Are We Making Soup or Stew? Cooking at 12:45am

Staying up late cooking at 12:45am for Missions Week tomorrow.  I'm not entirely sure what I'm doing, but then again the food I make usually comes out pretty good.  I basically threw in beef, chicken, potatoes, carrots, cumin, mustard, pepper, some soy sauce, and garlic.  Should put in some onions later, but I don't want to cry.  It's supposed to be a stew.  But right now it looks like soup.

In the movie "That Thing You Do!", the character Phil said, "Making a record is like making a stew - all the ingredients have to be put together just right...otherwise, it's just soup!"

In the same way, I find that our walk with God is more like a stew.  There are so many things that are seemingly randomly put together in our life.  We serve God in one ministry, we read our Bible, we fast on this day, we do a prayer meeting on this day, we lead a Bible study on another day, etc.  If we are not doing them with purpose, it's just soup.  Like, we're just randomly "doing stuff".  No, we should be doing these things with intent and purpose with the full knowledge that God is the one who is moving.

I was reading for my devotions awhile ago Zechariah 7. 
⁴ Then the word of the Lord Almighty came to me: ⁵ “Ask all the people of the land and the priests, ‘When you fasted and mourned in the fifth and seventh months for the past seventy years, was it really for me that you fasted? ⁶ And when you were eating and drinking, were you not just feasting for yourselves? ⁷ Are these not the words the Lord proclaimed through the earlier prophets when Jerusalem and its surrounding towns were at rest and prosperous, and the Negev and the western foothills were settled?’”
⁸ And the word of the Lord came again to Zechariah: ⁹ “This is what the Lord Almighty said: ‘Administer true justice; show mercy and compassion to one another. ¹⁰ Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the foreigner or the poor. Do not plot evil against each other.’

It hit me really hard.  Why?  Because it showed me that there are so many times that we are doing these things - fasting, mourning, etc....or in our day "doing good deeds" for the wrong reasons.  We can even deceive ourselves into saying, "I'm doing it for God."

What hit me with this passage was that they thought they were doing it for God, but ultimately, they were doing it for themselves.  They wanted their land back. They weren't mourning and praying because they wanted God's will, because they wanted to be close to God.  If they did, their lives that they were living would have been full of justice and mercy as they show those to each other.  But, they were just yearning for thing for themselves, and that's where things went wrong.  They wanted God's blessings without wanting to obey God and follow Him.

I've been asking myself most of tonight now if my prayers have really been searching for God's will in my life, wanting God's will to be carried out that I may glorify Him, or am I asking God for stuff so that I can get what I want for my own selfish desires?

Man, I got really hit with that tonight.  So we have to ask ourselves, are we following God and obeying Him intentionally?  Or are we just making soup?

Dr. Who - Episode 1 (2005): Rose

I was watching the pilot episode of the 2005 Dr. Who last night.  I had no idea what the series was even about, so I was slightly off put when mannequins started coming to life trying to kill the girl we were introduced to.  After awhile, I begun to get a hang of what the show was about (especially after the Doctor made his appearance).

There is one line that I really liked in the episode, though.  The Doctor is trying to explain to Rose who he is.  He holds her hand and says to her...

"Do you know like we were saying, about the earth revolving? It's like when you're a kid, the first time they tell you that the world is turning and you just can't quite believe it 'cause everything looks like it's standing still. I can feel it...the turn of the earth. The ground beneath our feet is spinning at a thousand miles an hour. The entire planet is hurtling around the sun at sixty seven thousand miles an hour. And I can feel it. We're falling through space, you and me, clinging to the skin of this tiny little world. And, if we let go... That's who I am. Now forget me, Rose Tyler. Go home."

It kind of reminds me how we, as Christians, sometimes get so overwhelmed the first time our eyes are opened and we see the world for how it is - that there is a Spiritual battle going on, that God is moving, the enemy is prowling around like a roaring lion, that we have a purpose beyond what the world tells us.  And then we kind of freak out and shut down...sometimes to the point that we blank out and don't really care about what's going on anymore.  Focusing so much on us, on me, on what I'm doing.  Instead, we should open our eyes again and realize that there is so much going on around us.

As Peter Parker told Harry Osborne in Spider-man 2, "There are bigger things going on here than you and me."  We need to remember that there are bigger things going on - that God is on the move, that there is a plan being carried out, and we have the honor and the joy of being part of His story, doing what we were made to do.

At the end of the episode "Rose", we get to see that Rose's world had suddenly been opened to this VAST universe of time and space.  No longer is she locked in to this little world of shopping and moving around.  No.  Now she lives this adventure.  As we read our Bibles, as we live our lives for Christ, may each of us see the big picture, see what God is doing, and excitedly run and join Him much like how Rose ran to the Doctor at the end.