Now and Not Yet

We are in the midst of February when it is largely dreary, gray and dark.  And we are weary of winter.  Yes, another storm is coming.  And we are grateful that February is the shortest month on the calendar.

But this is not the end of the story.  February is just a season getting ready for the curtains to part and God's glory to burst forth in full color.  That is what waiting for God is all about, staking our lives on God's love, grateful for what we have seen, confident even in what we have not yet seen.

Just because we cannot see results does not mean nothing is happening.  February is sending down deeper roots, far beyond our vision, preparing for what is to come.  God never works in singular outcomes and not always in what is visible to us.

The essence of hope is that spring comes every year and sneaks up on us.  And suddenly without fanfare, daffodils appear.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My father who grew up in Brooklyn and lived most of his life in frigid Chicago would tell me about this time every year, "Every day is one day closer to spring."  Those words helped me trudge through the snow on the way to school.

God gives us the strength we need for today and bright hope for tomorrow.

If we really grasped that God is with us and is already at work, how differently would we face the hard stuff?   How different our journey day by day, even on the dreary days?  We can have joy.

And that is contagious.

Scripture is full of descriptions and metaphors about weather -- clouds by day, tumultuous storms, floods, drought.  Over the gale force winds and waves that threaten us, Jesus still whispers, "Peace, be still."  Do not fear.  Do not be dismayed.  "I am with you."

Our hope is not that February will pass quickly by, but that we grasp His Presence in every hour of it.

Not just surviving with every day one day closer, but living with anticipation in the now and the not yet.  Not His glory coming next month or the month after, but today in unexpected ways.

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

We don't just wait for Him to act,

    but know He is already with us.

The word tread in Old Testament Hebrew

     does not mean slog through or endure

                      but dance.

Find a way to dance in God's faithfulness

       even today.

One Hundred Pot Holes A Day

 

 

When we moved from Chicago, the capital city of potholes, we thought we were largely done with them.  Indeed the Chicago department of transportation even posts a daily pothole tracker to point out the location of the craters and how many have been patched in the past seven days.

Nashville this year has begun keeping its own score.  The local news last night reported that for the past month crews had filled 100 potholes a day.   I thought that was a little extreme until my car was almost swallowed alive by one crevasse of extraordinary proportions on my way to the park.  I am now aware of big, deep, broken spots appearing daily on my way and carefully driving to avoid them.  But as they languish, unfilled and not patched, they continue to crumble around the edges, becoming even bigger, deeper gaps in the pavement.

As I contemplated this new year back in January, I was convicted by the thought:  step into the need.  It is easy to complain and criticize and wait for someone else to do something about a problem (or potholes), but what can I do?   I don't just need to identify needs and gaps, but respond to them.   And as Steven Garber says in his book Visions and Vocations:  Common Grace for the Common Good:  "I can't do everything, but I can do something."

What I can do?  I can't fill 100 potholes a day.  But I can respond to one.

Potholes are visible manifestations of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, moving from a state of order to disorder.  They won't heal themselves.  Left untouched, potholes move along a gradual decline into chaos.  What is the slightest inconvenience this week morphs into a car-sized crater.  And impacts everyone around us.

What is the one thing I can do?  To bring a my day before the LORD, listen with a willing heart, identify a need and fill in what I can.  God will provide the wisdom and the way.  It is not in me but Him.  And in the process, He helps us. I can be faithful to the One who is faithful.

...and find grace

to help in time of need.

                 Hebrews 4.16

Luci Shaw, a poet of faith, now in her 90s, admonishes us to "Reverse entropy" in whatever creative ways we can.  "And good will come of it."  Whether it is a kind word to encourage a lonely heart, reaching out to a neighbor, serving the church body in some capacity, creating a beautiful painting or poem to cheer a soul.  Or even filling the deeper needs.  It will cost something --selflessness always does--pushing back the darkness --patching the potholes on our stretch of the road--but as Luci says, "And good will come of it."

How we respond may not appear to be doing much, indeed the most profound rarely appears significant at the time. But God grants us divine appointments and sacred encounters that we would never expect.  He has put us right here for a purpose.  And this may be it.

