Month: October 2014

I have done a couple blogs on Facebook status’s. But, I have decided to do another one. I will make it short though.

I don’t get why people feel they have to put every little detail of their life on Facebook. There are some things that are better kept to themselves.

Some people on my Facebook have the idea that it is OK to talk about every detail from the time they wake up to the time they go to bed. They talk about other peoples life history and are nothing but busy bodies. We have enough of them in this world, I don’t like hearing the gossip and discussions that go on. I went to yahoo to get the definition of a busy body and thought I would share what and who they are;

bus•y•bod•y (ˈbɪz iˌbɒd i)

n., pl. -bod•ies.
a person who pries into or meddles in the affairs of others.

busybody
noun nosy parker (informal), gossip, troublemaker, snoop, intriguer, intruder, pry, eavesdropper, snooper, stirrer (informal), meddler, scandalmonger or Some busybody tipped off the police.

It has been some time since I cleaned out my friends list. I think I will be doing that though. It’s pretty sad that some people think it is OK to share every little thing with complete strangers. There are some things I share on Facebook, but I categorize people and family. Not everyone see’s everything I post. Even with my church family, I have grouped. If it is church oriented or a prayer need, then I will make the post visible.

I would prefer my life not being an open book. I also prefer to share information or updates with only those I choose to share with. I have to say it does tick me off when someone will update others about me without me giving permission to do that.

I’m just going to leave this post with this thought. Why is it that some people need to be into everyone else’s business? And why do they think they need to share their sex life and bathroom duties on Facebook.  TMI TMI

Recently, I was watching the show Ragamuffins. It is a story about Rich Mullins. I never realized his life was full of pain, anger, depression and reckless. I always thought of Rich Mullins as a person who was a singer and artist. His songs are awesome and I have loved his songs for many years. Rich Mullins was what many would call a rebel in the Christian world. He wrote Doubly Good to You for Amy Grant and that helped him become a name as a Christian Artist.

Here are some of the songs that Rich Mullins is best known for;

• Awesome God
• Hold Me Jesus
• Elijah
• Sing Your Praise to the Lord
• Calling Out Your Name

Rich wrestled all of his life with the brokenness and inner demons from his childhood. His father was very hard on him and he carried that with him throughout his life. One of the things in this movie that stood out to me is that he didn’t like the fame and all the stuff that comes along with it.  He would came on stage barefoot, shaggy hair and jeans full of holes and tattered. At the time of Rich Mullins death he gave away most of the money he ever made. He told his accountant to give him only 24,000 a year since that was what an average person would be making in a year.

Rich Mullins band was called the Ragamuffin’s. He wasn’t out to impress anyone, other than God. He was brutally honest and gave up fame and fortune to live on a Native American Reservation teaching kids music and the hope of the gospel of Jesus.

There was a part in the movie where Rich Mullins and a friend of his was driving down the road in his jeep. They popped in a cassette tape of this pastor that was taking about how Jesus loves the sinner. And that each of us has a war within ourselves that we are waging. God knows us inside and out.

He knows our darkest moments and our hurts. He knows our pains and He loves us anyhow. I think in the world we live in, we let Satan convince us that we are good enough to be loved. But God sent us His son and shows us we all are loved. Even through all the mess and ugliness of our lives.

By the end of the movie, I came to the conclusion that we don’t know what others are really going through. We may think they have it all together, but that is a lie. We see masks that people put on for different people in our lives.

Before Rich Mullins passed away he is quoted as saying; “Jesus said whatever you do to the least of these my brothers you’ve done it to me. And this is what I’ve come to think. That if I want to identify fully with Jesus Christ, who I claim to be my Savior and Lord, the best way that I can do that is to identify with the poor. This I know will go against the teachings of all the popular evangelical preachers. But they’re just wrong. They’re not bad, they’re just wrong. Christianity is not about building an absolutely secure little niche in the world where you can live with your perfect little wife and your perfect little children in a beautiful little house where you have no gays or minority groups anywhere near you. Christianity is about learning to love like Jesus loved and Jesus loved the poor and Jesus loved the broken-hearted…”

Rich Mullins died in a car accident when he lost control of the Jeep he was driving. RIP “Rich” Mullins (October 21, 1955 – September 19, 1997) Click here to listen to a tribute from Amy Grant at the Dove Awards.

When I was reading up on Rich Mullins, I loved what someone had to say about him. He was a prophet and a poet and a beggar, more comfortable with the homeless than the wealthy, more in love with Jesus than religion, more interested in the music than the song. He felt too much, and held too much. He searched desperately his whole life for a way to belong down here, but he never did. He was just passing through.
Rich Mullins & A Ragamuffin Band – Live From Studio B, South Bend, Indiana, 1997

I posted my testimony on my old blog and wanted to make sure to transfer it onto this blog since I moved all my posts and such to this page,

For me the first time I knew that Jesus was real was when I was little and living in Grovertown Indiana where my grandparents lived… I would go to a little Nazarene Church in Knox, that was just over the bridge from Grovertown… But us kids would get picked up from the pastor each Sunday and then he would pick us up for church on Weds… I don’t remember his name, but I guess that doesn’t really matter… But my Grandma Grace was a Sunday School teacher and I would learn a lot from her about what the Bible said and the fun stories in the Bible… I believe that the Nazarene Church in Knox was the first church and the first church camp I went too… I was only in 2nd grade I believe… I was young, so I am remembering as a child on this one… I asked the pastor about being baptized when we still lived there… In the Nazarene Church, you didn’t get baptized till we were at-least 14 and we had to make sure we understood what it meant to be baptized… There was one on one meetings with the pastors and such… Let’s say I didn’t get to be baptized… Remember I was only in the 2nd grade… My Grandma Grace passed away when I was 10 and we moved to AZ…

