Moving With God

Baby steps of faith, hope and love

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Details: Written by: Alyssa; Category: Scripture; Published: 03 September 2013

As I mentioned before, I have been loving the book of Zephaniah. So far, it has challenged my concept of a Sunday school story I grew up with, it has opened up my concept of discerning God's will, and it is expanding my concept of God's grace. I love this, because grace can be hard to see in the Old Testament sometimes; it is much easier to hang out in the New Testament where there are plenty of feel-good verses about being saved and way less prophets of doom spelling out God's impending judgment. Isn't it nice to live in an age where we've realized God isn't so mean after all?

There is a downside to the perspective we have, however, this age where beautiful promises of Scripture can be plucked up and planted on sweet backgrounds with a cute font and posted on facebook for tough times.

Don't get me wrong, I love Zephaniah 3:17. This is one of my friends' favourite verses in the whole Bible, and it is a beautiful statement of God's strength and love. In fact, the whole second half of Zephaniah 3 is a beautiful portrait of grace, forgiveness and redemption. God doesn't say "at that time you will get your act together and I will love you again." No, he promises to "change the speech of the peoples to a pure speech," "remove the proudly exultant ones," and "take away the judgments against you," all actions of God to make his people holy. My problem with cutesy Bible verses out of context is that it takes God's grace out of context and makes it cutesy too.

Read more: Cute Grace

Details: Written by: Alyssa; Category: Life; Published: 30 August 2013

Before I jump in to this post, let me offer full disclosure: we used disposables on our two week mission trip to Bathurst, New Brunswick, and it was almost the undoing of us and cloth diapers. Disposables are amazingly convenient - no rinsing, washing, or hanging to dry; they take up hardly any space in the diaper bag; it is easy to know when to change them because you can see when they're full. They're not even that expensive. Truth be told, I changed fewer diapers throughout the day when Torre was in disposables compared to cloth as well because they could absorb so much more.

But.

Now that we've been home for a few weeks, I am happily back in the swing of cloth diapering, even having just completed a week of day camp at our church. I have been meaning to write this post for a while because our apartment-dweller status was one of the biggest concerns I had researching whether cloth diapers would be a good choice for our family. Would we really save money if we have to pay per load of laundry? Would the diapers really come clean with only limited washer settings to choose from?

This is not meant to be a comprehensive post on cloth diapers, but a peek at the system I've developed that works for me. Cloth diapering is not for every family, but I don't think that living in an apartment is a reason to give up on it, so here's what works for us.

Details: Written by: Alyssa; Category: Scripture; Published: 24 August 2013

One of the most encouraging things I take out of the story of King Josiah is not only that bad legacies can be changed for the better, but that God's will doesn't have to be perfectly clear all at once in order to be found. I was struck by this because the whole spiritual revolution of Judah and restoration of the people to obeying God actually started as a much smaller step of faith: Josiah's decision to fix up the temple.

Kings and Chronicles tell Josiah's story a little differently - in Kings, nothing is said about his reign until the 18th year, while Chronicles tells us "in the eighth year of his reign, while he was yet a boy, he began to seek the God of David his father, and in the twelfth year he began to purge Judah and Jerusalem of the high places, the Asherim, and the carved and the metal images... Now in the eighteenth year of his reign... [he sent people] to repair the house of the Lord his God." (2 Chron 34:3, 8, emphasis mine) Either way, what we see in Josiah's reign is a journey towards obedience and submission to God, not someone who pulled it all together all at once. He began in the right direction, and as he did what was right, more and more became clear.

Details: Written by: Alyssa; Category: Scripture; Published: 22 August 2013

I have been loving the book of Zephaniah lately, and it has led me to look at the story of King Josiah differently than ever before because Zephaniah prophesied during his rule. Josiah is one of the better known Old Testament kings of Judah, famous for taking the throne at the age of 8 and of being an exceptionally righteous king in a long line of bad apples. His story is found in 2 Kings 22-23 and 2 Chronicles 34-35, although those stories paint a very different portrait of the situation than the book of Zephaniah. Two and a half of the three chapters are warnings of judgment and condemnation for arrogance and sin. Judah is front and center in this critique, although the surrounding nations are also condemned. I was confused when I read this because we taught the story of Josiah at our church VBS last week, and he is known as the boy king who got rid of all the idols.

Here's the thing about the story of Josiah - the reforms he's so famous for took place beginning in the eighteenth year of his reign. It started as a project to revitalize the temple, during which the book of the Law was found, and everyone realized they had gone way off track in terms of obeying God. There were high places and idols all over the city, Asherah (idols) in the very temple, and male cult prostitutes operating out of the temple as well.

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