Living Above the Sun Ministries

 

  "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...

"The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit. He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound; he was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed." -Psalm 34, 147; Isaiah 61, 53 ESV So, it turns out even the things that are to be most durable, can shatter. Tonight, a corelle dish that calls itself 'break-resistant,' shattered all over the floor of my kitchen. I tried not to cry, it had been a long time since I had dropped something and broke it. This was a treasured, sentimental bowl, and my heart was crushed. But what if this is right where God intends to meet us? Not on a high mountai...

"This, in essence, is the message we heard from Christ and are passing on to you: God is light, pure light; there’s not a trace of darkness in him. If we claim that we experience a shared life with him and continue to stumble around in the dark, we’re obviously lying through our teeth—we’re not living what we claim. But if we walk in the light, God himself being the light, we also experience a shared life with one another, as the sacrificed blood of Jesus, God’s Son, purges all our sin. If we claim that we’re free of sin, we’re only fooling ourselves. A claim like that is errant nonsense. On the other hand, if we admit our sins—make a clean breast of them—he won’t let us down; he’ll be true to himself. He’ll forgive our sins and purge us of all wrongdoing. If we claim that we’ve never sinned, we out-and-out contradict God—make a liar out of him. A claim like that only shows off our ignorance of God." - 1 John 1:5-10, The Message This past week in the Carolinas we endured s...