In Spirit and in Truth

<sup>How do we follow YHWH God?  In spirit and in truth, no matter what the truth may be or how uncomfortable it is to us or those around us.  Right?  What does it mean to follow YHWH in spirit and in truth?  

John 23-24</sup>

A time will come, however, indeed it is already here, when the true (genuine) worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth (reality); for the Father is seeking just such people as these as His worshipers.  God is a Spirit (a spiritual Being) and those who worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth (reality).  ~AMP

For the last 12 years my family and I have been learning this along with our friends who we have mutually agreed to 'stick it out together' with through the many discomforts of the truth, which does by the way, set us free from bondage in ways never imagined.  It is wonderful!  Hard, yes, but so, worth it!  

I encourage you, in the grace of God through His son Yeshua the Messiah to be set free as well!  Yes, we are saved by grace, there is nothing we can do to earn that!   THen we are to walk out our salvation with fear and trembling.  Righteous fear of our God, YHWH.  Do we fear Him as we should?  Do we do what He has laid out for us to do?  Please take some time to pray about this, watch these teachings below and search it out to see if it be true.  Be freed from the trappings of the world!  

Without the front of the Bible, (TORAH, Prophets and Writings) we cannot understand the back of the Bible.

 

 For more teachings, please visit:  119 Ministries, Test Everything

Empty Words

Being at a loss for words for months on end...I have decided I better just write something...anything to fill this void on my blog page.  Is this who I am?...It is not who I want to be...this wishy-washy writer who can't get her ideas out of her head.  I figure if I at least write something then maybe, just maybe something more will come to me...

Where is the poem?
Where is the song?
It is gone from me like a cloud that has no rain...
I am empty...

Fill me up again
Give me words to praise You
Help me live the life You want for me to live...
I am empty...

There is no song in me it seems, and yet it is there, I just can't access it...The joy of the Lord is my strength!  I will hold onto that until the song returns.  It is slow in coming, but I will hold on to Yeshua and be patient in this dry place.  I will rejoice in His Name!

Now...to post or not to post?...that is the question...

   

A Break...

There is a great wealth of information in the world today, and thanks to the internet it is right at our fingertips.  For me, this has been most helpful over the years as I have struggled to find gems of truth among the dross and mud that has covered the narrow way and made it hard to see.

Some of the things we have learned together as a family and alongside our friends have been paradigm shifts.  From learning about the pagan origins or outright apostasy of so much of our belief system, to learning about and keeping God's appointed feasts and the foods we should eat for our health, it has been quite a journey and it isn't over....I am thankful for this journey, even when it is overwhelmingly hard and all I can do is sit on the couch watching Julian Smith or Messy Monday videos to make me laugh at life again!
  
Today is one of those days where everything has caught up to me, and although I have only watched one video today as my computer balks at anything I do these days (being it is 8 years old), I have played Spider Solitaire THREE times and checked Facebook FIVE times! All intermixed in with making breakfast smoothies, swimming lesson, water kefir, granola, trip to Walmart, Safeway, & Settler's Market, laundry, dinner, and cleaning the kitchen!  It has been a day...now I must go for a walk....but, I just wanted to jot something down to let you know I am still here and thinking of what to write next.....

The Love of God

Yesterday a song came to mind that I hadn't thought of in quite some time...all I could think of were the first few words...The Love of God...  So, I looked it up.

I was pleasantly surprised to find the history of the song as well as the lyrics on the first page I went too...but was this the real history? 

From http://www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/l/o/loveofgo.htm a direct quote:

"Words: Fred­er­ick M. Leh­man; he wrote this song in 1917 in Pas­a­de­na, Cal­i­fornia, and it was pub­lished in Songs That Are Dif­fer­ent, Vol­ume 2, 1919. The lyr­ics are based on the Jew­ish poem Had­da­mut, writ­ten in Ara­ma­ic in 1050 by Meir Ben Isaac Ne­hor­ai, a can­tor in Worms, Ger­ma­ny; they have been trans­lat­ed in­to at least 18 lang­uages.

One day, dur­ing short in­ter­vals of in­at­ten­tion to our work, we picked up a scrap of pa­per and, seat­ed up­on an emp­ty le­mon box pushed against the wall, with a stub pen­cil, add­ed the (first) two stan­zas and chor­us of the song…Since the lines (3rd stan­za from the Jew­ish po­em) had been found pen­ciled on the wall of a pa­tient’s room in an in­sane asy­lum af­ter he had been car­ried to his grave, the gen­er­al opin­ion was that this in­mate had writ­ten the epic in mo­ments of san­ity.
Frederick M. Lehman, “History of the Song, The Love of God,” 1948

Music: Fred­er­ick Leh­man; ar­ranged by his daugh­ter, Clau­dia L. Mays"

As you can see above I have highlighted the text I found to be interesting...does anyone know what was happening in Europe during that time period?  THE CRUSADES!

