Put Yourself in the Place of Blessing (Ruth 2:1-23)
Bethel Church | Jackson, Michigan
Ken Pierpont | Lead Pastor
December 4, 2022 AM
Sunshine on Bittersweet
Over five years ago we drove out this way to show our son @wespierpont and his wife @dylanmariepierpont the place we hoped soon to own. I always name things I love. I was thrilled when I saw a cluster of Bittersweet growing here. I think it was Dylan who suggested the name should have Bittersweet in it.
Some of the circumstances of our life at the time were exceedingly bitter involving abuse, betrayal, and injustice. Our family was in deep pain, but God led us to @betheljxn and to our home on a quiet back road in the rolling countryside of Jackson County.
The some Bittersweet caught my eye on my walk today bright in the sunshine on a winter morning and I realized the sweet have overpowered the bitter in every way.
Last weekend was a wonderful weekend at Bethel Church. I large group of men met for a hearty breakfast of eggs and cheese and sausage and potatoes in a burrito covered with sausage gravy, coffee, fruit, and muffins. Later an even larger group of ladies met for a Christmas Brunch. Sunday the children played instruments and sang Christmas songs. The adults joined in. I preached an Advent message from the book of Ruth. Last night Lois and I closed the day having dinner with friends around a big round table talking and laughing and we drove home in the moonlight.
There was bright moonlight last night, but there really is sunshine on Bittersweet this morning.
Bittersweet Farm
December 5, 2022
Keeper of the Story | Bittersweet Farm Journal | December 3, 2022
Rambling Thoughts
A few minutes ago I stepped out onto the east porch just to check the weather for myself. I can always check the weather on the internet but there is something about just stepping out on the porch and hearing the wind in the trees and seeing the moonlight come and go as clouds blow past.
If you stand out in the night long enough, your eyes will adjust to the darkness and you begin to see things. A leaf tumbles across the grass. A car drones past on the road. An owl calls from the wood, coyotes from somewhere out north of the far north field—from the woods divided by the old railroad right-of-way turned bike trail.
In the morning the Bethel men will gather in the Fellowship Hall for breakfast, prayer, and encouraging words. I’ll sleep soon, but not too soon. I like to ring every last drop out of every day.
I’m writing up on the corner of my room tonight and playing a YouTube video behind my writing software—the audio playing into my headphones. It’s the sound of a crackling fire. Oddly, I feel warmer when I listen to it. It’s peaceful like living in the county.
Before we moved here we lived for five years in a city and eleven years in a crowded suburb. It was a mercy to move into our peaceful country home after a time of dark betrayal, abuse, injustice, and family pain. God was in it, all the ugliness of it and darkness, led us to a new and better place and new friends. We started a whole new life in this little farmhouse on a pleasant back road a few miles from a quiet village. We live in range of deer and wild turkeys, geese and cranes overhead, coyotes and owls calling in the night, and the sound of trains in the distance and planes far overhead going who-knows-were.
We have all we need and more. We have a good church, good friends, a quiet, good life. Only God could have arranged it. It is not something I could have fully imagined or personally arranged.
A Moral Victory
I won a moral victory today alone in our little home. Lois worked and I enjoyed the luxury of day mostly alone at home. I spent a chunk of my day trying to repair my coffee grinder. After taking it apart and putting it back together a couple times and pouring over the paperwork online and watching YouTube videos about it and reading about it on discussion threads, I feel like a master coffee grinder repairman. I was so thrilled when it worked. The dark, fragrant beans originally from South America, roasted in Oregon, shipped to me as a gift, began to growl, ground evenly down into the hopper. I heated some water immediately, took a couple tablespoons of the precious powder and made a generous mug of pour-over coffee. After all my labor and frustration, at last I carried it to my desk for comfort and inspiration.
I went for a thoughtful walk and when I got home a brewed another cup returning to my desk to work on my message for the second Sunday in Advent.
