Well, good morning again. I've welcomed most of you once already, but I'll welcome the rest of you who came in since then. Welcome to Faith Stories. We're gonna get started. Our speaker for today is Scottie Spore.

She's attended Faith Church since 02/2019. She and her husband Gary have been married for fifty years, and have a son, daughter, and two grandchildren. Scottie is mostly retired, but still offers career counseling part time, and she volunteers with FAAC, and with CREW. In her spare time, she enjoys gardening and genealogy. So I'm gonna pray, and Scottie can come on up.

So, Heavenly Father, we do thank you for today. We thank you that we have the opportunity this summer to, enjoy time, in community together here, and learning something about someone at our church, and hearing their story, and what you've been doing in their life. Just pray for Scotty as she comes and shares her story with us, that, that we would be blessed by that and enjoy getting to know her better. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.

Thanks for having me, and thanks for coming to listen to my story. I probably should let you know that, I'm not at all a morning person. So sometimes at this hour, I'm still just a little bit brain dead. So you may have to bear with me and we'll just see how this goes. So let's start with something easy, a family picture.

I ought to be able to get through this one. So this may help you put some faces with names, names with faces, and give you some context as I share my story. So this is our granddaughter, Leah on the left, daughter-in-law, Kelly, myself, husband, Gary, our son, Andy, grandson, Taylor, and then our daughter, Erica. She wasn't able to be with us when we had the first picture taken. So we just kind of had to patch her in.

Everyone lives here in the Indianapolis area. We didn't expect that nor imagine that that would ever be the case, but it is, and we're delighted to have both our kids and our grandkids so close by. So the next one is just for your amusement and entertainment. The picture on the left of course is Gary and me when we got married in 1975 and the picture on the right is us taken just a few weeks ago, on our anniversary. So now for the rest of the story, when you get to my stage of life, perspectives kind of start to shift and change as you realize that the greater part of your life is behind you or in the rear view mirror, so to speak, but it becomes a great time just to begin to reflect on the things that the Lord has done over the years you've been given, and to kind of ponder some of the enduring or life lessons that he's built into your life and character.

So, it occurred to me somewhere along the line, I asked myself, okay. So why do things become life lessons? Why do we call them that? And it's, I think usually because they seem to occur repetitively and we find ourselves having to apply the same principles over and over again. Or in my case, it may be because I was a slow learner and the Lord needed to take me through a lot of remedial classes in order for things to stick.

But so while, there are many things that I've hopefully learned over the course of my sixty plus years of being a believer, I've chosen for the sake of time just to focus in on three of those, today that kind of surfaced as being significant as I was preparing for this. So the first one is from a handy little book called the Red Sea rules, by Robert J Morgan, a book that I kind of keep handy and refer to often. And in it, he takes a look at Exodus 14, where God is bringing Israelites out of Egypt and through the Red Sea. And he keys in on 10 significant principles that we can learn and apply, by examining Israel's experience. And so that first lesson is realize that God means for you to be exactly where you are.

And so I wanna set the stage a little bit by reading just a short part of that passage. And while I do that, I'm going to put a map up on the screen so maybe you can visualize or imagine perhaps some of what the Israelites were doing and what the Lord was thinking. So here we go. When Pharaoh let the people go, God did not lead them by the way of the land of the Philistines, although that was near. So that's the northern route, the more usual trade route, the green line on the map.

For God said, lest the people change their minds when they see war and return to Egypt, but God led the people around by the way of the wilderness towards the Red Sea or the Southern longer route, represented in red. Then the Lord said to Moses, tell the people of Israel to turn back and in camp in front of between Migdol and the sea in front of Baal Zephan, you shall in camp facing it by the sea for Pharaoh will say of the people of Israel, they're wandering in the land. The wilderness has shut them in and I will harden Pharaoh's heart and he will pursue them. And I will get glory over Pharaoh and all his host and the Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord. And they did so.

So in contrast to what was, logically the human, the according to our human logic, what what everyone would have done, God engineers their path so that they find themselves stuck in a place where the sea is in front of them. Pharaoh's army is in hot pursuit behind them, and they're hemmed in by the mountains and the wilderness, on either side. So no matter which way they return, it looks like kind of certain death. So why would God do this? Well, he says very clearly, I will get glory over Pharaoh and all his host and the Egyptian shall know that I am the Lord.

