Category: Growing

Irony of Christianity…

sparrowsongLeave a comment

In the movie Becoming Jane, the character of Jane Austen offers a wonderful definition of irony: “…the bringing together of two contradictory truths, but always done with a smile”. As an author, Austen is most praised for her astute observations and understanding of human character. The ability to understand the complexity of human nature must take irony into account. It is an incontestable component of life. We all have some  experience with navigating its paradoxes. Those of us who find happiness have learned to do it with a smile.

 
This definition of irony calls to mind many things for me, but foremost among them is Christianity. We are saved sinners; we’ve been made right with God, but live out our sanctification; God’s power is made perfect in our weakness (II Corinthians 12:9); we walk in faith, and yet by sight. The season of Advent is described as “the already, and the not yet”. Jesus, our Messiah, lived a life where He was fully human, yet fully divine. The apostle Paul described the irony of the Christian life in his second letter to the young Corinthian church: “…we are hard-pressed on every side, but not crushed, perplexed, but don’t despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed….having nothing, and yet, possessing everything” (II Corinthians 4:8-10). Paul cuts to the core of the irony of Christianity in that same letter: “We have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all surpassing power is from God, and not from us….Therefore we do not lose heart: Though outwards we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day” (II Corinthians 4:7, 16). The irony of Christianity is a God who continually offers Himself to fill the needs of humanity, through broken humanity itself.

Surrendering to Rest …

sparrowsong2 Comments

I’ve been called particular and highly organized  by some, “persnickety” by my father. My physical therapist once commented on how strongly my body seems to like the predictable. I once joked with a counselor about how my family and friends exaggerated these tendencies by terming them as “OCD: Obsessive Compulsive Disorder”. She asked me to describe them and then remarked that she didn’t think the term was an exaggeration at all. Though I was surprised, I shouldn’t be. I like my world in order, and attempt to control what I can. It seems I can take chaos in stride until my physical environment is disorganized, but if it is, at those times, those who know me best know to keep a safe distance. Though it has its advantages, it makes finding rest challenging: it plays out most when it’s the least productive thing for me to do, like when I’m tired. Despite my stubborn resistance, rest is a habit my body demands I learn; I’m learning to let go, or at least practicing.

 

I’ve definitely tried to be a marathon runner in this journey of life, pushed myself to complete exhaustion more times than I care to count. I’m learning, oh so slowly, to become a weightlifter instead. When I’m diligent and following God’s rhythms, I rest after I work, and then to re-apply myself once recharged. For better or for worse, I’m reliant on His strength every hour of every day. As a teenager, I once asked God to do whatever He had to in my life, to keep me dependent on Him. Apparently, He knew my stubborn heart would need a lot of shaping and refining. I definitely didn’t know what I was getting myself into with such a request, but still find myself grateful He faithfully granted its fulfillment. Though at times it’s been painful, it hasn’t been without great reward; I’m blessed that He has given me Himself. I rejoice to sing with Matt Maher, “Lord, I Need You”:

 

Lord, I come, I confess

Bowing here I find my rest

Without You I fall apart

You’re the One that guides my heart

Lord, I need You, oh, I need You

Every hour I need You

My one defense, my righteousness

Oh God, how I need You

Where sin runs deep Your grace is more

Where grace is found is where You are

And where You are, Lord, I am free

Holiness is Christ in me

I Shall Not Want…

sparrowsong1 Comment

I listened to a wonderful sermon about the classic Shepherd’s psalm, & the pastor (Chip Ingram) read the psalm differently than I had ever heard it, simply by emphasizing the personal pronouns present in almost every line.  

 

“The Lord is MY shepherd; I shall not be in want.  He makes ME lie down in green pastures; He leads ME beside still waters; He restores MY soul….”

 
Isn’t that so personal & powerful?  The Psalm is also such a good reminder of God’s promise for provision.  So, today, rest easy in the assurance that YOU will not be without: rest, restoration, guidance, safety, companionship, peace, comfort, joy, goodness mercy or love.

Faithfulness of Perseverance…

sparrowsongLeave a comment

It strikes me that the saints of old are often called the faithful. The most famous example of this must be in the beloved Christmas hymn “O Come All Ye Faithful”. Those of us with even a small acquaintance with humanity know that none of us are naturally saintly nor faithful. What is it that enabled these pilgrims to be found thus, and in so doing, to become “joyful and triumphant”? What would allow us to do the same?

