Category: Surrender

Strong Hands, New Eyes…

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Oscar Wilde once said, “It takes great courage to see the world in all its tainted glory, and still to love it.” This truth often strikes me, for, on a daily basis, I am amazed by the beauty and kindness and inspirational perseverance around me. On an equally frequent level, I am confronted with woundedness, ugliness, and hypocrisy. To hold the tension of this world’s  “tainted glory” well takes great balance and skill. Whatever and whoever there may be in my own path, I am quick to judge, to praise or condemn, to choose a personal response that has the potential to fall on either end of the spectrum.

 

Whether in line at the post office or the supermarket, driving, walking in the beautiful mountain town where I live, or working, I cross paths with many I choose to ignore. How many do I encounter every day who are longing to be seen or heard or helped in some way? Most often, I choose to believe that my schedule is too busy, my hands are too small and weak. I allow my eyes to cloud over and my mind to wander back to its self-preoccupation.

 

But what if my small hands are strong enough to offer a drink to the thirsty? What if doing so is the water my own soul needs? As David Foster Wallace says in his graduation speech entitled “This Is Water,” “Sometimes the hardest and most important realities are often the hardest to talk about.” In the petty frustrations of day-to-day living with narrow-sighted vision, it is only in choosing to look around with compassion that we find our own paths enlarged.

 

Just as  Jesus did, we are called, “…to preach good news to the poor…to bind up the brokenhearted…to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor…to comfort all who mourn, and provide for those who grieve…to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair” (Isaiah 61:1b-3a). God says that “…if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday” (Isaiah 58:10).

 

Spanish-speaking artists Marcela Gándara and Jesus Adrian Romero have a beautiful song entitled “Dame Tus Ojos” (“Give Me Your Eyes”). In the song, they ask God, “Give me your eyes I want to see. Give me your words, I want to speak.” The song is a petition to be filled with the Spirit of God in every step. As we become Christ’s body and His church, may we literally be His hands and feet, see with His eyes, love with His heart.

***Photo Credits: Brainy Quote

Cracks…

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There really isn’t a time in my life when I don’t remember actively walking with the Lord, so one would think that as I begin my thirty-seventh year, I would pretty much have this walk down. Wrong. There are so many days when I feel distant from my Father, so many times when I clearly see my sin and flaws realized in bad behavior. This worn vessel cracks and leaks in ways that make it appear less than ideal for useful service. I hurt those I love most and fall short of God’s glory and my own ambitions every day. At times I am the judgemental older brother, at others, I know myself to be as the wandering and rebellious prodigal son.

 

As RZIM A Slice of Infinity author Jill Carattini pointed out, there’s an easily glanced over phrase in the prodigal son story, “…the prodigal ‘came to himself’ and, at this, he decides to turn back to the father…. The son is one who wakes to health and life again, having been unconscious of his true condition. Standing in a foreign field hungry and alone, the son comes to something more than a good decision. He is waking to an identity he knew in part but never fully realized. He is remembering life in his father’s house again, though for the first time.”

 

How easy it is to lose sight of our identity when we wander away from our Father’s house. How easy it is to forget who God says I am. Lauren Daigle’s recent song, “You Say” beautifully affirms that He sees me cleansed, perfected, and redeemed. He provides acceptance and belonging. No matter what condition I’m in, I can always turn back to the open and waiting arms of my loving Father God.

 

This vessel may be cracked, but may it come to itself, may it come home, and may it be of use. As the apostle Paul said in II Corinthians 5:7-9, “7 But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. 8 We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; 9 persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.”

 

Canadian poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen also summed it up well in his song “Anthem,”:
“Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.”

It Is Well…

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The past two years of my life have seen more change than the previous ten altogether. After a long waiting season, through an unexpected breaking process, God moved in both difficult and incredible ways. He asked me to release a teaching career that had been my passion and security in adulthood. He moved me back home and placed a man in my life to love and to marry. Then, the same month of our marriage, my husband’s mother was diagnosed with stage four ovarian cancer. Within four months, she passed away. We left everything to come to Puerto Rico, see her before she passed, and manage her estate. Months later, we remain here, searching for a solution for a disabled family member she cared for.

 

The more answers we seek, the more doors close. One slight move on the board changes the whole game, perhaps for the rest of our lives. We pray for guidance, but the heavens remain silent. I believe my Father is attentively at work in ways I can’t see or understand. I trust His hand, but sometimes, the weight of the unknown feels like enough to press me into the ground and bury me there. In the midst of it all, I feel ushered into the eye of the storm where one call is certain, “Surrender.”

