Srugim

We've been watching the Israeli tv series, Srugim,  on Amazon Prime.  It is quite interesting to watch a show about conservative religious people that are struggling with the fact that they are still single.  Below you will find the lyrics to the theme song. I pursue Your laws, on the one hand On the other, my passion pursues me. Ashamed and embarrassed, I will enter Your gates. And the long nights and the loneliness and the years, And this heart that has not known peace. Until the sea becomes quiet, until the shadows disappear.	אני רודף אחר חוקיך, מחד מאידך תשוקתי אותי רודפת בוש ונכלם אבוא בשעריך והלילות הארוכים והבדידות ושנים והלב הזה שלא ידע מרגוע עד שישקוט הים, עד שינוסו הצללים
Where shall I go, to where will I turn, when Your eyes gaze upon me? Where shall I flee, how will I not turn away? Between truth and truth, Between law and practice. Between the days of yore and modern times. Between the hidden and the revealed, Between the world to come and this world.	לאן אלך, אנה אפנה, כשעיניך מביטות בי איכה אברח, איך לא אפנה בין אמת לאמת בין הלכה למעשה בין הימים ההם לזמן הזה בין הנסתר לנגלה בין העולם הבא לעולם הזה
I pursue Your laws, on the other hand my passion burns me Fierce as death, terrible as troops with banners The long nights and the loneliness and the years, And this heart that has not known peace. Until the sea becomes quiet, until the shadows disappear Bring me back!	רודף אחר חוקיך, מאידך תשוקתי אותי שורפת עזה כמוות, איומה כנדגלות הלילות הארוכים והבדידות והשנים והלב הזה שלא ידע מרגוע עד שישקוט הים, עד שינוסו הצללים השיבני
Where shall I go, to where will I turn ...	לאן אלך, אנה אפנה ...

Not Striving

He opened and skimmed through letter after letter from the stations, from home, from Shanghai.

He came upon one from John McCarthy, written a day or two after Hudson had left. It was a long letter. He read on and on, attention riveted. ‘I seem,’ McCarthy wrote, ‘as if the first glimmer of the dawn of a glorious day has risen upon me…I seem to have sipped only of that which can fully satisfy.’ McCarthy had found the secret they sought. Hudson looked at the letter again. ‘To let my loving Saviour work in me His will…Abiding, not striving or struggling…’

Hudson came to the last paragraph. ‘Not a striving to have faith, or to increase our faith but a looking at the faithful one seems all we need. A resting in the loved one entirely, for time, for eternity. It does not appear to me as anything new, only formerly misunderstood.’

Hudson was amazed at his own blindness. His eyes opened wide. As in Barnsley twenty years before, as at Brighton four years before, a long inward struggle resolved in a split second. ‘As I read I saw it all. “If we believe not, He abideth faithful.” And I looked to Jesus and saw (and when I saw, oh, how joy flowed) that He had said, “I will never leave you”.’ In shorter time than it took to describe afterwards, Hudson grasped that he must not struggle to have strength or peace but rest in the strength and peace of Christ. ‘I have striven in vain to abide in Him. I’ll strive no more. For has not He promised to abide with me—never to leave me, never to fail me?’ The effort to ‘get it out’ was a mistake.

‘I am one with Christ,’ he cried as he explained the glorious discovery to the whole Chinkiang household, hastily gathering them together and reading McCarthy’s letter. ‘It was all a mistake to try and get the fullness out of Him, I am part of Him. Each of us is a limb of His body, a branch of the vine. Oh, think what a wonderful thing it is to be really one with a risen Saviour.’ And in some such words as he wrote a few weeks later to his sister Amelia in England, he expounded the truth he had missed so long: ‘Think what it involves! Can Christ be rich and I poor? Can your right hand be rich and your left poor? Or your head well fed while your body starves?’

A few evening slater Hudson went up the canal to Yangchow. Judd came in to the sitting-room to welcome him, and was astonished: ‘He was so full of joy that he scarcely knew how to speak to me. He did not even say, “How do you do,” but walking up and down the room with his hands behind him, exclaimed: “Oh, Mr. Judd, God has made me a new man! God has made me a new man!’ “

Judd, and every man and woman who came in close contact with Taylor noticed the difference. A magnetism of love and happiness radiated from him. The years rolled away, and instead of premature middle age he was again a man in his late thirties.

…

‘As to work,’ Hudson wrote to Amelia in October, ‘mine was never so plentiful or responsible or difficult but the weight and strain of it is gone. The last month or more has been perhaps the happiest of my life.’

Hudson Taylor and Maria

A Match made in Heaven

by John Pollock

pg 197

Picture

"Zhenjiang"

May 2019

by YuTaso Chang

Words

"Our words may not cause plants to sprout, but they can make hope spring forth in a human heart. God birthed us with words, and now we find ourselves in constant labor, giving birth ourselves through the power of words. When we release words into the air, like the first ones spoken, they create worlds both glorious and dark."

~Jonathan Merritt
Learning to Speak God from Scratch

Stone

AM I a stone and not a sheep
That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy Cross,
To number drop by drop Thy Blood’s slow loss,
And yet not weep?
Not so those women loved
Who with exceeding grief lamented Thee;
Not so fallen Peter weeping bitterly;
Not so the thief was moved;
Not so the Sun and Moon
Which hid their faces in a starless sky,
A horror of great darkness at broad noon—
I, only I.
Yet give not o’er,
But seek Thy sheep, true Shepherd of the flock;
Greater than Moses, turn and look once more
And smite a rock. Good Friday by Christina Rossetti