A few weeks ago I was preparing for a wedding in my inner study and Chuk took this picture. It seemed to capture the quiet of the place. Thanks for the pic, Chuk.
Saturday Night Routine
When I was ten I dressed like Opie Taylor. I wore Levis, basketball shoes, a red felt cap, and tee-shirts with stripes. On fall Saturdays when I was growing up there were chores in the morning, listening to football banter on the radio. Usually I helped (watched) Dad work on the car or prep the house for winter. We installed storm windows, clean gutters, made trips to the dump, puttered about the garage and raked leaves. Dad always washed the car on Saturday. In the afternoon we would go in town to make hospital calls and come home to listen to football on the radio or sometimes watch the game on TV.
The evening was different, though. At about 6:00 p.m. things began to change. The house began to quiet. The TV was turned off. Shoes were shined for church. Clothes were prepared. Dad would quietly study his sermon. Mom would prepare for her class or practice her music. We would be sent to our room to do our “quarterlies.” (our Sunday School books). The little brothers (now both pastors here in Michigan) were given their baths. Our offering was set aside. That’s the way it was growing up for me.
I hope you have a routine of preparation for worship. A routine of preparation is a part of your worship. It is a way to show honor to God and remind your whole family of your devotion to Him and their dependance on Him. People who take corporate worship seriously and honor God are honored by God and blessed by God. That’s the way it is. I’ve seen it for years. God honors those who honor him. (1 Samuel 2:30).
Under the Mercy;
Ken Pierpont
Granville Cottage
October 12, 2013
Two Pastors
Pastor Criag Clapper (Google him–interesting guy)
It’s crisp and it’s clear this morning. It’s cool and colorful. It’s the kind of morning you think about when deep into the hot and humid swelter of summer you imagine an autumn day.
I’m nursing a coffee and enjoying some conversation at Starbucks. I’m doing some writing and getting ready for a long string of meetings with people today. Many of the local pastors cycle through here and you get a unique mix of news, opinion and ecclesiastical banter unavailable anywhere else. Chuk is the early-morning shift manager here and has that special gift of making wherever he is feel like home. I have a coffee-shop story to tell you today.
True story. Two pastors frequented a coffee house. One of them studied with the kind of ear-protection you would wear if you were operating a jackhammer or industrial lawn mower–big, orange headphones. He buried himself in his study, a large study Bible and his sermon preparation. He didn’t take off the headphones, even when he went to the men’s room. He was orthodox, Bible-believing, sound in faith, truth-teaching and out of touch with the world around him.
The other pastor knew everyone’s name. He would breeze in every day with a smile on his face and a kind word for everyone. He genuinely cared about people. At Christmas time he would come in for his regular coffee and drop a one hundred dollar bill in the tip jar.
I want the be like the second pastor. Around Jesus were men and women with every imaginable need and he didn’t walk through his world with headphones on.
Ken Pierpont
Granville Cottage
Riverview, Michigan
October 9, 2013
Happy Pictures of Hannah and Dale – Mackinac Island
Hannah and Dale (our daughter and son-in-law) enjoyed a Pure Michigan Honeymoon along the West Coast of Michigan. They ended their week on Mackinac Island and asked us to join them and take some photos. It was a beautiful day. Lois took scores of pictures. I thought you might want to see the photos, so here they are. If you explore Lois’s site you can see the wedding photos, too. Photographic evidence of the kind favor of our God.
Here are some amazing pictures of a very happy day.
Laughing with a Lump in My Throat
This week October comes to Michigan. She is always a welcome guest. She never over-stays her welcome. I worked cleaning and organizing the garage. Saturday was one of those days you look forward to all year. I love having organized the garage. To some men the garage is their domain. If pressed I would have to say the study is my domain, maybe the pulpit is my domain. Maybe the family-room is my domain and my recliner is my throne. The garage to me is a necessary evil. I’m not one of those guys with a carpeted garage. I don’t have a peg-board on the wall with tool silhouettes painted on it. I don’t putter out there for hours on end. To me the garage is a very utilitarian place where you store things that really can’t go anywhere else. It’s where you put things that smell of gas and oil and things you don’t need very often. The garage is where you archive things that you really can’t bring yourself to throw away.
I’ve been thinking about cleaning the garage since last winter. “When the snow melts and it’s warm outside I will get out there,” I said to myself. Well, it was a very warm spring and the garage went from cold to hot. The cold froze my motivation and the heat melted it. I avoided the garage. A few weeks ago, it cooled down a bit and to silence my accusing conscience I went out and emptied the garage into the driveway. I started to organize when the phone rang. I was needed at the hospital. I quickly put everything back into the garage for another day–maybe another year. But on Saturday, oh, Saturday the moon and planets all lined up on Saturday and I took my radio out to the garage, stripped down to a tee-shirt, and mounted a full frontal assault on the garage.