 Fill a pothole no matter how small it seems.  It is never small.

What is the one thing I can do today?  Step into the need.

His glory is there.

 

 

 

Until It Did

When our girls were very young, they often drew pictures on construction paper, cut out oddly-shaped hearts, or carefully scrawled their names on a store-bought card (if I remembered to buy it) to wish their great grandmother a Happy Valentine's Day.  

I didn't think it really mattered much.  Until it did.

When she passed away so many decades ago, suddenly drifting away to the Other Side of life in her sleep, we helped clean up her fairly-sparse apartment.  We uncovered surprises along the way.  One drawer in a side table was filled to the brim with greeting cards and construction paper pictures that our girls had sent her.  She had not just read the cards.  She kept them.  And I can imagine on quiet days when she was all alone --on which there were many-- she looked through those messages and knew that she was loved.

It was a whole drawer of singular messages multiplied over time.  We loved her and wanted her to know that.

Love is not just seeing needs of people all around us, but seeing the people behind those needs. Loving others by responding to them. You are seen.  You are heard.  You are loved.  That is reflected by more ways, words, flavors, packages and dimensions than we can realize.  Never forgotten.  Never insignificant.

I felt the need this morning to repeat a Nightly Tea post about the real story of Saint Valentine's Day as a reminder. 

Happy Valentine's Day, my friend.

It occurred to me this Valentine's Day that somehow the "saint" part has been dropped.   Saint Valentine's Day has evolved into just another holiday whose origin has been forgotten and has morphed into another excuse to eat chocolate.  Ask any child in this generation about what Valentine's Day means, and it won't be about a saint.

Valentine, known as Valentinus, was a priest who lived in Rome in the mid-200s AD when being a Christian meant certain death.  He aided Christian martyrs during their persecution, and as a result was arrested and imprisoned.  He survived in jail for a year before he was brought before the emperor Claudius the Second who offered Valentinus to save his life if he worshipped the Roman gods.  Valentinus refused.   He was condemned and martyred on February 14, 270 AD, beaten by clubs, stoned and beheaded.  Hardly a Hallmark moment.

Legend tells that before his death, Valentinus fell in love with the blind daughter of the jailer, who along with her father had converted to Christianity.  As a way of saying good-bye on the eve of his death, he wrote her a message and signed it, “From Your Valentine.”  The jailer and his daughter were also later sentenced to death by the emperor.  Chocolate and soft music did not enter the picture until centuries later.

And it seems very appropriate that a holiday that is associated with love is also associated with God.  Valentinus risked his life and died a martyr’s death not to earn God’s favor or gain points with God.  Valentinus did it because he loved God.  He knew what God’s love meant.  It was not something he deserved or earned, but because that is how God revealed Himself to us. 

Valentinus was not an exceptional man, but an ordinary person.  What distinguishes a saint or any faithful Christian is not a special mandate, but their response to the circumstances around them.  They have no special powers, nor do any of us, but they loved God with listening ears, willing hearts, and eyes wide open. 

"They differed from the average person in that when they felt the inward longing, they did something about it.  They acquired the lifelong habit of spiritual response," noted A. W. Tozer in The Pursuit of God.

Those who love God and follow Him are just people like ourselves, but by responding to God in the ordinary, they know how to respond to God in the extraordinary.  They have been trained by the everyday patterns, practices and transformative habits they have chosen.  

A friend recently told me about a young man who had a sometimes-working car and had been given another mediocre used car.  She suggested selling the two and buying something better.  He replied, "Oh, I was going to give one away.  I know so many right now who need a car."

My guess is that this was not a solitary act of personal selflessness, but a pattern in his life.   He couldn't think otherwise, because he had done it so many times before, even in the unrecognized, even in what would be considered much smaller kindnesses. 

A saint chooses to do something about it.  A saint chooses to love others.  And God gives the power to do that.  Even in "the little stuff" which is never insignificant at all.

And He calls us to be and do the same and distinguished by His grace in us.  