So...I decided to dig deeper, which took some time. Translations of words are sometimes written differently so I could not seem to find this elusive Haddamut poem...until I typed in the name Meir Ben Isaac Nehorai and this was what I found in the webpage listed below:

From http://www.herjc.org/cantor/Shavuot.html

Akdamut

Sung in part during Shavout (that would be the Feast of Weeks or commonly known as Pentecost)

"Akdamut was written in Aramaic by Rabbi Meir ben Isaac Nehorai (c.1030-c.1096) of Worms, Germany. Rabbi Meir is known to have been a great scholar and a Hazzan, as well as the author of many liturgical poems and prayers, most of which have been lost." 

Some of the Akdamut is on the site above but I found a more complete history and poem translation here:


http://www.ou.org/torah/article/akdamut_and_ketuvah has this to say:

"Akdamut" - The Background

Akdamut is a "piyut," a religious poem, which was composed during the First Crusade, which began in 1096, as an effort by Christian Europe to recapture the "Holy Land" from the Moslem "infidels" who had seized it. On their way to the Middle East, the Christian knights would, in general, visit terror if not outright destruction upon the Jewish communities which happened to be on their route. It was a time of oppression, of cruelty, of ignorance on the part of the Jews' neighbors. There was absolutely nothing attractive in the dominant culture in Europe at that time.

Nevertheless, the Christians tried to force their religion upon their Jewish neighbors, often at the threat of death. Sometimes, mock "debates" were held, in which Jewish rabbis were forced to participate, knowing that the juries, consisting of church officials, were rigged against them, and that nothing they said would have any effect on their listeners, or upon their own fate. The author of Akdamut was the unwilling participant in such a "debate."

This then was the background of Akdamut, composed at that time by Rabbi Meir son of Rabbi Yitzchak, who was the "Chazan" of the City of Vermaiza, in Germany. The position "Chazan" is not directly translatable as "Cantor," which is its current meaning, for at that time, there was the additional connotation of great Talmudic scholarship associated with the position and, indeed, this particular Chazan is supposed to have been one of the teachers of the great Bible and Talmud Commentator, RASHI.

The poem describes the words of the author as he "debated" the truths of Judaism to a hostile audience. But they are disguised for posterity in the Aramaic language, which was not understood by the Christian world or its censors. The author, who died shortly after the "debate," left behind a priceless inheritance for the Jewish People, the piyut of Akdamut. The practice began to chant Akdamut on Shavuot, with its characteristic melody, at the beginning of the public reading which includes the "Aseret HaDibrot," the Ten Commandments.


They go on to talk about the structure of the poem which is very interesting...

 "Akdamut" - The Structure

Akdamut has ninety lines; the first forty-four begin with a double Aleph-Bet; Aleph, Aleph, Bet, Bet, and so on. The first letters of the next forty-six lines make up an acrostic in which the author expresses the prayer that the L-rd will bless him with the ability and opportunity, even in the extremely hostile environment in which he found himself, to grow in knowledge of Torah and in the performance of good deeds.

Each line of the poem, written in Aramaic, as mentioned above, ended in the letters "Tav," the last letter of the Aleph Bet, and "Aleph," the first letter of the Aleph-Bet, to show that when one reaches the last letter, the "end" of the Torah, so to speak, one immediately turns and restarts the Torah from its "beginning."



Then the poem is translated:


"Akdamut" - Free Translation of Content

Before I begin to read his Words (The Ten Commandments),
I will ask Permission,
Of the One Whose Might is such that -
Even if all the heavens were parchment,
And all the reeds pens,
And all the oceans ink,
And all people were scribes,
It would be impossible to record
the Greatness of the Creator,
Who Created the World with a soft utterance,
And with a single letter, the letter "heh,"
The lightest of the letters.

And Angels of Heaven of all kinds,
All full of fear and terror of their Master,
Have permission to praise him only at set times,
Some once in seven years, Others once and no more,

How beloved is Israel!
For the Holy One leaves the Angels on High,
To take the People of Israel as His lot -
And they make Him their King,
And declare, "Holy! Holy! Holy!"
Twice a day, Morning and Evening -

And all His Desire is that His Chosen People
Will study His Torah and pray to Him,
For they are inscribed in His Tefillin,
"Who is like Your People, Israel,
One nation in the World!"

Thus it is the will of the Holy One,
That I speak in praise of Israel,
And though all the nations come and ask,
Who can it Be, for Whom you give up your lives,
O most beautiful of the nations?
But come with us,
And we'll satisfy all your desires!

