A Prayer for the Persecuted Church

Here is a prayer for the persecuted church, written by Pastor Brent Johnson of our church and prayed in the morning service today. As you read it, make it your own prayer too.

Heavenly Father, we remember today those brothers and sisters of ours around this world whose safety and survival is in peril because of their faith in You, their commitment to Your Church and their dedication to your mission to save the world. So many have to worship You in utter secrecy, building up the Body of Christ while hiding from authorities who seek to arrest, imprison, torture and kill them for their love for You and those around them. We pray that You would today bring the comfort of Your presence, the peace and power of Your Holy Spirit within them. Give them courage to continue on in the mission to which You've called them.

For those who serve as pastors and leaders of Your underground church, give them wisdom and steadfastness as they seek to be instruments in Your hands for the advancement of Your kingdom. For those who are oppressed and ostracized in their communities because of their faith in Jesus, give them the comfort and courage that comes as they gather with other believers to lift each other up. For those who are imprisoned, give them a deep hope in You, that they might be able to endure whatever hardship befalls them behind bars. For those who are tortured, give their bodies strength to endure, a strength that comes only from You. We pray that they might even be a witness of Your love and redemption to the very people who torture and kill them.

And blessed is the death of Your saints who give their lives for Your sake, and thereby share in You sufferings, earning a glorious homecoming of ultimate relief, resolve and reward.

Challenge us, O God, who live in such comfort and ease, to stand strong in the struggles we face in our own lives. We stand proud today to be called the children of God, and thereby called the sisters and brothers of those across our world today whose hardships we can only imagine. Make them to lie down in green pastures and beside the still waters, and give them great courage as they walk though the valley of the shadow of death. In the strong name of Christ we pray, and for the sake of His Kingdom in power in our world, Amen.

No Smiling Allowed!

Maybe you saw this video a few months ago when it was making its rounds over the internet; maybe you didn't. No matter -- here's a challenge for you. See if you can watch it all the way through without smiling! Go ahead. Just try!

How Would Jesus Live?

I heard an interview the other day that Charles Morris of Haven Today did with Ed Dobson, a former pastor who, for nine years, has been living with ALS, "Lou Gehrig's Disease." He had heard A.J. Jacobs, a secular Jew, telling about the year that he endeavored to live by all the commands of scripture. It challenged Dobson to see if, for one year, he could live like Jesus, getting to know Him afresh from the gospels and putting into practice what Jesus taught. His book, The Year of Living Like Jesus: My Journey of Discovering What Jesus Would Really Do, is the story of that year.

He ate kosher for the year, read through the gospels many times, tried to follow Jesus' pattern of prayer. He observed the Sabbath and attempted to live in the way he felt Jesus would have lived. It changed his life, and impacted others. "I am not asking God to heal me," Dobson says. "I'm throwing myself on the mercy of God....I don't think I really care what [others] think about me. Ultimately what really matters is what they think about Jesus."

The book came out in October. If you'd like to hear Dobson talking about his experience, click here. It will take you to a three-minute video on Amazon. If you'd like to hear his interview with Charles Morris you can go to Haven Today, click on Program Archives, and look for 11.02.09's program -- Christians You Should Know - Ed Dobson. This is an entire broadcast and lasts about 25 minutes.

Hmmm...I wonder how it would affect us if we could truly grasp the notion of living like Jesus?

Pray for the Persecuted Chruch

This Sunday, November 8, Christians around the world are asked to join in praying for our brothers and sisters around the world who are facing persecution because of their allegiance to Christ. Let's pray that their faith will remain strong as they face unbearable suffering. Most of us would not choose suffering, but when the day comes that we might be called upon to suffer for our Lord, we pray that we will not shrink from it. So we should pray for courage and strength for those who even now have been called to suffer.

Let's wrap our arms around those who suffer for the name of Jesus and lift them to God through prayer, especially this Sunday.

To learn more, go to http://www.persecutedchurch.org/. There you will find a number of ministries that are working with the persecuted church and meet specific people for whom you can pray.

More on Norman Rockwell

I have an even deeper appreciation for Norman Rockwell after reading Ron Schick's book, Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera. Schick tells the story of many of Rockwell's paintings by showing just a few of the photos from which he worked.

Rockwell's paintings capture a moment in time, yet tell an entire story. Take the Going and Coming series (see above) that appeared on the cover of Saturday Evening Post on August 30, 1947. The photograph above is one he used in preparing the series. Even a casual look at the pair of paintings tells you that the family set out fresh and excited for a day at the beach and returned after dark, all used up. Only Granny seems to have been unaffected by the excitement of the day. Indeed, Rockwell used the same photo to capture her for both paintings.

The characters that piled into the car that morning and those that appeared in other paintings were precisely that -- characters. They were neighbors, children of friends, professional models and, often, Rockwell and his family. When he was painting Maternity Waiting Room for a 1946 Post cover he had to travel to New York City to find subjects who could display authentic anxiety. There just weren't men in Arlington, Vermont, to be convincing models!

