Ryan's Ramblings

Happy Birthday Mom!

Today is Leona Roberts' 70th birthday!

To her friends and family she is a fun, crazy, beautiful, passionate, hilarious, talented, caring person who is a joy, a hoot, a gift and a blessing to all.

She is a lady filled with lots of love and compassion for the world around her.  Her love is strong for her Lord, her husband, her kids, her grandkids, her cats and her shoes.

Today we celebrate her!

Happy Birthday Mom. 

I thank God for your life, your love and your faith in God.

Happy Birthday Dina!

 

The woman to be admired and praised is the woman who lives in the Fear of God.(Prov. 31:30, MSG)

 

Today is Dina’s birthday. What a blessing she is to her family, friends, students and colleagues. The fruit of her life fills the world around her with beauty, care, fun, comfort and love. She is a gift from God and it is a joy to celebrate her today. 

 

Happy Birthday to the one I love with all my heart. —Ryan

lay blame with care

 

 

“There are some upon this earth of yours,” returned the Spirit, “who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their goings on themselves, not us

 –The Ghost of Christmas Present,                    A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

The Dark Before the Dawn by Andrew Peterson

 

 

 

I just came across this video and had to share it. 

 

Andrew Peterson is one of my favorites.

 

 

 

 

 

 

30 years, together

 

 

 

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. –Annie Dillard

 

 

 

 

My Dearest Dina, 

Look at us in this picture—just a couple of kids starting out on the adventure of life together.  Wow, I loved you lots then, but nothing compared to how much I love you now. We have shared some wonderful adventures together, and some tough ones too.  

The alchemy in it all is the word: together.

What a joy it is to live each day with you; to make memories together, to laugh together, to learn together, to pray together, and to love together.

Today is our 30th wedding anniversary. Thirty years have come and gone all too quickly, but I thank God for every single moment, because I have spent my days with you.

With all my love,

Ryan

73 years!! Praise His Name!

We all have songs that make up the soundtrack of our lives. They remind us of "moments" in time—like that first junior high dance, or the day we left home for college. Each song connects us with a memory, a person, a feeling or an emotion.

The song, "Everybody Ought to Praise His Name" holds a treasured place in the jukebox of my mind and heart.  In the early 90's it was a tune that my Dad would sing and dance to around the house as an expression of his joy and thankfulness unto God.  He would crank up the volume and in a spirit of exuberance and fun he would belt out the chorus,

Everybody ought to praise his name,

Be thankful and praise his name.

Everybody ought to praise his name,

'Cause if a robin can say thank you, you can do it too.

There was a double entendre in my Dad's singing of the song that made it extra special.  My Dad's first name is Robin.  If the red-breasted robin can chirp out a song of thanksgiving and joy to God, how much more can "Robin" Roberts, "a sinner saved by grace," proclaim, from a heart of gratitude, "Praise His Name!"

Today is Robin Roberts' 73rd birthday!

Happy Birthday Dad. 

I thank God for your life, your love, your faith in God and in your example of living with a heart of gratitude. 

You are an inspiration to me, 'cause if a Robin can say thank you,                        I can do it too. 

***

Check out the song below!  

 

A School Yard in Autumn

 

 

A School Yard in Autum

by Ryan M. Roberts

 

Fall blankets the way;

         adorning the path as

                  little feet scuffle off to class.

Beauty abounds;

         in brilliance, color, leaves,

                                            and children.

the dark flames into light

 

The Dark Flames Into Light

by Ryan M. Roberts

 

As the sun rises it transforms

night into day.

The dark

flames into light.

 

So do the mercies of God;

new again,

they color our darkened lives.

 

The result is

beauty,

hope,

life,

and God's glory.

 

captives of hope

This morning my Bible reading calendar led me to the first chapter of Colossians and Paul’s words in Colossians 1:5, jumped out at me,

“. . . the faith and love that spring from the hope . . .”

Wow, faith and love spring from hope?! That is a big deal.

Faith is the way that we engage with the grace of God in our lives (Eph. 2:8). Faith is what the ancients were commended for (Heb. 11:2). Faith is what we live by as God followers. 

And love . . . well, love is the apex of it all.  “God is love” (1 John 4:8). Love is the thing that endures beyond all else, “the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor. 13). 

But where do faith and love come from?  They spring from hope!

This thought reminded me of the first sentence in John Eldredge’s new book,   All Things New: Heaven, Earth, and the Restoration of Everything You Love , where he says,

“We could sure use some hope right now.” 

Yes, we sure could. The fake news pales in comparison to the pain and dismay of the real news that surrounds us and encroaches upon our real lives.

The enemy’s strategy to defeat us is to leave us bereft of faith and unaware of love. The way this is done is by occluding and stealing our hope—imprisoning us in hopelessness.

Where is the hope?

Hope resides in nothing other than the Lord Jesus Christ and in his promises. The pain, sadness, and death all around us are not the end of the story, for we are in the midst of God’s larger story of redemption. As we move through the pages of our lives we might come to the end of a chapter, a difficult chapter, and feel hopeless, but we must remember that it is not the end of the book.

