View From the Bridge

sThese last two days before Christmas seem surreal. My cards are made, but not sent; gifts purchased but not wrapped; commitments noted but dangling for that magic moment that propels us into a new year filled with the promise of grand opportunity and expanded parameters of success. These last nine days before 2012 is like standing on a bridge between 2011 and 2012. Looking back, I can clearly see the steps that brought us to this place of transition. God's nudges from one path to another are clear but fading as time propels us into this new season -- a  season is, in many ways, requiring us to pick up the mantle He placed on us almost 10 years ago, one that was laid down when we couldn't find a replacement for our prison outreach. But this 2012 path is different; one tempered by time and experience. Now, for our ministry to survive after we no longer inhabit this earth, we must find and train new people; our replacement.

So, where do we begin? In the homeless shelter.

Already we have dates on our calendar for our new DIMH team -- January 15 at Eagles Wing Church of God in Dover, DE. We have dates for our men's prisons, for solo ministry, and a request to join the Garveys in North Carolina for several men's prison performances. It's a beginning. As we prove faithful here, the Lord will open new doors.

I am also committing to a new project for 2012 which begins January 1st. I will be completing faithbooking challenges with Patter Cross -- 26 entries focused on traditional hymns and scriptures. While I am expanding my scrapbooking business, Christ remains at the center where He belongs.

Through the application of this wonderful, legacy-building genre, I expect to see significant breakthroughs both commercially. The sense the Lord empowering me creatively. I am eager to soar higher  than ever before through two art forms I love -- drama/audio theatre and scrapbooking. Please keep our ministry in prayer as we continue to move forward in His perfect plan for us. Pray that we consistently touch hearts and draw them ever-closer to Him -- the One who created each of us. That said, May your Christmas be filled with peace, comfort and joy and may your New Year offer a greater manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ in your lives and the lives of your friends and families.

Homeless Men Light Your World

I absolutely love those special times when the Lord calls and we make ourselves available. Sunday morning, December 4, 2011 at Trinity Wesleyan Church was certainly one of those times. Cathi Kopera, one of our CTM Players prison outreach team members, was instrumental in putting this together. She obtained permission for some men from the Dover Interfaith Mission for Housing to minister through  our signature mime at her home church. We decided to rehearse with the men at the church on the previous Friday night.

Now, our "signature mime" is Kathy Triccoli's "Go Light Your World." CTM Players has closed every program with this mime since 1999. Suddenly, a week before our Trinity Wesleyan presentation, I decided that we needed to make a change! I'm allowed to do that since I'm the director and the Lord actually gave me the blocking for our church drama team in 1996 or 1997.

Now, when we performed this mime last month in partnership with the homeless group, we had four men. Imagine my surprise when 12 entered the church with Cathi on Friday night! I looked at them, then at the performance space and then back at them. No way! Not enough room! But that wasn't what Cathi had in mind. We stationed the additional men in specific pews in the sanctuary for what promised to be an ending with a punch. Afer maybe 45 minutes, we were satisfied with the presentation.

Sunday morning arose cool and crisp. It promised to be a great day for fellowshipping with the body of Christ. Our first surprise came when I looked at the program and discovered that we were not at the end as we expected; we were positioned before the sermon. We found that most unusual, but that was the pastor's decision, not ours. We're nothing if we're not flexible. We are there to serve; not demand. So we seated ourselves in the back of the sanctuary and waited for the call.

The service started with greetings, moved into praise and worship, prayer for those in need, a report on their new youth program, special music, and then us! Oh! Did I mention that at the last minute Cathi asked me to cold read a "Night Before Christmas" parody that a DIMH board member wrote? The parody touched on the holiday plight of the homeless. So we positioned ourselves for the mime while Cathi presented some facts about the homeless in Delaware -- the most telling fact is that there are 39,000 homeless in the state. Two of the men offered brief testimonies. I read the poem. The music started, I began singing, and the mime proceeded as planned.

I love the anointing of the Holy Spirit. The men were perfect in their presentation. The "new" ending that we engineered with the extra eight men showed six (the four men, Cathi and my husband Dave) going out to share their light with the congregation and 14 coming back.