So fast forward to 1986, Gary and I flew to Belgium. And then with our team of five, we boarded a train headed into the Soviet Union, going through East Berlin and Poland, on a summer mission trip with crew. So while we had reservations for the entire trip, for some reason, they'd only been able to purchase tickets, through Warsaw. So when we got to Warsaw, we were supposed to, purchase our reservations or, or pay for the tickets for the reservations for the rest of our trip, and then change trains and head on our way into the Soviet Union. So we got to the Warsaw Train Station and, began the whole process of being shuffled back and forth between ticket counter to ticket counter, sometimes three floors up, but on the opposite side of the building, if you imagine Grand Central Station, it may give you somewhat of a picture of what that was like.

We would stand in lines for literally hours on end, get to the ticket counter and then be told, oh, no, you need to go to this ticket counter, and the process would start all over again. So we were also blatantly and obviously followed by dogs and military police with machine guns, that we we know were put there for the intimidation factor. But, after eighteen hours of doing this over and over again, we were no closer to getting out of Warsaw than when we arrived. And, we had only been issued transit visas because we supposedly were just passing through Poland. So those transit visas were good for twenty four hours.

And once those expired, we would be in the country illegally. So we'd we had exchanged no dollars for Polish money. We hadn't eaten anything. So by the end of the eighteen hours, we were hungry, we were exhausted, we were frustrated, and we actually did not know how we were going to get out of our situation. So we felt a little bit, I think probably like those Israelites did when they were at the Red Sea.

1 of the people on our team said, Hey, what about if we call the American embassy? Great idea. So we call them, someone answers the phone very politely and hooray, they speak English. So we explained to them our dilemma and that very polite and sweet voice responded. I'm sorry.

We don't handle transportation problems. And then there was this very hollow click on the other end of the line. And it was like, what? Are you kidding me? If we're an American in trouble in a foreign country and the American embassy won't help us, who in the world is going to?

Well, lesson number one, God means for you to be exactly where you are. Or perhaps it was three, like, three years ago when Leah and Taylor, the grandkids were staying at our house for the full weekend. We had a a full weekend of activities planned. We were looking forward to all the things we were gonna do. And suddenly, I find myself at age 70 in the hospital having an emergency appendectomy.

Well, God means for you to be exactly where you are. Or it could have been two years ago, almost to the day on June 2023, we were again on our way to urgent care because Gary was having some breathing issues, that we thought were allergy related. There's a lot of allergies and asthma and lung issues in his family, and we wanted to get this addressed before it became any more serious. But we'd only been in urgent care a matter of a couple of minutes when they informed us that, he's not having any breathing issues, he's having a heart attack. And not only that, it was what they call the widow maker, where the front artery in your heart is blocked.

And in his case, they said it was a hundred percent blocked. So he was in a serious situation. So I remember, you know, the the lord obviously so intricately taking care of our circumstances and putting the right people in the right place at the right time so that, obviously, Gary's alive and well and he's sitting here today with us, in good health. But I remember so clearly that as I was driving so low to the heart hospital, because the ambulance had already whisked him away, And my reality was I didn't know if I was gonna see him alive again or not, but this rule popped into my head just as clear as a bell. God means for you to be exactly where you are.

So whether it's being stuck in a foreign country with no resources, or facing major medical crises, or perhaps something like taking care of your aging parents, or answering that fourth unexpected phone call that totally disrupts your agenda and the things that you need to accomplish for the day, or perhaps the baby that won't sleep when they're supposed to. I I hope that I'm learning a little bit more easily to say God means for me to be exactly where I am. So to recognize that, he has a purpose in the things, the circumstances in my life, whether or not I see or understand why those are occurring at the time, that he has a plan. And and if I'm willing to allow him to act and if I will follow obediently, he may just use that to bring about, glory and honor to himself. So that's lesson number one.

Another one that's been a big one for me is learning to live within my capacity. I don't know about you, but I tend to be a Martha. I am much better at doing than I am at being. I tend to respond to needs and I focus on getting things done. So as many of us experience, no matter what walk of life we're in, as we look around us, there are no there's no end to the needs that we that need to be met, and there are always more things that we need to get done than can be done in a day.

