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Tyler Morning Telegraph - Galdámez brings church planting, education experience to Grace Español

Here are two articles written by Emily Guevara ( Twitter: @TMTEmily)  on our background and on  Grace Español .   Tyler Morning Telegraph...

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Old Age



She is in the hospital. She is 82 years old.  Her son sits on a chair and observes.  An alarm from the IV machine keeps beeping. It’s an annoying sound.  Her son talks to her and asks her if she has eaten to which she answers affirmatively. They both stop talking. Soon she is sleeping again. The trembling and the shaking continues. At times, she lifts her hands makes pointing motions as if she is talking to someone. But she is not.  The son wonders what is happening inside her mind. Where is her mind going? Is she dreaming those times when she was young, times that he knows not for he is too young to have remembered her.  Is she in the meat market place talking to a customer? Is she dancing the night away? Does she dream all her nine children together with her, laughing and enjoying the time together? Her son can only wonder. The old woman who brought him to this world lays there. “Is it really her?” he thinks to himself. Old age. Wrinkled. Weak. Incoherent. Alone. Sadness feels his heart and wonders what his future will hold. “Is this what I can expect?” he asks to himself. “Is this how we end?”  he murmurs. An epiphany has occurred. Once upon a time, he was also young and thoughtless. He didn’t think about old age. Growing in reverse did not seem possible then, but now it makes sense. We enter the world as a child. We end our journey in this world as an old child. But the difference is evident. As a child we are loved and cherished by our loved ones. As an old person we are neglected by our loved ones and cared by strangers. Love them now. 
Love them now. Sooner than you think, you will take her place.

Monday, August 16, 2010

The Cause of Spiritual Stupidity by George MacDonald- Selected Quotes

This week while I was flying to DC, I read some of George MacDonald's Unspoken Sermons. I read two of them and I thought these quotes were very deep.

"The Cause of Spiritual Stupidity" - "Unspoken Sermons" George MacDonald

If a man forget a thing, God will see to that: man is not lord of his memory or his intellect. But man is lord of his will, his action; and is then verily to blame when, remembering a duty, he does not do it, but puts it off, and so forgets it.

Distrust is atheism, and the barrier to all growth. Lord, we do not understand thee, because because we do not trust thy Father—whole-hearted to us, as never yet was mother to her first-born! Full of care, as if he had none, we think this and that escapes his notice, for this and that he does not think! While we who are evil would die to give our children bread to eat, we are not certain the only Good will give us anything of what we desire! The things of thy world so crowd our hearts, that there is no room in them for the things of thy heart, which would raise ours above all fear, and make us merry children in our Father's house!

When I trouble myself over a trifle, even a trifle confessed—the loss of some little article, say—spurring my memory, and hunting the house, not from immediate need, but from dislike of loss; when a book has been borrowed of me and not returned, and I have forgotten the borrower, and fret over the missing volume, while there are thousands on my shelves from which the moments thus lost might gather treasure holding relation with neither moth, nor rust, nor thief; am I not like the disciples?

I forget that it is live things God cares about—live truths, not things set down in a book, or in a memory, or embalmed in the joy of knowledge, but things lifting up the heart, things active in an active will.

If you let thought for the morrow, or the next year, or the next month, distress you; if you let the chatter of what is called the public, peering purblind into the sanctuary of motive, annoy you; if you seek or greatly heed the judgment of men, capable or incapable, you set open your windows to the mosquitoes of care, to drown with their buzzing the voice of the Eternal!

Sunday, August 15, 2010

MAN'S DIFFICULTY CONCERNING PRAYER

This week while I was flying to DC, I read some of George MacDonald's Unspoken Sermons. I read two of them and I thought these quotes were very deep.


MAN'S DIFFICULTY CONCERNING PRAYER.

'—and not to faint.'—ST. LUKE xviii. 1.

"There are some who would argue for prayer, not on the ground of any possible answer to be looked for, but because of the  good to be gained in the spiritual attitude of the mind in praying...Theirs is a better way than that of those who, believing there is a God, but not believing that he will give any answer to their prayers, yet pray to him; that is more foolish and more immoral than  praying to the No-god. Whatever the God be to whom they pray, their prayer is a mockery of him, of themselves, of the truth."

"There are moods of such satisfaction in God that a man may feel as if nothing were left to pray for, as if he had but to wait with patience for what the Lord would work; there are moods of such hungering desire, that petition is crushed into an inarticulate crying; and there is a communion with God that asks for nothing, yet asks for everything. This last is the very essence of prayer, though not petition. It is possible for a man, not indeed to believe in God, but to believe that there is a God, and yet not desire to enter into communion with him; but he that prays and does not faint will come to recognize that to talk with God is more than to have all prayers granted—that it is the end of all prayer, granted or refused. And he who seeks the Father more than anything he can give, is likely to have what he asks, for he is not likely to ask amiss"

To give us the spiritual gift we desire, God may have to begin far back in our spirit, in regions unknown to us, and do much work that we can be aware of only in the results; for our consciousness is to the extent of our being but as the flame of the volcano to the world-gulf whence it issues: in the gulf of our unknown being God works behind our consciousness. With his holy influence, with his own presence, the one thing for which most earnestly we cry, he may be approaching our consciousness from behind, coming forward through regions of our darkness into our light, long before we begin to be aware that he is answering our request—has answered it, and is visiting his child.

THE WORD OF JESUS ON PRAYER.

'They ought always to pray.'—ST. LUKE xviii. I.

"If you knew God, you would leave that to him. He is not mocked, and he will not mock. But he knows you better than you know yourself, and would keep you from fooling yourself. He will not deal with you as the child of a day, but as the child of eternal ages. You shall be satisfied, if you will but let him have his way with the creature he has made. The question is between your will and the will of God. He is not one of those who give readiest what they prize least. He does not care to give anything but his best, or that which will prepare for it. Not many years may pass before you confess, 'Thou art a God who hears prayer, and gives a better answer.' You may come to see that the desire of your deepest heart would have been frustrated by having what seemed its embodiment then."

" 'But if God is so good as you represent him, and if he knows all that we need, and better far than we do ourselves, why should it be necessary to ask him for anything?'

"I answer, What if he knows prayer to be the thing we need first and most? What if the main object in God's idea of prayer be the supplying of our great, our endless need—the need of himself?"

"Communion with God is the one need of the soul beyond all other need; prayer is the beginning of that communion, and some need is the motive of that prayer."

"The true child will not fear, but lay bare his wishes to the perfect Father. The Father may will otherwise, but his grace  will be enough for the child."