And sometimes...

Early this week, I spent prepping for a minor medical procedure.  I knew what was at stake.  It was going to be hard.  And I dreaded it.

I faced a day of clear liquids – no big deal.  But then, drinking in rapid succession 128 grueling ounces of a potion that seemed like what antifreeze would taste like.

The night before, I thought a lot about a friend’s wife who endured years of strong treatments in an attempt to conquer a virulent form of cancer. 

And the morning of my own preparation, I received an email about a friend who is now pursuing every possible means of overcoming an unexpected turn in his health.  I was ashamed of my despair.

There are going to be a lot of things a lot harder than this.  I realize that.

As a runner, I know the momentary afflictions of the steep hills where I live.  And I have found the way to get up those daunting ascents is to just put my head down and keep moving upward, one step and then another, not looking up, lest a turn in the road gives birth to another grueling climb.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When I first began running as an adult, I asked one of our cross-country running daughters how she faced the demanding slopes.  “How do you talk yourself up the steepness?”  I still recall what she said so many years ago, “It depends what you are thinking about. Don’t think about the hill.”

The ancient Hebrews had an entire collection of hymns that they sang as they climbed toward Jerusalem on their way to worship.  These “songs of ascent” are preserved in Psalms 120-134.  They sang their way through the hard places.  They worshiped even on their way to worship.

And so, on Monday evening, in the middle of woes both real and imagined, I tried not to think about the “hill,"  but to turn an uphill battle into an ascent.  I set my phone to chime every ten minutes for yet another 8 ounces.  One after another.  As daunting as that whole gallon was, I poured out my next dose, and then the next.  Ounce by ounce.  Just one more.  And I realized that obedience sometimes means --as hard as it may be and as bad as it may taste-- intentionally slugging it down and holding my nose, if necessary.  One necessary gulp and then another.

Just twelve more cups.  Just six.  Just three left.  My last. 

“There are three stages to every great work of God;  first it is impossible, then it is difficult, and then it is done,” wrote Hudson Taylor, a pioneer missionary to China in the late 1800s, who learned that the word impossible doesn’t appear in God’s dictionary.

“And then it is done.”  And we realize that only God could have given us the strength. Only God could have made it happen.

Sometimes victory is just getting through to the other side, staying faithful to the path, head down, keep going, slugging it out.  Just because it needs to be done.  Sometimes victory is accompanied by the theme music from the movie Rocky, the soul-moving sounds of the Hallelujah Chorus, or a crowd lined street of people cheering. 

And sometimes the silence is broken by a whisper of “Thank you, God, for bringing me through.”

Life in this broken world is not always going to be a series of pleasant experiences, but obedience to God always prepares us for something more than we can know, another dimension of God’s strength, not new, but realized.  We come to know Him deeper and differently. Even in this hard thing.  Even in the next.

God never promised life would be easy, but “I am with you.”

God is not waiting at the end of this, but helping me through.  Just one more sip.  Now another.

This is what I want to remember from this:  His faithfulness.

In the middle of this hard assignment, a verse from God’s Word kept coming to the surface:

 

Fear not, for I am with you.

be not dismayed,

     for I am your God.

I will strengthen you,

I will help you,

I will uphold you

    with My righteous right hand.

 

                   Isaiah 41. 10

 

The circumstances may not change,

    but the journey can be different.

The best way through?

     “Trust Me in this.”

We have forgotten

          He is the Almighty One,

and He is with us.

The morning stars sang together

 My husband was ready the night before, everything packed and in place.  Nothing surprising in that.  He was going fly fishing with a friend at a river about an hour from here.  He set an alarm.  But he was up even earlier than that. Again, no surprise in that either.

It was dark.  It was still the deepness that abides before the opening of a new day.

I stood in the garage, sipping my coffee, as he loaded his lunch into his truck.  As he backed his truck out of the garage with his fishing kayak strapped to the top, I thought to myself, "No way is he going to be able to make it out of there with that kayak on top."   It looked way too close from my perspective, from my limited vision, from where I stood.  

