Children’s Prayer

May 16th, 2013 · H.Rinehart · Blog No comments - Tags: , , , , , ,

 

When I visited Hannah and Brady with their newly adopted baby, Sydney Grace, one Sunday afternoon a strange little trail of small children came to the door. One by one, their friends brought their children by to hold the new baby. Here was the child they had prayed for!

 

Allie, the 5 year old pictured here, prayed for a baby for Hannah and Brady every night for two years. When she heard that Sydney had come, she spontaneously began to sing the words to the old hymn, “Great is Thy Faithfulness.”

Nothing in the miracle of this adoption has touched me more deeply than the chorus of prayer that God raised up in the last few months. And a good portion of that prayer came in the voices of children, a tribe of little prayer warriors God appears to have chosen for such a task.

It touches me deeply because I know that Hannah and Brady have watched their friends have babies…and babies and babies. And they’ve loved those children even though it scraped raw the longings of their own hearts.

I can’t believe I got to watch their little faces come to the door, filled with the expectancy of Christmas morning. This child they’d prayed for, here at last. They got to hold the answer to their prayers!

 

Is it not freshly amazing how God takes the thing in our lives that ignites our pain and longing, He enters it and out of the crucible of that very pain, He actually fashions our deliverance?

Truly, He gives beauty for ashes. (Isaiah 61:3)

 

Sydney

April 18th, 2013 · H.Rinehart · Blog One comment - Tags: , , , , ,

 

I admit that I am new to the world of adoption.

Thirty years I’ve prayed for my children. Always, tucked inside that prayer has been prayer for their children….and their children. A line of family faces stretching from the past into the future. Yes, I can see them, as real as my hands on this computer.

Into this tightly woven script, God has written a new story, one much closer to the nature of His love. You are not God’s people, the apostle Paul reminds us in Romans. You don’t have a place in Him…unless he gives you one in his Son. That’s the plain raw truth of it.


So the story in this human family has taken a new turn. Three weeks ago Sydney Grace Rinehart became the adopted daughter of our son and his wife, a beautiful Easter gift wrapped in pink. Who could imagine this trail of tears would lead to such blazing joy? 

When I look into Sydney’s face, there is no thought of finding Aunt Minnie’s green eyes. I’m not wondering if this girl will be as punctual and organized as her father. Sydney is celebrated precisely because she is not like us. The experience of adoption is so different. It’s all a surprise. It all feels like gift.

 

I’m being introduced to a new facet of the love of God by this little pink bundle of a baby who has no idea how much her name spells H-O-P-E.

Living the Faithful Life

August 19th, 2012 · H.Rinehart · Blog No comments - Tags: , ,

 

Here’s a true story that’s worth your read.

So here I am in Minnesota speaking and I hear about the vast numbers of Somali refugees Minnesotans have sponsored. This, I’m told, is largely due to the influence of the Lutherans on the state legislature. And the great influence on the Lutherans has been Bible Study Fellowship, especially the ministry of Meryl Glockner, who recently died at 82.

I follow this story further. Meryl Glockner is rather famous in those parts, having taught BSF most of her adult life. It’s said that wherever you went with Meryl in her later years, a string of women would stop her and say, “I was in your BSF class years ago….” Meryl started teaching Bible classes for women when it became apparent (after 8 miscarriages and two failed adoptions) that being a mother in the traditional sense was not going to happen. At her funeral the same four things were said about Meryl: she was gracious. And compassionate. And grateful. And always interested in other people.

Oh, to have those words said of us at the end, right?

Then there is her husband, Bob. He owned a local Swedish restaurant. Most days you would find Bob in a back booth visiting with one man after another, talking about God and life and the Bible. When a missionary came home to Minneapolis, Bob would throw open the doors, invite the guy’s friends and feed the whole crew while the missionary told his story. Bob came to Christ in high school through the ministry of the Navigators. If you were Bob’s friend, you were always Bob’s friend. ( I knew that to be the case because I was the friend of his old friend, Doug Sparks).

Bob is now in a retirement center, hampered by significant Alzheimer’s. An aide comes to read him the Bible at night. When she finishes, he closes with the same line, “Now you go home and think about that and get back with me, okay?” Bob doesn’t remember much, but he knows that line by heart. Countless times with countless men through countless years, Bob said the same parting words.

Now you go home and think about that and get back with me, okay?

For momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison while we look not at the things which are seen…. 2 Corinthians 4: 17

 

New Life in Old Places

July 16th, 2012 · H.Rinehart · Blog 2 comments - Tags: , , ,

 

On a recent trip to Spain, I spent a day in Trarragona, the city on the coast where, allegedly, Pontius Pilate was born.

Right beside the sea stand the ruins of an old coliseum that dates back to the earliest days of Christianity. Can you see the large gap in the wall? Through this portal Christians were led to their doom in the center ring, the original “hunger games.” To name the name of Jesus might well mean facing a lion ready to tear you apart. It took four hundred years and an obscure Roman emperor to end this macabre sport.

But there is more to this picture. Look closely at the left hand side and you’ll see the rectangular remnants of two churches from the 6th and 14th century, respectively.

I was staring over the side of this now-tourist attraction when, suddenly, the witness of the ancient church spoke powerfully to me. The very stones that meant evil and defeat and death–these stones–had been dismantled and used to build the Church. On this blood-soaked ground Christians claimed the victory of the risen Christ.

This silent powerful witness of the early church is the story of your life and mine. In the place where you have known defeat, in the greatest wounds of your life…there God builds his new life in you, his “church.”

God disassembles the stones of your demise and creates a little tabernacle where, to the surprise of men and angels, his glory shines through. Who can believe it, really?

Could the man being thrown to the lions in 350 A. D. have pictured a church of worshipping believers on the ground of his execution two hundred years later?

Would you have guessed that a wound of sin and defeat in your own life could become, in some mysterious way, the place where God most pours his life through you?

Behold, I make all things new…

Revelation 21:5

 

Paula