Daily Photo Parable

Photo and Commentary ©2024 by Cheryl Boardman
Monday, November 25, 2024

This is a photo of an agate (microcrystalline form of quartz) slab (slice) that I got at a rock and gem show recently. The lines are called bands. This one has a little crystal pocket as well. I’m not sure where this originated from. I would guess maybe Mexico, as there are some really amazing agates that come from there!

There are a lot of different kinds of agate. Some can be recognized easily and some are more difficult. To identify them, it really helps to know where they were found.

I’m currently in a Bible study where we are studying Exodus 28 and God’s design for the priestly garments.

Fashion a breastpiece for making decisions—the work of skilled hands. Make it like the ephod: of gold, and of blue, purple and scarlet yarn, and of finely twisted linen. It is to be square—a span long and a span wide—and folded double. Then mount four rows of precious stones on it. The first row shall be carnelian, chrysolite and beryl; the second row shall be turquoise, lapis lazuli and emerald; the third row shall be jacinth, agate and amethyst; the fourth row shall be topaz, onyx and jasper. Mount them in gold filigree settings. There are to be twelve stones, one for each of the names of the sons of Israel, each engraved like a seal with the name of one of the twelve tribes. Exodus 28:15-21 (NIV)

Someone brought up the fact that the foundations of the new Jerusalem were also made of stones. Here is John’s description:

The wall of the city had twelve foundations, and on them were the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb. And he carried me away in the Spirit to a mountain great and high, and showed me the Holy City, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God. It shone with the glory of God, and its brilliance was like that of a very precious jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal. It had a great, high wall with twelve gates, and with twelve angels at the gates. On the gates were written the names of the twelve tribes of Israel. There were three gates on the east, three on the north, three on the south and three on the west. The wall of the city had twelve foundations, and on them were the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.

The angel who talked with me had a measuring rod of gold to measure the city, its gates and its walls. The city was laid out like a square, as long as it was wide. He measured the city with the rod and found it to be 12,000 stadia in length, and as wide and high as it is long. The angel measured the wall using human measurement, and it was 144 cubits thick. The wall was made of jasper, and the city of pure gold, as pure as glass. The foundations of the city walls were decorated with every kind of precious stone. The first foundation was jasper, the second sapphire, the third agate, the fourth emerald, the fifth onyx, the sixth ruby, the seventh chrysolite, the eighth beryl, the ninth topaz, the tenth turquoise, the eleventh jacinth, and the twelfth amethyst. The twelve gates were twelve pearls, each gate made of a single pearl. The great street of the city was of gold, as pure as transparent glass. Revelation 21:14-22 (NIV)

According to the Andrews Bible Commentary, page 1999, The twelve tribes of Israel represent God’s people of the OT. The new city will have twelve foundations that have the names of the twelve apostles on them (v 14). The twelve apostles represent God’s people of the NT (Eph 2:20). The coupling of the twelve tribes and the twelve apostles shows the continuity of God’s people and identifies the city as the place for all of His people, regardless of the time period in which they lived. The foundations of the city were decorated with all kinds of precious stones (v.19), which correlate with the precious stones that decorated the breastplate of the high priest in the OT and that were engraved with the names of the twelve tribes of Israel (Ex. 28:17-21).

Photo and Commentary ©2024 by Shelley Schurch
Sunday, November 24, 2024

We were walking through our neighborhood at dusk when I spied the strange sight you see in the photo above. I stopped and peered at it, trying to figure it out. Was it an unusually large light in the upstairs window? Or . . . “Look! What is that?” I pointed. “Is that the streetlight reflected in that window ahead?”

My husband explained why it couldn’t be the nearby streetlight’s reflection. I stared with furrowed brow, trying to come up with a better explanation. I could think of only one, but it didn’t seem possible . . . “Could it be the moon’s reflection?”

I turned around and gasped. Large, low, and luminous, the moon smiled back at me. I stepped closer, and took several photos, knowing I wouldn’t be able to capture the full, clear wonder of the sight, but wanting a memento of this moon. The moon I almost missed.

We would have walked home, unaware of the beauty beaming behind us, if not for noticing that unusual light ahead of us, and taking a moment to wonder and ponder.

I felt more than the moon was smiling upon us as we walked home; I suspected God was enjoying our surprise and delight.

In my Daily Photo Parable last week I wrote about Burning Bushes in our lives, those times when God definitely gets our attention, and sometimes upends our lives. This week it’s Moon Moments! But that’s just the jumping off point; I’m extending my description to call these our Behind My Back Blessings.

When we talk about someone doing something behind our backs it usually has a negative connotation – someone is being sneaky or deceitful and trying to harm us in some way. That’s not what we’re talking about here, because we’ve added the word “Blessings.”

Behind My Back Blessings could still include someone doing something in a secretive way, but with the intent of helping rather than harming. We have sometimes been asked to hand someone in need an envelope, so the givers could be “anonymous angels.”

