Not Just One Way

There is not just one way to read the Bible every day.  But beware.

It will change your mind.

It will change your heart.

It will change how you see.

It will change what you see.

     And how you respond.

It will change what you do

           and how you do it

           with excellence before the King

     whether cleaning toilets or wiping noses

                  or making multi-million dollar corporate decisions.

It will strengthen.

It will fill you with salt and light

        with grace in irritating situations

        with joy even in dark places

        with a radically different way to live.

I read passages in the Bible every day.

          Sometimes before the dawn.

          At times with morning coffee.

          A pocket of time – sometime in the day --

                a priority slipped in

                           between a rock and a hard place,

     or as an old refined Southern woman once told me,

             “Make it first.  Before you read anything else.”

   I still remember her quaking words spoken now 28 years ago,

                  even now when I sort through my email

                  or sit to read a manuscript.

                           “Have you read your Bible yet?”

And when I spend precious days and nights with the grandkids

           who run several marathons

                      every day,

        I read before I get in bed or as I sip some nightly tea

                                                     in the sudden silence of babies sleeping.

              Like setting out my clothes for the next day,

                God prepares the strength and grace I will need,

                                              ready and locked in place,

                    and brings sweetly to a close in the late evening

                                       what may have been hectic, precious and wild.

It is not a rule or a routine or a ritual

              but because God changes me through His Word.

It is my strength and shield,

            my hiding place and my refuge,

   the place where God reorients my day

              and changes my life.

It is not just another book about spiritual things,

         but the very Words of God.

 

Your Word is a lamp to my feet

       and a light to my path.

                        Psalm 119.105

When The Going Gets Tough…

I love to write, and so, to study journalism at Northwestern seemed like a good fit.  That is, until I started graduate school.  Because suddenly I realized that being a journalist had very little to do with writing.  I was expected to be an aggressive investigative reporter, breaking down locked doors, making illusive contacts, and interviewing reluctant sources.  Not what I signed up for.  For one of my first assignments as a grad student, I was supposed to approach and interview people attending a local Fourth of July parade.  Total strangers?  I was paralyzed.

When I landed my first job at a magazine, I can remember staring at the phone, straightening my desk, trying to drum up the courage to call and interview builders for an assignment.  I was still the shy student on the street corner.

As a mom, I can remember long days and sleepless nights when I didn’t know how to adequately mother three daughters, three and under, one of whom thought that sleep was a waste of time.  And then came the fourth.  I was running on empty.

And at those times when I wondered how in the world I was going to handle the task before me, God assured me that He had me just where He wanted me.  “But I can’t do this!” I would cry.

“Exactly,” He would respond. 

And I would not suddenly just drum up the courage or strength or confidence.  I would lean hard on my God.  He would give me the strength.  His deliverance led me through the midst of impossible situations.  And I knew I had nothing to do with it.  The strength was His.

In her book Kisses from Katie, author Katie Davis tells about her life as a 20 year old in Uganda, raising 14 adopted street children and running an organization that supports 400 more.  She lives an impossible situation in the midst of abject poverty.  I love what she says about being overwhelmed.  Many try to support her by saying, “Remember, God will never give you more than you can handle.” 

But Katie responds,  “It is meant to be a source of encouragement, and it would be if I believed it were true.  But I don’t.  I believe that God totally, absolutely, intentionally gives us more than we can handle. Because this is when we surrender to Him and He takes over, proving Himself by doing the impossible in our lives.”

She continues in her journal, “…Because in these times, God shows Himself victorious. He reminds me that all of this life requires more of Him and less of me. God does give us more than we can handle. Not maliciously, but intentionally, in love, that His glory may be displayed, that we may have no doubt of who is in control, that people may see His grace and faithfulness shining through our lives.”

Exactly where He wants us to be.  Leaning hard on Him.

 

Be strong and of good courage.

Do not be afraid or dismayed before the king of Assyria

    and all the horde that is with him,

for there is one greater with us than with him.

With him is an arm of flesh,

but with us is the LORD our God,

to help us

and to fight our battles.

                        2 Chronicles 32. 7-8

Get to Run

Today I ran.  I followed not a training plan nor a schedule of miles, but a meandering path through a sanctuary of trees.  I didn’t measure the distance or even maintain a designated pace.  I ran.  And I rejoiced under a dense canopy of interlaced branches and a thousand shades of green bathed in sunlight. The grandest Gothic cathedral could not compare.  Three gobbling wild turkeys stared as I went past, looking up as if I had invaded their privacy.  And in the middle of a meadow, two deer shyly poked up their heads, almost invisible in the waist-high grass.

After my last marathon, I was barraged by urgent pleas to sign up for another.  Whereas just a few years ago, a runner could sign up on race day or even submit online the night before, today’s races sell out within days or hours, some of them ridiculously more than a half year ahead of the event.  Hurry, hurry, you will miss your ONLY chance!  So, an October race like Chicago, sold out this year in four days.  Boston, for which one must qualify, sold out in less than 8 hours.

Within a day or two of finishing my marathon, people asked me with the same urgency, “So, what’s next?”   Most look at me amazed when I say “Nothing on my radar yet.  Just running.”  WHAT????  as if to say “Can you do that?”   Needless to say, I am still running.  I haven’t given up on it yet.  And I am enjoying this season of NOT being enslaved to a training schedule.  Many days I head out, not even knowing how far I will go or even my route.  I just run.  Sometimes I feel like slipping in a three-miler and end up with seven.  Other times, I take a slow jog around the large retention pond that my village calls a “lake.”  I bask in the shade of ancient trees, along crushed gravel paths, and pray, sing, and think.  Sometimes my brain just shifts into neutral. 

I don’t have to run.  I get to.  There is great freedom and joy in that.

