Ken Pierpont's Blog, page 43
July 10, 2019
Bittersweet Farm Journal (Number 52) What Are You Going to Do With Your Longing for Love
It would be impossible to script more beautiful days than the last few days out on Bittersweet Farm. I’ve been walking in the cool of the morning at dawn or in the cool of the evening at dusk. The days have been sunny. The evening cools down. Fireflies are out over the lawn in the night. It’s peaceful. We’re grateful.
I’m amazed at how many people have read Finding Bittersweet. If you don’t have a copy yet I would love to send you one. Send me an e-mail at ken@kenpierpont.com and I will tell you how to get a signed, inscribed copy directly from me.
Between the Fires
These days when I’n not puttering around in the Carriage House or tending to Bittersweet I’m writing. My current project is a book called Between the Fires; 50 Camp Lessons. Each of the 50 chapters included three things. A “Camp Lesson” the scripture upon which the lesson is based and a favorite story told at camp. I hope it will be treasure of camp lessons… truths to keep the “camp fire” burning all your life long. Today I will include one of the camp lessons from Between the Fires
Camp Lesson #9
You will never find the bottom of God’s love
Romans 8
Who do you know who doesn’t need love? The longing for love is universal. The longing for love is powerful. Longing for love is one of the things that makes the world go around. I promise, your favorite band sings about it all the time. Longing for love is more often than not the reason people do the things they do, good, bad and ugly.
If you heard me speak at camp there is no doubt you heard me remind you that no one or no thing on earth will ever completely fulfill your longing for love. Only God can do that. I love to tell the story to illustrate that.
The Jess Curtis Farm
Jess was born in a little house back in a remote “holler” in Kentucky. The nearest town was the county seat of Wolfe County–the little mountain town in Eastern Kentucky where my wife Lois was born. It has it’s own humble charm and there are few strangers there. After Lois’s grandfather died, her grandmother went down to the Senior Citizens Center in Campton to pick out a new husband. That’s when she met Jess. They had a couple important things in common. She loved to cook. He loved to eat. Her cooking made him happy his eating made her happy. So they were very happy—until he died of a heart attack on account of his insatiable appetite for her biscuits and gravy and her insatiable appetite for his appreciation of her biscuits and gravy.
One summer afternoon Lois and I drove out to visit the old newly-weds. Lois cherished her grandmother, Carlie. They puttered around the kitchen talking and laughing.
Like all self-respecting Kentucky homes, their place had a porch that stretched across the front of the house. Jess and I went out and set down in rockers as evening came on and talked.
I’ve been taught to ask questions and listen when I’m with older people. When you do that older people usually start bringing treasures out of their memory and sharing them with you.
I little at a time he began to tell his stories. I asked him about his place. He was proud of it.
“I was born in this house and I’m going to die here,” he said.
“Would you like me to show you around?”
“I’d love that.”
We walked. He showed me his smokehouse and his barns. He showed me his garden. Then he said; “Let me show you something else.”
I followed Jess as he led me along the edge of the woods south of his house. About a hundred yards from the house he stepped into the cool woods onto a narrow path nearly hidden from sight. He led the way for a while then stepped aside and said, “Keep going. Let me follow.”
The footpath took a turn and ended on a slab of gray rock. A steady stream of water ran over the rock and fell into an emerald-green pool about ten or twelve feet below.
I stood for a moment quiet with surprise. I listened to the music of falling water. “How deep is that pool?” I asked?
“That’s what everyone asks,” He said with a smile in his voice. “My brother and I were strong swimmers when we were young. On a hot summer day we would make hay, then we would come here and dive into this pool to cool off. We never found the bottom of that pool.”
What Are You Going to Do With Your Longing for Love?
When I was your age I felt like a big black hole of longing for love. It was behind much of what I did. Some of that was good, some of it was not so good. It took me some time to discover that what I do with my longing for love would “aim” my life. What I would do with my longing for love would power my life. It would give my life meaning and purpose.
