The Way To Atlanta And Other Such Misadventures --- Inktober 20 #uncharted

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We needed to transport some twin beds back from Atlanta to our home in middle Tennessee.  And that required taking two cars to our nephew's baptism there.  We were going to follow each other after my husband got off work...until I decided that I could travel ahead with our three small daughters. The girls and I could get there in time for supper.  And of course, they would nap most of the afternoon.

I didn't check the map, because --famous last words:  I know where I'm going.

I headed out on Interstate 40.  The girls fell promptly asleep. They were still napping when I reached Nashville, so I didn't stop.  I merged onto Interstate 65, so proud of how well the trip was going. We would be there in record time.  Pride goeth before the fall.  

About the time they woke up, I was nearing the Alabama state line. And I realized that I was not where I was supposed to be.  When I was feeling so proud in Nashville, I took Interstate 65 when I should have waited until Knoxville for Interstate 75, similar numbers but a huge miscalculation.

I was in uncharted territory.  No map. No GPS invented yet.  Cell phones were something out of a Jetson's cartoon.  I stopped at a little gas station at the next exit. It might as well have been in a foreign country. The proprietor in greasy overalls had a deep almost incomprehensible accent but no map.  He pointed down the highway and spit out the word t--wenty.

I veered back on I 65 until Birmingham when I made a big left turn onto Interstate 20 to Atlanta.  Time was fleeting, and I realized in the middle of a rain storm that Bill was going to be in Atlanta before me.  When I reached the big city, I called Bill's brother from a Waffle House with a pay phone.  Stay put, he said. He came to find me, and I followed him.  The girls and I arrived less than ten minutes before Bill arrived.

I know where I'm going.  I have eaten those words for breakfast, lunch and supper all too many days of my life -- on hikes, on road trips, and the most ordinary of days.  One exception was in parenting, when I knew I had no idea what I was doing.  O LORD, make it enough.  My one hope was 2 Chronicles 20.12  We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on You. 

The truth is that every day is uncharted territory.  But not to Him.

What is unknown to us is not unknown to God.  Imagine that.  God actually knows what He is doing.

 "You do not know what you are going to do;
the only thing you know is that
God knows what He is doing.
...God does not tell you
what He is going to do;
He reveals to you
Who He is."
              --Oswald Chambers
                 My Utmost For His Highest

We may not have a road atlas, stand point blank in the unknown, or not grasp where this trail may be going or reveal. Not time to panic, but to trust Him even more.  God does not show up.  He is already here with us on this adventure..

Call to Me and I will answer you,

and will tell you great and hidden things

that you have not known.

                  Jeremiah 33. 3

Because the really famous last words are from God Himself:  Follow Me.

Deep Knee Bends

Regular exercise conditions our bodies to be able to respond to the demands that even everyday life places upon it.  It teaches the muscles how to move differently, it strengthens the tendons and ligaments that hold everything all together, it increases bone strength, all in ways that we cannot see, until the challenges come.

We have been trained and equipped with a new energy, an abiding strength, to be able to respond and not be defeated. Our circumstances may not change, but we have. 

We admire and even honor athletes who bring their best game.  But they are not just naturally good at it. They don’t just excel.  They have worked hard, long hours to get there.  It doesn’t just happen.

I have long admired the many people I have known who respond differently to the struggles and sufferings of life, because of how they pursue God. They come from all different walks of life, all different ages and stages, but one common thread appears.  Their posture in prayer has incrementally increased their strength, long before the struggles appear, step by step, day after day.

Prayer is quite simply learning to pay attention, and not just reacting to the horizontal at eye level, but responding to a vertical dimension that comes only from God, that which the world does not comprehend. There is something deeper here. 

And that would be the deep knee bends of prayer.

Therefore lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint but rather be healed. (Hebrews 12. 12)

It is not that life becomes suddenly easier, but we know that we are not alone. 