Then it was over, but the glow remained. The greatest impact for the men was (1) the accomplished something powerful, and (2) they were seen as something other than "homeless." They experienced the anointing and empowerment of the Holy Spirit that comes only with the setting aside of self and pouring out to others.

So, we returned to our seats and waited to hear the pastor's sermon.

"Well," he said. "That's the sermon. There's nothing that I can add. Cathi, please come here." At that point, he presented Cathi with a check to the homeless shelter from the church, made a personal commitment to the men, lit the second advent candle and dismissed the congregation.

 I was stunned. I couldn't recall that ever happening before. The men were delighted. One man expressed special interest in doing more. Sadly, before the next week ended, he broke a major rule and was out of the shelter. That's how the enemy works, isn't it?

This experience birthed something new that begs for additional prayer covering and it comes on the heels of our promise to be more available. We are going to organize a new audio theatre team at the shelter with men from the shelter. Our first ministry opportunity will be on Sunday morning, January 15, 2012 at Eagles Wings Church of God on Denny's Road in Dover, Delaware. But I must stop here and start writing scripts. I'll keep you posted. Please keep us in prayer.



Renewing our Availability



A Day in the Life  debut, Trindad Sept 23, 2009



What a day we had yesterday. Dave and I awoke in Fredericksburg, VA to attend the second day of our district ministerial conference. Inspiring doesn't cover the half of it. I was scheduled to perform a short audio play right after our 11 AM break. The five-minute play was one I wrote during our last mission trip to Trinidad. It finally has a title: A Day in the Life: Unavailable. As only God can do, the script's theme tied in perfectly to the harvest message our keynote speaker, Mel High, delivered.

We had to leave right after lunch because earlier in the week I committed CTM Players to join Interfaith Missions homeless shelter guests at The Cross Church of the Nazarene in Dover, DE to close their JOY (Just Older Youth) fundraising program with our Go Light Your World mime. We also had the pleasure of meeting Ennio and Maribel Zaragoza, the pastors of Maranatha Christian Church in Dover. Pastor Ennio introduced a phenomenal singing group from their church called New Revelation.

I am convinced that there is  much more coming our way, so now is our time to build and grow; to train up those who will come behind us, to build our legacy for the futurepast. To all things may the praise, the honor and the glory rest in the Lord's hands as we strive to remain in His will.

On the Road Again

After a two-year hiatus from short-term missions and traveling, the Lord has opened doors that we thought were closed. We will be teaching a week-long audio theatre workshop at the P&W Artreach International Summer Camp in London, England this August. Not only do we have the expense of funding the trip, but we also need to reconfigure our equipment to accommodate air travel. We've also been reminded that we have an open invitaiton to Africa and we've been asked to return to Trinidad. Other unexpected opportunites (for one, ministering through audio theatre at the GCMF Women's Conference in May)  have arisen in the opportunity realm that I will reveal in the days and weeks ahead. The steps of the righteous are ordered by God . . . our righteousness is only through him. Please keep our preparations in prayer as we move into yet another new venture for the Lord.

A Snippet About God's Timing

I stumbled upon Psalm 70 this morning and was engaged by the urgency of David's outcry. Verse one says, "Hasten, O God, to save me; O Lord, come quickly to help me." We so often want God to come to our rescue quickly. Later, we may discover that quickly would not have been in our best interest. There is a time of urgency and a time for delay. I pray that God will give us the wisdom to properly discern those times and the tenacity to draw on the His perfect peace to sustain us until rescue arrives..

The Third Day: Celebrating God's Creation

The Third Day: Celebrating God’s Creation

Sunday Morning Sermon, September 12, 2010

Already the memories are fading as I try to chronicle pieces of our vacation into a cohesive, inspirational scrapbook. But “time waits for no man,” a concept first attributed to St. Maher in the 13th century and picked up by Chaucer and the playwright who penned Everyman in the 14th and 15th centuries. So time aside, I need to present to you The Third Day.

It’s rather fitting that I’m sharing this message with you today because I’m starting to plan out the Badlands pages. That’s where the Lord dropped this concept into my spirit. The concept emerges in

Genesis 1:9-13: And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it was so. God called the dry ground “land,” and the gathered waters he called “seas.” And God saw that it was good.

Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: seed bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds. “And it was so. The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening, and there was morning — the third day.

