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“Why can’t God just make my life better? Right now.”  In twenty years of hearing clients talk about their difficult lives, I’ve heard many variations on that sentence.

In the middle of a divorce, a man wonders why God didn’t save his marriage. He’d prayed for five years for his wife to fall in love with him again.  A woman remembers the time an older cousin, at a family reunion at a lake pavilion, took her behind a shrub and took advantage of her four-year-old innocence. As she feels that betrayal, she says, “Why can’t God just take this pain away?” Walking out of the cancer clinic, a patient wonders, “Why doesn’t God just stop these runaway cells?”

Are you there today? Are you wondering why God doesn’t just make it all better?

If that’s the pain you feel today, I’m sad with you. I can’t imagine your doubt, anger, fear, sadness. I know what that desire for God to make it all better was like for me, but I don’t know what it is like for you.

Often, Jesus does not meet our expectations. We want immediate results. Especially where emotional healing is concerned, he works with us over time, in a process. We want a certain kind of resolution, in a certain way, at a particular time. How hard it is to submit to the processes that he has designed for our healing.

Affection Pictures, Images and PhotosOur limited perspective means we need input from others.  Our aloneness means we need an arm around our shoulders. Our weakness means we need God’s strength, endurance, and encouragement, (Romans 15:5) just at the time when we doubt his desire to give them.

Father, you know our hearts and you know our needs. You have made healing a process. Help us submit to that process. In the name and for the glory of Jesus, Amen.

 

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In the Midst of Ordinary Life

A week ago, the Japanese were working, playing, and studying, when the ground began to shake. The shaking continues–after tsunami, on to radiation releases with long-term consequences. Economic shaking will ripple through their bank accounts. In the midst of their ordinary lives, they have awakened to the extraordinary.

Though we may be thousands of miles removed from this current shaking, we ache with them because we know what a life changed in an instant feels like. Even if whole pieces of our country and economy have not been devastated, many of us have answered the phone call or opened the door to a reality that shifted our personal foundations.

Especially if we are Americans, the very normality of our lives can lull us into a kind of short-sightedness. We forget that we will all die. We wake up, we eat breakfast, we go to the office or to the kitchen for our daily work. We drive home through rush hour traffic or we ride the train or we wait for a spouse to return from his or her work.

The days pile on each other, in a rhythm that lulls us into certain kinds of expectations. We do not expect the ground to shake today. We expect our spouse to return with a smile, our children to live to adulthood. We expect life to go on, as we know it now. Though we vaguely know we’ll die someday, it seems far off.

And yet. Life will not always be as we expect. There is an end coming. Psalm 90 teaches us to “number our days.” Indeed, our days can be numbered and wisdom keeps that in mind, in the ordinariness of our everyday lives.

Father, we pray for mercy for the people of Japan. And we pray for wisdom for all of us, to recognize the deeper realities. For your glory and your coming kingdom. Amen.

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Listen

1 Listen to this, all you people!
Pay attention, everyone in the world!
2 High and low,
rich and poor—listen! Psalm 49:1-2

What does it take to listen? To concentrate our attention towards hearing? The psalmist goes on to speak of wisdom. He talks specifically of rich people going to the grave like everyone else, leaving their wealth behind.

Every communication has a communicator, a message, and a receiver. To listen to the psalmist’s message, we need to define “wealth” like he does. I’d bet he would say nearly all of us reading this are “wealthy.” If we define the wealth as “someone who enjoys more resources than me” have we really heard?

ear Pictures, Images and PhotosWe may have had our own thoughts sparked by his words, but if listening is understanding the message that was sent, we haven’t truly listened.

On Oprah, yesterday, I listened to sexually abused men, telling of ways trusted adults used them, as little boys, for the adult’s perverted pleasure. It was hard to listen. I listened because they needed to tell. Oprah mirrored compassion  to them, just as I would have had they been in my office. Abuse victims first need to believe they will be believed.  Unlike many of their families, they knew Oprah would believe them.

Real listening, person to person, takes concentrated effort. It takes love. It takes commitment. It takes believing that every person is “created in the image of God, of much worth and value.” That phrase is from Dianne Leman last Sunday:  http://www.thevineyardchurch.us/podcast .