But what I’m mostly thinking about are the blessings I can best see when I stop, turn around, and look back in my life – to yesterday, last week, last year, or a much longer look back. Every Thanksgiving season I like to chant the reminder: “If we pause to think, we have cause to thank.”

As we step out into this brand-new week, filled with old-time traditions, may you carve out time to look back, then look up, and once again give God your heart – full of thankfulness for His goodness, His grace, His mercy, His love.

Photo and Commentary ©2024 by Darren Milam
Friday and Sabbath, November 22 – 23, 2024

(Note from Pastor Maylan: This has been a tempestuous week, weather-wise, with loss of power and internet due to an unusually destructive local windstorm. Darren Milam had sent me an earlier blog to be used while he was unavailable, and I’m letting it serve as our Friday and Sabbath blogs this weekend. Thanks, Darren. And thanks to our other faithful bloggers, whose steady schedule will resume.)

DARREN WRITES: Given the recent time change, darkness comes a little bit sooner in the evening. Last week, I was taking the garbage and recycling bins to the end of our driveway, and it was already dark outside. It allowed me the opportunity to see the moon. The image is the best of those I captured on my phone camera. It’s interesting how earth shadows a portion of it, allowing the “slice” to reflect the sun. When I was staring up at it, it made me think of God, watching all of us. It gave me a good feeling of being cared for.

I think David says it best, when he recounts the time he had to flee from his enemies and how God protected him

Psalms 3:1-5 (NLT)

O Lord, I have so many enemies;
so many are against me.
So many are saying,
“God will never rescue him!”
But you, O Lord, are a shield around me;
you are my glory, the one who holds my head high.
I cried out to the Lord,
and he answered me from his holy mountain.
I lay down and slept,
yet I woke up in safety,
for the Lord was watching over me.

Maybe you aren’t being chased by an enemy, but we all can use more protection. So, the next time you are taking out the trash (or for any other reason), and find yourself outside at night, look up and know you are safe because God is watching over you!

Photo and Commentary ©2024 by Robert Howson
Tuesday, November 19, 2024

The United States has few endemic bird species, in part due to the fact that birds have wings and can relatively easily cross borders. But the Brown-headed Nuthatch is one that has elected to stay within this single country. It and the Pygmy Nuthatch, with which it shares a close resemblance, are the smallest members of the nuthatch family in the world. They move among the Southeastern pine forests in small groups, calling back and forth in their soft, squeaky voices. John James Audubon, who was always desirous of collecting new specimens, described their behavior as moving “…with a quickness of motion so much greater than that of most other birds as to render it extremely difficult to shoot at.”

Conservationists are concerned because over the past 35 years their population has declined by two percent per year. However, the endangered Red-cockaded Woodpecker lives in the same habitat and much effort has been put forth to protect this environment, so the nuthatches may benefit from this effort as well.

Paul recognized that we humans can also benefit from shared efforts. He writes about this in Romans 1:11-12. “I long to see you so that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to make you strong—that is, that you and I may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith.” (NIV) And that’s why Christians are encouraged to meet together, rather than isolate themselves on the tops of lofty mountain peaks for extended periods of time.

Photo and Commentary ©2024 by Cheryl Boardman
Monday, November 18, 2024

I went to the Columbia Gorge with some friends a few years ago. This photo was taken at Multnomah Falls. If you buy any calendar of Oregon, this waterfall is most likely included in the photos.

Water is such a necessity for life on this planet but sometimes we just take it for granted. We sometimes don’t truly appreciate it or the variety of forms it comes in.

You placed the world on its foundation
so it would never be moved.
You clothed the earth with floods of water,
water that covered even the mountains.
At your command, the water fled;
at the sound of your thunder, it hurried away.
Mountains rose and valleys sank
to the levels you decreed.
Then you set a firm boundary for the seas,
so they would never again cover the earth.
You make springs pour water into the ravines,
so streams gush down from the mountains.
Psalm 104:5-10 (NLT)

Photo and Commentary ©2024 by Shelley Schurch
Sunday, November 17, 2024

“Look! Flames!” I paused in delight as we approached a neighbor’s front yard on our morning walk. “It’s a burning bush!”

We’d walked by this yard twice a day for many days, and I’d never noticed this knee-high bush. But on this day its slender grass seemed to shoot upward in flame, and I was a fan.

It makes me uncommonly happy to notice something that reminds me of God, and His friends. It also makes me smile to think how these unsuspecting neighbors might react if they knew I saw a scene from the Bible in their garden.

Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock to the far side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up. So Moses thought, “I will go over and see this strange sight—why the bush does not burn up.”

When the Lord saw that he had gone over to look, God called to him from within the bush, “Moses! Moses!”

And Moses said, “Here I am.” (Exodus 3:1-4 NIV)

God cautions him not to come any closer, and to take off his sandals, because he is standing on holy ground. He introduces Himself as “the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.”