So after twenty six years on staff with CREW working on college campuses in Iowa, Texas, the state of Washington, and the Upper Peninsula Of Michigan, Gary and I left the beautiful Southern shore of Lake Superior, to to move to, Indianapolis and that was in 02/2001. We transitioned from working on campus full time to being a part of the regional HR team here in Indianapolis and to work specifically with their intern program, which was, at that time, was just getting off the ground. So somewhere after moving here, I don't recall exactly when, I assumed the role of overseeing the process for selecting interns that would come and work with us for a year or two, and they could work either here on campuses in our four state region or perhaps serve with one of our partnerships internationally. And as a part of that role, it involved things like managing the overall application process. I also, needed to recruit and train and coach those people that we brought alongside us to help us process the applications, help us, you know, interview applicants, make decisions about whether or not they, were qualified to come work with us.

It was also up to me to make the final decisions when that decision didn't seem to be so clear and there were questions about whether or not working with crew was really a good fit for them. I communicated with local and regional leaders about the process as a whole, and about applicants, that they had questions about. And then together with Gary, we made, the placement assignments for those who were, actually hired and coming to work with us on a campus in our four state region here. Along about 02/2008, I began to go through a season where I knew that something needed to give and if I didn't make some personal changes in the way I was living, I was pretty sure that something was gonna be me. So about the same time, I came across a class that was being offered at the church that we were attending at the time.

It was called Restoring Margins to Overloaded Lives and, believe me, I could not get there fast enough. And as the teacher, introduced the class, she had us open up the book that we were given to page one and she read the third sentence on that page out loud and it said, take thirty seconds right now to ask God to run the universe for the next hour so that you can invest in this class. And, of course, like you and like everyone else in the class, we all burst out laughing. And I think that's because, sadly, we realized how true that was of our perspective mind, we thought that if we stopped doing what we were doing, that the world would fall apart or at least our little corner of the world. And that class was really the beginning of my journey in learning what it means to live within my capacity.

And when I think of capacity, I automatically also start thinking about limits. I think we would all agree that as humans we have limits and it seems more obvious in the area of the physical. Like, there's only a certain number of pounds that I can lift. There's a limit to the number of days that I can go without food or water and I need a certain number of hours of sleep if I'm gonna be able to function effectively. But I think what we often don't take into consideration is that we have mental and emotional limits as well.

They're harder to recognize and they're harder to define because they're invisible. You know, things like how many phone calls can I give and receive in a day? How many angry people can I respond to with kindness? How many problems can I hear and be a part of solving? And or how many good decisions can I make in a day before I'm just too tired to be to make good decisions anymore to think clearly?

And I honestly don't think at that time that I even recognized that there were areas in some of these limits in some of these areas, but we did an exercise that held a lot of moments for me. They gave us a series of statements and we were supposed to check the box on the life on the left if we believed that we had limits in this area. And then we were supposed to think about and check the box on the right if we actually lived as if we had limits in that the this area. And, oh my goodness, the revelations for me as I realized the big disparity there were in in those two things, the way what I believed and the way I was actually living. And as I process through these statements, I I have to say that verses kept popping into my mind.

Things like, but I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. Right? And those who wait upon the lord will renew their strength. They'll mount up with wings like eagles. They'll run and not be weary.

They'll walk and not faint. Right? Well, of course, those are right. They're scripture. The lord gave them to us.

But the reality is also that we as humans do have limits. Only God does not. And if I am trying to live as if I don't have limits, I am in the words of author Jen Wilkins setting myself up as God's rival. Instead of reflecting the image of God, I'm trying to become like God. And in her in her book, in his image, she says, like our father Adam and our mother Eve, we long for that which is only intended for God, rejecting our God given limits and craving the limitlessness we foolishly believe we are capable of wielding and entitled to possess.

Yikes. Even even as I read that right now, I am really convicted because I realize how often I struggle with that whole idea of limits and and living within my capacity. So, the reality is that to deny our limits oftentimes isn't actually faith, but it's more often pride. You know, even the Lord worked for six days and then he rested on the seventh and we were created to have periods of work and periods of rest. And if I don't take the time to get the rest that my mind and body require, then I am doing a couple things.

I'm trying to function outside of my capacity as a human being created in the image of God. I'm trying to become like God. And I'm also breaking a fundamental commandment of the Lord, you know, in God's economy rest, isn't a luxury, it's a necessity and it's not a suggestion, but it's a command. So I began to wrestle through, several questions, things like how much rest do I need to do what God has called me to do and what are things that bring rest into my life? You know, what are areas that need to change in order for me to regain some margin and rest?