One of the most important things to do in your youth is to connect with a source of love strong enough to last all your life and powerful enough to reach into the deepest part of your soul. You need a source of love that will still be alive when you die. You need a source of love so pure and enduring that it will still be there if everyone else in your life turns and walks away. You need a source of love so strong that it is there when the love of other well-meaning people fails.
All the time I meet teens at camps who have people in their lives who love them, but the ones who love them are troubled and weak in their love or they are sinful and selfish or broken, so their love is often good but not enough.
You don’t know it now, but this is true of everyone you know. Human love alone, as sweet and strong, as pure and powerful as it can be, will never be able to do what only God can do.
When I tell the story of Jesus and his great dying, undying love for you, when I tell the story of the death and resurrection of Jesus, do you see what I am doing? I am showing you the way to connect with the only source of love in heaven and earth that can fulfill your bottomless longing for love. This is what I want you to have down in the bottom of your soul when you drive away from camp. Jesus love for you is so deep you will never in all your life find the bottom of it.
I know it’s a confusing time for you right now. I know you are tempted to look to your parents, or a special girl or guy to satisfy your love longing, but if you do that you will be putting unreasonable pressure on mere humans. But if you learn to dive into the bottomless love of God you will have love to give. Please if you forget all the other things I said, remember this:
You will never find the bottom of God’s love.
July 7, 2019
Building Better Relationships V (Sermon) Audio
Building Better Relationships V (Mercy)
Bethel Church–Jackson, Michigan
July 7, 2019 AM
Ken Pierpont | Lead Pastor
https://kenpierpont.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/2019-07-07-Building-Better-Relastionships-V-Marcy-online-audio-converter.com_.mp3
Building Better Relationships V (Sermon) Video
Building Better Relationships V (Mercy)
Bethel Church–Jackson, Michigan
July 7, 2019 AM
Ken Pierpont | Lead Pastor
July 1, 2019
Bittersweet Farm Journal (Number 51) Can God Bless America?
Out on Bittersweet Farm it’s July 4th week and we are in the heart of summer now. It was a cool, wet, beautiful June and I loved every single minute of it, but now the summer feels and looks like summer altogether. We will pine for these long, warm evenings in a few short months.
Sunday morning I took a walk and a couple of noisy Sandhill Cranes announced my presence loudly to any creature who cared to know. They walked steadily away calling over their shoulders in their loud, rattle-like call.
Our neighbor, Cindy who owns the land north and east of us, is having a beautiful home built over on Nantucket Drive, just beyond the big barn east of us. I have mixed feelings about it. It will continue to increase our property value—it will sell for a three-quarters of a million dollars, but it will increase the number of people with whom we share this beautiful, bucolic little place on the earth.
It’s for sale, if you want to be our neighbor. I promise we won’t intrude though I do need to warn you, there are the kind of people around here who will leave zucchini on your back porch when you’re not home or bing over boxes of red, garden-ripe tomatoes big as as softballs toward summer’s end.
Our old farmhouse on Bittersweet has been up-graded to include central air—a welcome luxury during the brief but beautiful summer months in Michigan. The big window in our necessary room upstairs just off the bedroom looks out to the north, where, this time of year, all night you can see fireflies blinking their willingness to mingle. Out in the near north field every morning and every night the deer are in their pretty brown spring coats again. It’s a welcome sight to me. The winter coats are drab. Birds are busy doing what they do and providing welcome color and music among the walnuts and maples that shade our acres.
The grass is growing so fast, if you don’t tend to it quickly you could cut it and wind-row it and bail it. We keep it neatly clipped then sit back on the porch and admire our work with satisfaction. I my line of work you never get the feeling that your job is done, so there’s the lawn to tend, evidence to all who drive past of our diligence and ability to finish things.