I’m not particularly handy or experienced at repairing things so when I am able to successfully repair something that is valuable to me it gives me inordinate pleasure. Today I formed a special bond with my coffee grinder and if I ever need to take it apart and replace something I have confidence, tools, and now even a bit of experience. I only left the farm today for a few minutes to make the trip to the village hardware to get the little tool needed to disassemble and reassemble my valuable appliance. It was only seventeen months old and too young to die.
November has passed. High wind swept through a couple days ago and the lawn looks as if someone passed over the grass with a giant vacuum. The old place has an especially well-groomed appearance. We await the inevitable snows and keep reminding ourselves that there is no such thing as bad weather, just wrong clothing. We are about to test that theory. I’m 18 days into a goal of walking right through the winter into spring–150 days–six days a week. I will walk until the leaves return in mid-May. The roads will be clear and the temperature will rise and I will ride the bikes again.
On my walk today I noticed coolant stains on the road, broken glass, bits of trim, and other car fragments from a deer/auto collision. The auto was a van that belonged to a friend of mine and a Bethel member. He was passing Bittersweet Farm just after dusk last night and a buck sprang into his path from out of the darkness. Neither the deer nor the car survived. My friend is fine, but now he is going to have to replace his car. That’s trouble he didn’t need. He has had his share of difficulty in the last few years. But after a while it will be a story to tell and the pain of his misfortune will be gone.
So Much of Life is Stories.
Have you ever noticed how much of life is storytelling? On Sunday I usually tell a Bible story or I tell the backstory behind a passage of scripture. I usually illustrate and apply the truth using stories. Through the week I listen to the stories of others. At Baptism I tell the story of how someone came to follow Jesus or I help them to see how to tell their own story.
Evangelism is telling the story of the good news. Counseling is listening to the stories of others. At communion we tell the story of Jesus death. Business meetings are opportunities to tell the church stories of why what we give and how conduct business and how care for the church matter to all of us.
Across the nation and around the world men meet at restaurants or sit around the barber shops and tell stories. Veterans sometimes tell war stories. Athletes relive their exploits. Hunters love to describe their hunt in minute detail. Women swap birth stories. When the kids get home from school and the parents get home from work stories are exchanged.
Some people are very aware that they telling a story and others who relate what happened without being conscious that they are storytelling but conscious or not we are all storytellers.
The news is stories. The color commentator at a sporting event is telling the stories behind the players and teams. Movies are stories on film. Some are fiction, some are fact, and most are a curious mixture of both. The holy hour at summer camp is the time in the evening when everything grows quiet and the storyteller is invited to speak before a circle or a chapel or a cabin of campers silenced in wonder. Sometimes the stories are exchanged out under the open sky to the music of a sputtering fire.
I’m always alert to stories. I love them and I use them. You do too. Even if you don’t realize that you do. We are all story lovers and and storytellers by our very God-given nature.
Whenever I meet someone I ask myself, “What is their story? What is the story of what made them who they are?” And I ask myself, “Do they know the story of what God has done for them and have they believed? And “How will the story end for them?”
I often ask myself, “Am I living a story worth telling?”
Now maybe you understand why I like to call myself, “The keeper of the story…”
Old storytellers sometimes end their story by saying, “Well, that’s my story and now it’s yours…”
Stories are to keep and to give away at the same time.
Bittersweet Farm
December 2, 2022
Between Moab and Bethlehem (Video)
Between Moab and Bethlehem (Ruth 1:1-22)
Bethel Church | Jackson, Michigan
Ken Pierpont | Lead Pastor
November 27, 2022 AM
Walking in Snow | Bittersweet Farm Journal | November 21, 2022
It’s Monday as I write, my day off. We are busy making ready for family to visit for Thanksgiving. The grandchildren are mostly small and filled with wonder and eagerness especially when they come out to Bittersweet Farm on the holidays. The teens will be happy that for the first time in five years we now have high-speed wifi. Doesn’t that just warm your heart? I have to admit. I love to live on the backside of nowhere… with high speed wifi.
