Living Above the Sun Ministries

Can you write a hymn of praise at this moment, an instant falling from your lips?  Your heart is so full that there is no effort needed to expand your lungs and empty them of praise.  Maybe right now you are in lament, and all the words that can fall are in forms of tears asking God to be merciful.  There is a powerful song and lyric that contrasts each other when a heart of praise and joy collides with sorrow and tears.  It is where hope is born. Whatever praise collides with in our lives, hope is there.   I began my work week with a panic attack, thankfully a co-worker was there to calm me down.  By the end of the work week, I was praising more than I was panicking.  When life feels like a choppy sea, quiet yourself and sing praises to God!  My personal Psalm of praise looked like this in a text to a friend: "I'll finally get this closing binder finished that I've been working on, the last of the documents come today, Praise the Lord! ...

  Our God is merciful and tender.  He will cause the bright dawn of salvation to rise on us and to shine from Heaven on all those who live in the dark shadow of death, to guide our steps into the path of peace.  -Luke 1:78-79 Tis the season to be jolly!  Yes!  Even in 2020!  I've been reading the book of Luke along with a friend who is in jail right now. He told me he didn't even know where to begin reading the Bible and I told him to start in Luke.  He messaged me delighted to find out it was the Christmas story that begins it all.  Surprise!  Luke begins by saying he had studied all these matters that happened from their beginning, he understood it, and wanted to give a detailed approach to clear up any misunderstandings that may have been floating around.  He wanted there to be a truth in full report of things that occurred, not pieces of information here and there, but the whole full truth.   In the first part of the script...

 

  "Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom." This summer I suffered a severe mental breakdown that put me in behavioral health hospital for a little over a week.  The quote above was written outside my door.  This had been building for the past decade or two and our present conditions made the perfect storm for everything to burst open.  It was a sinking feeling when my primary care physician looked at me and said, "There's nothing more I can do to help you."  She told my friend who had taken me to see her that morning to take me directly to Behavioral Health Hospital on Billingsly, don't go home to get anything, don't stop on the way.  She told me based on all I had spilled to her that I didn't have time, that I could only go on a few more months in the condition I was in mentally. I was assessed by many doctors and nurses.  I had to strip, searched and put on scrubs to make sure ...

  "Is there no balm in Gilead?      Is there no physician there? Why then is there no healing      for the wound of my people?" -Jeremiah 8:22 I've been thinking about the prophet Jeremiah lately and reading his book in the Bible. If there was ever a prophet that was mournful over a nation, it was Jeremiah. When we are in dark days God extends to us the same invitation He gave Jeremiah, "Call to Me, and I will answer. I'll show you great and mighty things that you don't know." This book of prophecy is balanced by judgement and hope. That though we have abandoned God, there is forgiveness and a promise that He the writer of the Law will put it in our heart and cause us to follow. Right now it feels like there isn't any hope, but rest assured in our deepest darkness of mourning over this nation, our cities, our homes, God is asking that we call out to Him. While we may not feel strong enough to continue through these days of COVID, polit...

O Lord, you have searched me and known me! You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from afar. You search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways. Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light about me be night,” even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them. -Psalm 139 We are all born with a butterfly looking gland fluttering in the lower part of our neck. It's called, the thyroid and it controls a lot of the body as apart of the endocrine system. When it gets out of whack the rest of your body is in troubl...

Who believes what we’ve heard and seen? Who would have thought God’s saving power would look like this? The servant grew up before God—a scrawny seedling, a scrubby plant in a parched field. There was nothing attractive about him, nothing to cause us to take a second look. He was looked down on and passed over, a man who suffered, who knew pain firsthand. One look at him and people turned away. We looked down on him, thought he was scum. But the fact is, it was our pains he carried— our disfigurements, all the things wrong with us. We thought he brought it on himself, that God was punishing him for his own failures. But it was our sins that did that to him, that ripped and tore and crushed him—our sins! He took the punishment, and that made us whole. Through his bruises we get healed. -Isaiah 53:1-6 The verses above have stuck out in my mind surrounding this Easter Season and in the midst of this plague. Jesus wasn't afraid of disease or death or anything deemed to b...