Seeing me measuring up the possibility, Bill directed me, "Go stand on the stairs."  And from there, I watched, and indeed, there was room for him to pass through.  He waved.  And he was on his way.

How many times in my life have I thought, "No way can I get through this.  No way can I do this."  How many times do I not even try, because I don't trust God enough, and because I don't see the situation from His perspective?  Even the "narrow squeaks" are not narrow squeaks to Him.

"Trust Me in this.  You will get through."

God may be leading us to a different place....or to see a deeper dimension of Him, right where we are.

I followed his truck into the driveway, outside into the predawn darkness.  As he pulled away, something caught my eye.  I looked up and was surrounded by the brilliance of the heavens, stars God has numbered and named, like a million galaxies emerging into view.  I knew there are far more than I can even see with my myopic vision.  

I stand exactly where I need to be, trusting in Him.

I chuckled as I re-entered the house.  I could have been sleeping.  And I would have missed it all, the chorus of the morning stars, the music of the spheres, a vision of His faithfulness, the brilliance of His steadfast love.

 

He determines

   the number of the stars;

He gives to all of them

             their names.

         Psalm 147. 4

 

God cares even more about each one of us.

 

The Day After And the Day After This

It was going to be a beautiful day.  Every person remembers how vastly blue the sky was that day.

And I thought about that in snatches yesterday.  Nineteen years since 9/11.  What are the things we remember about that day?  Where were we when we found out what happened?  How did we respond?  Even the little details are still vivid.  I remember canning a garden full of ripe red tomatoes still warm from the sun that afternoon, because it just needed to be done.  And because I just needed to be doing something.

I realize that college freshmen this year were not even born yet.  9/11 is ancient history to them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We took some of our grandkids to the zoo yesterday.  9/11 is not even history to them yet.  People strolled around the zoo, looking at the amazing designs of God's creation.  And it appeared by all accounts, this September 11 was just another day.

September 12, though, should continually remind us of God's faithfulness.  He brought us through that crisis.  And He will bring us through this one and the next and the next.

"Trust Me in this."

It is our daily trusting God that brings us there, on the ordinary days in the ordinary ways, that we learn to turn from despair and worry and anxiety and make trusting God our default.  To sing a little louder in the dark shadows and momentary afflictions and when the road turns another way.  To understand the magnitude of the ordinary days which are not so insignificant at all.  To learn by heart a new song of His faithfulness. To know that.

To trust Him even in this.

That morning nineteen years ago, even before I knew what was going to happen that day, I read in the devotional My Utmost for His Highest:  "If we do not do the running in the little ways, we shall do nothing in the crisis." 

I read it, underlined it, sent the girls off to school, and went for a run on a beautiful morning with a sky so blue there still are not the words to describe it.  And when I returned from my run, my mom called.  She did not even say hello.  "Turn on your tv.  You obviously don't know what is happening."

It was no longer an ordinary day with an extraordinary blue sky.

But it was on September 12, the day after and the day after that, we saw what trusting God was all about.  Every day, even in mystery, even in the bleakness, God was still there.  Every day is a story of His faithfulness.  We can hold that reality fast, because He holds us fast.

God is still bringing us through.  God is still here.  Even six months into the pandemic.  Even in this mystery.

Today, tomorrow, and the day after that.  God is faithful.

 

When I am afraid,

I put my trust in You.

In God,

   whose Word I praise,

in God I trust.

I shall not be afraid.

               Psalm 56. 3-4

The Sacred Ground of Barren Landscapes

 

















During the early months of sheltering in place, I daily escaped lock-down by going out on a run on country roads. The countless hills and pastures around me seemed frozen in time like sepia photographs taken centuries ago. The motionless fields were covered in the remains of last year’s unidentifiable crop, rows upon rows of dead stalks, like neglected headstones in an old cemetery. It was a bleak reminder of the statistics day after day of disease, death, and an economy on life support, as tragic and lifeless as that field. It was not anything we saw coming or expected.

What good can come of this?

