“ASK, and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and it will be opened to you. For everyone who ASKS receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. Or what man is there among you who, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or it he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him!” Matt. 7:7-11

“Again, I say to you that if two of you agree on earth concerning anything that they ask, it will be done for them by My Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there in the midst of them.” Matt. 18:19,20

“Therefore I say to you, whatever things you ask when you pray, believe that you receive them and you will have them. And whenever you stand praying, if you have anything against anyone, forgive him, that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses.” Mark 11:24,25

“Whatever you ask in My name, that I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask anything in My name, I will do it. “ John 14:13,14

“If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, you will ask what you desire, and it shall be done for you. By this My Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit” John 15:7,8

“Most assuredly, I say to you, whatever you ask the Father in My name He will give you...Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full.” John 16:23,24

“....Ask that you may be filled with the knowledge of His will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding.” Col. 1:9

“If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all liberally and without reproach, and it will be given to him.” James 1:5

“But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for he who doubts is like a wave of the sea driven and tossed by the wind.” James 1:6

“Yet you do not have because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive because you ask amiss, that you may spend it on your pleasures.” James 4:2,3

“Whatever we ask we receive from Him, because we keep His commandments and do those things that are pleasing in His sight.”
1 John 3:22

How many times does He have to repeat Himself? When are we going to learn?

A few years ago as I was praying the Lord began impressing on me to ask Him for more than I was. I told Him that I wasn’t comfortable asking Him for anything. I told Him that I felt like I had everything that I ‘needed’ and that He had already given me so much that I didn’t want to ask Him for more. I'm just comfortable worshipping You God, I'll just do that!

Looking back, I’m not sure, but I have this sense, that it was kind of a perverted pride that was holding me back. All I know is that once I started questioning what He was trying to tell me He didn’t change His words, not one little bit. He just kept repeating His Word from James 4:2, “You have not because you ask not”. That’s all He kept telling me. So, I began to seek Him on this matter and it has changed my life. My material and financial life, as well as my spiritual life.

I am convinced now that I can see it in hindsight, that there was some kind of ‘false humility’ that was causing me to stumble. It is easy to look at others, whether they have more or less than you do, in material wealth, intellectual development, physical ability, and judge yourself by that. I live a very standard, middle class life. I am average in all uses of the word. Even my parents, who had a very comfortable life, lived frugally in some ways because of the Great Depression that they both lived through when they were children. I always felt that God had provided adequately for me and I felt like to ask for more than that was somehow to be ungrateful for His blessings. My middle class lifestyle didn’t always afford me everything I wanted, and sometimes I didn’t even feel like I could spend money on something I needed but I still felt that we were “okay”. I always felt like I was capable in all ways but not extraordinary in any.

As parents, mine gave us what they felt was important, private schools, college, braces, good shoes, etc. but we did not live half as greedily as people today do. Even some of the foster kids that come to live with us came expecting to eat steak, pork chops and roast beef everyday because that is what they ate at home with their mom who got food stamps. Well, that must be nice.

A young man, who was dating a former foster child of mine, came to dinner at our house one night with her a couple of years ago because she wanted him to meet us. He seemed very nice. I did not judge him on the fact that he is functionally illiterate and could not fill out his own applications for work and made her do all his writing for him. I did not judge him that he was unemployed and had a habit of mooching...oh, I mean, living off of women, collecting welfare and doing nothing about it. I did not judge him on his ‘gangsta’ appearance and occasional cursing in front of my children. I did not judge him that he has created five children with three different women in the past ten years.

Yet, when I served dinner and put a dish of Kraft Mayonnaise on the table, he sniffed his nose at it, told me that he could not eat that, and ordered his girlfriend (my foster daughter) to go down to the local grocery store and use her food stamps to get him some Hellmans.

Okay, now, THAT'S the kind of ungratefulness that I'm talking about.

Anybody can disagree with me all they want but I have been in foster care for over twenty years and I have had it UP TO HERE with people who think that they are entitled to what those of us working folk can’t afford. Ask Whispered Promise, who with her husband, owns a grocery store, if I am wrong. I am not wrong. I'm not saying I can't afford Hellmans if I want to but I also know that if I’m careful with the grocery money that my husband might be able to retire someday and not have to worry about if there is enough Social Security to go around which there probably won't because we have slaughtered half of our future workers of this generation, but that's off the subject. It’s called wisdom. It’s not about whether you got exactly what you wanted at the exact moment you wanted it, it's about looking ahead and planning for the future.