I will skip all the little stupid drawn out stuff… But eventually we moved to a place called Hyder AZ… It was between Gila Bend and Yuma… You had to go what seemed like an eternity to get to where it was located at in the middle of the desert. Not sure what got my parents to think this was a good idea… I think my parents thought hole in the wall places was the place to be… It was all cotton farms and close to hell temperatures… But I happen to make some friends there and found a little church that had maybe 25 people in it… They came from the areas around Hyder like Dateland, Sentinel, Ajo and other hole in the wall places… Hyder now is a ghost town… Should have been then too… I think peoples brains had to be fried to live there… But back to my topic… My friends and I would swim in the irrigation ditches there… That was really the only way to cool off there… It would be 125 plus during the summer time… But my friends went to church with me and we would act like we were baptizing each other… We would take turns and we did this every time we went swimming, which was every day unless they put sulfur in the water for the farms… We would do the whole thing like we seen in church… We dunked each other in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit… We wanted or I wanted to make sure that I got baptized… So I must have really wanted this… It was the first thing we did when swimming…

If anyone has ever been to Hyder AZ, you would know there was bad things lurking around there. We would have to be bussed about 30 miles to go to school in a little town called Sentinel AZ… Our school had about 25 or so kids and it went from 1st grade to 8th grade… It was two trailers and two teachers… I tell ya, there was evil stuff on the drive to that school and all around us… Protection is what we all needed from my point of view… There was this one group called Children of Light where we would go swimming. As little kids, we didn’t realize that we were already protected by God…I count those baptisms that we did every day as my first time and many times I got baptized…

Our family moved to Willcox AZ… For me this was the first real sign of civilization… It has a population of 2000 or so… But I went to the Willcox Church of the Nazarene… My best friend was the pastors daughter… Her father retired by the time I was able to be baptized… But I remember when some missionaries came to our church… Pastor Harry was still there as the pastor… But they asked a question about what would be the one question that God would ask when you get to heaven that you feared… My friend’s sister stood up and said that she would be afraid to stand before God and asked her why she didn’t talk to her friends about Him… And she would say that she thought they already know… She was a pastors kid, so they knew that… And then come to find out that nobody talked to her friend and they lost their place in eternity because of it… This stuck with me all the way through my life… I guess that’s why I’m not really afraid talk to others about Christ and what He can mean to them…

I got baptized on my 14th birthday and the 1st Baptist Church in Willcox, AZ and I wasn’t going to wait till I was 14 yrs old 1 day… I was waiting for years for this to happen and the day was finally here… I am sure my pastor was tired of me hounding him about it, lol… Pastor Randy Tipton was my pastor at the time and he did my official baptism… I don’t know if the Nazarene Church is still that way… If they lowered the age, it is probably because of me and giving them a hard time… But it finally happened and I was happy… Now the hundreds of baptisms in the water in Hyder and this one made it complete…

I really like the Nazarene Church… It seemed to be where we were always doing something to reach out to those around us… We had prayer meetings every Weds… There was a sermon, but it always ended in prayer at the alters at the front of the church… Those who were too old or unable to, would move to the front pews to pray and everyone took turns to pray… Whatever was on your heart… There was invitations to accept Christ… I think I compare a lot of churches to the Church of the Nazarene… I will always be a Nazarene at heart. I also liked that there was a lot of focus on Missions and Outreach… We were always doing something in our community or for someone else… Or at-least the ones I went too… I think society is laxed in wanting to conform to the ways of the world rather than God… I know I would love to have God conform to my way of thinking at times… But then again, the world would be even more messed up and dysfunctional… I guess everyone has their thing and how a Christian should or shouldn’t be… I think though that a lot of churches through out the world and my area are more as a social event than worshiping… Maybe I think that because of how I grew up and my own way of thinking… Who am I to say…I love the people where I go to church at now… It isn’t a Nazarene Church, but they are awesome… I guess each person chooses to worship the way that they do and they all have their own normal… But should we have our normal or God’s normal? Maybe I am wrong, which I probably am…

Nazarene’s Believe: Nazarene’s believe that Christians can experience a deeper level of life in which there is victory over sin, power to witness and serve, and a richer fellowship with God, all through the infilling of the Holy Spirit.

There has been a lot of things throughout the years that has happened and I have made good and unfortunately bad choices… Accepting Christ was the smartest choice I ever made. But I know that God knows that no matter what that He is first in my life, even when I forget that and do my stupid things…

I would like to thank my friend who edited this post and she helped it sound like it should… 🙂 I have been working on this post for a month or more now and it is finally done… Good thing I can save my drafts on here, lol…

If you want to read a little article about the Children of Light from Dateland, AZ… You go here... I remember this group because when we wanted to go swimming in a real pool, they had the only one… They lived only a few miles from where we lived… Or at-least in my mind it was a few miles…This link to the Children of the Light has a number of pictures from this group and I remember most of them…