July 4th Week
It is the first week of July and Thursday we will celebrate our great nation’s independence. On the way home from storytelling in Kalamazoo last night I saw a guy with a huge American flag mounted on the back of his pick-up-truck. I smiled. Are you patriotic? Does your heart beat fast for love of country when you see Old Glory snapping in the blue summer sky?
Lois draped a bright American flag on the side of our farmhouse facing the road. It covers a third of the house and our youngest daughter is named America, so there’s that. God bless America—and we pray, we pray that Americans will once again honor God and His timeless word. America is a wonderful country but she has deep flaws only God can mend.
One day we will leave this country to our grandchildren. This nation’s decline into anarchy against God and his law has been grievous to any who really know and love God.
We have debated and disregarded the clear commands of God regarding human life and sexuality.
We have been guilty of race-based hatred.
We have lived in relative luxury, ease, and comfort while many in our world have died in poverty and oppression.
We have turned aside from many evils we did not want to untangle or understand or resist.
We have condemned others for sins, and practiced “forgivable” versions of them ourselves.
We have sinned against God and called others to repent.
We have elevated minor things and ignored great moral evils.
Even great church bodies debate and divide over things plainly taught in the Bible. It is common for people to claim that they know and love God and boldly disobey and distort the plain teaching of the Bible turning the truth of God in-side-out and up-side-down to fit their own will.
I don’t think God will bless America again until she repents and returns to Him, until once again she trembles at His word. When I read Deuteronomy 28 I see the heart of God to bless his people, I see the importance of obedience. I see the curse that comes to those who willfully rebel and I’m grieved to say it, but I see America, the land that I love.
Go to the parade this week. Sip some cold, sweet lemonade out on the porch. Bake an apple pie. Take in the fireworks or a baseball game. Sing the Star-Spangled Banner with your hand over your heart, but don’t forget to go to church and thank God for His great mercy on America and quietly get on your knees and pray that she will return to God before it is too late.
Bittersweet Farm
July 1, 2019
June 30, 2019
Building Better Relationships IV (Sermon) Audio
Building Better Relationships IV
Bethel Church–Jackson, Michigan
June 30, 2019 AM
Ken Pierpont | Lead Pastor
https://kenpierpont.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/2019-06-30AM-Building-Better-Relationships-IV.mp3
Building Better Relationships IV (Sermon) Video
Building Better Relationships IV
Bethel Church–Jackson, Michigan
June 30, 2019 AM
Ken Pierpont | Lead Pastor
June 24, 2019
Bittersweet Farm Journal (Number 50)
Bittersweet Impressions:
-Red River George (my red Jeep) faithfully helping with a few chores
-Friends that show up with trucks and vans and trailers just when you need them
-Grandchildren playing in the yard
-Lois puttering among in the flowers
-Sweet Hope getting some sun then doing Keira’s nails
-The first of the fireflies over the lush, green lawn
-Swapping stories on the porch with my grandson Koen. He’s talking with his hands and eyes.
-Three sunny days in a row
-A warm Sunday afternoon
-Cool evening breeze moving the leaves in the dark green canopy of trees over Bittersweet
-A soft rain comes in overnight. We don’t see it our hear it. We are fast asleep but in the morning the freshening effects of it were apparent everywhere.
-Thank you, Lord. Thank you. Thank you from the depths of my soul. Your goodness overcomes the darkest evil.
Kindness
I watched a series of programs on Netflix recently. It was called The Kindness Diaries. There were two seasons. In the first season a fellow named Leon drove around the world on a bright yellow motorcycle with a side-car, depending entirely for gas, food, and lodging on the kindness of the people he met along the way. In the second season he drove a fifty-year-old yellow VW convertible from Alaska to Argentina using the same method. (This without a working heater. Sometimes ice and snow formed inside the car).
It was fascinating to watch. The sights were stunning. The acts of kindness were heart-warming often coming from people who had very little. The poverty was oppressive in some places. Leon said he often was helped by people who attributed their kindness to belief in God. He said; “They believe in God. I believe in humanity.”