There is a spirit of ‘entitlement’ that has come upon a generation of people and it is causing serious ungratefulness. I work very hard to breed gratefulness into my children. I am grateful for what I have... for what God has given me. I taught my children, from a young age, that if they are at someone else’s house and they need something to drink they may ask for water. Nothing else. If juice or milk is offered that is fine, but they may not snub their nose at water and insist on Kool-aid, as I have had some neighborhood children do with me. Since I never bought Kool-aid when my kids were little (food coloring causes bedwetting but that is another subject) I never had it in the house anyway.

So, some of my not wanting to ask more from God has come from a desire not to show ungratefulness for what He has already given me and to be content with what I have. Also, the knowing that I have as much as many people and more than most.

Yet, here was God TELLING me to ask. You have not because you ask not. Now, the next part of the verse says that even when you do ask you ask amiss because you ask in order to heap it up on your lust. In other words, you are asking for that Rolex, not because you need a new watch, but because you are dissatisfied with your Timex that works just as well, amen?

Let’s face it, if God wants to give me an awesome state of the art car instead of my GEO Prizm and Odyssey van, I’m receiving. But for me to have two wonderfully functioning cars (the van even has a DVD player in the back~~are these kids spoiled or whaaaat?) and still be coveting because I don’t have that Lamborghini, well, that is just plain ungrateful.

Yet, if you don’t have a car, or have one that barely works and is in the shop every other day, then I think you need to ask God for a new car. How can you be a service to others by driving them somewhere when they need you if you don’t have a car that works right? God wants to bless you so you can be a blessing to others.

I want God to know, and I believe He does, that I will love Him and serve Him no matter what. He could put me in a cave, and I might not like it, but I will praise Him. He could put me in a mansion, and I might love it, but I will not love it more than Him and I will still praise Him. And I guarantee that if He did give me a big huge mansion, I would fill it up with more kids and at my age start praying for a maid and a chef to help me! I can handle things the way they are now but in that case I would need help and I know God would give it to me because I would be using what He gave me for good.

There was a year when I had gone through a lot and was not feeling well. Not anything specifically, just extremely tired. I didn’t pray for someone to come and help me but I remember thinking that I would love it if I had help. A couple weeks later a friend of mine who had moved out to California many years ago was coming back to the area for a couple of months and needed a place to stay. She stayed here for two solid months and when she wasn’t doing what she came to do she was doing the laundry and cooking. I kept trying to tell her that she didn’t have to, but she insisted. Suddenly one day it dawned on me that she was the answer to my complaining. God helped me even when I didn't ask Him. She was such a blessing and I missed her when she went home.

God doesn’t need you to pray, as much as He just wants you to lay every burden at His feet. He doesn’t want you to ask just so that you can learn to humble yourself, although that is a good lesson we should all learn, He wants you to ask so that He can answer and you can ‘taste and see that the Lord is good’, and not just good, but good to YOU!

After really seeking God about this, I realized what this is all about. God wants to build His kingdom on the earth. This concept does not negate His heavenly kingdom....but when we pray the Lord’s Prayer, doesn’t it say, “THY KINGDOM COME, THY WILL BE DONE, ON EARTH AS IT IS IN HEAVEN”. Was Jesus just praying that to say something that sounded pious and religious? I don’t think so.

I think that He was trying, as He did with all His teachings, to tell us how we are supposed to live and how we are to pray. I think He wanted us to see that God’s Kingdom would be built on earth as well as heaven. If there is something that we need in order to do that then we need to ask for it.

We should not assume that God wants us to just ‘get by’ here on earth. My concept of God is that He is an abundant God, Who wants us to live an abundant life and He owns the cattle on a thousand hills. He wants us to know that the earth is His and the fullness thereof.

If those verses are true then why are we so afraid to ask? Because we think we might look greedy? Because we have some false concept that we are supposed to live in poverty because somehow that is holier? If we are so poor that we do not have enough even for ourselves and our family, how are we going to be able to bless anyone else? I believe that God wants to bless us so that we will be a blessing to others. To whom much is given, much is expected, and it is more blessed to give than to recieve.

The Persecuted Church. What is it? Who are they? Where are they? That's news to me!

Christians in this country talk about being persecuted for their faith. Ummm, why, because your friend turned their back on you when you wouldn’t keep your mouth shut about Jesus in the restaurant? This happened to me…and I was speaking in low, moderated tones. Why because you took a lower grade on an essay in high school or college when you mentioned GOD in your paper? This happened to my oldest child when she was in graduate school. It could have affected whether she graduated from that school or not. Why, because your unbelieving parents disowned you? This happened to a close Jewish friend of mine when she accepted Christ at 18 years old.

