Life is CHANGE

Hello again, did both here. It is Labor Day, 2022. It's a glorious Monday morning and I sit actually about 20 feet above the Puder River in Colorado here by our home and it's just a wonderful day. It's pristine blue. There are flocks and birds in the sky, little tiny guys. Geese will be coming over pretty soon. The sun has just come up and it's just glorious. Over back took a break for summertime from the podcast and this is season two. The first season was called known. Stories to make sense of it all. This season is folk and friends. Stories to make a difference. There is something about story for which we're built. There's something about story that is embedded in our brain. We're designed for it because it helps us remember things. It gives us places to hang our hats if you will. Labor Day weekend, 2022. The thing that strikes me as I sit by this river is that though we say there are two things you can always count on, death and taxes, I would submit that there are other things you can count on one in particular and that's change. As things go on around us, you can sense change. I'm hearing the sound of the river. I'm hearing the sound of biker's sliding past behind me on the pathway. You can hear the highway about a half mile to my west. Maybe not even that far. We got birds, all kinds of things are in movement. Change, transition. I mean, just sitting here, I know today in the next hour, I'll move 67,000 miles. You say really, well, you know, that's how fast the earth is traveling around the sun. It feels like we're stationary. We're not in a car on a bike or in a plane. But the fact is that today will travel 1.6 million miles. Life is full of change and some of it's slow and some of it's fast. The aging process is a relatively slow process and Ruth and I now have been around the sun a bunch of times and we see the aging process. But sometimes you see change that's radical and quick. Justice past Friday, Ruth and I had taken a whirlwind trip, the driving trip actually a five day driving trip from here in Colorado to California to see family and back. And on Friday afternoon, as we headed from Southern California back toward Colorado, we came through biker, California was just kind of a dot. I think it's an unincorporated community out on the edge of the Mojave Desert, heading northeast toward a city called the Meadows. We don't know it by that. And it's a big city. It's the size of Baltimore. We know it by its Spanish name Las Vegas. Las Vegas is surrounded by mountains, some distance away, but the mountains on all four sides. And we're coming from the southwest up over a range of hills. We've just come through an area in the Mojave Desert that's just full of Joshua trees, these interesting plants. I don't know if they're thorny, but they're sort of twisted and gnarled and very interesting. You can just look up Joshua tree national monument, you can see them. But we're coming up over a range that I think it's about 4,000 feet and I look ahead and we see some clouds and what looks like rain, you know how you can see rain falling in the distance. And I said, Ruth, I think there might be rain. Well, the crazy thing was that my temperature gauge on outside air in our car read 112 degrees. We come up to the top of the range and there's a spectacular rainbow because we're just at the right angle for us to see a rainbow as the water is the sun comes from behind us and goes to the water droplets. And Ruth said, you got to take a picture. So stop the car, got out when it got back in the car. There was a splattering of rain on the windshield. We headed down the underside of the mountain and all of a sudden it was like, you talk about change, it was like a monsoon. It was it was a torrent of rain, if you will. And it lasted for about five or six minutes. It could hardly see the road. What was crazy is that the temperature on that temperature gauge on our car for the outside air went from 112 degrees to 75 degrees in five minutes. That's what I call change. Well, here's the deal. We're changing up this podcast a little bit. We're transitioning from a longer podcast 30, 35 minutes to I think maybe about 10 minutes, maybe a little shorter, perhaps more often. But I'm just going to share some thoughts each week just from kind of from the road. You know, I may be sitting in my study, maybe sitting on my back porch, but just thoughts certainly on the road of life about things that I think are important. And one of them that I'm sharing with you right now has to do with change that if we as human beings want to experience change in a way that is not destructive to us, I think we need a place to stand. I think we need a place of stability. One of the challenges for young people today is the fact that everything is changing, nothing is settled for them in culture. And I say for them simply because they have many years ahead of them. And there's an anxiety that's created by that, isn't there? That just because everything seems to be moving and not just moving, it's moving at hyper speed. So when we think about change and what lasts and how things can remain the same so we have some sense of stability, I don't look to old school personally. I don't try to guess what the future is going to be like. What I do is to say where's that place of stability that that platform, the place that I can stand that gives me some kind of peace in the middle of change. It's this very interesting passage, if you will, the story in the story of Exodus and the old Testament, where Moses, who's had a lot of change in his life, he's an 80-year-old dude. When he was 40, he killed a guy. You can read this in Exodus the third chapter. And he ends up instead of leading a country like he did in Egypt, he had to run for his life. He ends up actually leading sheep for 40 years out in the Arabian desert. And one day he shows up and many of you know the story that there's a bush on fire and it's not just a bush that's on fire, it's talking bush. And sometimes in very dry climates apparently vegetation can spontaneously combust. This isn't that because this is a bush that isn't consumed. It isn't just fuel that goes away. And the voice says to him, take off your shoes, Moses, you're on holy ground. And God Yahweh himself has a commission. There's going to be a big change for Noah. He wants him to go and set his people free in Egypt because they've been slave for hundreds of years. And Noah of course doesn't want to do that. I don't know if his face is on every wanted poster and post offices across Egypt, but he's a wanted man. And so he asks God his name because they're gazillion gods in that part of the world depending on what tribe you're with and how you see things. And he says, my name is I am that I am. And I'm thinking to myself, what kind of a name is that? Well, it's certainly not a Western name because that would just be I do that I do. I am that I am is like the most secure name in the universe. He just is if you will. That I would submit is a place to stand in the middle of change. And when you stand there, I think what happens is that when the apostle Paul comes along years later, thousands of years later, and he's sharing this good news about Jesus, this is what he says about being in connection with that I am God that Moses talks about expressed in the person of Jesus. This is found in a letter that he writes to a to a group in a party town called Corinth in the south of Greece. And you can find this in the second letter to the Corinthians 3rd chapter 18th verse. And we who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord's glory are being transformed into his likeness with ever increasing glory which comes from the Lord who is the Spirit. In one or more translations, it says we go from glory to glory. Everything around us is changing. I would submit that when we stand in the eternal, when we stand next to the person or in the person of God through Jesus Christ, that we change in different ways, that we have stability on the one hand, but change happens in our minds and in our spirits from glory to glory. We can expect it. We can expect good change when that happens. Well, that's my thought on this Labor Day morning. And I encourage you to just reflect on that. When everything is changing around us, where can we find a place to stand that in and of itself doesn't change? I am that I am, but it in fact creates change in us that's for the good from glory to glory. Well, on this glorious bright blue Colorado Labor Day morning, I'm all over that. Good to be with you again. Take the folks signing off. Catch you later. Bye bye.