In our beautiful part of the world, the leaves are gone and they will not appear again for 25 weeks–mid-May of next year. Until then I am determined to get outdoors every one of those 170 days. 150 of those days, six out of seven of them, Lord willing, I will walk at least 30 minutes. I will document my walks with photos and brief journal entries so all my cyber-friends can cheer me on like friends gathered along the racecourse. On most of my walks I will get up in the morning, dress for the weather, and walk fifteen minutes away from our house. Then I will turn and come back. On other occasions I will drive to special places to walk in villages, towns, parks, and on trails.
Walking after a fresh snowfall shows you how many critters share your woods and fields. Those who walk leave their tracks and this morning in the wind and winter sun I left my tracks among them. As often as the snow falls until the leaves return I will continue. Everything I see was created by God and I, too am one of his creatures. By his good grace and through his Son, our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, I am one of his children.
I will pray for occasional thaws when I can ride one of my bikes. In early February I hope to enjoy the tubing run up at Camp Barakel, maybe even cross-country ski and skate and walk across the icy lake. Maybe the sky will be clear and I can take a night walk. Out under the winter sky among his creation every day until spring returns I will remind myself that I am his one of his creatures–and thank him that I am his child.
“Know that the LORD, he is God!
It is he who made us, and we are his;
we are his people,
and the sheep of his pasture.”
(Psalm 100:3, ESV)
Blessed Thanksgiving to each of you. Thanks for reading. It’s nice to know you are out there.
Bittersweet Farm I Jackson County, Michigan I November 21, 2022
The Generations | Bittersweet Farm Journal | November 8, 2022
Welcome Grey November
Grey November is upon us out on Bittersweet tonight, yet is has its own beauty. This week I spent a few delightful hours out in the indian summer sun managing leaves. Every year my skill increases and I refine my technique. Every season I am better able to read the direction of the wind and mix may means of blowing or raking or mulching the leaves I so looked forward to seeing in mid-May. They shaded the farm through the long sunny days of summer and died in a blaze of colorful glory then wafted down like young dancers to the earth where they turned brown in the sun. Now they skitter along the ground at the will of the wind.
As I stand out in the yard and rake them onto the tarp my heart is filled with thanks for them and “…for the beauty of the earth and the glory of the skies…” A Pileated Woodpecker surprises me with a brief visit. Cars pass. The leaves swirl in a vortex of color behind. Geese, Sandhill Cranes, and murmurations of dark birds I can’t identify fly over Bittersweet.
My chores around Bittersweet are simple. I clear the flowerbeds. I fill the bird-feeders. I tidy the Carriage House (I’m never done with that). I store summer things away. I check football scores on my phone and take occasional calls from parishioners. I gather windfall branches and putter with my equipment and make excuses to stay out under the open sky as long as I can. Out there my puttering seems like prayer. My heart is deeply thankful.
This week the moon rose full into the purple twilight behind dark, slender branches blown bare of leaves by an unrelenting wind. Lois was visiting Daniel and his little family in the panhandle of Florida of all places and visiting the white beaches in 80-degree weather. I drove to dinner out on Clark Lake with friends. We talked and kept a wary eye out for deer and marveled at the beauty of the moonrise over the lake.
A few years ago a read a biography of the great Baptist missionary Adoniram Judson. I wrote a little something about his growing concern for the faithfulness of the generations to come after him…
The Generations
Reflections on generational faithfulness from reading the life of Adoniram Judson.
The nearer we get to the heart of God the more we have a vision within for multi-generational faithfulness. This is true of the Church. When you see the Church grow cold and apostate you will notice that they speak little and care less of the generations to follow. We are more concerned with our happiness and prosperity than we are with our holiness and posterity. We are more concerned with our own comforts than we are with the world and the church our sons and daughters, grandchildren and great-grandchildren will inherit. We insist on our own preferences without regard to the effect such selfishness has on the generations that will follow us.