The decade of the 1980’s was a hotbed of abortion protest in Upstate, New York. Christians banded together and marched around abortion clinics in record numbers. I was not a part of this protest, by spousal decree, but I would have been if left to my own devices and faith.

This was before the mixed up zealots started shooting doctors and bombing clinics. These were peaceful demonstrations, with counselors available for any woman or teenager who wanted to think about the possibility of saving their unborn child at the last minute.

Many of these Christians now have police records in our state because of their arrests. They were not arrested for doing anything ‘wrong’. No one had a weapon of any type and no one was interested in seeing any fighting or violence. They were out there trying to SAVE lives, not take more. These protestors spent a night or two in a jail cell, in some cases more than that. Just for trying to convince a woman not to take the life of her own unborn child.

Again, please remember, these were not the same people that you read about in the newspaper who blow up clinics, or shoot doctors through the window of their homes while they were eating breakfast with their wife. These were kind and gentle people, some of whom were my friends and neighbors who peacefully collected on the sidewalk outside a clinic, as is their first amendment right, and carried signs and begged women and young girls to spare the life of their innocent and give them up for adoption should they not feel capable of caring for them.

These were dedicated Christians who were willing, as I have been, to open their homes and help to find resources for the women who made the decision to sacrifice nine months of their life to do the right thing.

As far as persecution goes in the United States, this is about the max. A night or two in jail. The cause was just, the protest was peaceful, and they should not have even had a handcuff laid on them, yet this ‘persecution’ is so minimal compared to what is happening across the world to the Body of Christ.

We think that because we have suffered a slight or a rebuke from our friends at school, or our neighbors next door that we have been persecuted.

I found out a while back that my husband and I are referred to as “The Christian Foster Home” in our town. I never knew that before. Sometimes this is said with an air of respect and deference, other times it is attended with a smirk at the word Christian or a sniff at the word Foster. Either way, it would be very easy for this hyper-sensitive mother over here to dwell on that and regard it in my heart. I do not. I know what God has given me to do and I am choosing to do it with all my heart.

Even a night in jail for a just cause would not seem like persecution to me now. I know too much. I know the suffering of my brothers and sisters in China, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and parts of Africa. I don’t claim to know it personally, mind you, certainly not as I sit in my lovely and soft Lazy-Boy recliner that my wonderful husband bought me a year ago, typing on my brand-new laptop that he bought me two weeks ago so that, even though he doesn’t care for all this new blogging that I am doing, I will have a faster system to attend to my needs.

This is persecution? God help me not to be so arrogant! God has asked me to fast. Frequently. Sometimes for many, many days. Yet, I still drink fresh carrot juice, fresh fruit juice, flavored teas of all description with a little Splenda to sweeten it, lots of clean water, even flavored Aqua-fina water and Propel which has lots of vitamins.

I can still move about at will. Yesterday all the kids that were home went with Mr. Hope and me to an old railroad track that has been converted to a lovely wooded path for hikers and bikers. We did a short walk, just two miles, as my back and leg are still bothering me a little bit from picking up the apples a few days ago, even though I knew I should have left it for someone else to do. That was a ‘my bad’ and I am still paying the price for it although I am feeling considerably better today. We listened as the birds welcomed the warm air back to New York and reveled in the sunshine.

In my supposed ‘sacrifice’ of fasting, what hardship am I truly enduring? An empty stomach? Hardly. I drank a 12oz. Bottle of organic carrot juice this morning and I am full to the brim. I didn’t even have to cut up the carrots or mess up my juicer to drink it either. It was already prepared for me!

Plus, I got it for free because my husbands store was throwing it out. You know why? Not because it was bad. In fact, it tasted very good.....well, as good as carrot juice can taste! It was being thrown out because it has TODAYS date on it. They are not allowed to sell it until tomorrow, they have to throw it away TODAY! So, I got it. This is persecution? This is hardship?

As I allow myself to ponder the lives of my siblings in the faith, I admit that I cannot really understand. I can think that I do but in all reality I am not capable of it. I don’t believe any of us are. We endure some suffering....I am not denying that....but most of it is either brought on by our own carelessness, stupidity or the process of living life. This life is not perfect and it is never going to be. Only when we are with Him, Who is the Author of perfection, is life going to be all that it was intended to be in the Garden of Eden. Paradise.

My fellow Christians, particularly in Asia, but in other parts of the world as well, are being jailed, not because they did something ‘wrong’, not because they protested in a peaceful assembly outside a clinic or business that they felt was immoral, not because they disobeyed a law, but solely because they chose to believe in Jesus Christ and refused to be part of the ‘State church’ that is controlled by the government officials. Okay, sorry, maybe they did break a law. The law that says that if you live in China you are not allowed to worship Christ apart from the what provisions the State makes for you.