His theology was incomplete, but along the way he began to call himself a “believer.” I thought of Cornelius, the God-fearing man in Acts who eventually came to follow Christ. Leon seemed like a sweet guy. I hope one day he, too will know and follow Jesus.
Kindness is a beautiful thing, it is a powerful thing, it is a universal thing. When I finished The Kindness Diaries series my heart was stirred with a powerful desire to honor God as a Christian by practicing kindness. Kindness is a fruit of the Spirit and the fruit of the Spirit occurs in those who continually yield to the impulses of the Spirit in the power of the Spirit. The results of that kind of living are not just powerful and heart-warming, they are life-giving and miraculous.
While we are thinking about doing kindness and receiving kindness from people all around the world it is a good idea to remember the teaching of Jesus and how kindness to our “neighbor” the one nearest us with a need. Often the people who need our kindness the most are those who live under our roof.
Bittersweet Farm
Jun2 25, 2019
Building Better Relationships III Humility (Acts 24:16) (Sermon) Audio
Building Better Relationships III Humility (Acts 24:16)
Bethel Church–Jackson, Michigan
June 23, 2019 AM
Pastor Ken Pierpont
https://kenpierpont.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/2019-06-23AM-Beuilding-Better-III-1.mp3
Building Better Relationships III Humility (Acts 24:16) (Sermon) Video
Building Better Relationships III Humility (Acts 24:16)
Bethel Church–Jackson, Michigan
June 23, 2019 AM
Pastor Ken Pierpont
June 19, 2019
On Eating an Apple
He worked hard but when he arrived home it would still be a few hours before sunset. He got an apple and his pocket knife and sat on the edge of the porch in the sun. The simple pleasures of the warm sun on his head and the sweet taste of the apple took him back in time 50 years to his boyhood in the little village of Logansville.
In his memory he is eating a small apple, a tart Jonathan. He is wearing his Levis and a pull-over tee-shirt with stripes. A red felt ball cap is sitting back on this head, a shock of white-blond hair jutting out from under the bill of the cap. Birds are singing and school is out for the summer. Bright sun is taking the chill off of the morning.
His dad is the pastor of the little white church on the edge of the village. Their home is the modest parsonage across the road. He always has his chores in the morning, but by late morning or early afternoon on those summer days he rides his bike along country roads around the little village where they live. He picks up empty bottles and cashes them in for a cold orange pop and drinks it on the steps of the Sinclair station. He has a red bike with 24 inch balloon-style tires and coaster brakes. (Think Opie Taylor and you will have the picture clearly in mind).
For a dollar a week he push-mowes the church lawn. Pop is fifteen cents and a candy bar is a nickel. They take a trip every week out River Road to the dump and bring along the BB-gun to take turns “plinking” cans. Dad makes 80.00 a week. Every Friday the boy rides up the hill to the treasurer’s house to get the check and a dozen brown eggs. The church provides the parsonage. There always seems to be enough.
One afternoon his Dad built him a small “tree-fort” up in the branches of a Maple. He spent hours there that summer. They have a garden. They even have a chicken for a while. They have a mutt dog, the boy’s companion.
Funny what you think about when you are sitting in the sun munching an apple on a summer evening. What he didn’t know as a boy was that the feeling of warm sun on his head, the tart sweetness of the apple, the sound of the birds, the quietness and sense of well-being in his heart, the thoughtfulness and the thankfulness behind them… each of these were acts of worship to His God and they would follow him through his life and overtake him time and again when driving down a long country road, or hearing the strains of organ music, or singing an old hymn that reminded him of Prayer Meeting night in the little white church across the road in the village of his boyhood.
Now he is grown and has grandchildren. He is a pastor himself, has been for 40 years. On Sundays he stands in the front row and throws back his head and sings along with the praise team with his whole heart…
“Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life.”
Bittersweet Farm
June 2019
