Sheep

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

It is a wonderful grace to know that the Lord is indeed God, God Almighty, the Creator of heaven and earth and everything in it.

He made us, we are not a product of random actions, we were created by our Lord, we belong to Him, he made us, he bought and paid for us, he paid the price in full for our sinfulness. We are his sheep, the unworthy objects of his eternal loving protectiveness!

The Revenge of the Guava!

It wasn’t all doom and gloom between My sister and I, well mostly it was but not all the time, one of my happiest memories involved her and a friend of ours and I going berserk in a small neglected guava plantation on the farm. That day we really did discover the true purpose and correct use for Guavas.

This small patch of Guava trees had long been neglected or forgotten by the man who owned the farm and it bordered the back portion of our property, we had up to now avoided it, but on that day we ventured in and seeing a mass of rotting guavas on the ground we picked them up and began throwing them at each other, now realize this they were rotting and really stank, I mean really badly, they were also really soft and when the said projectile, the rotten guva hit its target it broke up completely leaving the victim in a real mess, we played for what seemed an age until our steam ran out, when my mother came out of the house to see what the commotion was all about she was horrified that we had wasted all that fruit, it was a while before she actually listened to our explanation and eventually she saw the funny side, but would not let us into the house before she had thoroughly hosed us down with our garden hose-pipe.

 I cannot fail in my duty to add a cautionary note to this story, it is a little know fact, perhaps up to now I have been the only person to come to this momentous discovery, that Guavas have a long memory and can be vindictive, yes its true they had their revenge on me, I was visiting a friend and they like so many people had a really nice guava tree in the garden, the guavas on this particular tree were quite simple the biggest and best looking I had ever seen before, and that is saying something as they are very common in Zululand and we did have a small plantation near our back yard. We all began eating guavas we had picked, the tree was heaving with an abundance of them. I was halfway through mine as we stood chatting and eating when I looked for the first time at what I was eating and to my horror saw it was absolutely infested with worms. Eating such a soft fruit the texture and taste of the worms were impossible to detect, I can tell you it took me years before I could eat one again, and I am not talking about the worms.

The Smell of Home

 I grew up along the east coast of the republic of South Africa The smell of the warm sea, the Indian Ocean to be more precise is unforgettable,  not being a marine expert, but when you approach the beach and the warm and humid air hits you with a bit of the salt spray it’s tremendous, I always feel as if I’m on holiday when whether I’m ankle  knee or waist deep in the sea waters, and after taking a few tumbles in its strong currents and feeling the salt water work its way through the nostrils may be unpleasant, but one still feels affection for the experience.

The vast fields of sugar-cane one sees as you travel the length of the Natal coastline, on a windy day from afar the leaves move in waves just like one large grassy ocean, and the sweet smell of unrefined sugar one gets as you approach the plantations is such a familiar smell to me, it’s the smell of home. 

Our living water

He made streams come out of the rock 
and caused waters to flow down like rivers.  - Psalm 78:16

Think of being in a desert, a place with no access to water of any kind. Think how important finding water in order to survive would be, we would become obsessed with water. Think about the fact that outside of Christ we are spiritually dead, we are nothing more than dry bones in a very dry desert. 
Jesus is the living water, He is the stream of life giving water, our thirst is for Him, only He can satisfy our thirst, even in the deserts of life, places where there is no water, Jesus can cause water to flow from out of the rock, He can do the impossible. He has done the impossible for us already, He rose from the dead. His resurrection proves He can bring life giving water, he can bring, he can give new life to the dead.