In the “Faith Hall of Fame” begun in Hebrews 11, those such as Abraham and Moses are referenced because they believed that God had power to do what He proclaimed, and were obedient, even unto death, despite great obstacles. It could be said they persevered in the calling God gave them regardless of the circumstances.Merriam-Webster defines perseverance as “continued effort to do or achieve something despite difficulties, failure, or opposition: the action or condition or an instance of persevering : steadfastness.” Paul wrote to Timothy, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race” (II Timothy 4:7). I have always thought of the two statements as two different accomplishments, but maybe they are one and the same. Maybe to be faithful, we just have to run our races, not win any prizes. Maybe we simply have to stay the course. 
Today, we promise to be faithful in everything from attendance to marriage, and yet so few of us are. For most, it has come to mean loyal, or steadfast in fulfilling one’s promises or obligations. If we simply dissect the building blocks of the word, it is to be full of faith, but its definition parallels that of perseverance: “loyal, constant, staunch, steadfast, resolute, firm in adherence to whatever one owes allegiance, implying unswerving adherence to a person or thing or to the oath or promise by which a tie was contracted” (Merriam-Webster). It would seem it is working in tandem with God, and taking Him at His word, that enables us to embody such constancy and unswerving devotion, and gives us the tools to persevere.

 

God makes us faithful, by being faithful to us. Each day, He asks us to run the course He’s set before us, and each day, He acts as our trainer and guide, as well as our fuel and our rest. I’ve found if I’ll just show up & take that first step forward, He’ll take me the rest of the way; irregardless, He shows up every day. He invites all to come, regardless of their qualifications or the training needed. The end results are in His hands, and regardless of how we place, He is “quick to mark even the simplest of efforts to please [Him]” (Tozer, A.W., The Attributes of God). He offers Himself to as the prize., and in so doing, He Himself is glorified. As we, the faithful, sing out each Christmas to THE Faithful One: “Jesus, to Thee be all glory given…..Word of the Father, now in flesh appearing…. O Come, let us adore Him….O Come, let us adore Him, Christ the Lord” (“O Come All Ye Faithful”, Wade & Reading).

The Gift of Presence…

sparrowsong1 Comment

There’s a faithfulness in presence. On the other side of my Grandma Thelma’s kitchen, and the table she always seemed to have prepared, sat Grandpa Ray in his screened back porch. No matter when we’d arrive for a visit, there he’d be in his chair, calmly smoking his pipe, ever composed and even-keeled. He never seemed caught off guard: throughout each day until supper and sunset, there he remained sentinel, regardless of what moved around him. He wasn’t an excitable man, and despite having spent his life as a barber, he wasn’t a talkative one. Even as a child, I wondered why he held himself aloof, always a bit removed even from those he loved most. I still know relatively little about his life, beyond the fact that he married my grandma when my dad was in high school, after my dad’s biological father had passed away. Grandpa Ray was the only paternal grandfather I knew, and though he never said he word, I knew he adored us. He  died soon after Grandma passed, so in my mind and in that reality, he was always with her.
Though I never understood his cautious engagement with life and people, I think it was through him that I first learned that presence itself is a gift. Grandpa Ray was an observer of the quiet and beauty around him, enjoying his vantage point of the lane through the apple orchard and the bluff of southwestern Wisconsin. More than that, he regarded relationships and life with acceptance and wisdom. On the rare occasion where he would choose to comment, it was clear he’d been paying attention all along, and his voice was respected. “[His] good opinion [was] rarely bestowed, and therefore more worth the earning” (Austen, Jane. Pride & Prejudice). Though he was a man of few words, on the rare occasion he was out of the house, it felt rather empty without him. By the time I knew him, and perhaps before, he’d realized he could do little to control life, little he could understand of it. Still, he faithfully offered his attendance, and stood beside us all; his was the faithful gift of presence.

The Inevitability of Hope: Esperanza…

sparrowsongLeave a comment

In her beautiful novel Gilead, Marilynne Robinson’s protagonist astutely notes, “We are never out of light, we just turn around in it.” David said it too in the 139th Psalm:

 

“Where can I go from your spirit, where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there. If I make my bed in the depth, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast. If I say, ‘Surely the darkness will hide me, and the light become night around me’, even the darkness will not be dark to you, the night will shine as the day, for darkness is as light to you.”

