Monthly Devotional 18 - June 2020: Love

"Good people take care of their animals" - Proverbs 12:10

"For I too had my hour; one far fierce hour and sweet: there was a shout about my ears, and palms before my feet" - Chesterton, 'The Donkey'

"The Lord must be keeping me alive for some reason". My grandmother would often say things like that. I was too young to understand what she meant but I could feel the sadness in her voice, the resignation and the thoughts of more hard times to come. She often seemed "in vacant or in pensive mood", taking part in everyday life while simultaneously being transfixed by a vision of something beyond her. When I looked, I saw sunlight making visible the dustmites in the kitchen air. But for all I know she may have been seeing the heavenly Jerusalem and myriads of angels.

Mary Ann, for that was her name, had a snatched a break from housewifery amid the dog days of summer and we went a-wandering back roads. I didn't know where we were. There were flies and country smells and daisies and dandelions. And there was love.

She saw a donkey by a fence. We went over to him. She moved the back of a finger slowly, lovingly, up and down his long face. "Ned", she said, the universal name for donkeys. But it was the way she said it. Like a caress. "Ned". There was love in the way she said it, there was respect for God's creatures, there was recognition of the toil and trouble of working animals, there was remembrance of her days growing up in the country. And Ned seemed to smile his toothsome smile and show his pleasure in the turn of his head.

We don't need to use many words to live life. Very few, one or two, or none at all.

We just need to have love.

Monthly Devotional 17 - May 2020: A Helping Hand

"My soul is in utter torment ... Come back, Lord, rescue my soul, save me, if You love me" - Psalm 6:3,4

She was out for a late-night stroll. A small, thin, slight-looking woman with a calm, purposeful walk, she stopped to notice a man sprawled upon the footpath. He had been in the river nearby. He spoke four words: "Can you help me?" 

The streetlight caught the concern in her bright eyes. The man explained what had happened. Things had gone very wrong for him that night, he had heard terrible news which cut his heart in two, and a feeling of torment led him to the river.

The angel of mercy told him what she was going to do for him. "You just stay here, I will go and get my car and bring you to your house". She came back after a few minutes, put blankets on the car-seat, helped the man into the car, drove him home and when she saw he was safely inside, she returned to her own life.

On the journey there, the man talked of his bitterness and frustration with life itself. The woman replied with quiet confidence and the man said to himself, She knows what she is talking about, she knows from personal experience. This is what she said: "Don't worry about other people and how they treat you. Think about the eternal things. Think about God. Be right with Him, be okay with Him, and He will look after you".

I tell you these things because I am that man and I worship that kind of God.

Monthly Devotional 16 - April 2020: Not Alone Anymore

"I am not alone, for My Father is with Me" - John 16:32

Bryan MacLean was a child prodigy. Hearing his three year old fingers hit piano keys, a famous songwriter declared him "a melodic genius". While in the '60s rock group Love, he penned the beautiful, haunting ode to loneliness, "Alone Again Or". Later falling on hard times, he found himself "alone in a hotel room in New York. I had lost practically everything. I thought, Well, why don't I pray? Nothing happened for a while. Then one day sitting in a drugstore on 3rd Avenue having a drink - suddenly the drink turned to sand in my mouth. I knew something had changed".

MacLean gave his life to the Lord and went on to record Christian albums before an early death. How did God call you? Did you meet someone on the street and read the leaflet they gave you? Were you raised to love Jesus and when you knew the time was right, you made the truth your own? Were you lying in a drunken stupor at the dark end of the street and you said to yourself: I need to sort myself out. Did you become so fed up with a sinful habit you couldn't break, you cried out, Please release me! However you came in, you are welcome home. Get right with God. You can't make it alone. You don't have to be lonely. Jesus implores you right now: "Come to Me ... I will be with you always ... I will never leave you ... I will never forsake you".

Monthly Devotional 15 - March 2020: Shine Like Stars

“Can you bring forth the constellations in their seasons or lead out the Bear with its cubs?” – Job 38:32

“Well? Did you see any?” The teacher laughed at my eight year old self whom he had sent out to the yard because I said the stars are still there in the daytime. “They are there but you just can’t see them!”

In daily sunlight the stars are not visible because the sun is stronger. Stars are a part of God’s creation that are fascinating to ponder. The Bible says that their Maker counts them and has a name for each one. There are so many zillions of stars it would take many human lifetimes to count them. Did you ever think about this – if God made all the stars and He holds them in place through His awesome power, surely He can provide for and sustain little ol’ you and me? The stars are perfect and mysterious and wonderful – but Jesus didn’t give His life for stars, He gave it for men and women, frail, feeble, forgetful, foolish – but lovable – humans.

The next time someone goes out of their way for you, goes the extra mile, does something they don’t have to do but because they love you, look them full in the eyes and smile and say “Thank you so much! You’re a star!” And when you meet someone who is down, be the person who turns their darkness into light, be a bright shining star in somebody’s midnight.

Jesus went out of His way all the way to a place called Calvary cross. The apostle Peter writes: “Christ suffered for YOU, leaving you an example, that you should follow in His steps”.