"...loved by God and called to be saints."  Romans 1. 7 

And that's what St. Valentine's Day is all about.

A lot harder than what appeared

 

 

Deep into last autumn, it took just one night of freezing temperatures to turn the colorful flowers in our front bed into a wilted mess.  The seasons had changed.  We were slipping into winter.  Time to clear out the old.  

But what I thought would take just a few productive minutes of yanking up the dead stalks turned into an hour of tugging and digging and hacking away.  Those cute little plants last spring had taken up permanent residence, sending down deep snarling roots into the soil.

Not what I expected.

And as I hacked with the hoe and tried to loosen the soil with the spading fork, I thought about all those innocent habits and routines that have so taken root in my day.  A bad attitude seems justified.  Looking at Instagram is not a bad thing.  And oh, I didn't realize how much time those emails were taking.

All those seemingly good things send down deep irretrievable roots far below the surface until it is hard to let go.  A "get to" becomes a "have to."  What is extraneous and seemingly inconsequential moves in and takes over.  

What liturgies have I sown into my day?  What is gripping my soul or entangling my heart?  That which bears fruit or thorns?  That which sustains or pushes everyone off the bench?

Our habits run deep.  Choose carefully.  They live beyond our lifetimes.  They impact us.  They impact generations after us.

In her book Liturgies of the Ordinary, author Tish Harrison Warren points out:  "But it’s in the dailiness of the Christian faith – the making the bed, the doing the dishes, the praying for our enemies, the reading the Bible, the quiet, the small – that God’s transformation takes root and grows."

 

The kingdom of heaven is 

like a grain of mustard seed

that a man took and sowed in his field.

It is the smallest of all seeds,

but when it has grown

it is larger than all the garden plants

and becomes a tree,

so that the birds of the air

come and make nests in its branches.

                    Matthew 13. 31-32

 

And Always in the Unexpected

It was cold and windy, but I rejoiced.  The ice had melted.  It was not raining.  And the sun beckoned to me like when I was a little girl, inviting me to open the door and play outside.  I dressed in layers.  I brought my mittens.  I wore sunglasses.

I chose to run my hill route, a rigorous but beautiful winding path through the forest.  After weeks of the treadmill -- for which I was thankful through the January storms-- I knew the hills would provide a different kind of training, a type of strengthening offset by the beauty around me.

Halfway through, I added a loop around a ridge that I had not run in months.  As I approached the last big curve in that loop, surrounded by the wild, I remarked outloud that I had not seen so much as a squirrel.  I noticed, however, a large number of dogwalkers coming in the opposite direction.  As I rounded the bend, I saw the reason why.  They were turning around.  An enormous tree about fifteen yards away came into sight, having fallen directly across the path, blocking the way with its large trunk and huge splintered branches.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I hadn't expected that.  

Sometimes God leads us to turn around by blocking our path.  Sometimes He guides us right through the chaos.

I got down on my knees and tried crawling through an opening under the trunk.  A large branch blocked that avenue.  I tried again by working my way over to one side and scooting across the trunk that way.  Now I could see the way around.  Over, under, around and through.  Willing to turn around, if necessary, willing to keep going, watching and responding as needed.

As I reached the other side, I could see another hiker beginning her journey through from the other side.  I had not just made it.  But perhaps also inadvertently handed courage to another.  

Even in the unexpected, we can trust God.  The circumstances may appear outside of our plans, but not beyond His.  Not in our timing or place or purposes, but deeper in His.  Unknown and unexpected to us, but not to Him.  He sees what is coming even if we do not.  Throughout the history of the world, God uses the unexpected to reveal His Presence.  We all have a chronicle of God's faithfulness.

I was not stuck after all.  But I was strengthened through the adventure of it and even the struggle.  How else can I approach this dilemma?  And perhaps not just impacted by this experience, but for yet another.  Recognizing God and trusting Him changes everything we see, how we walk, how we climb through, and how we respond.

 

But I trust in You, O LORD;

I say, "You are my God."

My times are in Your hand.

                   Psalm 31.14-15

 

God doesn't shout, "You've got this.  You can do it!" as if we are invincible.