The front flap of Schick's book tells us, "What most people do not realize...is that virtually everything and everyone that Rockwell painted from the 1930s onward was first elaborately staged for the camera." And that is what I found to be so fascinating about this book.

In the pages of Behind the Camera we are able to see into Norman Rockwell's studio and glimpse his models posing for the paintings we love. Whether he hauled a rowboat into his studio (as he did for an unpublished calendar illustration in 1956), or staged a circus audience with his models on dining room chairs atop a library table (Circus, a 1955 advertisement), he worked to make his paintings authentic. The photo to accompany his 1976 painting entitled Liberty Bell, depicts Rockwell attaching a Happy Birthday banner to a barrel on a table. Simulating people walking or dancing required awkward positions with one foot propped on a stack of books or twisted sideways on top of an upended apple crate.

I was intrigued by Boy in a Dining Car, a 1946 cover for Saturday Evening Post. A young boy sits at the table in the dining car, holding his change purse and studying the menu, while the waiter stands by patiently. Seventy-three photographs survive from this series, with four different models used for the boy. I wondered why there was a separate photo for the waiter's feet. According to Schick, "The model for Rockwell's waiter was a veteran New York Central dining car employee. The narrow confines of a sidetracked New York Central Railroad car prevented the photographer from positioning his camera far enough from the waiter to capture his full stature in a single shot."

The Gossips, probably my very favorite of his paintings, was done for a 1948 cover, and features many of Rockwell's neighbors. In the painting, fifteen different subjects, including Rockwell and his wife, enjoy a good bit of gossip as it travels from person to person, returning to the woman who started the story. When the painting was finished the editor of Post, Ben Hibbs, was unconvinced that these people were real, until Rockwell introduced them to Hibbs.

Norman Rockwell's work spanned sixty five years and appeared on the covers of seventy-nine magazines, beside Saturday Evening Post. More than 18,000 black-and-white photos from which he worked are archived in the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

My Favorite Rockwell Painting

Strange thing, the memory. I've been looking online for days for my favorite Norman Rockwell painting that appeared on the cover of Saturday Evening Post when I was a kid. I could see it in my mind -- a woman whose husband is just boarding the train while she is parked in front of the station, dressed in her robe, her hair in curlers (maybe, that part I wasn't sure of), looking at her flat tire. I finally found the painting today, and it doesn't look much like I remember, and it is not painted by Norman Rockwell!

I was only ten when it came out on November 26, 1960. It laid around our living room for a while until it was carried to the attic to be piled with the other magazines that Mom planned to read if she ever had an operation and got a chance to lie around. Years later, my chronically healthy mother packed up all those musty magazines and found a home for them somewhere besides our house. So I don't suppose it had too much time to articulate itself in my mind. I was convinced, though, that it was a Rockwell. Today I discovered that it was called "Flat Tire at the Commuter Station" and was by Amos Sewell, another slice-of-life Saturday Evening Post illustrator whose style couldn't be mistaken for Rockwell's. Shucks! The Norman Rockwell post I'd been planning suddenly lost some of its punch!

How about we talk about him tomorrow (I found a wonderful book at the library that's a lot of fun called Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera) and for now answer the question, "Why did I like this picture as a 10-year-old?" I have no idea! Maybe it was the horror that I felt when I saw the picture, the empathy for this women who had run her husband to the train in her robe and had gotten caught. Had she just slept in this morning and not changed her clothes before they had to rush out the door? Or did she always drive him in her robe and slippers, tempting fate? It was a dilemma too overwhelming for my sensibilities. How many times since then have I awakened from dreams of myself in similar situations! Even as I write I realize that I may not have actually liked this painting at all, but I couldn't let it go without trying to help this poor woman resolve her situation. And I could never come up with a rescue plan for her.

Now that I've come to terms with this little bit of mis-remembered information, I think I'll go study my Norman Rockwell book and figure out which of his own paintings is really my favorite! I'll let you know tomorrow.

In the Blink of an Eye

Life is fragile and uncertain. My brother Ted was reminded of that last Friday morning as the car he was riding in was hit broadside, ripping off the driver's door. His boss Tom was driving him to work on the day of Juneau's first frost. They were going 55 on a divided highway when they saw an out-of-control pick-up in the oncoming lanes. The truck spun around on the ice and shot through the guardrail and across the median like a cannon ball, and slammed into Tom's car. The force of the crash pushed them into a panel truck in the next lane; it was that panel truck that prevented them from ending up in the bay. And it all happened in the blink of an eye.

Except for little cuts all over from broken glass, Ted is fine. His boss was air-lifted to Seattle because of the severity of his injuries, including a broken hip. Both men are grateful to be alive.

We don't know what the next moment will bring. Good thing, too, or we'd spend our lives trying to manipulate the circumstances to our own advantage. Aren't you glad our times are in God's hands? (Psalm 31:15) We don't know what the next moment will bring, but we don't have to. God does.