Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

After Jesus said this, he looked toward heaven and prayed:
“Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you. For you granted him authority over all people that he might give eternal life to all those you have given him. Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. I have brought you glory on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do. And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began.

• John 17:1-5

Later, knowing that everything had now been finished, and so that Scripture would be fulfilled, Jesus said, “I am thirsty.” A jar of wine vinegar was there, so they soaked a sponge in it, put the sponge on a stalk of the hyssop plant, and lifted it to Jesus’ lips. When he had received the drink, Jesus said, “It is finished.” With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.

• John 19:28-30

and everything that does not come from faith is sin.

• Romans 14:23b

“High-tech times lead to high-stress tension. The never-ending drive for more, mixed with the popular tendency to increase production and intensify involvement, leave most folks in the workplace not only exhausted but dissatisfied.
Instead of Saturday being a change-of-pace day, it has become an opportunity to squeeze in a second job. And Sundays? A time for renewal and refreshment? You’re smiling No, it’s the day most type-A high achievers start another to-do list in preparation for the new week It’s become the ideal ‘let’s get a jump on Monday’ day. Rest is out of the question.
There is tyranny in all this. Tyranny of the unfinished as well as the urgent. There is discontentment. And ultimately there is disillusionment along with back-burner boredom. …
What’s happened to us? When did we buy into all this hectic hassle that steals so much of the joy of just plain living? Who convinced us to feel guilty for taking time to balance work with play?
Get off the treadmill and reorder your life. Go back three spaces and clean out the clutter that led to all this nonsense of busyness.
Simplify!”

• Charles R. Swindoll, The Finishing Touch (Devotion for week 43, Tuesday)

Rev. Swindoll discussed Jesus’ prayer in the remainder of this devotional.  Jesus secures our salvation that we cannot lose from God the Father.  He commissions each one of us whether or not you quite believe it or not, but we are to carry on Jesus’ mission to spread the Good News.

So, what is holding us back?

If you say that you just cannot go to a foreign country.  Maybe you are like me and your education was undone in middle school and high school and learning a foreign language left you behind long ago.

Odd, I just wrote that, and I had one year of middle school Spanish.  At the end of that year, I could carry on a simplistic conversation in Spanish, hampered mostly by vocabulary.  But that teacher left to have a baby, and my first year in high school Spanish, we got a teacher who had been retired for over a decade.  All we did was chant verb conjugations.  We covered verb tenses that we had never covered in English class.  We conjugated verbs that we had no idea the English translation of them.  But we sounded like a pep squad at a ball game.  Then my second year of high school Spanish, we had a teacher who was an immigrant from Puerto Rico who taught us the Castilian pronunciation differences to words we had no idea of the meaning.  After three years, I can remember a few simple words, but I even wonder what “Como esta” means.

But that being said, when I was working with people in India, I could count to ten in Hindi.  I knew the Indian number system; in that they do not divide their numbers by millions and billions.  But we spoke English in the classroom.  When we had the dual language people translate to those who were not verbally confident in English.  In China, I knew very few numbers, but I knew key technical phrases, like the different types of heat transfer, and it scared the class when I would pronounce those words – especially when the translator would get stuck, not knowing the word himself, or in two cases herself.  Hmm.  Two cases out of about 10-12 different classes (five in China itself).  When you know just a few words, the translator becomes more alert and is more honest in the translation, not knowing what you really know.  In Korea and Italy, they understood, but few wanted to try to speak English, preferring to funnel their questions through the interpreter.  But then there was cultural differences that you had to negotiate, as in Korean and Thai classes might enthusiastically nod to let you know they heard you, but they had no idea what you just said.  That would get me ahead of the class in a hurry, and I would lose a day trying to find where they got lost.

This was a lot to say that while my foreign language skills are highly suspect, it never stopped me from going to far flung places around the world.  Scared?  Absolutely, but if the job took me there, I was there to teach them and make their lives better.

But I ran down a rabbit hole here at full speed.  I was just trying to say that not having language skills should not hold you back.  And you do not have to go to a foreign country.  The person three doors down, whether houses or apartments, may have never heard of Jesus and they may need help.

But that gets us to Rev. Swindoll’s point.  We do not follow the Great Commission for a variety of reasons, one being that we are too busy.

My wife told me just hours before she passed away that if she was no longer here, I would have more time to write.

I think that it is God winking at me here of late.  This year, I have had posts read by more countries than any other year so far, now more than a year after my wife passed away.  My percentage of readers outside the USA is the highest it has ever been, on an annual basis.  That is God doing that, not my increase in writing.  And I thank all the readers, foreign or domestic.  But since my wife sensed my zeal to spread the Good News everywhere, the statistics are pointing in that direction.  I thank her, but I thank God.

And even with writing roughly 13+ posts each week, I have time to cook my meals, do some house cleaning, a lot more than I did when I was my wife’s caregiver, and I prepare to teach a Sunday school lesson each week.  I do some intercessory prayers.  And I try to spread some cheer.

But even I can do a little more unplugging to get closer to God and turn some wasted time into productive time for God’s kingdom.  While we need time to rest, I am reminded of the second half of Romans 14:23.  Anything that is not faith is sin.  We can all become more efficient to have more time to glorify God and spread the Good News.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.