Wednesday, July 06, 2005

Agape Love

I decided to put old sermon messages that I had on tape, onto CD. This proved to be quite a project. Even though I didn't listen to the entirety of the messages as they were recorded onto the computer, I heard bits and pieces. One of the messages was from Pastor Ron Smith, who was on staff at Antioch church in Eden Prairie, MN at that time. Ron has a true pastor's heart that radiates from him when he talks to you. He cares deeply about your walk with the Lord. He is soft-spoken for the most part. In this particular message, he talked about God being Love. God doesn't just have an attribute of love. He IS love. He can't choose whether to love or not because that is who He is. Then he went into the different types of love; agape love being the deepest form. The tape went on as I was doing laundry, vacuuming...

I came back into the room and heard the tape again. Now he was talking about circumstances that get under our skin. I thought of things like... not being "on the same page" as your spouse, frustrated at the slow cashier who chatters away as your children are crying, tested by the customer service representative who just doesn't "get it", or exasperated at your child that disobeyed AGAIN.

To this, the usually soft-spoken, wisdom-emitting man said,

"BE ENCOURAGED!! This is an opportunity to grow and mature in unconditional Agape Love!"
This is now posted on a 3 x 5 card at the windowsill by my sink.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Heidi,
I have been just wondering about this...and you're the first person I've heard of doing it. I want to record our old tapes that we made when we were little on CD, to preserve them. Lots of them are wearing out. How are you doing it? I've not seen a lot of "tape to CD" things.

On another note, (I found your blog from Aimees) several years ago when I was attending Kitchi Rally, you gave your testimony in our girls dorm time. One of my friends who grew up in a Catholic church was there, and she was so interested, intrigued and challenged by your speaking. She has since joined our church and become a genuine Christian(praise God!!!!). I know that your testimony definitly helped to encourage her to go that direction, but I've never gotten the chance to let you know and say thank you. :) Thank you for speaking out, and helping to make a difference.
~Laura

Anonymous said...

Wow! That is really special!! I had recieved a couple encouraging comments, but I didn't have any true idea how it had been recieved. I had resigned to the fact that I would probably not know until I got to heaven. God really can bring beauty from ashes! I will be praying for her.

Regarding the CD's...Keith knows how to set up our computer to record audio input from our tape player that has an audio out jack. He knows what to plug in where. He knows hardware better than me. Then I am able to burn it onto a CD, either as a regular CD or in MP3 format. Hope that helps!

Thanks for stopping by!