Memo From the Mann

What a beautiful thing it is to accomplish God’s intent for us. What a content feeling of joy it is to please God; to act in a way that would bring a smile upon his face, that would bring joy into his heart, and that would create a special parental bond between us. Lord, how we long to be the pleasing shepherd. How we long to hear you say of us, ‘He/She is my shepherd and has accomplished all that...

Psalm 106: 43-46 Many times He delivered them; but they rebelled in their counsel, and were brought low for their iniquity.” Nevertheless He regarded their affliction, when He heard their cry; and for their sake He remembered His covenant...”   My journey in life has brought me into a few relationships that have challenged me. By challenged I mean when my patience, my compassion, and my love was p...

I’ve always connected well to Luke 12:34,” For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” It speaks plainly, and clearly,  to my personal heart. It leaves no loop holes to wiggle out of, or rhetoric to creatively spin. It simply asks where and or what is our treasure.   You see, as I’ve come to discern, we were created to be God-centered, and sin, makes us self-centered. Knowing our w...

Being creative people, means we’re often searching for a better way to do things. A better way to save time, or a better way save money. The quest here is an honorable one ...after all our creative genes come from our Designer, who created us in his image.   In Psalm 101, we read where David wanted to bring the Ark of God up to Jerusalem. The Ark was God’s sacred seat - His throne on the earth. Da...

Malachi 2:4–6 (NIV): 4 And you will know that I have sent you this warning so that my covenant with Levi may continue,” says the Lord Almighty. 5 “My covenant was with him, a covenant of life and peace, and I gave them to him; this called for reverence and he revered me and stood in awe of my name. 6 True instruction was in his mouth and nothing false was found on his lips. He walked with me in pe...

6 “A son honors his father, and a slave his master. If I am a father, where is the honor due me? If I am a master, where is the respect due me?” says the Lord Almighty. “It is you priests who show contempt for my name. “But you ask, ‘How have we shown contempt for your name?’ ~ Malachi 1:6 (NIV)   If I’m honest, there were a few moments growing up where I probably harvested some contempt for my ea...

“Should I mourn and fast in the fifth month, as I have done for so many years?” ~ Zechariah 7:3   How many time have you caught yourself doing something that you weren’t aware of. Maybe your hands were idling themselves with unknown movements; or your leg were bouncing with anticipation, or maybe your feet were tapping out an annoying rhythm.   We are prone to doing some really curious stuff when...

Is there yet any seed left in the barn? ~ Haggai 2:19   As the days fly by on my calendar, I’m well aware of the passing of time. In fact these days, way too often, it seems as if life is rushing by ...and then with it comes these feelings of self deprecation.   Age has a way of creeping up on us when all of a sudden we’re doing second takes at the image in our mirror, but it’s the nature of our e...

This is what the Lord Almighty says: “These people say, ‘The time has not yet come to rebuild the Lord’s house.’ ” ~ Haggai 1:2   My earthly father had a tough time with me when it came to getting my chores done, my jobs done around the house. I had a special way of putting them off. I don’t know why I say special, as they were anything but special in that I was always getting reprimanded for not...

“you cannot tolerate wrongdoing.” ~ Habakkuk 1:13a   Do you ever look at the world and feel confused by its behavior? Not a day goes by where we’re not bombarded with an endless supply of examples. It seems that every time I really step back and look at it, the world insults my faith. It makes me, a believer, wonder how can this continue ...day in, and day out?   The prophet Habakkuk was wondering...

“I am against you,”  ~ Nahum 3:5a   It’s human nature for all of us to want to be liked, to be accepted, and to be supported by others. Whether in business, or our personal lives, we want to be smiled upon. Just take a glimpse of our social networks and the vein attempts being made to get positive feedback.   None of us want to hear the words, “I am against you,”  ~ (Nahum 3:5a) ...but that’s exac...

His way is in the whirlwind and the storm, and clouds are the dust of his feet ~ Nahum 1:3b   The closest thing to God’s fury that I can think of is weather related. I’ve experienced some harrowing weather events in my lifetime, events that made me reflect on how I was in control of very little, if anything at all.   Those are great equalizer moments. In those moments we realize just how weak and...

hurl all our iniquities into the depths of the sea ~ Micah 7:19   My daughter once lost a teething ring in a swampy bit of water in St. Augustine Florida. What compounded the retrieval of the ring was that it settled onto the snout of a rather large alligator. Just relocating where the ring was a miraculous achievement on my part as I realized after the fact that it was gone, but the sight of this...