 

Such statements would seem to describe our existence on earth. We cannot escape the light and love and presence of God, and yet we dwell in the valley of the shadow, where we cannot yet fully enter in. Though I cannot escape His love, I am also unable to avoid waiting for its full realization. To be able to enter fully into the presence of peace one day is our hope; hope is essential to life. I remember feeling caught off guard once as I read Paul’s observations on hope in Romans 5:3-5:

 

“Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because suffering produces perseverance, and perseverance, character, and character, hope; and hope does not disappoint us, because God has filled us with His love by the power of His Holy Spirit.”

 

I was in my early 20’s, and processing several years of experiences that had been traumatic for various reasons. The passage struck me because I felt jaded, and in my cynicism, had begun to assume hope could only be the product of naivité, something generally found at the outset of experience, but not at its end. This verse asserts the opposite: Hope comes as the fruit of suffering, perseverance and character; if hope is founded on the true love of God, it cannot lead to disappointment. As Paul says later in Romans, the eighth chapter, “Nothing can separate us from the love of God.”
It encourages me to think that though there are times I might not always feel hopeful, I can trust that it is still a possibility of whatever process I am in. In Spanish, the verb for “to hope” is the exact same as both the verbs for “to wait” and “to expect”. Though in English, the terms are nuanced, when viewed as they are understood in Spanish, it seems true we cannot separate them. “Who hopes for what he already sees? But if we hope for what we cannot see, we wait for it patiently” (Romans 8:25). Paul also felt the terms and their practices were inseparable. Esperanza: hope and expectation, inextricably intertwined. If waiting is unavoidable, perhaps too, expecting and hoping are inevitable: “We are never out of light, we just turn around in it.”

Offering the Cup of Salvation…

sparrowsongLeave a comment

The Psalmist echoes what I would imagine Bartimaeus sang in praise:

 

“I love the LORD, for He heard my voice; He heard my cry for mercy.  Because He turned His ear to me, I will call on Him as long as I live….Then I called on the name of the LORD: ‘O LORD< save me!…our God is full of compassion…when I was in great need, He saved me….For You, O LORD, have delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling, that I may walk before the LORD in the land of the living…” (Psalm 116).

 

“How can I repay the LORD for all His goodness to me? I will lift up the cup of salvation, and call upon the Name of the LORD.” This is the response our Messiah, our promised and long-expected One desires from us.  When we are granted our freedom, our sight, may we have eyes to see those around us living in darkness.  When our thirst is satisfied by His rivers, may we lift His cup to the thirsty.  
Doing this work with Jesus will not only bless others, but as Mother Teresa says, it will make us happy too.   “If we pray the work…if we do it TO Jesus…if we do it FOR Jesus…THAT is what makes us CONTENT.”

“Looking for An Answer to a Question I Can’t Name”

sparrowsongLeave a comment

I learned a long time ago to stop asking questions of others if I don’t want to hear their answers. At least that’s the case most of the time, with most people. It’s definitely a different story when it comes to God; despite my best efforts to predict and control my circumstances, He always seems to answer in the most unexpected ways. Sometimes His responses takes my breath away with how wondrous they are; others, they can stop me in my tracks with how much they seem to wound. He’s hard for us all to comprehend. Mostly, it seems my questions have to do with the problem of pain, essentially asking why I and others must suffer. Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias points out that only a Western worldview would allow this question. Isn’t it funny that we frequently question why we deserve to suffer, but rarely consider why a just God has freely given us so much love and grace and beauty?

 

Just maybe, I’m trying to reconcile the irreconcilable. Still, I can’t seem to stop wondering why things happen as they do. Why are we all living our lives as if we’re trying to tip the scales in our favor, when we have to know that’s not the way it works? Maybe, as Norah Jones sang, “I’m looking for an answer to a question I can’t name”. Author Marilynne Robinson reflects on this too:

 

“Things happen for reasons that are hidden from us, utterly hidden for as long as we think they must proceed from what has come before, our guilt or our deserving, rather than coming to us from a future that God in his freedom offers to us… My meaning here is that you really can’t account for what happens by what has happened in the past, as you understand it anyway, which may be very different from the past itself. If there is such a thing….Of course misfortunes have opened the way to blessings you would never have thought to hope for, that you would not have been ready to understand as blessings if they had come to you in your youth, when you were uninjured, innocent. The future always finds us changed. So then it is part of the providence of God, as I see it, that blessing or happiness can have very different meanings from one time to another. This is not to say that joy is a compensation for loss, but that each of them, joy and loss, exists in its own right and must be recognized for what it is. Sorrow is very real, and loss feels very final to us. Life on earth is difficult and grave, and marvelous. Our experience is fragmentary. Its parts don’t add up. They don’t even belong in the same calculation. Nothing makes sense until we understand that experience does not accumulate like money, or memory, or like years and frailties. Instead it is presented to us by a God who is not under any obligation to the past except in His eternal, freely given constancy. Because I don’t mean to suggest that experience is random or accidental, you see. When I say that much the greater part of our existence is unknowable by us because it rests with God, who is unknowable, I acknowledge His grace in allowing us to feel that we know any slightest part of it” (Lila, Farrar, Straus and Giroux; pp. 222-223).