 

The earth quakes and the storms come, and yet…it is well with my soul. I’ve thought often of the old hymn of that title, written by Horatio Spafford after he lost his family in an ocean storm. “When peace, like a river, attendeth my way, When sorrows like sea billows roll; Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say, It is well, it is well with my soul.” Bethel Music artist Kristene DiMarco recently rewrote the song with words that pierce my soul. “So let my soul go and trust in Him. The waves and wind still know His name.”

 

It Is Well
Bethel Music (Written by Kristen DiMarco) 


Grander earth has quaked before
Moved by the sound of His voice
Seas that are shaken and stirred
Can be calmed and broken for my regard
And through it all, through it all
My eyes are on You
And through it all, through it all
It is well
And through it all, through it all
My eyes are on You
And it is well with me
And far be it from me to not believe
Even when my eyes can’t see
And this mountain that’s in front of me
Will be thrown into the midst of the sea
And through it all, through it all
My eyes are on You
And through it all, through it all
It is well
And through it all, through it all
My eyes are on You
And it is well
It is well
So let go my soul and trust in Him
The waves and wind still know His name
So let go my soul and trust in Him
The waves and wind still know His name…

The Dance of Good Story-

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I’ve been struggling a lot lately with what a good friend calls “bad story.” Essentially, bad story is what I am under when I allow insecurities, lies, or the shadows of the past to dominate my thinking and identity, and convince me that I am anything other than the precious daughter God sees. In His sight, I am pure, prized, redeemed, righteous, and worthy of all the blessings He bestows on His children. This is the Gospel, this is good news, this is good story. This, my friends, is the battle of all our lives…to fight off the lies of the critics and the Enemy, and many times, our own. The loudest voice of all can be the critic inside our heads, and that critic can only be silenced by grace of God. I’ve learned I can only extend it to others as I learn to extend it to myself.

It’s a little bit like a dance, a simile I love to use for our relationships with the Lord and our journey through life. He takes a step, and we respond. The moment we step away or fail to follow His lead is the moment our dance loses its elegance and grace. The only way to continually stay tuned to Him is to practice looking in His eyes, following His leads, and choosing to believe His truth.

 
As Margaret Manning Shull of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries wrote, “Becoming a black-belt in karate or a seasoned dancer doesn’t happen instantaneously. Instead, each day offers multiple opportunities to practice whatever it is we want to become….If the grace-full life of Christ is the intended goal for those who claim to follow him, each day presents the opportunity to practice—to grow in the very grace Christ embodies. Each day brings circumstances and events that call for a response. Instead of fear, there can be empathy and hope. Instead of pride, there can be humility and hospitality. Instead of bitterness and resentment, there can be forgiveness or sacrificial giving. There is always a choice. And thankfully, there is always one who extends flawlessly the very grace we need ourselves.” I want to live under good story, to dance the dance of grace with my Father, and to help the world to do the same.

 

***Photo Credits: lovedoes.org

Woven…

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I think I’ve mentioned before that one of my favorite poems is called The Tapestry, by Corrie Ten Boom. One stanza reads: “My life is but a weaving, between my God and me. I cannot choose the colors, He weaveth steadily. Ofttimes He weaveth sorrow, and I in foolish pride, forget He sees the upper, and I the under side.” This is such a profound poem and life insight to me, especially as written by a woman who survived the horrors of Auschwitz, but saw her family perish there. Though, they weren’t Jews themselves, they were imprisoned for providing “a hiding place”, as her memoir is entitled, to the Jews within Holland.

 

In my own relatively peaceful and unscathed life, still I find that the majority of life is lived as this beloved author painted it, looking at the messy underside of a weaving. The tapestry may indeed be masterful, but from the limited vantagepoint of earth, the larger picture is hard to see or understand. I cry out when a pattern I’ve begun to be able to see or become attached to is suddenly disrupted, or when one color is torn to make room for another that doesn’t seem to belong. I question why so many messy threads hang down and why it’s all such mayhem. I’m ever striving for a tidier picture than the one I have, and a semblance of control. It rarely makes any sense what is happening through my lens. Believing that it’s all a part of “a grand design” takes a giant “leap of faith” most days.

 
But then, there are those moments, when the master weaver beckons to me from the other side of the tapestry, and allows me to come and take a peek at His view. Just for a moment, I see the smile on His face and the twinkle in His eye. I get to take a seat with Him as He points and gestures to the pattern He’s designed and woven. And oh my, how it takes my breath away. A chill crawls down my spine and tears fill my eyes, for I can see that all along, there really has been a plan, and He really is an artist, and every stitch has been joined with the utmost care for its ultimate great beauty and purpose. It’s all sooo beautiful, and He’s been arranging and composing it all along. He looks into my eyes with joy, and I can only look back into His with regret. I’m filled with sorrow for the many moments, or if we’re really being honest here, the lifetime of moments, I’ve filled with distrust. He knows them all, and knew them all when He designed this glorious pattern for me, and yet still, He counted me worthy to be woven into the fabric of His plan. This inclusion, this composition, this revelation…these are His gifts to me. These are the manifestations of His love for me.

“Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me”…

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We all need something solid to stand on, to ground us, to provide a refuge for us. How blessed we are that Christ is our foundation, sure & unchanging. What comfort we can take from the hiding place & shelter He provides for us. The Psalmist says, “From the ends of the earth I call to you. I call as my heart grows faint. Lead me to the rock that is higher than I. For You have been my refuge, a strong tower against the foe.”

 

But, if you’re out of strength, beloved, hear this: Not only can we cling to Him, He clings to us too. Jennifer Knapp sang a declaration, “I will not be shaken from the Rock that clings to me” (emphasis mine). Whatever condition we are in, however far we’ve tried to run, we cannot escape the kind constraints of His Presence & Love. As Charles Wesley & Augustus Toplady wrote in 1763, let us seek the cleft He offers us in Himself.

“Rock of ages, cleft for me

Let me hide myself in Thee

Let the water and the blood

From Thy riven side which flowed

Be of sin the double cure

Cleanse me from it’s guilt and pow’r

Nothing in my hand I bring

Simply to Thy cross I cling.”

Divine Interruptions…

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Sometime in college, a friend and mentor introduced me to the concept of “Divine interruptions”. She noticed that I struggled with unpredictable interruptions into my very well-planned and predictable routine schedule, but counseled that I had to stay open to the idea that God was allowing these interruptions in my day and plans. They could, in fact, be what has been termed in “Christianese”, “Divine appointments.”  If I could learn to consider them Divine, I could remain inviting and open to what God wanted to show me, and how He wanted to use me.

 

This transformed my approach to life. It’s still a struggle, but over the years, space has often been created to see God do something that only He could do. Life would be a small fraction of the gift it has been if my heart had been closed. I’m so grateful for this lesson early in my adulthood. Life, indeed, is a series of interruptions that can affect and change our courses. I want to continue to see these as invitations into His space…as a surrender of the plans I cling to into His capable hands.
Henri Nouwen has invited, “Let us try to see the pain of our human and spiritual journey “from above.” The great art is to gradually trust that life’s interruptions are the places where God is molding you into the person you are called to be. Interruptions are not disruptions of your way to holiness, but rather are places where you are being formed into the unique person God calls you to be. You know you are living a grateful life when whatever happens is received as an invitation to deepen your heart, to strengthen your love, and to broaden your hope. You are living a grateful life when something is taken away from you that you thought was so important and you find yourself willing to say, ‘Maybe I’m being invited to a deeper way of living.’ ” I want to live in such gratefulness.

Accepting Joy…

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Part of my very part-time employment at present is working with a woman who also has a severe neurological condition, though hers is far more severe. I model a few exercises and provide a little massage and stretching; she models so much more for me. She’s been sick for most of thirty years, and has spent thirteen of those paralyzed from the waist down and regulated to a wheelchair. And yet, she always has a smile on her face. When I asked her how she was able to be so upbeat and positive, she said that she wouldn’t want the husband who’s been her caretaker all those years to have to live with a grump. This made me smile; it almost seems like a casual and lighthearted approach to coping with illness, but it is most definitely far more. Long ago, she made a very intentional choice to live in acceptance, gratitude and joy, one I’m sure she has had to make that choice over and over again, but she has. Hers is a very cultivated positivity held perfectly in tension with practical surrender, and they end result is joy.

 

She calls it grace. It reminds me of what Ann Voskamp once wrote: “Grace is like the wind. It finds us as we are, but it does not leave us as we have been. All is grace.” Grace has met her anew each day in exactly the place she is; it continually shapes and molds her into the image of God. She’s a willing vessel in the hands of a skillful potter; anyone has only to look at my friend’s radiant countenance to be awestruck by its fragile strength. She’s a former elementary teacher, a mom and wife and daughter and sister and aunt and friend. She’s a quilter and a prayer warrior and a blessing to all who know her. I’m so very thankful: in a season of struggling to accept my own challenging circumstances, or perhaps simply arriving in the place where I actually have accepted them, God has given me this beautiful example. I want to accept the joy that fills and surrounds me and say with my friend and the saints of old, as voiced by the prophet Isaiah: “And yet LORD, you are our Father. We are the clay, you are the potter” (Isaiah 64:8).

 

*Photo by Ann Voskamp. 

