to aim for numbers in our ministries you kept right on pouring the Word into those God led to you whose mission was to teach it to others.  You aced every test the evil one threw your way, modelling for us the fact that God uses everything for His ultimate glory. I can't thank you enough for that.

The Thursday girls just left and I am so excited to tell you about them.  They are all building relationships with people who have an empty place in their souls that can only be filled by Jesus! Today I played your podcast "Meekness #2 " for them. They love hearing your voice and your good sound teaching.  (Ted's pod casts can be downloaded on 12stoneslegacy.com.)

I still have all of my own teeth.  Did you check them out before you married me...kind of like farmers used to do before they bought a workhorse?  My new hearing aids cost almost as much as our first house. The three nails that hold my hip together throb when the temperature drops.  My brain is still relatively good. ... remembering some things best forgotten.   You were always the "half-full glass" partner in this marriage.  I mentioned to you more than once that you weren't very good at spotting deceivers. Over my desk I have a picture of hounds racing pell -mell after a fox.  Blending in, running with the pack is the fox himself!  I Thesssalonians 4:11 ("Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, mind your own business and work with your hands.") provides a check on me:  If I don't have a hound dog in the race I pass.

The country is a mess, no matter how wide a brush the president chooses to paint his picture.  We were given much as a nation and much, therefore, is required.  Am I scared? ...not for me. ...but for our families?   Persecution will make them strong. ...just as it has down through the ages.

I love you and have since we were seventeen!

How silently, how silently the wondrous gift is giv'n!
So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of His heaven.
No ear may hear His coming, but in this world of sin,
Where meek souls will receive Him still, the dear Christ enters in.

Love,

Your Jo