The lion under my bed

One of my childhood memories is cowering in my little twin-size bed at night, terrified that there was indeed a lion crouched underneath, ready to pounce if I so much as put a single foot on that cold bare wood floor.

To qualm my fears, my grandmother would leave on the closet light.  But fear is the most creative of all the emotions.  Even that tiny line of light and shadow often grew into something equally scary.

I lost a lot of sleep that way.

And I think of the ridiculous things that still wake me in the night.

Am I still fearful about imaginary monsters under my proverbial bed, ready to pounce through the shadows?  An awkward social situation, words I should have said -- or left unsaid, things I should have done -- and left undone, my feet unable to run, still bound by barbed wire that doesn't even exist?

"Fear not.  Be not afraid."  God repeats that phrase over and over.  Because when Eve ate that apple, sin alone did not enter the world.  Fear did.  

In His Word, the LORD reminds me that He has already overcome anything that I can possibly fear.  It is not that I am a super hero, but He is the supernatural One, my strength and deliverance.  There is a reason why He is called Savior, not just to save us from our sins which are many, but to save us from the enslavement of fear.  God does not just release us;  He breaks out the teeth that grip us, turning that lion into a big kitten, turning my fear into turning me toward Him.

Worry never works things out

                        or gives me strength.

Worry always robs me blind

        and leaves me destitute on the side of the road.

Worry shuts out the light

             on the deeper work God is doing.

The LORD is the One

   Who gives power and strength.

And He says to me,

"What if you trusted Me in this,

                and how would you do it,

      if there was nothing to fear?"

Rebuke the beasts

   that dwell among the reeds.

                     Psalm 68. 30

The ink of many pens

I began working my way through the miry bog of papers on my desk this afternoon, looking for something in particular, but inevitably finding something else.

Ironically, I found the "something else" in a folder printed with the inscription "I dreamed my whole desk was clean," given to me years ago by a friend as a joke.   How little did she realize that ten years later, it would be filled with notes on the back of envelopes, clipped articles, and deep ponderings written on the margins of unrelated things -- thoughts which still profoundly touch me, even as I read them now.

One piece of paper in that mess was left over from a Bible study I attended at least a half dozen years ago, maybe more, entitled "A Record of Prayer Requests and God's Answers."  There were dates, names of people I vaguely remember, and requests scribbled in the ink of many pens.

Why would I have saved this? I wondered out loud.

I glanced down the list of things we had prayed about --the usual things like praise for a repaired furnace, prayer for a husband's job, surgery for someone's mom.

And then I saw the deeper stuff we prayed for:  praying for a daughter to have the courage to walk away from a troubled relationship, a friend losing her baby, and a son's parole hearing after almost a decade in prison.  I can't remember a whole lot about what we studied that semester, but I remember the intensity of praying deep vulnerable stuff for each other.  And sometimes being led to a remarkable answer even while we were praying.

A bitterly cold morning, one of the women in the group slid into the room uncharacteristically late.  At the end of prayer requests, she said, "I didn't want to come today.  And I don't even want to ask this request because of its ridiculous nature."  She hesitated a moment.  "I have a refugee friend who will lose his job if he doesn't pass the employment test next month.  He needs a tutor, not just a tutor, but a tutor who is fluent in Turkish, and because the man is Muslim, the tutor must be male and be able to meet during the day."

I raised my hand.  "Another request?" the leader asked me.

"No," I almost gasped.  "The answer." 

The husband of a friend of mine had worked in Turkey for some 20 years. He now lived about two miles away and worked a flexible schedule.

This sheet I found was not just a random list of needs, but a chronicle of lives intertwined by prayer.  We rarely saw answers as immediate as that.  But we saw answers even more unexpectedly, spelled out in ways we did not recognize as the hand of God.  The answers came in a lot of different size packages....and as far as I know, are still in process.  Because God never works in singular dimensions, nor so neatly tied up with a bow.

Sometimes His purposes are revealed,
sometimes they are too deep to comprehend,
the depths of the ocean,
the enormity of the universe,
         His intricate design undergirding it all.

I thought about that prayer sheet this afternoon in a now distant season of my life in a different state, and about the group I am in now, praying for each other with a box of kleenex in the center of the table.

Some things we see,
but even more that we do not.
But oh,
  the difference praying makes,
that which is revealed
       even in the rear-view mirror,
the faithfulness of God.

Then you shall call,
and the LORD will answer;
you shall cry for help,
and He will say,
                "Here I am."
The LORD will guide you
                 continually.

                Isaiah 58. 9, 11

An Ordinary Tuesday Morning

I am lingering in the waiting room at the car dealer this morning with a tepid cup of coffee, getting the oil changed in my car.  With 121,000 miles on this faithful vehicle, I am hoping that nothing else will be added to the tab. 

It is an ordinary Tuesday morning, doing ordinary things. 

And it is not lost on me, another ordinary Tuesday morning not so long ago, when I packed lunches, found missing shoes, and hustled the girls off to school. As soon as they left, I went for a six mile run with a fabulously blue sky soaring above.  I could have run forever that morning.  The beauty of the day astonished me.

Before I even changed out of my sweaty clothes, before I jumped into the work for the day, the phone rang – you know, the kind of phone still attached to the wall, the kind of phone where you actually had to be home to answer it – and it was my mom. 

