The Phil Files

For several days, the weather forecasters had warned that last night could be a rough one. It seemed fitting that this might be true, since our family’s had a bit of a rough road with medical issues for the last several weeks. Yet last night passed without the typical spring thunderstorm fury we’ve come to expect out here in west Texas. The morning broke bright and clear with a touch of cool in the air and sun streaming down. What a beautiful morning!

As I worked on images and meandered around some Bible verses for my own quiet time this morning, the Lord led me to this verse from Psalm 143:8. It seemed appropriate and it fit an image I was working with for Heartlight graphics:

Let the morning bring me word of your unfailing love, for I have put my trust in you. Show me the way I should go, for to you I lift up my soul.

The image below is much small version of the image I posted to Heartlight’s PowerPoint background Scripture graphics (you can use the search feature to look through thousands of images that can be used in worship or as your computer wallpaper.) This small image gives you the idea, but I hope you can make the prayer your own whether the image interests you or not. Blessings for the weekend and for seeing the way the Lord wants you to go!

You can find three versions of this image, Title (picture above), Text (with the Scripture), and Plain (only the image).

The wise one said it powerfully and clearly:

Whoever oppresses the poor shows contempt for their Maker, but whoever is kind to the needy honors God (Proverbs 14:31 TNIV).

A photo from a recent trip to Africa called to mind this passage. The color, shadowing, and sunlight called me to this message. But this image is more than that for me. I can still remember the smell of that moment … the smell of the fish being cleaned about fifteen feet to the left of this picture, the smell of the morning cooking smoke still hanging in the air, the smell of human waste barely detectable in the breeze, and the aroma of baby spit up smelling like moldy soy. I also remember the emotional smells: a faint aroma of hope celebrating the intervention of Compassion into the lives of a twenty-two year old married HIV positive woman of with two young children and the clean, prepared, and loving tenderness of the project worker who shared scripture and love, as well as her expertise on health and nutrition, with this family a world away from where I live.

Now if I can just live to honor God in this … I so want to be a person of honor, who honors, the LORD who has been so gracious with me, by being a real, tangible, fragrantly pleasing aroma of Christ (2 Corinthians 2:15). To bet a part of culture change, as Randy’s Watercooler Wednesday suggests, I’ve got to keep all the odors as images in my heart and then act personally.

While I like the Scripture graphic (aka PowerPoint background) with the text, of the three related images, I like the one without any text or title most of all. All three — the Bible text, the title, and the plain image — can be downloaded free from Heartlight.org. Check on the latest images, or use the search for color, Bible reference, or key theme. Here’s a small version of the real image:

 

Well, it’s way too late to be posting this. I should have done it much earlier today, but then we all know how plans some days. But since I have to take one of my last anti-malarial pills tonight, I was going to at least enjoy the precious memories of the recent Uganda trip with Compassion International to encourage people to sponsor a child.

God blessed all of us on this trip in so many ways. We had safe travel with few connection difficulties and little or no luggage problems. Health problems were pretty minimal, as well. Remarkably, God took a bunch of very different people and poured us together and blended us into a remarkable cocktail of grace. I personally treasure the folks with whom I spent this time and consider meeting them a great gift.

One of those remarkable people we all met was not a blogger when we arrived in Uganda– but he does now blog regularly and I encourage you to check out his message. In fact, he didn’t travel to Uganda with us. He was waiting for us at the Entebbe airport, and from that first meeting till the end of the trip, he made sure every detail of our time there was well utilized and enhanced. He covered our tardiness, helped make new plans on the fly, and arranged every facet of our time down the most precise detail. (If you have never led an international trip like this with so many different kinds of people, then you will only have to imagine how incredible his work proved to be!)

Dennis is a precious soul, whose soft and mellow voice is deep and rich, but full of passion and emotion. Dennis has a broad smile and a great laugh. Spend some time in conversation with him and you will find out that he has at least three great passions: 1) Jesus; 2) children; and 3) statistics. Dennis’ recent post on malaria as a sniper in Uganda gives you a taste of each of these three interests. He knows Scripture, the country of Uganda, and the issues at stake in the lives of the children we came to see.

One of my favorite pictures of Dennis shows him in the doorway almost portrayed in silhouette, with happy children in the background. I will carry this image of Dennis with me, because I see him as one standing near the door of hope for many children in Uganda. Most of those blessed by his efforts will never know him personally, because he is not going to call attention to himself, but their lives will be forever blessed.