Prior to this action, the Lord our God created a water planet. He could have stopped there, but He didn’t, because He planned to populate His creation with those made in His image. Instead of starting over, He did something that is so artistic and creative that we marvel at the concept today.

I was with Dr. Sharon Yoder last week when she asked me a rather unique question: “Why is that we get so much joy out of making our own laundry detergent?” she asked. My friend and I got together and made a big batch, and you know what? It works!!! That brought me so much joy that I couldn’t believe it! Why is that?”

Could that be a whisper of the indescribable joy our Lord God felt when he opted to separate the waters and see His functional, foundational, future foliage-bearing creation emerge from the seas, much like an infant emerges from the waters of the womb? This phenomena we call land emerged as clean and as pure as a new-born babe, filled with the promise of a place where all that is good will thrive, where love is untainted by jealousy, envy, and hate, where prosperity that outshines wealth abides for those created in His image bear the judgment that “it was good.”

In this season, the concept of time was in its infancy. The kingdom of God, beyond earth’s creation, was at war. Perhaps our Lord God felt the need to have that one special, untouched place where peace could shine like a diamond in the midst of darkness. While the Lord removed his enemies from His residence, they still had access as we see in the book of Job. If we interpret Isaiah 14:12-15 correctly, we can see who the key players are in this other-worldly drama.

Isaiah 14:12-15 NIV:  How you have fallen from heaven, O morning star, son of the dawn! You have been cast down to the earth, you who once laid low the nations!  You said in your heart, "I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God; I will sit enthroned on the mount of assembly, on the utmost heights of the sacred mountain.  I will ascend above the tops of the clouds;
I will make myself like the Most High."  But you are brought down to the grave, to the depths of the pit.

Just as God had plans for his beloved Eden, so did His arch rival, His enemy. It was Satan who corrupted God’s creation in the heavens, through deception, misplaced ambitions, and doubt. It obviously worked on dissuading a third of God’s angels? Why wouldn’t it work on God’s latest creation – man? Sadly, we know that it did.

Genesis 3:17-19: To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat of it.’Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”

Do you think that when God cursed the ground that it remained dormant and fruitful? Was it still the seed-bearing place He raised up on the Third Day? Or would the ground outside of Eden reacted to the spoken Word of God?

During our eight days of sightseeing in the western states, we worshipped, celebrated & communed, declared God’s glory (Ps 19), trusted, inherited (Ps 16), walked, and kept our eyes on Jesus. Despite God’s curse on the ground at the beginning of time, His glory abounds in oh, so many ways:

1. In the barrenness of the Badlands, there was beauty & life.

2. In Man’s resourcefulness at Mt. Rushmore, there was reverence.

3. In the bounty at Custer State Park, yet there was danger.

4. In the resourcefulness of the Cody legacy, yet there were trials.

5. In the volatility of Yellowstone, there was stability.

6. In the remoteness of Shonshone, there were dwelling places.

Despite the curse, we witnessed God’s glory and faithfulness in ALL His creation despite our best and worst efforts to usurp them on so many different levels. You can’t look at the vastness of the ever-changing Badlands and not be touched by God’s vision and disappointment. You can’t walk around the sulfur-pits of Yellowstone and not be concerned about the volatility created by sin.

Colossians 1:16-17, NIV: For by him all things are created; things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

In an April 9, 2006 comic strip by Johnny Hart, BC was reading Luke 19:40 when his friend, Rocky, rolled.

“Rocky!” BC said as he looked up from his stone slab.

“Hi! Whatcha readin’ about”” Rocky asked in his own language.

“Palm Sunday,” BC said.

“Read some more,” Rocky replied.

“His followers took palm branches and cried out “Hosanna” in a loud voice , and the Pharisees ye,lled, “Teacher – rebuke your disciples.” BC read aloud.

“What did he say?” Rocky asked.

“He said, ’I tell you that if they should keep silent, the stones would cry out.’”

in and asked him what he was doing. CM then read the scripture: “I tell you,” he replied, “if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.”

“What does Hosanna mean?” Rocky asked.

“It mean, praise the Lord.” BC said.

Suddenly, in a big, loud, purple-outlined voice, little Rocky proclaimed “Hosanna!”