And the hardest one of all is what am I willing to commit to next week, next month, next year in order to reclaim margin and live within my capacity with the way the Lord is intended. So for me, thinking through those questions really brought me to a point of making some structural changes in my life. I gave up some of my responsibilities. I learned to say no to some other good things in my life. And even more, I began to pray more intentionally that the Lord would show me what sorts of things he wanted me to focus my time and energy on.

Being reminded that the Lord will give me the strength to do all the things that he calls me to do. But not necessarily all the things that I decide I should do, or sometimes even the things that other people might expect of me. So this continues to be very much still an ongoing process for me, as I go through different stages of life, as I age, as I faith health issues, or as I bump up against other things that just may affect my capacity. So that's lesson number two. And the third one is as I continue to look in that rear view mirror, one more thing that was a turning point for me was, realizing that being transformed into the image of Christ really isn't about me.

During the COVID years, I listened to a message by Tim Keller on prayer and adoration. And during that message, he made the comment that you will never really understand who you are until you understand who God is. And that comment, that phrase really grabbed me, even though it wasn't at all the focus of his sermon. You know, in my time as a career counselor, I just kind of naturally gravitate towards being interested in how people are wired, you know, what makes them tick? What are their strengths and weaknesses?

How they can, how can they make their best contribution to a team? And then I love coming alongside them and helping them understand those same things so that they can make wise decisions, whether it might be an educational decision or a decision about a career fit. So again, I was asking myself, what in the world does he mean? How does this relate to my growing in Christ, or using my, gifts and talents to serve the Lord? And the funny thing was, is that in the weeks that followed this statement popped up everywhere.

Whether it was a sermon I heard, and that might have even been one that I heard here at faith church or an article that I was reading a, message that I was listening to online, in books that I was reading. And then I discovered that John Calvin said this way back in the fifteen hundreds, and I thought, where have I been that I have never heard this before? At any rate, I began to get the message that maybe the Lord was trying to get my attention and tell me something. So I started to kind of, restudy the attributes of God in a way that I probably hadn't since the early days of my Christian life. I reread JI Packer's book, knowing God.

I listened to sermons on the attributes of God. And when I went to scripture, I started looking for and cataloging and doing word studies on things related to the attributes and the character of God. And, just by random pick, I had started with the holiness of God. So somewhere again in this process process, it dawned on me that during most of my Christian life, I think I had really looked at growing in Christ or maturing as a believer from a really self centered perspective. When I would go to the word, I would ask myself questions like, what promises can I claim?

What commands do I need to follow? What sins do I need to confess? Where do I need to change? Where does God want me to serve? And what do I need to apply to my life?

Now are these bad questions? No, not at all. They're good questions. And I think there are appropriate times and places in our Christian life and our relationship with the Lord that we need to ask these questions and reflect on our answers. But for me in this season, I began to see how self focused this was, you know, that it was all about, it was all about me.

Second Corinthians three seventeen and eighteen, are have always been I've always considered them life verses. They've been a part of my story whenever I've had an opportunity to share my story with other people. And I think that's probably because of the they talk about your our freedom in Christ, And then they also talk about the ministry of the holy spirit. But during this season, I think they began to take on a little bit of a, a new focus. For me, they had a fresh perspective and I will put them up on the screen in a minute, but I want to give again a little context first.

Prior to this in chapter three of second Corinthians, Paul is writing extensively about the glory of God. And he uses the example of Moses. And when he went up on Mount Sinai and received the tablets of stone or the 10 commandments for the second time. And after spending forty days and forty nights in the presence of the Lord, his face was so radiant that he had to cover it with a veil because the Israelites were terrified. In verse 16, Paul says that when we become believers, that veil is removed.

And then he goes on to say, now the Lord is the spirit and where the spirit of the Lord is there is freedom. And we all with unveiled face beholding the glory of the Lord are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the spirit. So what's my role in spiritual growth? Well, according to verse 18, it's beholding the glory of the Lord.

And that word beholding means to contemplate or to reflect. And so my job is to contemplate, to understand the Lord and his attributes and his character, to sit in his presence and to get to know him and understand all of who he is. And as I do that, as I do my part, then it's the holy spirit who will transform me to be, be more Christlike, you know, he will do the work. He will take care of the growth and change. So now when I read scripture, I look first for what does this passage say about God, the creator, or what does it say about Christ, the son in whom and for whom and by whom I've been created, or what does it say about the Holy spirit, who is the agent of transformation and change and who sustains me in my Christian life?

