Safe with the Lion of Judah

I think I have tendonitis again.

Definitely in too much pain to type anything (or do anything else) the last few days. In fact, yesterday I was so bad I actually stayed in bed most of the day – very unusual for me! But I used my time well listening to another Chautauqua book (not part of the series but a related book) and thinking about mission.

The book I was listening to yesterday

I’d like to share some of my thoughts but my husband has strictly forbidden me to type any more today – he thinks I probably got the tendonitis from typing.

So here is a prayer letter I wrote when we first discovered the Chautauqua books:

A few years back we noticed that the beautiful evening hymn "Day is Dying in the West" was written by Mary Artemesia Lathbury the "poet laureate of Chautauqua." What sort of Bible conference we wondered was Chautauqua

Last month I discovered the newly re-released Chautauqua Series:  a 6 volume set of novels following the lives of 4 young women who come to the Lord at Chautauqua in - a that time a Sunday School teacher training convention. It has made for a fascinating read in the spirit of C.S.Lewis' essay "On the Reading of Old Books" and in the light of our passionate prayers for the rebirth of the Aomori Christian Center.

As I finished up the 6th book in the series on Friday, I was very, very moved by the following passage:

The speaker was telling a story; and of all stories in this world for a preacher to tell at a religious meeting, it was about a little trained dog in a circus! Eureka felt scandalized. She made no pretensions, she was counted always outside the circle of good Christian people, but she knew nevertheless what was fitting at a religious meeting! Yet she could not help listening.

The little dog, the speaker said, had not done his tricks, and had been unmercifully whipped by his master. In his agony and terror, looking about for a way of escape, he rushed to the cage of the great Numidian lion and squeezed his little body through the bars. A moment of awful suspense; surely the dog had gone to his doom!

Straight up to the monarch of the forest he ran, and that king of his tribe put out his great paw and gathered him gently inside the circle of his protection, uttering as he did so a low, ominous growl to the people outside. The owner of the dog, who had feared for a terrible second that he had lost a treasure, now recovered himself and said gruffly to the lion’s keeper: “I want my dog.” The keeper looked at him for one disgusted moment, then he said in significant tones: “Oh, all right; I’ll open the cage door, and you can go in and get him if you want to.”

“I tell you, brother, you who have fled for protection from the blows of Satan to the offered Refuge, remember that the ‘Lion of the tribe of Judah’ is your protection; and those looking on if they but understood it, could afford to say to the evil one; ‘Get him if you can!'

Have you, too, been suffering from Satan's blows? Remember the Lion of the tribe of Judah is your protection and ours.