Her frantic words stumbled over each other, so rapidly, I could not understand.  “Slow down, Mom.  What’s going on?”

“Turn on your tv,” she said as she hung up the phone.

It was an ordinary Tuesday morning, doing ordinary things.  And then, it changed forever by the images on a screen.

Someone once told me that at the news of any catastrophic event, one’s senses surge into high alert.  I remember such vivid details. I was wearing an old cotton t-shirt and royal blue running shorts, sitting with my feet up, my running shoes still on, the shrill of the phone startling me, the immense red of September ripe tomatoes lining the counter, waiting to be canned, their deep earthy aroma penetrating the air.

The very first image on the television screen was a newscaster running into the controlled pristine newsroom.  The other journalists were obviously both shocked and shaken.  A really deep abyss faced them, much deeper than could be condensed and captured in headline news, the dark unknown gaping in front of these seasoned professionals, who were speechless in the face of a vast evil, beyond the easily explainable or reportable, with no commercial breaks.

Seventeen years later, there are still no ordinary days.  There never were.  Peace and strength and God’s faithfulness are not dependent on blue skies and favorable circumstances, but manifest even in the hard stuff, the really really hard stuff.

God never promised us that life would be easy,

but “I am with you.”

Churches that Sunday were packed to overflowing, as if suddenly, quite suddenly, people realized that God is real.

Even though the fig tree should not blossom,

nor fruit be on the vines,

the produce of the olive fail

and the fields yield no food,

the flock be cut off from the fold

and there be no herd in the stalls,

yet

I will rejoice in the LORD,

I will take joy in the God of my salvation.

GOD, the Lord, is my strength;

He makes my feet like the deer’s;

He makes me tread on my high places.

                                Habakkuk 3. 17-19

On that particular September 11, I read Oswald Chambers’ devotional that morning, words that had been transcribed by his wife in the early 1900s and published in the 1920s, words that took my breath away, words calling for faithfulness in the ordinary:

“We have to go the “second mile” with God.  Some of us get played out in the first ten yards, because God compels us to go where we cannot see the way, and we say –‘I will wait till I get nearer the big crisis.’  If we do not do the running steadily in the little ways, we shall do nothing in the crisis.”

God does not compel us to be fearful of the future,

    but to be faithful on the most ordinary days.

Even today.

Even in this.

Walking the dog on a mid-summer's night

I slip out into the night for the mundane walking our daughter’s dog who is visiting for a few weeks.  As routine and uneventful as it is, an evening’s liturgy has been established, largely wordless.  All I have to do to begin the dance is pick up her ragged braided leash, and she awakens even from her deepest doggy sleep and races joyfully to the door.  No big deal to me, but a great adventure to her. 

 

The probably-unnecessary leash is slipped over her head, the heavy iron door opened, three steps out, two stair treads down to the sidewalk.  The heavy humid blanket of a mid-summer’s night hangs like a thick southern curtain blocking out any breathable air, the deep heat of the sultry afternoon still radiating from the concrete.  A mere momentary affliction.  Two minutes, maybe three, and I will be back inside where the air conditioner moans endlessly.

Nothing appears but darkness outside, but inside my head, my list of what still needs to be done stands like an impatient buzzing crowd encompassing me, pieces of conversations stuck in ragged incomplete bits in my thoughts, that which has worked its way to the surface, and what has not yet been, like a deep loss I step carefully through.

I am just walking a dog, that is all, but I am not alone, surrounded by things not left behind, nor forgotten, some packed in boxes and taped closed, dare they come spilling out at an inconvenient moment.

The tectonic plates of the universe always seem to shift unexpectedly in the ordinary, that split second when something completely new infiltrates through the cracks, not just an open door to another room, but revealing a different universe already set up and humming, inviting me in.

I wait for the dog on the edge of the dark field.  Come on, come on, come on.  She pulls at her leash, meanders and sniffs, her paws making little crunching sounds in the dead august grass.  This is such a waste of time, I think out loud.

And then, I look up.

The vastness of the stars surprises me, waiting there all along.  Suddenly, I no longer hear the words for all the thunder, these important things I was pondering, abruptly nothing at all in the immensity of glory.  I am now swimming in the heavens, not in what I had been doing but created for, my smallness swallowed up by tiny pinpoints of light all around me, distracting, disorienting, waylost in the brilliant unfolding of awe and order emerging out of chaos.

The deafening reverence of sight is simultaneously translated into sound and touch and meaning, a new language taking shape in a thousand new dimensions.  I cannot breathe, no longer stifled by the restraints of humidity but shocked by eternity without limits at all.

I am no longer standing on asphalt on the edge of a field overgrown with weeds, but on holy ground.  The magnificence of the stars blocks my steps back to the ordinary. I am unable to disregard anymore the intense intimacy seamlessly woven into the universe, nor explain away the wonder.

And when I come back through the door, my husband glances up from his book and asks, “Out walking the dog?”

I only nod and smile at what I had been missing. "You wouldn't believe."

He determines the number of the stars,

and He gives to all of them

                          their names.

                                Psalm 147. 4

Even in the mystery,

    there is nothing random,

    nothing “just happens.”

Even in the darkness

   or thunderous silence,

    we are all divinely appointed,

                strategically placed,

beyond the walls of comprehension,

    called by name

                                 beloved.