It was a crisp fall morning. I’d had my coffee and a pumpkin spice donut. There was football chatter on the radio. For a few autumn saturday mornings of the year I love to hear football chatter on the radio. I cleaned and swept and organized and moved things around and re-packaged things. I explored boxes that had not been opened for a decade or more.
Then I found a box in a box. I opened it. Pictures, a ten-year old box of pictures. When you are raising children a lot changes in ten years. I found a chair and sat down. For the next hour a turned back the pages of our life ten years, snapping pictures of pictures with my cell phone, remembering and laughing with a lump in my throat.
There was a picture of our whole family around a huge table in a restaurant. The picture was taken when all the children were still at home. There they were. All eight of them. Four sons. Four daughters. We went everywhere we went together in one car. Looking at that wonderful old picture and I had two significant thoughts:
The first thought was, “Wow, that’s a lot of kids. How on earth did we ever feed, clothe, and care for so many children?” The picture was taken in the Ohio Amish country. When we ate out during those years it was usually at Little Caesars. We would get a couple pizzas and demand that every bit of crust was eaten before they got another piece. Across the street at Woosley’s the sold canned pop for a quarter. If we were on the road we would go to Meijer and get a two-liter of pop and share it. We could not afford to go to a sit-down restaurant to eat.
But all those years God provided. God provided though the church and our diligent labor in it, gathering people who shared with us. God provided through Lois’s hard and continual work. She made things for we to sell. She had all the children at home with her all day, but still she was continually making things. God provided by giving me extra work, driving the Amish, assembling playgrounds with the boys, or peddling Lois’ dolls or crafts. For a season he gave me just the job I needed to supplement my income working one day a week taking insurance claims. God provided through the gifts of people. People gave us gifts of money or clothing or food. They paid for special opportunities for us or for the children. They built nice parsonages for us to live in that we didn’t have to pay for. Friends would share a load of wood or a cut of meet or a basket of garden tomatoes or tickets to a concert or an afternoon on their boat or a weekend at their cottage.
I spoke at camps and God provided opportunities for the family to enjoy Michigan’s beautiful North Country that way. Sometimes God provided through answered prayer by reducing our expenses. We went years without having to go to the doctor or hospital—years without a single doctor visit. He provided dental care. We paid to get the kid’s teeth fixed, God provided jobs so the kids could pay to keep them strait. For years we had a wonderful old farmhouse on a dead-end road with free heat for only 400 dollars a month. We were starting a church and we had so little, but the memories and experiences in that old farmhouse are so precious to me today that they make me ache with gratitude. God has been so good. I keep a little snapshot of that house in front of me every day to remind me of how God provided that house as a direct answer to the prayer of a ten-year-old boy.
Usually we ate inexpensive casseroles and saved money wherever we could. So to go to a restaurant… This was an occasion. A rare occasion. A special day. This day we were all sitting around the table the Das Dutch Essenhaus… in Walnut Creek in Holmes Country, Ohio. I quickly calculated the cost of that single meal and realized that I was looking at a picture of a significant and expensive meal… a big event. Year after year, week after week, morning by morning God has provided. Isn’t He wonderful?
But there was another thought that came to me as I looked at that photo. Will every one of those children be around the table of fellowship when Heaven and Earth are new? I have deep in my heart a great longing to see each of these children, every one of them, around the table of fellowship with the Lord in Heaven one day. I want each of them to live with heaven on their mind all the time and I want each of them to be there when they die. I can’t imagine an empty place at that table. It is too painful to conceive.
Will you be at that table, or will there be an empty chair? Will those you love be there?
Ken Pierpont
Granville Cottage
Riverview, Michigan
September 30, 2013
Pleasures Forevermore
When I was a boy I discovered that if I would swing and lean back and then lean forward quickly on the descent, I would have a feeling of weightlessness. At the time I considered it a wonderful feeling of euphoria. I tried to show others how to experience the unusual feeling of sudden weightlessness.
I would not know for years that there were unspeakably greater pleasures that God had designed for me to experience later. One of those pleasures was the pleasure of marital intimacy. Wouldn’t it have been foolish for me to say that the pleasure of a little boy on the playground is all the pleasure I ever want or need to experience, when God designed other pleasures to wonderful to adequately describe? It would. And it would be equally foolish to doubt that there are pleasures forevermore that go far beyond even the wonderful pleasure of marital intimacy.
How could heaven be blissful, more wonderful than earth, and yet without marriage and marital relations?
The best marriages include trouble. On this fallen earth all human relationships are troubled. Not so in heaven. Even in the very best of marriages there is longing for things that are not and will never be. Not so in heaven. Even your relationship with your believing spouse is troubled by the effects of the fall. If I started to give examples you would all laugh. Some of you would cry. Those incompatibilities will be removed and replaced with heavenly love. There are pleasures for us greater than we have every experienced and greater than we can imagine.
At his right hand are pleasures forevermore. (Psalm 16)
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