Who will cross our path today who needs to be listened to? Spouse, child, neighbor, grocery store clerk? To listen is to love. To love is to obey Jesus’ command to “love our neighbor as ourselves.”

Holy Spirit, give us power, today, to listen.

 

 

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Over All

“What to write, Lord?” is usually my Friday morning prayer. This morning, my thoughts are many:

As I woke up, I thought about the relationship between sex and violence. Both penetrate physical boundaries, one in love and one in hatred. Not sure where that thought is going, but the similarity of the opposites intrigues me.

As Jerry and I took our morning walk, Tyler Perry’s comment on Oprah yesterday, about his physically abusive father, came to mind. “If I’d beat you one more time, you could have been president, like Obama.” I’m glad Mr. Perry knows his father is wrong.

Today’s USA Today includes a special supplement  about the need for global women’s rights. The right to be physically whole rather than mutilated, the right to be a child rather than a wife, the right to self-determination. Massive pain. Among others, a group called the Elders, including Jimmy Carter and Desmond Tutu, are working on some of these issues.

And the weather is finally breaking in central Illinois. Birds were singing this morning. Walking, we got overheated in our down vests.

Jerry just interrupted me to say, “I know you’re working, but you need to step outside. It’s 60 degrees.” In winter, does spring ever sound too good to be true?

Valley of the Fallen Pictures, Images and PhotosAnd yet, spring is here today. Snowdrops are blooming. The tiny bit of snow remaining in the front yard from the snowblower pile should clear out by noon.

And, after cancer and cataracts, we’re healthy enough to walk two miles every morning.

And, over it all,  amidst the jumble of evil and good that makes up the world, a good Father watches and waits and works.

 

Father, may we watch and wait and work with you.

 

 

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Obedient Wrestling

“If I tell Jesus my anger, he’ll throw me out of the room.” The young woman’s tears glistened on her cheeks.

During prayer ministry time, I had just encouraged her to be honest with God about how she felt. Her husband had cheated and she’d been downsized. She was furious with her husband, her boss, and with God for letting it all happen.

“What makes you say he’ll throw you out?”

“I dunno. But that’s what my father would have done.” She wiped her tears with a crumbled tissue.

“But you’ve turned your back, your arms are crossed, and you’re ten feet away from him, right?”

“Well, yes.”

“There’s a world of difference, in our anger, between facing away and facing toward him.”

“Oh.” She looked at me, a half-smile mixing with her tears.

“He knows your anger. But he doesn’t know you in your anger. He wants to know you.”

“He won’t reject me?”

“Did he reject Jacob? I’m not talking about cursing God. I’m talking about a respectful but intense wrestling with him. Like Jacob did in the wilderness when he wrestled with the angel of the Lord. That was where Jacob’s name changed. It was that honest wrestling that changed Jacob’s character so much he needed a new name.”

“Oh. How do I wrestle with a God I can’t see?” She stared at the carpet.
“Write a letter to him.”

A letter allows us to pour out our emotions in words to the God who listens. It also enables us to confess to God our dark desires to hurt others as we’ve been hurt.

The Father of Jesus is unlike any other authority figure most of us know. He invites us into an obedient wrestling.

To wrestle is to learn the contours of your opponent’s very body.  To wrestle with God is to experience him and let him experience us.  Not only will God stay in the room with us, obedient wrestling will teach us the contours of our hearts–and of his.

Jesus, give us grace to wrestle.

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Dependent, Like it or Not

What scriptures do you dislike? Here’s one I wish was different:  “Therefore, in order to keep me (Paul) from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” 2 Corinthians 12:7-9  Nobody knows exactly what that thorn was–physical, emotional, spiritual. And we all have various kinds of weaknesses.

I’m developing a new retreat. This morning, I woke up early with some ideas to expand the basic concept. That was God. By myself, I get stuck on the core idea, with little sense of how to expand the focus. I know it needs expansion and to be viewed from several different angles, but it is one of my weaknesses as a developer to actually be able to see the related concepts.

Even using a number of helps–mind-mapping, mining my own story, and reading others’ explorations of the topic, I still feel stuck sometimes. I’d much rather be full of ideas, able to see the relationships between them and able to grasp what needs to be included. But that is a request for a different kind of intelligence than God has given me. I have a weakness in this area.