When the Spirit brings revival, though, things are different. When men and women of God grow close to the heart of God they begin to consider and cherish God’s values, including an obsession with generations of faithfulness to God. When you read Christian biography you see this clearly.
I discovered a beautiful example of this in the biography of the great Baptist missionary Adoniram Judson. His story was powerfully written by his son Edward Judson in 1883. Five hundred and thirty pages in, in the record of the final weeks of his life, the great missionary experienced an awakening, a renewal of spirit. As his physical strength ebbed away his inner man was being renewed with spiritual vitality. The effect of that renewal was to stir up his heart for the generations to follow for the glory of God.
These observations on the final days of his life were written by his wife in a letter to his sister. Notice how he was taken more and more with Christ and with things eternal:
“There was something exceedingly beautiful in the decline of your brother’s life—more beautiful than I can describe though the impression will remain with me as a sacred legacy until I go to meet him where sun shall never set, and life shall never end. He had been, from my first acquaintance with him, an uncommonly spiritual Christian, exhibiting his richest graces in the unguarded intercourse of private life, but during his last year it seemed as though the light of the world on which he was entering had been sent to brighten his upward pathway. Every subject on which we conversed, every book we read, every incident that occurred, whether trivial or important, had a tendency to suggest some peculiarly spiritual train of thought, till it seemed to me that, more than ever before, ‘Christ was all his theme.’ Something of the same nature was also noted in his preaching… He was in the habit… of studying his subject for the Sabbath, audibly, and in my presence, at which time he was frequently so much affected as to weep, and sometime so overwhelmed with the vastness of his conceptions as to be obliged to abandon his theme and choose another. My own illness at the commencement of the year had brought eternity very near to us, and rendered death, the grave, and the bright heaven beyond it, familiar subjects of conversation.
When he was touched by God he had a renewed unction in the exercise of his gifts and he had a vision of a long unbroken line of his generations gathered around the throne of Jesus.
“I believe he has sometimes been thought eloquent, both in conversation and in the sacred desk; but the fervid, burning eloquence, the deep pathos, the touching tenderness, the elevation of thought, and intense beauty of expression, which characterized those private teachings, were not only beyond what I had ever heard before, but such as I felt sure arrested his own attention, and surprised even himself. About this time he began to find unusual satisfaction and enjoyment in his private devotions, and seemed to have new objects of interest continually rising in his mind, each of which in turn became special subjects of prayer. Among these, one of the most prominent was the conversion of his posterity. He remarked that he felt impressed with the duty of praying for their children and their children’s children down to the latest generation. He also prayed most fervently that his impressions on this particular subject might be transferred to his sons an daughters, and thence to their offspring, so that he should ultimately meet a long, unbroken line of descendants before the throne of God, where all might join together in ascribing everlasting praises to their Redeemer.”
When a man walks with God and nears the throne of God he acquires the heart of God and the heart of God is for a godly posterity. Men and women of God are concerned, burdened with godly generations. They are not content to simply survive the entrapments of this present world and make it through safe to heaven as the world crumbles behind them. They want to build bridges of faith for those who follow them on the path. They want to plant trees of fidelity to truth so their generations can live in the shade and eat the fruit of them.
“O God, thou hast taught me from my youth: and hitherto have I declared thy wondrous works. Now also when I am old and gray-headed, O God, forsake me not until I have shewed thy strength unto this generation, and thy power to everyone that is to come.” (Psalm 71:17-18)
Prayer: “God of Eternity and of all the generations to come in all the earth, be honored and glorified by all people for all time. Be exalted in the ages to come and today give us an eternal vision to see into the future with the eyes of faith. Stir up in us a spirit of intercession for the nations around us and the generations ahead of us. May we live and speak and work and pray and serve with that eternal impulse always beating within us. For Jesus’ sake, for Thine is the Kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. -Amen.”
Bittersweet Farm
November 8, 2022
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