And Israel responds with wisdom,
Only a bit of the truth do they reveal,
What is your greatness, say they to the nations,
Compared to the reward that He has in store for us!
And when He sheds upon us His great light,
While you go, then are destroyed in darkness!

Yerushalayim will be rebuilt!
The Exiles will return,
The Gates of Gan Eden will Re-Open,
And all their Brilliance will be Revealed to us -
We will enter those Gates and take Pleasure,
In the Radiance of the Divine Presence,
Whom we will point to, and say -
Here is our G-d, in Whom we hoped,
He will save us!

And each righteous one under his canopy will sit,
In the Sukkah made from the skin of Leviathan,
And in the future
He will make a dance for the righteous ones,
And a banquet in Paradise,
From that Great Fish and the Wild Ox ,
And from the Wine preserved from the Creation -
Happy are those who believe and hope and
Never abandon their faith forever!

Now you my listeners,
When you hear your praise in this song,
Be strong in your faith!
And you will merit to sit in the company
Of the holy and righteous ones
In the World-to-Come!
If you've listened well to my words,
Which were uttered in holy majesty -
Great is our G-d!
The First and the Last!
Happy are we, for He loved us,
And gave us His Torah.

So...we go from an insane asylum to a prison to maybe neither, an insane Jew to a persecuted Jew who may have lost his life for what he believed...I will leave it to you to decide...

As for me, I do not believe the first report above by Mr. Lehman, I am saddened that he believed that Meir Ben Isaac Nehorai had gone insane and I am relieved to know more about the time now with so much at our fingertips, after all it was a time of great turmoil and loss of life in Europe, if you were not a Catholic, you were a heretic or a Jesus killer...sigh...how absolutely wrong they were...  I am thankful for Mr. Lehman's tribute of the Akdamut/Haddamut in "The Love of God".  It is a great song and now I know why the 3rd stanza always makes me cry when I sing it...so much the Hand of God in those words!

Here is a version from Mercy Me.
The 3rd stanza has been moved to the middle in this version...enjoy!

The Love of God - Mercy Me



  

Where do I Belong but Right Where I am...

Life really is like going on a long trip.  You get on the highway and stop at rest stops, places to refuel yourself and your car, and, if you are traveling from the west side of the Cascades to the east side as I have done many times in the past few years, you will also find places of desolate landscape. The highway also has a lot of side roads you can take as well as get lost on, depending on your strategy or destination, not always the best of choices but sometimes worthwhile learning experiences. 

A couple of years ago, we found ourselves in our Suburban pulling a 26 ft. trailer taking many of those side roads as we neared Moses Lake from the east.  I-90 was closed in this section due to a dust storm and we were stuck on the wrong side of it trying to get home, another 4 hours away.  So, off the main road we went, it was quite an adventure and there were times we couldn't even see the road in front of us.  I will never forget that trip and how relieved we all were to find our way back to the main road.  It wasn't all bad, there were beautiful sights and interesting things to see on our side road trip.  We basically traveled parallel to the highway as much as we could and were alarmed when we veered too far away from it.  We felt safe as long as we knew where we were...but...to get us back to the main road we had to make decisions based on nothing concrete to get us there in the end.  The roads were blocked all around us and it seemed we were never going to find our way back.  How similar that is to life.  When we are following God's ways and take a detour to avoid a wait or a discomfort of some kind we often find ourselves in a place that looks right and seems right, but then the dust comes and totally covers our way and we can't see a thing.  It clears again and we find we cannot know our way back, all looks hopeless and blocked off to us.  Then we find we are back on the road again not really sure how we got there...but by the grace of God!

 Our lives for the last 10 years have been like that, somehow we found (about 10 years ago) we had veered off God's road at some point in the past and for years He was slowly bringing us back to His road, although we didn't know it at the time, we had made a commitment to follow Him no matter what came our way and He was faithful to show us His ways little by little so we would not be overwhelmed by all the conflicts and changes this would bring to our lives.  We have always known the road was narrow, we heard that so often, but the road we were on didn't seem to be narrow as we read His Word, in fact it started to look rather wide as we started to leave it behind to follow the true narrow road. Since we have found this narrow, straight road, we have left it a few times for an easy way around an obstacle which never quite turns out right. Thankfully, through repentance and forgiveness we are always brought back to the road.   We were confused by traditions and doctrines that were not biblical nor had any possible connection to the truth but were intertwined with the truth and all these types of half truths, myths even, have had to be brought into the light of God's word and shown for what they are.  There are great differences between the road we were on...it was quite wide (although we did not see that), there were a lot of others who believed as we did which made it seem right, and it was comfortable, to name a few...as soon as we got onto the right road, we noticed how absolutely narrow it truly was and it was then we started trying to stay on this road because we saw the danger in the wide road appearing as something it was not and how subtle the lies were that we needed to weed out regardless of how we felt about things we thought we could do, or things we believed were true but were not actually, or what other people thought about us.  The dust storms are very intimidating and easily blinding and it takes a very long time and lots of hard work to recover from the blindness that surrounds one, especially if one believes one can see.  The blindness is a deep blindness, it seeks to destroy not just sight but gets right down into the heart and changes truth into what is believed to be true but is more often than not just a lie perpetrated on us by a very crafty deceiver. Would you eat a cookie if you knew it had chicken poo in it?  I mean it looks good...right?  We have recovered much of our sight...but I am sure we still see dimly and always will have some dimness with us somewhere that needs bringing into the light and examined thoroughly.  We see through a glass dimly, but then face to face...