How do you feel about that idea, that God’s power is made perfect in our weaknesses? Are you comfortable with that? Good! I’m working on it. I’m grateful for this morning’s input. Whether I like it or not, I depend on his help.

But is dependence easy for any of us? Independence is the familiar sin. Our primeval parents said, “No, God, I’m not going to listen to you. This snake here has a better idea.”

But it is God’s idea that we are dependent beings. That feels like weakness to us. We prefer conceit. But we are made for his glory (Isaiah 43:7).

Yes. So be it.

Father, show your glory through us today!

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Methaphor, All

Is every bit of the creation meant to be a metaphor for spiritual realities?

At sunrise this morning, the clouds glowed, prettier than the sun alone brightening the horizon. God shows his glory as he lights up the clouds in our lives. When I describe the deep darkness out of which God has delivered me, his glory shines.

God’s flowers speak to me, in so many ways. Jerry and I were hiking in a state park a few years ago when I bent down to a tiny blue and purple flower. “If God takes such trouble to design this quarter-inch flower so carefully, won’t he also take great care with the details of our lives?”

“What a good little sermon.” He took my hand as we continued to the waterfall at the end of the canyon.

Water gushing over a cliff is also a metaphor. John 7:38 says, “Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.” Believers walk around spilling out grace, often without realizing that reality.

You can make your own list of all the ways you’ve understood God better because of his creation. God says his unseen qualities  “—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made…” Romans 1:20.

And so, we “fix our eyes” on the eternal unseen. But we can see it more clearly because of what’s temporarily visible.  2 Corinthians 4:18.

Holy Spirit, open our eyes today to the “eternal unseen.”

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The Call of Wisdom

Wisdom, Proverbs says, is supreme. “Though it cost all you have, get understanding.”(4:7) 

The wise person manages his weaknesses. He flees the streets of temptation. Some doors are always locked and the keys have been melted in fire. He knows “Just this once” is a dark lie. He understands his Father’s call.

Door, Dunbarton Oaks

The wise person recognizes her strengths. She develops her talents, with Godly boldness. When fear knocks, she locks him out. Though fear camps on the front porch, when the call comes, she strides through its slime. 

The wise person obeys the God who calls us out of darkness into his marvelous light. (1Peter 2:9) That obedience, though it may cost all we have, is worth all it costs.

Father, we are stupid and dull in ways we don’t fully realize. We need your wisdom today.

 

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Resist Distraction

"My dad always taught me to stay focused," the twenty-something contestant on Fox’s "Are You Smarter than a Fifth-Grader," said, as she stopped the play. "$25,000 is enough for me."

We’ve driven up Boulder Canyon road into the Colorado mountains and seen mountain climbers hanging from the rock face above us.

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Jesus "set his face like flint" towards Jerusalem. (Luke 9:51) What’s the commonality? Focus. The woman, the mountain climber, and the Son of God understood how to resist distraction. 

The contestant’s father’s words flashed brighter than the glaring game board. The climbers move with careful attention to each toehold, toward the pinnacle. The man of sorrows kept walking toward the place of deepest sorrow–and greatest victory. 

What helps you stay focused? These examples help me.  Money is not the ultimate good, goals are worth striving for, and sometimes we choose to walk into deep pain in order to gain substantial victory.

Father, we need grace today, in the midst of myriad distractions, to stay focused on your path for our life.

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A Sucker-Punched God

Forgiveness is the core of love. When we say Jesus loves us, the center of what we mean is he forgives us. Our detachment from him causes pain. Our indifference, our rebellion, our sin, sucker-punches him. 

Though he has every right to slap our face, he straightens up, smiles and extends his arms.

From the beginning, he knew what he would pay and considered us to be worth the price.

We don’t see what God sees. He says that the sight of his heavenly light will compensate for every pain we’ve endured here.  I’m counting on that.

And in the meantime, I’m counting on his promised presence with me through anything. I’m counting on redemption of every pain. I’m counting on deliverance from every earthly evil and being brought into his heavenly kingdom.  (Matt. 28:20, Ro. 8:28, 2 Tim. 4:18)

To say he loves us doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll fulfill all our wishes. Nor will he “come through” for us in every way we want him to. He may not give us the job we want, the spouse we long for, nor the house we are praying for.

It’s deeper, broader, wider than that. His love gives us what we really need. A God who extends his arms in spite of the pain in his gut.

