Wisdom-Trek / Creating a LegacyWelcome to Day 1374 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to WisdomThe Church as a Tumbleweed – Meditation MondayWisdom - the final frontier to true knowledge. Welcome to Wisdom-Trek! Where our mission is to create a legacy of wisdom, to seek out discernment and insights, to boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before. Hello, my friend, I am Guthrie Chamberlain, your captain on our journey to increase Wisdom and Create a Living Legacy. Thank you for joining us today as we explore wisdom on our 2nd millennium of podcasts. This is Day 1374 of our Trek, and it is time for Meditation Monday. Taking time to relax, refocus, and reprioritize our lives is crucial in order to create a living legacy. For you, it may just be time alone for quiet reflection. You may utilize structured meditation practices. In my life, Meditation includes reading and reflecting on God’s Word and in prayer. It is a time to renew my mind, refocus on what is most important, and making sure that I am nurturing my soul, mind, and body. As you come along with me on our trek each Meditation Monday, it is my hope and prayer that you, too, will experience a time for reflection and renewing of your mind.


 If we are honest with ourselves, none of us like to sacrifice our comforts. Very few desire to sacrifice by hunkering down in our own ‘shelter,’ but there are many people that would love to have a few days at home. I realize that we all desire for the world’s economy to get back to work, so we can return to a schedule that is comfortable for us. Even with this temporary inconvenience, this is nothing compared to what the early church faced, and what many churches face today under repressive regimes such as China. You would think that these crazy times would snuff out the church, but the opposite is true. Today let us meditate on a strange parable called:


The Church as a TumbleweedYou are probably thinking, what a strange analogy, what possibly could the church have in common with a tumbleweed. This story came to mind after reading information about the attributes of the tumbleweed. While working with a client in Kingman, Arizona, a few years back, on windy days, I used to see tumbleweed, like in the old westerns roll by in the open plains.  The wind blew there often, so it was a fairly common occurrence during the dry seasons. We also recently traveled across the entire state of Texas to spend time with our oldest son and his family last Christmas, and once again, the wind was sailing down the plains, and you could see the tumbleweed bouncing along the ground.


I recently read a story from a man who grew up in Texas, and this is what he said. “We had 70 acres on our ranch to explore, fish, make forts, and play. Anytime we had to make a fire when camping, we would find a tumbleweed, stomp it into small pieces, and use it as fire-starter for dead mesquite limbs. We learned that you NEVER put a full-sized tumbleweed on a burning fire. As it burned, the tumbleweed would pop and shower the air with red-hot embers that floated on the wind threatening to start a wildfire. The more you tried to stomp out the burning tumbleweed, the more you spread the embers on the wind.”This reminded me of a book written by the New Testament scholar, F.F. Bruce called “The Spreading Flame.”  Let me read to you Acts 8:1-4 (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=+Acts+8%3A1-4&version=NLT) and meditate on it to see if you can understand the analogy of the church to a tumbleweed. Saul was one of the witnesses, and he agreed completely with the killing of Stephen. A great wave of persecution began that day, sweeping over the church in Jerusalem, and all the believers except the apostles were scattered through the regions of Judea and Samaria. (Some devout men came and buried Stephen with...