I have no doubt that many rocks in the badlands were shouting before, during and after our visit.

“This is all well and good,” you might say. “But what does this have to do with me? How am I affected by what you saw?”

Just as the sin-generated curse affected the land, it affects us. Just as the glory of God shines through the most desolate places in this vast land, so does His glory shine through us despite our sin-laden lives. Whether you’re scanning the landscape of the Badlands, admiring its variegated colors, or climbing its ever-changing, ever-crumbling rock structures, you can’t help but be struck by the limitless panorama. In our humanity, we have limitless potential. Not because we’re great, but because God’s glory dwells within us. He made us in His image to create, to be fruitful, and to prosper in ways that transcend the economy of this world. Our job is to turn a deaf ear to the devil and let Him have His way with us.

Psalm 96:1-13 says:  The Lord reigns . . . Let the heavens rejoice, let the earth be glad, let the seas resound and all that is in it; let the fields be jubilant, and everything in them. Then all the trees in the forest will sing for joy, they will sing for He comes, He comes to judge the earth.

As our time together draws to a close, I pray that we’ll not only remember this time with fondness, but that we’ll also glory in the vastness of God’s kingdom, seeing His glory in it all. Let us pray:

Lord, thank you for the grace and mercy you’ve given us during our time together. Keep us ever mindful of how we can be good stewards of this land you’ve given us to dwell in. Let us be constantly aware of your glory, your presence, and your empowerment. Thank you, Lord, for the work of your heart and your hands. Thank you for keeping us humble while showing us that one person can make a difference. Help us be difference-makers, Lord, as we return to our daily tasks. Keep us safe in Your loving arms. We ask this in Your Holy, Precious Name. Amen.

Celebrating Christ Creatively

While filling out our Gospel Crusade Ministerial Fellowship renewal forms, the Lord gave me a glimpse of our larger vision and subsequent mission. He showed me that we are called to Celebrate Christ Creatively, using our combined gifts and talents to fulfill HIs will in our lives, and to affect our community throught the fivefold ministry. In many respects, it speaks to why we are here and how He intends to use us in the overall scope of things.

Our VISION, then, is to serve Christ as we bring arts (both visual, performance, and 'crafts') to the Christian community. Our MISSION is to provide a nurturing environment and safe haven for Christian artists to celebrate Christ creatively while engaging the fivefold ministry.

So what does this mean? As well meaning as the organized church is, there is often little room for the creative among the congregation. How do we encourage the visual artists who paint, sculpt, and engage their creativity through photography? Do we see home-grown work hanging in our church offices? Our lobbies?

Dramatists have an equally difficult time in dedicating their gifts to the Giver of Creativity -- God. I was privileged to present an hour-long storytelling piece titled "Experiencing Eve" at a church in Maryland. Afterwards, an elderly woman assured me that I would go crazy just like Amy Semple McPhearson for presenting that type of program in the church.

Fortunately, that was one of the few negative responses I've seen during my touring season, but in the days ahead, we will need more creativity, not less, among us.

Storytelling is another rarely tapped gift in the body of Christ these days. When David and I attended the Methodist Church (in the 1980s), we were especially drawn to Asbury UMC in Camden. A gifted storyteller by the name of Jim Cook would gather all the children to the front of the church and share a story with them every Sunday morning. Afterwards, they would follow their teachers to the various Sunday School classes were they would have children's church. What a gift!

We've implemented a similar practice in our home church, only our chlldren remain for the service. But our resident storyteller, Tina Riley, does a wonderful job conveying the Word through story. The children love it and are always clamoring for more.

As I prepare to post this note, snow is steadily falling outside as we brace ourselves for our second snowstorm in January and one that promises to be even bigger than our end of December adventure. Some news reports claim that we've not had snowfall such as this since 1922. Though we will not be meeting in our home sanctuary because because we anticipate being snowbound at the end of our 350-foot lane, we will still have "church". We will meet via teleconference so I can share more on this topic as we come to a deeper understanding of our creative call and how we can use it to glorify the Lord.

I have some ideas, some plans, and lots of prayers over the task the Lord is putting in front of me. I will present these plans in the near future. I anticipate victory at every level and will share them with you as soon as they solidify.

I'm excited. How about you?