 

Perhaps it’s natural I don’t understand God’s working, when there’s so much about Him that simply can’t be known yet, and so much of what we do know defies understanding. I’m a spectator in a parade, and He’s the grand marshal, looking at His creation from a view up above. As C.S. Lewis says of his character Aslan, and in so doing describes and untamable God: “Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”  Who could worship a god that was at our level, that didn’t defy our logic? What can we do but stand in awe? As Chris Tomlin sings, it’s good He’s “Indescribable”:

“Indescribable, uncontainable,

You placed the stars in the sky and You know them by name.

You are amazing God

All powerful, untamable,

Awestruck we fall to our knees as we humbly proclaim

You are amazing God”.

Anchored in the His Harvest…

sparrowsongLeave a comment

A friend of mine was once  given a vision and a strong mental picture of harvesting. She saw a girl walking through a corn field, ripe for harvest. As the girl walked, the storm winds blew & endangered all that had grown. As she faced the storm, she carried a large anchor, & began to cast it against the wind, into the harvest field. Again & again, as the storms buffeted all that had been produced by hard labor & careful care, the girl made this choice. Again & again, she threw her anchor into the harvest.

 

It reminds me of Bebo Norman’s song entitled “All That I Have Sown”, which describes what ultimately comes of each of our lives:

 

And all that grows is our story told

As life unfolds here before

The peace we found in that broken ground

I can see them in the harvest…of all that I have sown

And when my life is done

I pray the kingdom come

And take me to Glory

It’s living inside me

It was planted like a seed

All to tell a story
It’s “all to tell a story”. The tasks given to each of us may require a hard, committed constant endeavor, and at times, can feel very lonely. We must encourage each other to take heart, and together, courageously cast out our anchors over and over again. Matthew tells us that Jesus said, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Pray therefore that the Lord will send out workers into His harvest field.” Even prayer may feel like a long labor, and trusting the season of harvest awaits us may require immense faith; we are only capable of this great work as we are filled with God’s strength. As we anchor ourselves in a harvest that is most often unseen, truly, we anchor ourselves in Him. In Him is “all our hope & stay” (On Christ the Solid Rock I Stand).

“O Joy that Seekest Me Through Pain” (George Matheson)-

sparrowsong1 Comment

One of my favorite sights in Barcelona is the artist Antoni Gaudi’s Parque Güell, where mosaic tiles cover the longest bench in the world. There’s something so beautiful about mosaics, isn’t there? They strike something within us not only for the picture they create with complementary colors, but also for the stunning revelation of patterns and colors one wouldn’t think of as naturally belonging together. They are all simply pieces of vessels and structures that have been broken and neglected, whose original purpose seemed to lie torn in worn-out pieces. They highlight the beauty of fractured things coming together to create something new, something unexpected. When this happen in my life, as in this present season of reinvention, the new and ultimate picture being made by God is often a mystery. C.S. Lewis spoke of God as being the master artist in our lives:

“Remember He is the artist and you are only the picture. You can’t see it. So quietly submit to be painted—i.e., keep fulfilling all the obvious duties of your station (you really know quite well enough what they are!), asking forgiveness for each failure and then leaving it alone. You are in the right way. Walk—don’t keep on looking at it.”

When I do catch a glimpse of God’s vision for what seemed fragmented and lost, it often takes my breath away. Submitting to His artistry, and to this mystery, ultimately seems to bring a surprising joy that can’t be ignored. Pastor and hymn writer George Matheson spoke of this too:

“O joy that seekest me through pain,

I dare not close my heart to thee.

I trace the rainbow through the rain,

And know the promise is not vain,

That morn shall tearless be.”

The Apostle Paul’s encouragement in Romans 8:28 is so comforting: “And we know in all things, God works for the good of those who love Him, of those who are called according to His purpose”. One day will see the grand design: “Then I will know, even as [we] are fully known” (I Corinthians 13:12). That day will not only hold the revealing of His artistic design, it will be the completion of all our joyous victories, manifested in all their fullness.