In the years ahead, I think one of the most important qualities any spiritual leader can ask for from Adonai is discernment. Primarily this is because I believe deception within all sorts of Christian, messianic, and even Jewish movements is at an all-time high.

Rabbi Stan recently said this in one of his sermons: “A person – or a demon – does not need to be with you to control you. All they need to do is teach you something that sinks in and that you conform your life around, and from that moment on, whoever taught you that is in control of your life, even if you never meet them again.”

Too much of this is increasingly evident within the Judeo-Christian movement. We have exchanged, each in different ways, the truth of God for lies, and we will not go unpunished if we do not repent of it, cast off the deception, and re-embrace truth.

Unfortuantely, I believe that in too many congregations, the lies are so embedded, so sunk-in, that most of the people who attend these churches would not know the genuine experience of fellowship with the Almighty from the counterfeit, because they’ve never experience the genuine.

Controversial thought, I know… but for most believers and even church and synagogue leaders, our spiritual discernment is on diet pills, and we’re in danger of becoming spritually anorexic. The time to pray for discernment and the repentence it will bring as Adonai cleanses his bride is now.

Today, my wife and I went to meet with a couple friends for prayer. Though we all (except my wife and I, of course) go to different Twin Cities-based churches, we all are feeling equally convicted that the church as a whole is pretty messed up, with a lot of false teaching in it that needs to be cleaned up soon.

Our outlooks and approaches are different, of course.

Tim (I’ll share first names only) is a solid balanced-view guy. He is an evangelical who is not highly partisan and can see the way Adonai uses each church movement, but is concerned about the amount of deception many in the church have embraced.

Jim (who wasn’t able to make it this time) is from a more mainline church, and his emphasis is to pray for mercy from Adonai.

My wife and I, as messianics, place a lot more concern on repentence than anything else, because we are convinced that God will not hesitate to judge those who embrace deception over the truth. Especially those in leadership positions.

It can become an ugly treadmill when church leaders embrace deception, and today I felt moved to pray for discernment on behalf of all Twin Cities church and synagogue leaders. But that’s a topic for another post…

Slowly… sometimes lethargically, I’ll admit… my prayer time is increasing.

I’m great at studying the Torah and related materials; studying is a strength for me. But that’s not enough if one wants to be a messianic rabbi. One must also have an active prayer life and be sure of God’s call on their life to such an undertaking. It’s certainly not a job one wants to take on without Adonai’s blessing on their ministry.

I’m still not where I need to be, quite honestly. If my prayer life were essential to breathing, I’d still need an IQAir or something to help out. But I am further along than I’ve been.

One thing that’s helping is now being part of a prayer squad. It’s a group that consists of two long-time friends and my wife, so far, and may grow beyond that. We’re all from different denominations, but we’re all brought together by the conviction that there’s too much false teaching out there in the church, be it Christian, Jewish or messianic. We all feel compelled that God wants to clean up the mess of all this false teaching, to prepare his bride and make her hold again.

It’s a help to be part of a group like that; it lends extra purpose to devoting more time to my prayer time with Adonai.

I never expected it when I began, but in the bar/bat mitzvah lessons I’m writing for my students, I’ve been doing a character study of David and, even without hardly trying, I’ve found no less than 11 lessons when breaking down the passages that pertain to David in I and II Samuel.

Eleven lessons is much longer than I thought I’d be able to go with this, but David’s life is a much richer tapestry than most people ever hear about in their church or synagogue. Everyone remembers the tale of his battle with Golyat or his fall into sin with Bat-Sheva; but there are many more episodes out of his life, and each is rich in insight, lessons and meaning that can be applied to how we live out our lives of faith today.

It might sound a bit odd, like a random offer of foreclosure help, but I honestly think that David’s life hasn’t been studied nearly enough. Even though I extracted 11 lessons for my bar/bat mitzvah kids from the Tenakh, I skipped a lot and highlighted only the most applicable main events that would carry relevancy for the kids I teach.

Next time through, I expect I could easily double the number of lessons.

One can take matters of the spiritual world to two extremes; overspiritualizing – the habit of seeing a demon under every rock, tree and cereal commercial, and underspiritualizing – the habit of seeing the world only in the scientific, observable spectrum of reality.