An Iron Will: A Tribute to Georgine…

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Tomorrow is Independence Day, a celebration of what it means to know free life. The Fourth of July marks not only that for me: it is both the anniversary of a friend’s spiritual birthday in 1950, as well as that of her “home-going” sixty-four years later. She’s been gone for three years now, and it still doesn’t seem possible that’s a reality; I can hear her voice as if it were yesterday. From the day I met her when I moved to this area in 2008, she said I was a kindred spirit and adopted me as a granddaughter. She called me her “Sweet Pea”; I called her my “Mama G”. She reminded me of the grandmother I lost when I was nine years old: Mama G’s quiet strength, obdurate determination, compassionate presence and vocal faith mirrored those of my Grandma Thelma. I was instantly at home with her.

 

Mama G was an example of the faith and perseverance of the saints to all who knew her. She modeled for me how one could live well with serious illness, something she coped with admirably for almost half her life: the chronic and inflammatory autoimmune disease Lupus targeted her as a young mother. Everything she did over the next decades came at a cost, but she counted it all worthy of the price she paid. She told me often with great sincerity that she counted it a true joy to share even a small bit of the suffering that was our Lord’s, and she lived out its truth. Her best friend says she had an “iron will”. As Proverbs 27:17 says, “As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.” She helped all her loved ones (in other words, everyone she knew) to be shaped into the mold of our Savior. In the spring of 2014, she contracted pancreatic cancer, the same disease took my Grandma Thelma’s life. They say it’s the most painful way to die: since the pancreas sits on a bundle of nerves that travel throughout the whole body, its sensations are akin to those of crucifixion. Though a nerve block relieved that pain for a while, in the end she suffered its fullness. Again, she counted it all joy and faced it with that iron will, her eyes on Jesus. A few short months later, she went Home to be with God. In life and in death, she celebrated free life that did not come without a cost; her soul at last found its final rest. 

 

I am only one who loved this precious woman of God, she was precious to many, but I remember and miss her every single day. As I face each new dawn and dusk, I hear the words to one of her favorite hymns Carolina Sandell Berg, modeling the acceptant trust with which she lived all the days of her life, Day by Day:

 

Help me then, in every tribulation,

So to trust Thy promises, O Lord,

That I lose not faith’s sweet consolation,

Offered me within Thy holy Word.

Help me, Lord, when toil and trouble meeting,

E’er to take, as from a father’s hand,

One by one, the days, the moments fleeting,

Till with Christ the Lord I stand.

Feeding on Mystery…

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In 1,000 Gifts, Ann Voskamp explains that the Hebrew word “manna” means mystery. In their wandering in the wilderness on the way to the Promised Land, the food the God of heaven and earth rained down on the Israelites was literally mystery. The sweet manna bread was given purposefully to be only sufficient for one day at a time, keeping the children of Israel continuously dependent on God to supply their each and every need day by day. No matter how many days God provided faithfully for them, they wondered with each new one if He could do it again. So it is for His children today: we are dependent on His provision each and every day. He faithfully provides for our needs, yet we are often filled with doubt that He will do it again. Our lives are full of paradoxes: glories and suffering fall on us all; rain falls on both the just and the unjust. So much is unexplained; our walk with the Lord can be nothing besides a walk of faith. We feed on mystery too.

 

In A Chance to Die, Elisabeth Elliott’s captivating biography of missionary Amy Carmichael, a letter is quoted that was sent to her by her mother. Amy had suffered a fall that caused an abnormal nerve response throughout her whole body. It left her bedridden for the rest of her life. These words encouraged Amy’s remarkable faith and  trust in the Lord that would be an example to many around the world in the coming years:

“He who hath led will lead, all through the wilderness.

He who hath fed will feed.

He who hath heard thy cry, will never close His ear.

He who hath marked Thy faintest sigh, will not forget thy tear.

He loveth always, faileth never, so rest in Him today, forever.”

 

I too, am currently in what could be called a wilderness season; I seem to have lost the path to the Promised Land. Trials of health and loss of career have led me out of Egypt and into a new place of dependence; the path is unknown and seems illuminated only one step at a time. I feed on mystery meted out in doses sufficient for each day. But if I’m wandering in circles through desert, I’m not wandering there alone. God has provided sweet sustenance through His presence and the companionship of true friends. He has fed my soul with beauty and peace; even the prickly cacti bloom in the barren land. I’m reminded of the prayer of George VI at the dawning of a new year:

“I said to the man at the gate of the year: ‘Give me a light, that I may walk safely into the unknown.’ He said to me, ‘Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. It shall be to you better than the light and safer than the known.”

 

And so it is, and so shall it be. We put our hands into the hands of God and feed on the manna of His mysteries. We give thanks for it, break it, share it, and we call it…grace.