God entered the story of our lives and responded to our cries for hope with the cross of Christ and the empty tomb. God’s story includes the restoration of all things—where the things that are worn and tattered, and seemingly destroyed, are made new.

God has the final word and that word is, “Behold, I am making all things new.” (Rev. 21:5) 

I have this quote written in my Bible next to Col. 1:5,

Hope is the ability to hear the music of the future;

faith is the courage to dance to it today. –Peter Kuzmic

I love the idea of dancing, with courage, even in the minefields of today.

May we be captives of hope.

the only real thing

On October 13, the movie, “Goodbye Christoper Robin” opens in the United States and I can’t wait to see it. It looks to be, in-part, a bit of backstory to the books, Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner. I love the tender, innocent wisdom of Pooh and I delight in the unique and colorful personalities of his many friends that reside in the Hundred Acre Wood.

The author, A.A. Milne is the creator of Winnie-the-Pooh and his stories were written for and about his son, Christopher Robin. The story of Winnie-the-Pooh is tinder for the imagination, and in the early 1900’s served both as a respite, and a point of hope, to a humanity ravaged by World War I.

Sometimes the real world occludes our vision of the things that matter most in life. We need stories like Winnie-the-Pooh to give flight to our imagination, allowing us to rise above the milieu and see, by means of make-believe, those things that are most real, like friendship, hope, love and Truth.

In 1996, the London Times reported that Christopher Milne (the real Christopher Robin) had died at the age of 75.  In response to that news, the poet, Czeslaw Milosz wrote, in the voice of Winnie-the-Pooh, the following anecdote on youth and age, time and eternity.

***

Christopher Robin¹

by Czeslaw Milosz

I must think suddenly of matters too difficult for a bear of little brain. I have never asked myself what lies beyond the place where we live, I and Rabbit, Piglet and Eeyore, with our friend Christopher Robin. That is, we continued to live here, and nothing changed, and I just ate my little something. Only Christopher Robin left for a moment.

Owl says that immediately beyond our garden Time begins, and that it is an awfully deep well. If you fall in it, you go down and down, very quickly, and no one knows what happens to you next. I was a bit worried about Christopher Robin falling in, but he came back and then I asked him about the well.

“Old bear,” he answered. “I was in it and I was falling and I wore trousers down to the ground, I had a grey beard, and then I died. It was probably just a dream, it was quite unreal. The only real thing was you, old bear, and our shared fun. Now I won’t go anywhere, even if I’m called in for an afternoon snack.”

***

I love the exchange that Milosz created between Christopher Robin and the “silly old bear.” As a child I loved the stories of Winnie the Pooh—where toys were fast friends and the backyard was a world of adventure—limited only by my imagination. To me, Milosz’s anecdote fits; giving voice to an unexplored realm in A.A. Milne’s beautiful story, where each of us are one or more of the characters in the garden.

The anecdote begins with Pooh describing the garden where he and his friends live. It is a place of little or no change, where all abide happily together. Pooh has no idea what lies beyond the garden, nor does he care. Nothing seems to change; except for the fact that he says, “Only Christopher Robin left for a moment.” 

Pooh knows that his friend, Christopher Robin, went somewhere. Wise old Owl says that “somewhere” is beyond the garden, where Time begins, and he describes this unknown place as an “awfully deep well.” Pooh lives beyond Time and has no idea that Christopher Robin’s “moment” is the deep well of a lifetime (75 years), where he left the garden and entered the world of adulthood—with all of its adventure, pain, regret, opportunity, loss, mishap, gain, anger, joy, hope and love.

Currently, I am surprised to find that I am a bit like Christopher Robin was in his “moment.” I am beyond the garden of childhood innocence and unchecked imagination, and Time (note the capital “T”) is having its way with me.  I, in my long trousers and graying whiskers, am free falling headlong into the unknown deep.

Yet, as I fall, I find that I am even more like Pooh, a “bear of little brain.” But it is not because I am faced with things that I don’t understand or care about. Rather, it is because I forget to live into and appreciate the things that I already know. I take for granted the fact that each day, and the moments and people that inhabit them, are precious gifts.

So here I am in the midst of my “moment.” and it all seems very real to me, but I am reminded that it isn’t. It is quite unreal. It is at this point where beyond make-believe my imagination leads me to the only real thing—the Truth.  There is something beyond this vapor of a life we live.  What began in a garden long ago ended victoriously on a cross and all of our “moments” were subsumed in the depths of an empty tomb.

The author of this truest of anecdotes is Jesus. In Him alone is the genuine place of love, forgiveness, relationship and “shared fun.” In Jesus Christ is found the “only real thing,” a place where Time is no more; where there are no more tears, no more regrets, no more separation and no more goodbyes—just life together, in all of its fullness, forever. A place where we can say along with Christopher Robin, “I won’t go anywhere, even if I’m called in for an afternoon snack.”

¹ Milosz, Czeslaw. New and Collected Poems (1931-2001), 2003, pg. 656.