There is a middle-ground, though. The prophet Elijah once, through the power of Adonai, opened the eyes of a disciple to the reality of the spiritual world, and what he say was that there is more of a struggle against the spiritual than there is against flesh and blood in much of life.

Often, a simple argument with a spouse “over nothing” can be inspired by the spirit world, looking to disrupt a marriage and lead one or both spouses into unbelief or error. It’s a way of keeping our marriages from being the powerful tools for the kingdom of heaven God had in mind when he brought couples together.

Angels and demons are not toys; they are real beings and while they are not behind everything the way some folks believe, they are behind more than most of us suspect.

Some kids turn out great. Some… well, eventually you hope they’ll catch up to their peer.

A couple weeks ago, we graduated a bar mitzvah kid who has done well; he’s a young 13, but his mind is bright and he’s been a careful study and grasped his lessons well. Yet there are others I’m far more concerned about.

A child is usually as his or her parents expect them to be. If they allow their children to drift into bad habits of prioritizing entertainment over education, rare is the child who will become a good student. If they allow their kids to do whatever their heart desires, rare is the child who will show respect for their elders and obey their authority figures.

The behavior of children reflects an aspect of a congregation to those who visit. If children are generally well-behaved, it is a blessing to the congregation. If they run wild, it creates a less favorable impression.

The trouble is that not all parents are uniform in their approach to parenting. Some are involved and caring and appropriately strict; others are self-involved and unconcerned and as stable as inflatable boats.

This is human nature, it’s true; never will there be any congregation for whom all kids and parents produce equally encouraging results with their children. But I do wish more parents would see the importance of bringing up their children well. Yes, it’s a tough job; but it’s actually part of our covenant with Adonai our God. Solid parenting ought to be taken more seriously.

It’s amazing how life ticks by.

Today, my wife and I reached 23 months of marriage and we’re now only a month away from our second wedding anniversary. We’re not getting there without trials. In fact, we’ve had more than our share, it sometimes seems.

From all the health things with mom, to other friends’ troubles, family troubles on her side of the family, our own newlywed adjustments, the loss of a friend at church to the same thing that’s taking the life of my Mom. Too many things to list, it seems at times.

We’re getting through and we’re blessed to have not only faith in common, but the same brand of faith in common. Yet even with all that, we struggle. We have disagreements, misunderstandings, disputes.

Sometimes it seems like it’s all too much.

But then, a moment passes and we find a way to the next moment and somehow we survive. Not without the help of Adonai; not without the help of friends and family. But we make it through.

It means more now, carries more history now than when we first met and started saying it; but it’s as true as ever between my wife and me: we’re blessed to have found each other.

That means more, I think, than any gift wrapped in custom boxes.

This Tuesday, my mother goes in for her treatment evaluation at Rochester Mayo. She’s been told to fast after dinner on Monday, in case they want to run the first course of radiation or chemotherapy on her at that time.

This is where it will start to get more difficult for us all, and probably more painful for Mom. It scares me. While I have faith in Yeshua, and faith in my mom’s trust in Him and her eternal destination, it is the losing of her that scares me, the pain she’ll be going through, the suffering she’ll endure.

It’s the prospect of the lack of her at the other end of a phone call, which will eventually become a reality for me, possibly before the year is out. Not being able to call home and talk to Mom is going to be the loss of a bit of my psychological security blanket.

I’m 41, an age where life insurance quotes aren’t looking so affordable even for me anymore. I’m blessed by having my Mom around this late in life, far longer than many get to enjoy. I’m a married man with a wife to lean on now. But is this still going to be painful, despite how richly Adonai has blessed me.

You bet it is. It’d be foolish and untruthful to pretend otherwise.

This is one of my mom’s favorite stories to tell about raising me, and a testimony to her faith, and haShem’s faithfullness. I hope you enjoy it.

When I was young, about three or four, I kept bugging my mom what day my birthday was. I knew it was in the fall, but at that age, not much more. And I was too young to understand “September 29.” But that didn’t stop me from asking her, almost every day, from mid-August on.

One day, she grew flustered with being asked so many times and, without thinking, she told me, “You see that big, white birch tree in the middle of our back yard? The day the leaves fall off that tree, that’s your birthday.”