So much in our lives has become regimented, and even those things and relationships we love, are impacted, the very joy crushed out.  Routine and ritual can rob us of delight, and those things in which we should bask leave a dryness in our thoughts.  We go to church, we pray, we take communion, and we forget we are worshipping the Maker of heaven and earth, we are pouring out the cries of our hearts before the God who cares so much that He saves our tears in a bottle, we rush through communion before the Savior who died for OUR wrongdoing.  Our relationship with God becomes a “have-to,” the dry motions of religion instead of a love relationship.

But we don’t have to.  We get to.  God doesn’t work under a paradigm of performance, but of grace.

And there is great freedom and joy in that.

White Noise

What is that noise in the background?  That low dull sound hums on, like muddled voices in the next room with indistinguishable words.  It is not a joyful sound, but that of grumbling, an irritating noise that infects everything in our lives.  It is the mindset of whining, complaining, and discontent, a continual sound-loop in our thoughts.  And this virulent form of murmuring keeps us knee-deep in the miry bog, draining our strength, rendering us incapable of doing what we ought, focusing our eyes on the mud, imprisoning our thoughts in the quagmire, everything is dismal, and we are doomed, FOREVER, it seems.  God appears to be silent, while all along we have our hands over our ears, mumbling as loud as we can.  “I can’t hear You!”  perhaps, because we just don’t want to.

The Old Testament is FULL of the murmurings of God’s people, even in the midst of His deliverance.  In plain sight of incredible miracles, God’s people complained and grumbled, finding fault and basking in discontent.  No matter what God did, it just wasn’t good enough.  What was God thinking?

The problem with grumbling is that it completely hinders the capacity to experience joy.  It is a type of white noise, designed to create an artificial selfish cocoon devoid of any outside influence.  It is the sound of not trusting God with what He is doing.

Grumbling seems now to have become a recreational sport in our lives, an addiction that refuses to just go away on its own.  But it can be challenged, replaced and defeated.  Several weeks ago, I suggested to a friend who was going through a difficult experience to get a notebook and start writing down the things that she was thankful for in the midst of her hard situation.  I just received an email from her, telling me that her list has taken on a life of its own.  It has made a tremendous difference in her life, recognizing God’s goodness and acknowledging what He is doing, in things both seen and unseen.  “God has been flooding me with evidences of His faithfulness here (past and present)” she wrote, “and it has produced such joy in my heart to write them down.”  Her situation has not changed, but her heart is being transformed.

A similar experience happened to one of our girls who was going through a low valley of discouragement in high school, experiencing the cloudy and dismal days of adolescence when even getting dressed in the morning seems overwhelming and so monumental.  “Look for the joy,” I suggested.  “When you get home from school this afternoon, tell me ONE good thing that happens today.”  It was like giving her a new pair of lenses – she saw her world differently, not in a Pollyanna artificial sweetener kind of way, but the reality of what is really there – the reality of God’s goodness staring her in the face. 

Recently I was looking through a digital gallery of pictures taken by a photographer during my last marathon, when it was raining so hard that our shirts were plastered to our skin and our feet squished along the muddy trail.  In picture after picture, I saw a beautiful meadow nestled in front of mountains rising out of the mist, a rustic wooden fence meandered along the rise and delicate trees decorated with spring green.  “Where was that?” I asked myself.  “I missed that part.”  And then, suddenly in one of the pictures, there I was, floundering along in the foreground, the magnificence behind me like a backdrop right out of National Geographic.  This part of the trail – on which I traveled twice - was on the edge of what I had termed the “valley of despair,” where the bridge had washed out.  I missed an awesome sight, because I was SO preoccupied with my grumbling.

Today – no matter what you are facing – look for the joy.

And write it down.  Thank God for what you are going through.

Yes, even that. 

And even what you can’t yet understand.

Because below the shallow surface,

there is great goodness.

You can trust Him in all things,

         and He will guide you to higher ground.

 

O give thanks to the LORD,

          for He is good.

                      Psalm 118.1

It all fits!

I spent last week putting together puzzles with my two year old granddaughter, over and over again.  The pieces were odd-shaped and as they lay on the floor, staring at us, they didn’t make any sense at all, a foot here, part of a nose there, a hand stretched out.  I watched as Maggie fit together the chunky wooden shapes.  As an adult, I would have formed the edge first to establish the borders and work my way into the center, but she focused on the picture first, adding the details as she went along, trying each notch, turning the pieces slowly to see if it would click into place.  At times, she had the right location, but there needed to be another piece added before it fit.  “Try another one first,” I would suggest. 

Quite suddenly, I saw myself when in the middle of life’s confusing experiences, looking at God and saying, “I don’t get it.”  And like those puzzle pieces, sometimes parts of life come together, quickly and without effort, and then sometimes, a hole where nothing seems to fit at all, or an experience I’ve tried to jam every which way to find purpose and meaning in it. 

In the end, the picture that is completed

      one piece at a time

      so slowly

  may not become as I expect

or even what I thought it should to look like.

And it might not be until the very end,

           that all those odd ill-fitting pieces

    surprise me all together --

           “oh, so that is why it happened that way.”

Last week it was Mickey Mouse and the Lion King.  This week, things much deeper.  And I realize I NEED to break out these pre-school puzzles from time to time to be re-assured  and to know, just as Maggie shouts out to me, “it all fits, gramma!”  Life does make sense after all, even the hard parts, even the experiences we cannot comprehend. 

We are stewards of the mysteries of God (1 Corinthians 4.1)

and while I may not understand yet

          the eternal things that are happening all around me,

I can be confident

that there are no missing pieces,

no mistakes,

but only that which is redeemed,

                   revealed,

                         and perfectly placed.

And someday

             I will stand amazed

   at what God has done.