He will stand and shepherd his flock ~ Micah 5:4   There are countless stories where love lies bleeding. Where the love for another is the driving force for sacrifice that sometimes leads to death. Have you witnessed this kind of love in your life time?   Seven hundred years before the gospel, in Micah 5, we read about a deliverer that is foreseen. The character of the deliverer will be that of a...

and peoples will flow to it ~ Micah 4:1   Have you ever been caught up in a moment when time didn’t exist? A moment when your mind was so occupied that the passing of time was oblivious to you. That’s to say at some point you stopped to realized a large portion of it had passed without your recognition. That’s being in the flow.   As a musician I get to experience (flow) it in those special improv...

Let everyone call urgently on God ~ Jonah 3:8   When is a time where you have urgently called on God? Urgently meaning you required immediate action or attention. It certainly would’ve been a serious, and probably even a life threatening moment. I mean we’re not gonna urgently call on God to shine on tomorrow’s day at the beach.   In Jonah 3 we find the king of Nineveh, the most powerful man in th...

But Jonah ran away... ~ Jonah 1:3 Have you ever run away from something? I’m sure you have ...we all have, and hindsight usually reveals just how foolish and wasteful the behavior was.   But imagine running from God ...as if that’s even a possibility. What foolishness to think that the omnipresent God would not be able to track us down, that he’d somehow lose us in the world’s mass of humanity. Si...

A library is a house of  hope (we could stop there) ... It’s a place where we all, whatever our situation, can feed our ideas and developed our dreams.   A cartoon showed (a father handing a child a book to his teen-age son): “It’s a book you say, ..uh, what do I plug it into?” You mind!   Apart from the word of God, human life knows only chaos. It is the word that speaks order into creation and t...

...break up your unplowed ground ~ Hosea 10:12 One of my daughters was a stubborn child. She knew what she wanted, and wasn’t going to have it any other way. Her will was strong, her heart could turn hard during such an exercise, her upsetment occurred because she wasn’t getting what she wanted ...much like many adults, like many unhappy souls in the world ...dare I say much like our politicians ....

Woe to you who are complacent ~ Amos 6:1 Don’t you just love people who are full of themselves? They have an arrogant way about them, one that seems to allow them the belief that we commoners, we sheep,  just grazed around them as they carry on the important aspects of their day.  Smugness wears ugly ...don’t you think. I mean we don’t wear it as a compliment. We don’t greet a great man or woman w...

 Do two walk together unless they have agreed to do so? ~ Amos 3:3 I’d like to share some common agreed upon thoughts about this statement. Persons do not walk together unless they have agreed to meet; lions do not roar unless they have captured some prey; birds do not fall to the ground for no reason; alarms don’t sound without causing fear. (Indeed, our natural disasters come not from happenstan...

Amos 7:14 (NIV): 14 Amos answered Amaziah, “I was neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, but I was a shepherd, and I also took care of sycamore-fig trees. Has the Spirit ever got you attention in an uncomfortable way? You know, you feel like you should say something, or do something that’s outside of your comfort zone? We should take care to listen, and to trust, and to respond to such callin...

They kiss calf-idols! ~ Hosea 14:2 To whom are you expressing your loyalty, your devotion, and your love? Now you can answer in any number of ways, but ultimately it’s your life that will express the truth when it comes to your loyalty, your devotion, and your love. Here in Hosea 14 we read that Instead of seeking life from God, Ephraim sought it from the fertility rites of baal worship, which was...

Turn & Return But you must return to your God... ~ Hosea 12:6 All of us have guideposts that mark our journey, and some of them we’d no doubt like to remove ... but then that’s an impossible feat, they’re posted there indelibly, we lived them, and we can’t undo our history ... we can only learn from them. They’re reminders, not only to grow by, but also not to repeat. In Hosea 12  the Lord adm...

It was I who taught Ephraim to walk, ~ Hosea 11:3 (Hebrew Ephraim, refers to the northern kingdom of Israel) I became a father for the first time in my mid-thirties, and I was more than ready for it ...and yes I was probably what we’d consider a doting parent. I cherished the gift of my new born child, and couldn’t do enough for her. My days were filled with her first words, her first steps, her f...