I ran off, satisfied, and apparently stopped bugging her. But immediately after she said it, she began to regret her hasty words. So she prayed, “God, please help me. Don’t make my son grow up thinking his mother is a liar.”

Well, September rolled on and the temperatures began to decline, and yet not one leaf fell from that white birch, right up through September 28, even though they grew a beautiful golden yellow.

The next day, the day of my birthday, my mom took me out into the back yard. We had some patio furniture set up back there and there was a lawn chair under that tree. She sat down in it and pulled me up on her lap, prepared to tell me it was my birthday.

Before she even began to speak, the leaves began to fall. And they didn’t just fall; they rained down on us, covering us in a golden blanket of white birch leaves.

Mom told me she prayed a prayer of thanks that day, and promised never again to speak so hastily; while she appreciated the answer to prayer, she was never one to put God to a foolish test.

I don’t have as reliable a brain as computer memory possesses, but as I face the fact of my mother’s mortality, I can’t help but find comfort in some familiar stories she’s told and retold time and again ease my mind about the solidity of my mother’s faith.

Here’s the first one:

When my mother was young, she saw a procession of building parts being hauled by her house to a place in town where a new church was being built. As a young girl she’d been wondering where she needed to go to find God, and on that day, she felt He told her: to that very building. She made sure her parents gave her the chance to go there.

Here’s another:

Sometime later, the biggest question in my mother’s mind about God was the whole question of Yeshua’s resurrection on the third day; after all, dead things don’t come back to life. The empty tomb bothered her; it made the Gospel feel like a children’s story instead of the truth.

Well, mom had a pet frog along with one of her brothers and one of her sisters. He lived under a staircase. One day, the frog died, as creatures eventually do, and the three of them carefully placed it in a shoebox, held a funeral for it, and buried it in the back yard. But on the third day, her mind kept returning to that frog; she couldn’t stop thinking about it.

So she dug it up. And what do you know? The frog was gone. The shoebox was empty.

“That’s when I decided, OK, God, I’m never going to doubt you on anything you say, ever again,” is how mom always ended that story.

With stories like that, I have to believe that haShem has honored the faith of my mother and will welcome her into the kingdom of heaven. It’s what she’s clung to no matter how much life has changed or disappointed her in the past 70 years or so (she’s 78).

I believe God honors those with sincere hearts seeking to know and honor him; he’s not someone who’ll toss someone aside for minor issues, like the fact that she called the Son of Adonai Jesus Christ instead of Yeshua the Messiah.

It’s not in Adonai’s nature to be petty; that’s our specialty.

This past weekend, my wife and I had our first visit with mom since she was diagnosed with cancer. Here’s what we know: it’s stage four cancer of the pancreas, as well as some spots of lung cancer from her smoking habit. Today (Monday) she was meeting with another doctor who would be describing the course of treatment, care options and the like that he would be recommending for her case.

It’s a tough, grim diagnosis and a topic that makes something as common and pedestrian as door hardware seem like a preferrable topic of conversation. But as we visited, I was struck by our ability to make the time together enjoyable and fun, rather than morose and full of tears.

I suspect we were all trying to create some good memories to fall back on, once this progresses a bit more. That’s what I think. And I think it’s needed.

Mom tires too easily to go out for lunch anymore, so we brought a homemade meal to her. My wife, who is a wonderful cook, fixed up some homemade spaghetti sauce and brought it down with noodles and cheesy garlic bread. On the trip down, we stopped by a grocery store and picked up six different kinds of brownies: peanut butter, cherry frosted, mint chip, German chocolate, caramel and regular fudge. We all had a taste of each of the ones we liked.

We left the leftovers with Mom and Dad to make sure they had something nice to heat up for the next few meals. We took pictures and played cards and handheld games together at the table, talked some serious stuff but didn’t allow our time together to become dominated by the cloud of doom trying so hard to hover over us and spoil our time.

The end comes of each of us, eventually, until Yeshua’s return; with Mom, we have a warning that it’s coming soon, so I’d rather spend that time letting her know what she means to both my wife and me, creating as many good memories as we can in the time that’s left, than sitting around weeping about what we cannot change.

There will be time enough for tears in private… before she passes, and after.