They huddle in small homes, keeping their songs of worship to a whisper, and reading over and over some page of the Bible, just one page usually that someone secretly gave them, to the small congregation encircled there. They hear that one piece of scripture and moan with desire, as if they have received a piece of bread after a week of fasting. This scrap of paper may be a piece of a Bible that was ripped out but more likely it is just a handwritten copy of a page someone else had. This tiny fragment of scripture feeds them more than their necessary food. We have bookstores filled with all translations, paperbacks to leather covered.....little ones for a dollar, big ones all the way up to hundreds of dollars. Missions give them away for free!

My son stood on a soap box in Atlantic City a few years ago and in his booming voice challenged people to take English and Hispanic Bibles. He gave away over 600 in less than two hours and was so hysterically Jim Carrey-like funny while doing it that the policemen told him they’ve never seen anything like it. The leaders of the mission he was serving asked him to come back. The only rebukes he took came from his fellow students who told him he was embarrassing them....wait a minute these people WANT to be in the ministry? You better find a way to make your faith relevent to this generation then.

If the only form of church available in the U.S. today was the kind our Chinese brothers know, would anyone even go? Man, where’s the awesome keyboard player? Where are the lights, the action, the cameras? Where are the new seats with the nice padding? Why, I can’t sit on the floor, for goodness sake, I might dirty my new dress, and my back will hurt. Who will help me up when my arthritic knees refuse to accommodate me? Where is the bathroom? Oh, it’s just this little hole in the ground? Well, I am too dignified to stoop to THIS!

I can’t leave the house, you know, without curling my hair and ‘putting my face on’. I have children, donchaknow, and I cannot subject them to this rebellious form of religion. Why, what would happen to THEM? (uh, they might get saved? Ooops, envision me here slapping my own face for suggesting that our American children are so spoiled that they don’t know what true salvation really means).

Gracious me, where is the ‘fellowship dinner’ following the service? You aren’t telling me I should FAST, are you? I might not feel good. I might feel hungry and tired, I might have some discomfort, I might DIE.

Arrrrrrrrrggggghhhhhh!

YOU ARE GETTING MORE AT COMMUNION THAN SOME OF THESE PEOPLE ARE GETTING FOR DAYS!

I PROMISE you, you WON’T die. You may feel a little discomfort, but poor baby…..I know you’ve never skipped more than a meal before and that was only because Mickey D’s didn’t come up at noon time when you were on I95 on your way to Disney World. Imagine me, right here, patting you on the back, and feeling very sorry for you......not.

What is wrong with us? What are we doing? What kind of Christianity is this that we can just go about our business, fixing up our homes, eating gigantic meals, worrying about whether we have enough money in the bank for retirement, building bigger and classier buildings for our services that are just going to rot and rust anyway, and we have forgotten about our siblings who are perishing in jails all over the world? Simply for their faith. Not for anything else. Lest one think that I consider myself more spiritual than my readers, let me just say that I am preaching to myself here too.

I am not ASKING for persecution, God forbid, but I am asking for my fellows to stand up, even me, and begin to pray and fast, and take authority over the devil who is alive and well in the world today. The spirit of antichrist is pervading the land. Not just THEIR land….OUR land. He is increasing in the world.

I’m not talking about the spirit of doubt that is so prevalent in this country, I’m not talking about a spirit of rejection or poverty. I am talking about the spirit of the antichrist that has so pervaded and persuaded the people in this country that we are somehow ‘better’, somehow ‘to be spared’, somehow to be able to just keep going about our lives, as in the days of Noah, eating and drinking and being merry, and will not be held accountable for what we knew and did not do. It is a lie. And even if you do not think it in your conscious mind, I’ll bet you do somewhere in your deceitful heart. And don't tell me you didn't know. Even if you didn't before, you do now. Ooops, too late.

Even the poor people who ended up in the Superdome in Atlanta with nowhere else to go were fed and cared for better than the Christians in other countries who are being dragged from their homes, beaten, sometimes to death, and thrown into prison just for reading their Bible and worshipping God. You think this couldn’t happen in THIS so-called Christian country? I beg to differ with you.

If this post is not as humorously tongue in cheek as some of my other ones...if it seems depressing to you...I apologize.

Then again, never mind, I don’t. It’s real, it’s happening, and the only thing I’m sorry about is that I don’t have a bigger soapbox to stand on and preach it from. See ya tomorrow, gotta go drink some water. At least it’s bottled. And flavored! How BLESSED I am!!