Monthly Devotional 14 - February 2020: Blue Strains

"When my disquieting thoughts became many inside of me, Your own consolations began to fondle my soul" - Psalm 94:19

Troubles were crisscrossing my mind, digging ditches of despair. Closing my eyes, my head went down. Depression, descent. Suddenly soothing strains of cascading piano chords alighted upon my benighted brain. I looked up and there at the top right of the church, Jeff from Maryland, a Yank studying psychotherapy in Limerick, had yanked me right out of misery by the simple application of fingers upon keys in the musical opening act of Evening Worship at Limerick Baptist Church. I thanked God for music.

The Lord knows all our needs. He is the Provider par excellence. He will make a way when there seems no way. He will use His people to build up their brokenhearted brothers, bathe the wounds of their battered sisters, He will take a troubled mind and say - Sing me a melody, Sing me a blues, Walk through the bottomland without no shoes. Live with a singer and you sing.

Look up! Look up! Heaven's not down there so stop studying your shoes. When those blue strains of no regret were laid across my broken thoughts, bridges over troubled water began worldwide construction. Why do you think music is part of Christian worship? It makes alive, it cheers up, it sends down buckets into the wells of our souls and they draw up pure water of life. Sing me a melody, Sing me a blues, Walk through the bottomland without no shoes.

Monthly Devotional 13 - January 2020: Home

“I am going there to prepare a place for you” – John 14:2

“Home is the nicest word there is” – Laura Ingalls Wilder

The TV series “The Little House on the Prairie” has a special place in the hearts of those of us who were children in the 1970s. Yes, perhaps it was sentimental or over-emotional or unrealistic – but it also spoke to the truth of the heart.  A house may be made of wood or stone but a home is made of love.  There may be tears but there is laughter too, there is joy in enduring and caring and keeping going and watching out for others.  There is happiness in growing up in a place where you are loved and wanted and treated as important.  We ourselves may or may not have experienced something like that.  But there is always a sense in us, conscious or unconscious, that to have a home that is truly a home is all we really need.

Jesus died to give us a home on high, a forever dwelling in eternity’s undying embrace, enfolded in the everlasting arms of love.  If humans can build a home, God can build a heaven.  If people can love you for a while, God can love you yesterday, today, tomorrow and forever.  If you can feel secure in a temporary earthly place, how much more wonderful is a permanent celestial kingdom.

A schoolboy was visiting his friend’s house.  As he sat there and watched the father in his armchair, the mother making tea and sandwiches, the older children running in and out and the baby’s toys perched upon the mantelpiece above the roaring fire, he said to himself: ‘This must be what a real family is like, what a home is like’.  He didn’t have such a home himself and there is sadness and pain in that.  For Christians, Jesus lives in us and we in Him.  We don’t live just within our mean and lowly circumstances; we are seated in the heavenly places with Christ.  “Truly I tell you, today you will be with Me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43).  Doesn’t it make you want to go Home?

Monthly Devotional 12 - December 2019: Please God by Doing Right

"Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everybody ... Live at peace with everyone" - Romans 12:17,18

Love and kindness light up the world. Let there be light, God said, and "Let there be love", Nat King Cole sang. Jesus is the King of kings, Cole was a king of singers, love is a kingly law, and love is the fulfilment of the Law of God. Jesus is the Light of the world, the Word of God enlightens our mind, and walking in this world as children of light, we know we must do good, do the right thing, when the opportunity comes. As it does daily.

Now when it says in Romans 12:17, "do what is right", did you know that the word translated "right" in Greek is "kala", literally meaning "beautiful"? What a wonderful thought! Doing the right thing, the good, noble, honourable, decent act, is something beautiful in God's eyes! If the all-seeing Lord is a divine conductor and orchestrator, we have the privilege of being a little second violin bringing musical colour to our neighbours lives. Getting to know God's ways from studying the Bible impresses His personality into our minds and hearts. We can think His thoughts after Him, we can act in ways He would act. We can be a force for good, a force for God, in our little corner of His universe.

"How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!" the Good Book says and to do someone "a good turn" is to imitate our Maker, "the giver of every good gift and every perfect present". Now, to "live at peace with everyone" seems a tall order. Paul wrote to Titus: "Be ready to do whatever is good, to speak evil of no one, to be peaceable and considerate, and to show true humility towards all". Speak evil of no one? So that includes your spouse, politicians, the staff in the bank, the driver who cut out in front of you, the person who ignored your Hello, the worker in the call centre who doesn't seem to want to help you, the loud teenagers on the street who get in your face ... speak evil of no one. That's what it says.

God's Word gives light, it leads us in the way of uprightness, the whole course of what is good. I was pondering these things today whilst in a car traveling through Tipperary. I looked to the left and there was "Kala", the name of an electrical shop on Bansha Road. Light is a beautiful thing, it illuminates, it drives out darkness. Lord, let Your light drive out any dark thoughts we harbour in our hearts against our fellow humans who like us are made in Your image. Use us to reflect the Beauty You are.