Discipline

Devotion for the week...

Can I share a confession? I find the prophets really hard to read. There's so much doom and destruction, and reading that for chapter after chapter after chapter gets mind-numbing. I think I find the lists in Numbers easier to get through! 

I usually read the Bible straight through (slowly!), a little bit each morning, but sometime last year I was struggling to read Ezekiel, bogged down in the destruction being prophesied, and I finally gave myself permission to leave it and skip ahead. The next morning I flipped to Matthew and breathed a sigh of relief as I started reading. Well, last week I reached the end of Revelation, so I flipped back to the bookmark I had left in Ezekiel and started tackling that again.

Saturday morning I finished off Ezekiel chapter 30 and a couple of verses caught my attention: "When I put my sword in the hand of Babylon’s king and he brings it against the land of Egypt, Egypt will know that I am the Lord. I will scatter the Egyptians among the nations, dispersing them throughout the earth. Then they will know that I am the Lord" (Ezekiel 30:25-26).

What stopped me in my tracks was that God said Egypt would know that He is the Lord when everything goes wrong for them, when they are subject to complete destruction.

We tend to think God is working in our situations when things are getting better, when we see good things happening, and when our prayers are being answered the way we want. Here, though, God is saying He will be working in this situation when nothing is going the way the Egyptians want.

Now, to be fair, this is because the Egyptians are coming under His judgement, so it makes sense that His hand is extended in punishment rather than blessing. What we often don't consider when something is going wrong in our own lives, is that the situation could be God disciplining us, too.

"Have you forgotten the encouraging words God spoke to you as his children? He said,

'My child, don’t make light of the Lord’s discipline,

    and don’t give up when he corrects you.

For the Lord disciplines those he loves,

    and he punishes each one he accepts as his child.'

As you endure this divine discipline, remember that God is treating you as his own children. Who ever heard of a child who is never disciplined by its father?...But God’s discipline is always good for us, so that we might share in his holiness. No discipline is enjoyable while it is happening—it’s painful! But afterward there will be a peaceful harvest of right living for those who are trained in this way." (Hebrews 12:5-7, 10-11).

God doesn't only deal in sunshine and rainbows. Sometimes His hand may be extended towards us in discipline and we won't like it at all. That's not to say that every bad thing that happens to us is discipline from God! When things are going wrong, though, it might be worth considering if there's something in our lives God could be disciplining us for. We'll learn the lesson contained in the discipline a lot faster if we recognize it as His hand working to bring us closer to that peaceful harvest of right living.

Note, I'll be away all this week for my grandmother's funeral, so there will be no devotion next week. I would appreciate your prayers for our family.

The Men Who Brought Her to Jesus

Devotion for the week...

Last week we looked at the story of the woman caught in adultery, found in John, chapter 8. Today I want us to consider the men who dragged her to Jesus in an attempt to trick Him into saying something they could use against Him. This two-part series was originally part of the Moments with Jesus QAL and Devotional Journey. 

We don’t know much about these men, except that they were "the teachers of religious law and the Pharisees" (John 8:30), meaning they held positions of authority in the community, and they were threatened by Jesus' popularity with the people.

From their actions with this unnamed woman, we can deduce a few other things. Since they couldn’t know how Jesus would answer them, they had to have been okay with the possibility that taking her to Him for judgement would mean her death. They didn’t mind shaming her in front of the crowd, either. It’s obvious they had no consideration for her whatsoever, probably because they saw her as 'sinful' which meant she was beneath them.

But then Jesus wrote…something… on the ground, and stood up and told them they could go right ahead and stone her, but "let the one who has never sinned throw the first stone!" (John 8:7).

Can you picture the men shuffling their feet, maybe looking sideways at each other, wondering who would move first? Did any of them dare to pretend they had never sinned? And then "they slipped away one by one, beginning with the oldest, until only Jesus was left in the middle of the crowd with the woman" (John 8:9). I’m guessing the oldest left first because they were better able to see the truth about themselves, or maybe because they didn’t feel the need to pretend they were without sin like the younger ones may have.

When they dragged the woman in front of Jesus, these men were so sure of themselves, so confident they were in the right, and only she was in need of judgement. Whatever Jesus wrote in the dirt, though, it was enough to challenge their view of themselves and their right to judge her. Jesus was gentle even as He corrected them. He could have pointed to each one individually and listed off their sins for everyone to hear, but He didn’t. Instead He wrote something that made them realize the truth on their own.

I don’t want to compare myself to these men at all, and you probably don’t either. I don’t want to even entertain the possibility that I’m like them, but maybe we, too, need a reminder that we aren’t as sinless as we’d like to think we are. 

Thankfully, God is gentle with us, too. He might use something someone says, a song we hear, or a verse that stands out as we read our Bibles, to call us out and remind us that we’re not without sin. That reminder should serve to remind us, too, that we shouldn’t be so quick to judge, and especially to broadcast, the sins of other people.

12 Years of Devoted Quilter

On this day in 2013, I hit publish on my first blog post. I had no idea if anyone would ever read it, or how I would connect with other quilt bloggers out there, but I published that post anyway. I figured I could figure out the connecting with others part once the blog was actually started 😄 

Thankfully there were linky parties and blog hops to help make those connections, so it was surprisingly easy to find other people who share my obsession with quilting. In fact, by my second month of blogging, I had already connected with the TGIFF linky party (of which I'm now one of three managers). I still use the thread catcher I shared the first time I linked to TGIFF. I keep it in my hand stitching bag, so it appears in pictures now and then, too. Here it is in the background of a picture I took of a hexie flower I made Tuesday morning as we were driving out of town.

I read my very first post again while writing this post, and I was entertained to see the two projects I shared as examples of my WIPs. Neither of them are finished 😂 The blocks I shared then are still just blocks today. I ran out of some of the fabrics in the kit, so I couldn't finish the blocks that are missing, and just set the whole thing aside. I should use the finished blocks for something so they can be set free from the box.

The hexagon flowers I shared in the post were pieced into a quilt top in 2014, which was basted for hand quilting in 2017. I think I quilted around one flower and then gave up! As I've been doing the big stitch hand quilting on my Hexie Rainbow quilt, I've been thinking about doing big stitch quilting on that old hexie flower quilt, too, so there's hope it may actually get finished someday. Obviously I've always been in need of a good WIPS-B-GONE challenge!

I'm planning to make a chocolate cake today to celebrate my anniversary. Since I can't send chocolate cake through the screen to share it with you, I'm having my annual Anniversary Pattern Sale so you can join the celebration, too. Saving money and dreaming about the next quilt (and the one after that, and the one after that...) is just as good as having cake!

From now through Thursday, March 6th, save 25% on all patterns in my shop (printed or PDF), no coupon code needed. The sale price is already applied.

Whether you've been here since last week or since 2013, I'm so glad we're able to connect over our love of fabric and thread! The friendships are my favourite part of this online quilting community (and the reason I get serious FOMO every year when people are sharing pictures of their QuiltCon meetups)! Let's keep making the world more beautiful, one quilt at a time 😊