Marsha's Blog

I heard a good speaker, maybe you know her. Her name is Jennifer Rothschild, who is blind, by the way, and she spoke from the Book of “Lamentations".  I call that the “clean part” of my Bible, since I so seldom go there.  What she had to say resonated with me.  She went to great lengths to explain the difference between "Lamenting" and "Complaining", explaining that lamentable things happen over which we have no control.  She had gone blind from some rare malady when she was just 15.  Then there was Jeremiah the prophet, who had a pretty miserable time his whole life.  And don’t forget King David. We can see through several of his Psalms that he was no stranger to misery.   Closer to home, I was reminded of a brilliant young man I once knew in Japan. He had come from Ghana on a scholarship to study Mineralogy at one of Japan’s top universities, and we crossed paths through our student ministry.  There were several in his group, and I soon lea...

 So last week I told you I'd give you a little preview of some of the amazing things we witnessed on the mission field, in terms of spiritual warfare. Here goes… It seems obvious to us, in light of the evidence all around, that Satan is definitely alive and well, but that in some of the countries we’ve lived, he’s better at staying hidden. I think he chooses to operate at whatever level “works best” for his evil purposes. In some places that mean open and overt in-your-face activity, while in others, he’s comes across as more subtle.   Anyway, I mentioned before the small prayer group made up of broken and discouraged missionaries. For the first several weeks, we never looked at each other; we just fell on our faces, figurately and sometimes literally, praying for ourselves and our own needs. Then one day, we started noticing each other. In tiny steps, we began to pray for the other people in the group. And to the amazement of us all, God heard us. At first, we just asked...

  Good Morning Friends, I know last week I promised you some ‘spiritual warfare’ stories, but begging your pardon, I’d like to interject just one more interesting story I found this last week. We were involved in a “Writers Workshop” this weekend. In addition to both of us doing a large share of the teaching itself, this was a big part of the reason for our coming to Hawaii, so it meant a lot to us.   Reading thru the comments on people’s evaluation, we think it was a huge success, thankfully because of your prayers.  We are doing what we love to do, and we’re glad you can be a part of it. And in the course of researching for this event, I became, this last week, obsessed with finding a poet that I remembered from our time in Japan. Because I'm getting old, I suppose, I could only remember that he was paralysed and that he’d become a Christian because of a missionary who passed by.  The way it happened was the missionary stepped into a store to buy something....

 Good morning friends, This last week has been a busy one and I think that will continue till we leave, as Tony has finals and evaluations, as well as a Writer's Conference and a Journeyman retreat with our friends form 50 years ago. But in the midst of all this, we got a letter from a friend saying that he wasn't satisfied with the SBC Sunday school's material on Spiritual warfare that they were offering this week. I don't know what proportion of you use that material, nor do I know what it said, but since both Tony and I have some opinions on this, we happily wrote up a few vignettes of what we'd experienced on the field, and sent them along.  He wrote that what we wrote was a little more personal and he’ll be using them today. Ever the dovetailer of time, I thought "Oh, I can use that as my blog this week!", but the more I thought about you waking up to me and reading that, I could envision you sitting down to your cereal and reaching into the box to fi...