But instead, "Follow Me.  Do not fear.  I am with you."   Because He is our strength.

It is God who brings us through.

Even through what we face today.

Sometimes in the Splendid, Sometimes in the Ordinary

On an ordinary run on an ordinary day, not thinking about anything spectacular, God quite often surprises me.  Alongside my path last week, suddenly around a bend, a beautiful deer stood on the other side of the pavement, peacefully watching me with her huge eyes, not ready to bolt, but just sharing the quiet beauty of the woods and as if she were whispering, "Oh hey, there you are."

Yesterday I ran my usual hill loop, deep in thought.  I came back down the slope to my starting point where the path diverges. There, on a branch in the thicket, a barred owl stood faithfully as a sentinel watching over my path and waiting for me.  I didn't see him on my way up.  But that stately creature was there all along, on guard and silently present.

Sometimes those little momentary glimpses make me feel like God is winking His eye, saying, "I'm right here, even when you don't see Me."  And He uses His elaborate creation to assure me of His Presence.  Those moments shouldn't surprise me at all.  But God always uses them to make me chuckle.

Yesterday afternoon, my husband and I took our daughter's dog for a long walk, while she navigated a maze of on-line business meetings.  We entered the sanctuary of a local wildlife area nearby, knowing that two eagles had nested there by a small lake, a very rare occurrence in this part of the country.  We hoped to catch a glimpse.

As we made our way across the small dam, we scanned the opposite shoreline. Almost right away, we spotted one of the eagles across the lake, perched on the branch of an old sycamore tree, overlooking its newly acquired kingdom.  Its black body and white hood stood out, even that far away.  We could see the beginnings of this pair's enormous nest with lakefront views in yet another large tree.  But the other eagle was nowhere in sight, perhaps just hunkered down in the nest. 

And I was reminded by how the sight of eagles stirs up courage in the hearts of those who need it most:  "but they who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles,  they shall run and not be weary,  they shall walk and not faint."  Isaiah 40. 31

Further along the path, we spotted a group of people gawking --looking up and pointing their phones skyward like tourists.  At first, all we could see were black lace branches against the waning light of the winter sky.  And then, quite suddenly, we became aware of an extravagant beauty.  Whoa! The other eagle was almost right above our heads.  He was not impervious to our presence.  He knew exactly where we were and what we were doing.  He was not threatened in the least, but only perhaps slightly amused.

 

He was not just huge, but magnificent, and much bigger than we imagined.

God gave us far more than we expected on this little afternoon hike.  We stood there mesmerized, our eyes wide open, and our hearts stirred by the appearance of this stately bird. 

"Experiencing the present purely is being emptied and hollow;  you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall."  (Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

Our cup runneth over.

What does it take for God to get our attention?   Sometimes we are surprised by the splendid and other times astonished in the ordinary.   Am I aware of God's Presence, even when I can't see what is pointblank in front of me?  Even when I am not quite sure what I am looking at?   Am I so distracted that I walk right past His wonders, right by my side?  Or right above my head?

As we started walking away, a woman meandered by.  "What are you looking at?" she casually asked.

"A bald eagle, right there."  I pointed.  "Really?"  She tilted her head upward, her skeptical eyes searching through the branches, unaware how close he actually was..

"Oh, wow!"  Sometimes we are reduced to the vocabulary of a toddler.  

The sighting of the eagles was splendid, but the ordinary is just as engraved by unexpected and inexplicable awe.  We may look for God in remarkable events.  But we miss His wonders of the world seamlessly woven in our everydays.

 

And he said, "Go out and stand on the mount before the LORD."

And behold, the LORD passed by, 

and a great and strong wind tore the mountains

and broke in pieces the rocks before the LORD,

   but the LORD was not in the wind.

And after the wind an earthquake,

   but the LORD was not in the earthquake.

And after the earthquake a fire, 

   but the LORD was not in the fire.

And after the fire

       the sound of a still small voice...

                  1 Kings 19. 11-12

 

May we be astonished 

     by God's magnificent Presence

     even in the ordinary.

Even today.

"Oh hey, there You are."