You know, all throughout scripture, we encounter various and a variety of people who, encountered or experienced the presence and the holiness of God, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Joshua, Moses, Peter, John, and the island Of Patmos, Paul on the road to Damascus. And whenever people in scripture encountered the presence and the holiness of God, their natural response was to fall on their knees or on their face in fear, and to cry out in anguish over their sin and their, the recognition of how unworthy they are. John Stott in his book, the message to the Galatians says that all of us have inflated views of ourselves, especially in self righteousness until we've visited a place called Calvary. It's there at the foot of the cross that we shrink to our true size. And again, Jen welcomes in her book in his image says, when we apprehend his holiness, we're changed by the revelation, the knowledge of God and the knowledge of self always go hand in hand.

We see ourselves differently because we see God as he is. And we understand our calling to reflect God as Christ did in a new way. So it's a little bit embarrassing to acknowledge that it took me so long to kind of get this, that the more deeply I get to know God, the more I understand myself in relationship to him and the more I see his greatness and glory, the more I'm aware of my own sin and unworthiness and the more grateful I am for the Lord and all that he has done for me through Christ. For me again, that is still very much an ongoing process and I still have a long way to go. So just to kind of a recap, the lessons that I feel like I see when I look in the rear view mirror, realizing that God means for me to be exactly where I am learning to live within my capacity and understanding that Christian growth isn't about me.

It's about knowing God and understanding him. And I'm just gonna close with a few verses from Jeremiah. And interestingly enough, these happened to be the same verses that pastor Jeff used in his sermon last week. So Jeremiah nine twenty three through 24, thus says the Lord, let not the wise man boast in his wisdom. Let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches, but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me that I am the Lord who practices steadfast love justice and righteousness in the earth for in these things.

I delight declares the Lord. So thanks for coming again and thanks for being willing to listen. I realize that this hasn't been much of a chronological journey of my walk with the Lord. So there may be lots of gaps or questions that you have. And, certainly, I'm willing to entertain any of those and try to fill in any blank spaces.

Matt? Don't don't go anywhere just yet. Does anyone have any questions? Lisa? How did you get out of Warsaw?

I knew that was gonna be a question. That was kind of a cliffhanger, because I knew if I explained the whole story, we'd never we wouldn't have time to talk about anything else. And, actually, it would probably a lot more be a lot more entertaining if I had my husband Gary come up here and explain the rest of the story to you. But for the sake of time, I'll tell you that, yeah, we after that being rejected by the American embassy, we all the five of us sat down in a circle right there on the floor in the middle of the Warsaw Train Station and prayed. And we said, lord, we do not know what to do next.

And when we got done praying and lifted our heads up, there was a man standing right outside our circle, and he spoke to us in English, and he said something like, Do you need some help? And so we told him what the problem was, and he said, I'll take care of it. Come with me. So we had to leave some of the people with the luggage, but I think Gary and I went with him, and he took us back to a ticket counter, one of the ticket counters. And we may even have ended up at two or three ticket counters with him as well.

And he would he he said, okay, now everything's gonna be okay. And then he would turn around and to the people behind the little cage, he he just let loose and started screaming and hollering and doing all sorts of things. And then he would he would stop and he would turn and say to Gary, everything's gonna be fine. And then he turned back and he would do the same thing all over again. And so by the by the end, we came away with with a piece of paper that had two times and train tracks on it.

And and they said, these are the trains to Russia. You need to go to the platform and meet the train, and you will, pay for your tickets when to the conductor of the train, which in code meant you've got to bribe your way onto the train. So we did that, and I think he gave us two times in case we missed one or couldn't find one or whatever. And so we went back down to the platforms, which again was a hike down three stories and to the other end of the building. But then it was confusing because trains were coming in from both directions, and we didn't know where the conductor was gonna be on the train and which end we're supposed to get on.

And we actually so we sat down. We were waiting. There was still some time before the first train that he had, told us to get on, was coming in. And I sat down, on a bench. We all did.

And the person sitting beside me struck up a conversation again in English and she was a Polish woman and come to find out she had done her graduate studies at the University of Michigan. So it was, very interesting. And she explained to us exactly what we needed to do, how we needed to find the conductor. And actually in in that picture back that I showed when we were on the train and there was a guy in a white shirt, that was the conductor of the train. And we did indeed pay him.

We gave him all of our U. S. Dollars and we were able to get on the train and get on our way to Russia. So, we did make it out of Poland. But anyway, it was a fun story.