Amidst the din of news reports, I listened to the quiet voices of people I trusted, ordinary prophets who said this is not going away tomorrow, this is not the end of the story, nor of our careers, nor life as we have known it, but perhaps only a change of direction, a change of plans that were not ever our own, a different path through the chaos of the world, behold something beyond our myopic vision. “Actually, it is liberating to have your plans shattered,” remarked author Andy Crouch. Something different is about to emerge.

And I heard over and over again: Take advantage of this time. Not waiting for “normal” to return on the southbound train, but instead, to seize this in-between time on a different patch of unaltered soil, a place of becoming. Not a time to bury, but to plant, to nurture, to grasp the profound significance of the ordinary, not to just make the most of the time but the most of the now we don’t yet understand, not solely focusing on what comes of it next.

Even now, months and months later, as Covid-19 rages on, that which unfolds is not a mindless flipping through a chronicle of wasted time, but that every day is an ongoing story of God's faithfulness.

I ran alongside barren fields on miles of rural asphalt that seemed forgotten and lonely. But never without hope, not running away, but running toward. Spring is coming, I reminded myself, just as it always has. It is not just meaningless fallow dirt around me or gravel crunching beneath my feet on the edges of the road, but sacred ground.

And through those endless days, I wondered, what will the children remember about this? (“Back when I was a little kid, we used to get on a bus and go to school every day.”) What will we remember? Are the “good old days” really how we lived so naively five or six months ago? And we complained about it then?

We have been so overtaken by the pandemic, that one morning, even the wild flowers began hilariously looking like the virus.

Early into the quarantine in March, sheltering alone in her apartment, my mother in law exclaimed, “They are saying this could last until July or August!”

 Well, here we are.

When our grey cheerless spring, with its cool days and forecasts of rain, slipped suddenly into summer’s suffocating blanket of heat and humidity, I changed my running routine, heading out even earlier, before the blazing heat of the day, and seeking out paths with any possible suggestion of shade.

Several weeks passed before I returned to my old rural route, where I am greeted by cows and horses and an occasional pickup. As I crossed the bridge over the slow muddy river and came around the bend, there was hope thriving in that same field, the old having been plowed under and forgiven, the new growth in a thousand shades of fresh green, that which had been planted and that which had come up on its own.

It just needed time to grow.

It still needs time to ripen.

Will we be surprised in the seasons and years and even weeks from now to see what we have nurtured, what we have pursued, choosing what to plant in those moments through the valley of deep darkness, choosing what to let go, choosing what to let grow, choosing to follow God into this?

And to see the first fruits of what hope in God looks like, not dependent on appearances or circumstances, but that on which we can stake our lives.

God is at work in a million different ways in our lives. Probably more.

God still knows what He is doing. And there, in those fields I observed what had been already growing below the surface, not anything we saw coming or expected.

“The great stories are those about redemption,” says Don Hahn, creator and master storyteller of such Disney classics as The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast, “the coming out of a dark place.”

And indeed, God brings the redemption. Visible accomplishments are not the point, but faithfulness to God in what is at hand. To take one step and then another into His redeeming.

To know Him more.

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

Yet
is one of my favorite words in the Bible.
Because this is not
            the end of the story.

The Wild Places

Last week, as I was working my way through a box of old papers, notes, and clippings, I came across a single sheet torn from a journal, dated almost exactly 23 years ago.  We were camping with our four daughters, driving endless hours on a state highway. Stunned by what was before me, I jotted down my thoughts, not imagining I’d find these words again someday.

                                            

                         Montana 7-14-1997

In this desolate land

  of endless miles of scrub grass,

           a patchwork of dust and rocks,

the shadows of clouds

                  passing overhead.

Hill after hill, a barren place,

the only signs of life

   are fences of barbed wire,

lining the asphalt two-lane.

                         No speed limit.

And suddenly,

           from a far-off view,

a line of green drawn erratically 

    as by the hand of a two year old.

There is no question 

            where the water is.

The trees flourish 

with a sharp contrast of color

                     in a place so pale.

Should not our lives too

    point the way to hope

like trees planted 

              by rivers of water,

    laughing and singing 

       and clapping their hands?

A mirage does not 

                  produce life

     visible from miles around.

Hope does.