While I know Dennis was sad in many ways to say goodbye to us and put us on a plane back home, I also know he was worn out and needed a break by the time we left. We can’t thank you enough, Dennis, for the great job you and the folks from Compassion in Uganda did. We will not forget you.

I ask all who read this to please pray for Dennis and the Ugandan team. Pray for peace for this country so surrounded by tribal strife on a continent that is dangerously “twitchy” with religious conflict. And most of all, if you have not prayerfully decided to sponsor a child, the greatest blessing you could give to these committed and dedicated servants of children is to prayerfully decide to sponsor a child, today — just click on this link and it will take you to the page to sponsor a child from Uganda.

If you would like to know a little more about Dennis and the children he loves, take a minute or two and enjoy the slide show below.

 

Color, for some of us, is everything. For others, like a good friend of mine I work with, color is a mystery — he is absolutely color blind. I’m not sure how I would make it in such a world. I love the artistic use of b/w photography. This brings out elements and lines and mysteries I don’t see in color. But, to live without color always, would be hard to imagine.

As much as I would like to think that color is an individual, preference sort of thing, colors change us, move us, and touch us in ways that similar and yet uniquely distinct. So there are color palettes. God gave us the rainbow. Artists work within, or intentionally defy, acceptable color palettes. Some of us just goober up the canvas, interior design, website, or whatever medium we defile, because we pay no attention to color palettes.

So to the rescue comes the kuhl kuler website, http://kuler.adobe.com/ that helps us all, skilled and neophyte, get the color thing dialed in … or at least have a clue when we’re out of whack with the rest of eyes on the planet.

Enjoy … play … and use. Be kuhl, and even kuhler!

Being kuhl today is part of Randy Elrod’s WaterCoolerWednesday, join in the kuler celebration!

Sooner or later, the jet lag, emotion, and amazement of the Compassion trip to Uganda had to hit me. When we arrived home on Monday the 19th, I got a good night’s sleep and jumped right back into my routine with Heartlight and Southern Hills. I was playing catch up and scrambled my way through a busy week.

On Sunday morning, however, about ten minutes into my sermon, an image flashed on the screen of some of the children I had been with in Uganda. Then the picture, the little girl we sponsor flashed on the screen. In a very public situation, and without warning, all the emotions, exhaustion, cultural differences, and jet lag hit all at once. I wrestled to gather my emotions, my voice pushed by will through clenched vocal chords tangled by emotions. The carefully prepared outline of a message suddenly scrambled in my head as my thoughts wrestled with the emotions of my heart. By the grace of God, I got through it without a total meltdown. However, some things slipped out in ways that I wouldn’t have said them under different circumstances. Carefully crafted points suddenly became fuzzily entangled in the moment.

When I sat down with ministry staff and several elders months earlier to speak on the topic, “Unto the Least of These,” I had no idea I was going to Uganda to be with children, and especially this one special child, whose smiles would be indelibly written on the canvas of my heart. But I had gotten through the message … in the first service! Somehow, the Holy Spirit was going to have to pick me up and kick me in the backside and help me through another one.

Before I made it home from that Sunday morning, Megan (our daughter) and I picked up Donna at the airport. She was coming in from a speaking engagement in Alabama with her friends, The Coffee Group. They were excited and tired and glad to be home, but feeling good about their weekend with their sisters in Christ from Homewood. I was excited to be with her and we were both glad to get home and be together.

On the way into the house, there on the counter, was a simple vase filled with white roses. They looked great except for one wilted set of leaves. I had sent them to her for Valentines’ Day, along with red and pink roses — two dozen in all. Somehow the white ones had hung on for nearly two weeks and still looked good, but all the other roses with color had wilted. I had culled out the wilted roses, and left behind the white ones. It was a little thing, but something I knew Donna would notice as a simple way to say, “Glad you are home! I love you!”

As I looked at those roses, that’s how I felt. Glad to be home and loved, but drained of color and wilted on the edges.

My blogging buddies — it is unbelievably cool to think of these incredible people as my buddies connected at the heart through the children of Uganda — have been discussing the challenge we have faced the last few days of speaking about this event. We want to share what we feel, but our feelings are too deep to communicate without tears and laughter. We are not sad, we are just deeply changed. For awhile, as we regain our balance, we are wilted roses. But unlike the roses I culled to leave only the nice looking white ones for Donna to see, we will regain our color and lose our wilt. We have experienced something we don’t want to forget and have been touched by children whom we can’t forget.