And so, with prayer, faced with serious decisions, the ordinary or the overwhelming, does it even occur to us to pray about it?  Or are we so used to driving in the dark without headlights and wondering why we are having such a hard time, buying into our culture of despair, that we forget or ignore praying about it?  It doesn’t have to be like this.  There is a vertical dimension that the world does not recognize.

We are still walking through impossible situations with enormous degrees of difficulty, and the really hard stuff is still really hard.  But somehow differently now.

A heart stretched by prayer will never see the world or face difficulties in the same way.

We cannot imagine the enormity of God, but now and then, we capture a glimpse by praying.  That which should defeat and stop us in our tracks is like moving from a flat two-dimensional existence to walking into the soaring grandeur of a cathedral that we didn’t even know existed.

“O God, I didn’t realize.”

And He replies, “I didn’t think you did.  I’ve been trying to show you all along.”

Not the possibility of a bigger universe, but the reality of God. 

Trust Me in this.

“Daniel got down on his knees three times a day and prayed and gave thanks before his God, as he had done previously.”  (Daniel 6. 10) 

Daniel was not just prepared for the crisis or the unexpected, but even in the familiar and the ordinary.  Praying was not just a habit to him, but a pattern engraved and treasured in the every days.  To Daniel, prayer was not a have to, but a get to.

Daniel had been conversing with God for a very long time.  Daniel knew his knee exercises had changed the course of his life…..and continued to do so.  No matter the consequences.  And helped him see it all from a different perspective, that which is eternal and lurks beneath the obvious. 

It is not that treasures appear suddenly when we pray, but we can gradually see what is already there.  And that would be God in this.

One of our granddaughters finished yet another novel last night.  She couldn’t wait to tell me about it, as we were getting the grandkids ready for school.  A voracious reader, she told me she was really surprised by it.  Set in medieval times, when the main character, who was an orphaned young man, didn’t know what to do or where to go, he prayed.

She looked me in the eye and said, “I want to be like that.”

It is as if she knows even at this young age, how different her life can be.

Even in this fairly short tale, she recognized prayer not as a 911 call, or the recitation of spiritual words, nor about getting answers, but as a response to what is going on, what is unfolding all around us. 

How can we respond?  On our knees.

The Secrets of Slow Cooking

The rock-hard frozen chicken thighs made a slight clunk as I dropped them into the slow cooker.  I threw in some spices, two cans of coconut milk, and a sauteed diced onion, and covered it with the lid.  The unlikely mixture did not look at all appetizing at this point. But I gave it a long slow afternoon.

For a time, slow cooking doesn’t look like anything heroic is happening at all.  And then, a gentle boil and perhaps a bit of condensation is visible on the lid.  We leave to do something else, but when we return and walk into the room, the aroma gets all over everything.

Faithfulness believes in the slow cooking of prayer. All too often, we pray pre-packaged microwavable prayers and expect an immediate pre-conceived plastic-wrapped answer in sixty seconds or less.   

But we just need to trust in the slow work of God.

A lot of ingredients have yet to be added.  And the flavors need long slow hours to meld.  God is at work.  Over time we may realize something else is missing, a vital element perhaps.  And many more long-simmering prayers are mingled in the pot, added in sequence when the time is right, and somehow our hearts come to a different understanding.

We don’t comprehend the tenderizing that is happening, the connections being made with unrelated people or situations that appear not to fit.  The deeper things cannot be rushed.  And the result would not be the same if it were hurried along.  The Lord is not slow to fulfill as some count slowness…  2 Peter 3. 9

It is just not the same without the slow cooking of our prayers.

Recently as I was cleaning out a file, I uncovered scraps of papers covered in prayer requests which I had jotted down in a Bible study group from years ago. We had prayed through personal disasters, heart aches, desperate needs, new jobs, new hearts in old jobs, difficult relationships, anxieties, and downright fears. 

