Among the Watering Places with Liz

"Nothing in God's Word impresses me more than the fact that God seeks men and women to whom He can say, "I am going to do certain things in you. I am going to prepare you for it, and I'm going to send you forth, and I'm going to expect you to work My works." God sends men out to do His work for Him and He expects them to do it. It is God's work, and it must be done in God's power - but it is man who must do it. Early in my Christian experience God showed me that, and the Holy Spirit laid it on my heart to try to find out how a poor sinner saved by grace was to work the works of God. The Lord is looking for men and women who will learn the secret of getting and using the equipment He has given - who know how to bring the Holy Ghost on the scene so that they can go forth and work the works of God. The world can be evangelized when God finds men and women like that. God is looking for workers who have cast their own burdens upon the Lord and have ta...

Another book I've been reading - but this one chewing it off in little pieces because the content is so personally challenging. Scott Bessenecker writes in The New Friars: The Emerging Movement Serving the World’s Poor (Downers Grove IL: IVP) not only about the grass roots modern movement, one that is not orchestrated by the institutional church , but reflects back on the examples of those saints from the monastic tradition - Franciss and Clare of Assisi, Patrick and Brigid or Ireland, the Moravians, etc. In the "Incarnational" chapter, the motivating force is the pursuit of Jesus' example in which he descended into humanity - to BE the Gospel! “But incarnation is not easy. For Faye, the glamour of a life of service among the poor, if there is such a thing, was short-lived. Her early journals betray a period of testing and complaining. Being constantly dirty, having legs peppered with bug bites, the heat, the difficulty of life without modern conveniences-all of t...

I was so delighted to read this: Charlotte Bronte once saw Queen Victoria when they happened both to be in Brussels. The author was already well known by then but the Queen passed her unknowing. CB wrote of HRH as "A little, stout, vivacious lady, very plainly dressed - not much dignity or pretension about her" ( Queen Victoria , Lytton Strachey, 107). I have long been dismayed by my own figure and demeanor and found this observation about a real queen most heartening!

"When you devalue yourself, you become overly absorbed in and with yourself, and don't have anything left over to give others." (Encounters, Australian Evangel, April 1986) I found that clip in an old book and it gave me pause for thought: How often in a day do you think negatively about yourself? When I asked myself that, I was surprised with the answer!! My little friend (sort-of niece) Gill has very positive ways of dealing with life. She has been working on a 'Happiness Project' in which she spends a whole month thinking about an aspect of her life - such as gratefulness - then she focuses on cultivating this in a variety of ways. Another is money, not just her attitude to it, but going through her finances and reorganising. The last one she spoke of dealing with was confidence . What a great idea! It is the opposite of self-absorbed navel-gazing, because the focus is outwards, not inwards. Way to go, Gillie!

The boy with the loaves and the fishes, Rebekah at the well and many others in Scripture 'did what they could.' This is all that God asks of any of us. If we bring what we have or do what we can as an act of worship to Him, it is our heart attitude that He sees and loves. The woman at Bethany who broke her alabaster flask of spikenard oil over the Lord Jesus' head was sharply criticised by others - but He said "She has done what she could" (Mark 14:3-9) How often we downgrade what we have to offer because it is small or because others may not understand our motives. But this lady still poured out her perfume and the widow still gave her mite, though neither act appeared to achieve anything much in themselves. By this I mean, the mite wasn't multiplied like the loaves and fishes and the lady with the spikenard was not elevated and rewarded as Rebekah was, but their attitudes are spoken of still as memorials to them. There are two things t...

Of course, I had a difficult pregnancy! Not only did I suffer with the dreaded high blood pressure from the very beginning, but there was also the added complication of learning to do housework for the first time. And let me tell you, learning to iron a shirt is a harrowing experience when you've already turned twenty-four! He virtually abandoned me in a strange land, the man I married did. Went and joined the Police, didn't he, then disappeared into the winds of the Welsh countryside on an Advanced Driving course, leaving me to cope with my difficult pregnancy and the washing up? He phoned me often though - I'll give him that - to see how I was coping. "It's the English summer," I told him. "I don't like it! The days are too long. The wretched birds wake up at 4 a.m. then sit in the lilac tree by my window bragging about it." (I had discovered In myself a deep-seated loathing of cuckoos. The beastly things sound exactly like their mechanical c...

We wept together, then we laughed together, my friend and me. As I left, she said "Elizabeth, you're a tonic!" Driving home with a lighter heart, I asked aloud "Lord, what's a tonic?" It was merely rhetorical. Of course I knew the answer - it's a nasty tasting liquid that's supposed to buck you up! Well, the answer came all the same and was not what I had expected. 'A tonic is the keynote, Elizabeth, the first note of a scale. If you strike the tonic, the songster can sing the whole melody in tune.' My heart soared. "Lord! You're lovely."