Right now, if you don't know me or don't know me too well, you are probably wondering WHAT in the world is she talking about?  All I can say is read the Bible, the word of God and pray for understanding.  The WHOLE Bible, not just bits and pieces.  It may clear some things up for you.  If you don't have one you can go here, this is a great place to start:  http://www.biblestudytools.com/cjb/ 

As the years have gone by since that trip through the dust and side roads of Eastern Washington many things have changed.  We have had many trips to the east side of the state and each time have felt we would eventually end up there somehow and we better get used to that idea.  So we did, we prepared for the inevitable as we had been preparing for couple years already, but all that seemed to happen was our friends moved to Wenatchee.  The adjustment was painful and hard, but it was fun too, (isn't that how life is), as we now could spend days with them instead of just hours.  After they were settled into their new home, we went home and I settled.  I settled for where we were, I hung up pictures in the hall.  Yes...that is how I settle.     Then, I told my mom basically this...'now that I have hung the pictures, we will probably have to move', and I laughed because it was funny and most probable to my life.  Nothing happened of course, months went by and the year turned...then it was February and we were forced to make a choice.  So, the choice was made again with much prayer and all of a sudden we were going to be moving across the state, it was clear that this was what we were to do, which is what we had been waiting for.  It still seems unreal and it was SO hard.  Hard because in most ways I really just wanted to stay where I was, I was comfortable and had my routine as exhausting as it sometimes was for me.  My kids were happy with their routine and their activities and visits, Grandma's, Aunt Karen's, CAP, quilting, clogging, Awana's...My husband was totally happy with his position at work, guns and keys and such, fun, fun!  We were settled...and then all of a sudden, it was time to go.  I wonder if Abraham ever had this difficulty...he must have, right?  No, stay, keep staying, ok, yes, you could go, but no, stay it's not the right time, yes it is time for them but you stay......alright GO, now...it's time to move!   

The actual moving day...week...6 weeks actually...was surreal.  I really am still having a hard time with realizing where I am.  It is so different.  We went from a place of lush greenery, beautiful lakes and streams, wonderful views of the mountains...to utter desolation...we are surrounded by a desolate landscape, one that offers little 'natural' protection.  Desolation is a beautiful thing though.  I love driving through Vantage, I love seeing the desolation of what I believe to be the remnants of a catastrophic flood,  fountains of the deep bursting open...this is what it reminds me of anyway, it is true to me one way or another there was a flood in the Columbia River Gorge.  I love watching the brown and yellow hills turn green in just a few short days brought to life by the rain.  I love that it does rain even here, just not as much.  Desolation is where God does his work raining down on the dry earth to make it bloom and turn green.  If it is lush and green and lacks nothing there is no need of Him.  I love that this area reminds me of that.

I am thankful for the rest stops along the way where we could rest.  I am so glad for the last three years living where we did, the neighbors, the mountains, the kind landlord.  It was a lovely rest stop.  Much needed at a time when I wasn't sure God cared where we lived.  He gave me the Olympics to see on clear days, a wish I only mentioned in passing, and the means and provision to live there even when my mom had to move out.  I am so thankful for that much needed resting place of beauty. 

 Refueling comes in many forms and our friends have a great part in that, the chatting online, the visits with friends going to Wenatchee in the fall and our one visit to Beit Tefillah and Beit Aveinu online have been a great part of our 'refueling' as well as just resting on Shabbat.  Learning from God through and with others is one of my favorite things to do.  Eating the right food, 'refueling', is really important to your health both physically and spiritually.  You eat the wrong foods, it kills you slowly but surely and you become diseased and sick.  Still, I am recovering from sicknesses I picked up along the way. 

 It is an amazing journey we are on, I don't want to miss out on anything and this keeps me moving forward.  So, this is now where we live...it is much larger than it looks...and I will grow and learn and settle a little faster here as apparently I need to learn to settle and enjoy where I am.  All the pictures have been hung too...  



Many Blessings to you in the name of our Lord and Savior Yeshua HaMaschiah! (Jesus Christ )

~HaveCourage