I was not impacted by the “results,” but God’s faithfulness to that group, even when we could not yet see His hand.  And all the while, all that time, even now, God has been working.  The waiting is part of God’s gentle simmering. 

How long, O LORD?  (Psalm 13. 1)  His love extends as long as it takes.  We cannot measure the time it takes for a prodigal heart to soften – or maybe our own.  This feast may not be for us – or about us—after all.  But for a thousand generations.

The things we pray may never see the light of day in our lifetime, but that does not diminish the significance that we pray.  We have been entrusted to faithfully come before the Lord.  We may never taste the outcome.  Perhaps for us, to pray is just being embraced by the aroma of the Almighty.  That would be enough.

In slow prayer, the impossibly tough cuts of meat become amazingly tender.  The ordinary vegetables orphaned in the bottom of the fridge become royalty. The flavors join together seamlessly.  Every ingredient adds to the final result.  And when it seems like God is taking His sweet time – well, God has all the time in the world. 

At some point, we just have to trust. 

There are no secrets of slow praying.  Just that we pray.

The prayer of the righteous has great power as it simmers. 

                             James 5. 16

 

Not Enough Time

When Leonardo da Vinci was dying,
he apologized,
"to God and man
          for leaving so much undone."

Royal Wedding

The other day I was cleaning out one of our closets and I came upon my 30-year-old wedding dress stored in a box and shunned by all my girls as too old fashioned.  The girls have all smiled kindly at me and said, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

So I had a great chuckle this morning after all the hoopla about the royal dress for the wedding in London today.  For there, it appears, Kate was wearing my dress – or very similar.  The only difference is I married the better guy!

Act your age!

I come from a long line of women who refused to act their age.  I have looked at pictures of my grandmother Mammy and realized that she did not have grey hair until she was in her 70s…..and she never dyed it.  Indeed, she envied women who, at that time, had blue hair from a bottle.  She was told at the age of 35 that she had rheumatoid arthritis and that she would soon be in a wheelchair.  I think that she might have spit on the doctor who told her that.  She hobbled around until the age of 81, working hard until just hours before her death.   I know how hard she worked.  She lived with us from before I was born.  I used to wake up in the middle of the night to the smell of brownies.  When she hurt bad enough not to sleep, she just got up and baked or sewed or sent out get-well cards to people who were sick.  “No sense just lying there,” she would say.  “I could be doing something.”  My mother said that when the paramedics came to take her to the hospital after her heart attack, she fought them off.  It was her 81st birthday, and she never did see the likes of a wheelchair.

My mother married late and did not have her first child until a couple days after she turned 32.  At that time, there were women at that age who were pretty close to becoming grandmothers.  She was always conscious of her age and kept it hidden under lock and key.  She decided in her late 30s that she would be better off being blond than grey, and so, she bleached her jet-black hair.  She was an ash-blond until just a year before she died at the age of 83.  She never used her senior-citizen card even in her late 70s, foregoing eligible discounts, because she didn’t want anyone to know how old she was.  She kept my grandmother’s old coats in her closet, you know the curly wool ones with the fur collars, for when she got old.  Needless to say, she gave them away to someone who needed them more. 

I took heart when I turned 40 and met my Kansas City neighbor’s mom, who at that time was, I guess, late 50s or early 60s.  She was a grandmother.  And she still wore blue jeans and Birkenstocks.  That encouraged me.  Old doesn’t have to be old.

So, here I am today, turning 57 years old.  At one point, a 57 year old grandmother sounded really really old.  But I read the other day that the oldest woman in the world right now is 114.  I am just to the halfway point.  My to-do list just keeps getting longer.  Family sweeter.  Friendships deeper.  And God even more amazing.

A Chicken in Every Pot

This posting begins a new category which I have named "famous last words."

In 1928, Herbert Hoover was elected President of the United States. In his acceptance speech, he stated: "We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of this land. We shall soon with the help of God be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this land."

His campaign slogan was: "A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage."

Less than a year later marked the beginning of The Great Depression.