Moses is afraid to look at Him, and his emotions are further roiled as God explains that He has seen the misery of His people in Egyptian slavery and is coming to rescue them and to bring them into “a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey.” The kicker is that God is now sending Moses to appear before mighty Pharaoh to accomplish this rescue.

(Gulp.) Moses is no doubt regretting he ever noticed the burning bush. He pushes back in an amazing exchange with the almighty God of heaven. He is full of questions and protestations. (See Exodus 3 and beyond to follow the story, because we have to get back to the burning bush.)

This week I’ve continued to ponder burning bushes. I asked myself what have been the burning bushes in my life, and I immediately thought of one, but it wasn’t mine. It was my husband’s. With his permission, I tell a brief account of it here.

We had been married about a year, when I woke up in the middle of the night to find my husband sobbing beside me. I was frightened. He was the most mellow of men, always upbeat, looking on the bright side – so what was this?

I didn’t know and he didn’t know. It looked like darkness to us, but it turned out to be a burning bush. As a result, within the year he made the transition from college English teacher to seminary student, on the firm path to pastoral ministry.

I see at least four characteristics of Moses’ burning bush. It was unexpected, it caught his attention, it was from God, and it was a call.

My husband’s burning bush shared all four characteristics. However, there were some differences. The most important one was that God called Moses to take clearly-described immediate action as He changed his life. In my husband’s case it took prayer and time and counsel with wise and trusted people to discern God’s call, away from a life in which he had been well content — first into the wilderness of uncertainty and confusion, and then into a life richer than we could ever have planned and imagined.

And me and my burning bushes? I think of one that blazed brightly during my college years, when late one Friday night I read the Gethsemane chapter in The Desire of Ages by Ellen G. White. At my roommate’s request I had started reading aloud to her, and even though she dozed off after the first few paragraphs, I continued reading aloud. (Apparently this was not her burning bush.)

When I finished the chapter, I closed the book, laid my head down on it, and cried as if my heart was broken, because it was. Hearing how Jesus struggled alone in agonized, blood-sweating prayer; how he was betrayed and denied by the closest of friends; and how he chose to go to the cross for people like me – for me – was a burning bush. It was unexpected, it caught my attention, it was from God, and it was a call.

Not a call to leave college and strike out on another path, but a clear, compelling call to respond to His love, and to choose to stay close to Him always.

Our young people’s Pathfinders club planned and presented our worship service this Sabbath. I grinned wide when I saw the prop in the middle of the platform – a burning bush.

It’s a mild version of what must have been an incredible, wild sight that caught Moses’ attention centuries ago. Maybe not all of our burning bush experiences are as dramatic as the three I’ve mentioned. Maybe anytime God does something to catch our attention is a small burning bush flickering in our face.

I just thought of a fifth characteristic of a burning bush – it’s fueled by love. God kindles these flames because He loves us. I’ve heard that love means paying attention. So this week, I’ll be on the lookout. You, too?

Photo and Commentary ©2024 by Maylan Schurch
Sabbath, November 16, 2024

This past August, in a small tourist-oriented town Shelley and I visited, we checked out a used-book store. Just inside the front door, I spotted this wonderfully-titled shelf, with the unabashedly mixed-message sign.

I mean, the first half touches my heart, because I too feel a pang when I think of all the written-and-forgotten books I see in stores like this. My hope for these shabby volumes would be that their potential readers would buy them (at $3 a book) to take them home and read them.

However, let’s get real. Most of these books look as though they are between 80 and 100 years old, and the reason they’re huddling shoulder-to-shoulder in a used-book store is that people who had no further use for them brought them here.

But the second half of the sign was written by a clear-eyed marketer. The bottom line is to move these tomes out, at three bucks a throw, to make room for other books. Not for reader edification, but for “home décor, staging, and upcycling.” What they meant by upcycling I had no clue, until I Googled the definition. Oxford Languages says it’s to “reuse (discarded objects or material) in such a way as to create a product of higher quality or value than the original.” In other words, bringing home and shelving scads of these books would create the illusion that their owner is a book-lover, and therefore presumably very smart.

Once upon a time — in another used-book store – I saw a Bible which was the perfect example of that. Its leather-like cover was worn, faded in the exact spots where a human hand would grip it. I almost bought it, purely because it seemed to have been lovingly read by a true devotee.

However, as I flipped through its gold-edged pages, I discovered that many were stuck together, even in sections you’d think a Christian would study, or at least refer to during a sermon, places like the Gospels, the 23rd Psalm, the writings of Paul. Obviously, this Bible’s owner had indeed gripped this Bible in hand during many a pious saunter across the church foyer and into the sanctuary, but had barely opened it.

You know where I’m going with this parable, right? God’s 66 Bible books aren’t for external display, but for internal deployment. Are you reading yours?

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