REVELATION: UNTIL HE MAKES IT ALL BETTER

"Hold on a minute!" I shouted to my friend Aino as she was about to leave; "is it OK to have Kinya take a pic of us before you go?" I ran back into the bedroom to get my camera and set the flash, handing it to my husband, rushing to the front door where my friend was. "Kinya, would you get pics of us, but first check the flash..."

OOPS! And here we are again, ready this time!

Think I should've just posted the first photo? No; I should've just kept taking it until I was satisfied, right?

That's something I remember Itsuko Shimabukuro, one of the ladies in our church mentioned, as having been taught as the way to read the Word. Sometimes, we can read scripture and have no idea what it's saying. Tell God you can't understand and go back and read it again, asking the Holy Spirit for help, she was told. Sometimes it's just picking up something you missed the first time so you can "see the light." But if even reading it twice doesn't help, pray you still don't get it, and read it again, repeating the same thing expectantly until God shows you. "He will, and then it will be so clear and you will see it has been sitting there all along;" she'd said. That sounded like she'd experienced it, so I decided to do it too.

One of the things Aino and I talked about was recent readings in Revelation. Yeah, I know. It's a rather scary and difficult book, so we'd pretty much avoided looking at it. But it's like Itsuko said in the above paragraph. In a perusal reading, Revelation may look that way. But I've found God can speak through it until it feels like Psalms sometimes! May I share an excerpt from my journal again?

"having a golden censer; . . . that he should offer it with the prayers of all saints on the golden altar " (Rev. 8:3)

As I mentioned to my friend the other day, God uses gold to show incorruptible, permanent substance; He was saying: YOUR prayers are HEARD and ARE IMPORTANT, haven't been shelved to be forgotten. The petitions are significant, and believe Me, I will do something about them.

I'm leaving my journal and getting back to my blog post again. I'm thinking before, the book of Revelation seemed to be a textbook of Bible prophecy of end times with date lines and symbolism and complicated things to learn and memorize. . . I thought it was a book for smart people who studied the Bible. But this time going through the book, I'm not studying it. (After all, I'm not going to be quizzed, graded for my acquisition of knowledge of its content, am I?) This time around, I've decided to try to listen to the Father as He leans over His Creation and says, "Just Wait a little longer, until I make it all better."

P.S: (I found a little bonus from my Heavenly Daddy. I feel he understood from eternity past how many humans wouldn't be able to wait for Revelation 21:4 to read, "God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes", so He put it in chapter 7:17 "God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes." We have a tender God Who longs for us to keep hoping!)