Jesus. You knew from the beginning and yet you began. Worthy.

 

 

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Fill Our Own Tank

I'm tired. I just deleted two hundred words and two pictures that I'd been working on for two hours. Am I tired because I couldn't generate a thoughtful insight or is my fatigue blocking my brain? I'm too tired to decide.

How did we get in a place where so many of us feel pressure to produce a coherent thought every day or every week so those who read us will be entertained or encouraged? Used to be only magazines took on that task. Time magazine collected the news every week, wrote up the latest conflict, and we read it in our easy chairs. We didn't know about user-generated content.

Today, I'd like to go back to that. I don't want to think about social media, or book promotion, or even being a means of grace. Not today. I'll feel more rested later and I'll come back. But today, I'm going to read someone else's writing and glean God's word of grace to me.

Sometimes we need to fill our own tank.

Father, thank you for being in charge so we can take time to rest.

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Hold Tight the Kingdom

There are many unseen but real threats, but there are also unseen but real promises, and he who makes them says, “Behold, I am coming soon”
(Revelation 22:12).
Stuart McAllister  August 6, 2009 Slice of Infinity devotional from Ravi Zacharias International Ministries

What kinds of threats are unseen? Unseen in the sense that they are insidious, infiltrating our thinking without our conscious awareness? I think about American entitlement–the sense that we deserve the high standard of living we've enjoyed for the past fifty years. In one sense, we do, because we, as a culture, have worked hard and been full of energy and invention and productivity.

In another sense, though, there is the unfairness of hogging the resources of the world. That some of us cook on stoves while others cook on a ground fire is wrong. It is the way the world has been since the Fall, so it seems normal to us. Yes, the issues are enormous and political and complex, but it's still wrong. Entitlement threatens justice.

What real promises are we ignoring as we attempt to hold on to our materialism? I want to hold things lightly. I certainly enjoy cooking on my Kenmore stove rather than a wood fire in my backyard. And yet, why do I have that privilege while so many work much harder to prepare food for their children?

The lighter my grasp on this world's privileges, the tighter my grasp on what's coming. Recently, as Jerry and I admired Lake Michigan waterfront mansions, I said to him,

"If I did not believe in the Kingdom, I'd be jealous. I'd want to work for a cottage by the sea."

It is getting more and more real to me that the Kingdom both has come and is coming to this earth. That what God has in mind, that which is beyond our imagination, is this life, made new. (Isaiah 65:17) This life, where we all live in mansions by the sea. This life, fully submitted to our good and faithful Father. For his glory and our joy.

Maranatha, Jesus. Come. In your time, in your way, in accord with your purposes. Amen.


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Head in the Sand?

ostrich Pictures, Images and Photos

Ostrich. What’s your first image? Heads in the sand? That's mine. Turns out, on further investigation, that I'm wrong. Reliable internet sources say it's not true. From Wikipedia:

"When lying down and hiding from predators, the birds lay their heads
and necks flat on the ground, making them appear as a mound of earth
from a distance. This even works for the males, as they hold their
wings and tail low so that the heat haze of the hot, dry air that often
occurs in their habitat aids in making them appear as a nondescript
dark lump. Contrary to popular belief, Ostriches do not bury their
heads in sand." 

So what's the deal with this photo that I got from Photobucket? Photoshopped? Looks like it. Man, ya got to check out everything these days. Who's telling the truth? What's really going on? 

Information flashes around the world practically at the speed of light in fiber-optic cables. But wisdom takes time. Time to accumulate in our hearts. Time to think through the data accumulating in our browsers. A photo, a saying, a bit of information might reflect reality, or it might not. How do we know what's solid enough to stand on?

Authority used to be a respected arbiter of truth. The authority of the
Catholic Church. The authority of teachers. The authority of the government.
The authority of information handed down from generation to generation.
Such as, "ostriches bury their heads in the sand." We’ve
lost faith in many authorities. And yet, we all count on those who, we believe,
know more than we do.

I'm changing my mind today. I'm gonna go with the authority
of Ostrich.com and Wikipedia.  I'm taking
my head out of the sand. Any “truth” you need to reconsider?

Father, thanks for being real and solid and the final authority. May your kingdom of wisdom come, in our lives, today.

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