Gifts on the Mind - Christmas six months away!

I don’t know if it is the reality that Christmas comes in six months or just that grace has been on my mind, but they kind of came together this morning.

Now this may be a strange beginning, but I will get there.

Sweat tickling down my back and lizards shimmying up the wall behind the pastor wanted to distract me but communion had always been a sacred, and a little bit scary thing for me, so  I struggled to pay attention…even though most of the service was in a language I could not yet grasp.

Women sat on one side, men on the other, and everybody else’s children sat up front.  I still kept mine with me on the women’s side, about half way back.  The pews were simply mud-brick benches – no back, and as hard as you can imagine.  Occasionally the rooster, tied to a chair on the platform, given as an offering crowed, and a bee buzzed low around my head. But I could see the platter of chunked baguettes and cups of communion juice (is it sacrilegious to say it tasted sort of like ashes – not that I had ever imbibed of the juice of ashes) coming my way.

In those moments I became aware of the absolute unity of the body of believers. All around the world believers would be taking communion, drinking some juice, or wine, in memory of Christ’s shed blood and eating the bread (or crackers) in memory of His broken body.  I was just a tiny part of that amazing body of people, of countless languages, of different skin colors, of different traditions even, but men and women and children who believed Christ paid their sin-debt on the cross – the greatest grace gift of all.

Today I am grateful for the grace gifts of hope, of security, and of my place in a much larger family – the genealogy which goes beyond blood. I pray for the Body and I know there are those who pray for me.  How amazing that is, to never be alone….God said He will never leave nor forsake us, but God can also lay me on the heart of some other family member, just as I am certain there are those I have prayed for who do not know me.

I am only beginning to understand grace, unmerited favor, the lavish gifts of God.  This morning, I feel as though I am standing under a waterfall of His grace.

 

Just a bag of cosmetics!!

That’s what it was, a plastic make-up bag filled with things like nail polish, lipstick, fragrance, nail files even, but what made it so wonderful is that my husband thought it up all on his own.  He took the time to pick out the colors, the fragrances, each item so foreign to anything he would normally shop for and from an area of the store he would never visit.  It was one of those Christmas gifts from my husband I have never forgotten…just because it was all his idea.

Then this morning I found this line in the Message, James 4: 6, And what He gives in love is far better than anything else you’ll find.  The NIV puts it this way: But He gives us more grace…James 4:6a NIV

The idea is the same; God graces us because He loves us, and the way He loves us is better than anything we could imagine.  And like that wonderful Christmas gift so many years, God’s grace gifts are absolutely personalized…He thought about you and me and designed exactly what He knew would be the best gifts for us.

This morning one of my grace gifts was this passage.  Honestly, I have been struggling with contentment, with the desire to do something meaningful.  Then God graced me in two ways: this passage and a call from my older daughter reminding me that words have influence – even when they are lined into cyberspace. 

I sit here happy.  Yup, happy!  Content!  You should see this silly grin!  God reached down through all the pages I consume every day and messaged me: what He gives us far better than anything I could find. And through encouraging words from my grown-up child and encouraging words spoken through His words.

I have to thank Eugene Peterson for his work making the Word of God even more accessible.  A couple of years ago I heard Eugene Peterson speak and address the young pastors-to-be in the audience: Get your languages he said.  Peterson translated from the original languages  when he worked on the Message, putting God’s thoughts into contemporary language…so I thank God for allowing me to go to the Festival of Faith and Writing where I heard Peterson and where my fear of the Message was defused, just one more grace gift this morning.

 

The Unseen Visitor At TLC

Did you ever think of Jesus walking about seeking those whom He could bless?  I know we are all aware of the Scripture that tells us the devil walks about like a roaring lion seeking whom he would devour(I Peter 5:8), but what about Jesus as the Son of God?

As I was praying this morning about TLC and all the workers – and there are a ton of them, everything from kitchen workers to counselors to maintenance workers to the workshop leaders and musicians, the image of Jesus walking about the campus became very vivid.

Jesus is present.  In Matthew 18:20 we find Him speaking these words, “For where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in the midst of them.”  So, this morning Jesus is there on campus at BBC at TLC wandering around in the midst of 500 some people, and I cannot imagine Him doing anything other than seeking whom He could bless.

Some He will bless with a renewed and refreshed faith that He is Who He said He was, the One Who loved them so much He bore their sin debt on the cross.  Some He will refresh with a reminder that on that cross He paid their sin debt in totality, that wandering around on earth under a load of sin and guilt was not His plan for them.  Some He will bless with relationships, with the reminder that they are not alone in their faith but there are hundreds of other young men and women who love God.  Some He will bless with refreshment through the great music, music that will run through their minds and hearts when they leave the campus and which will encourage and bless them for the months to come. Others He will bless in ways we will never know unless they tell us.

The point is, I love that image, the invisible Christ, seeking to speak blessing into the lives of all those kids and their youth leaders and the staff of TLC today.

TLC, and it's not a TV channel!!

Funny, as old as we are, we are so unconscious of those we influence or those who influence us. Yesterday I helped with the registration for the Teen Leadership Conference on our campus…some four hundred senior highers filled our dorms, spilled over the sidewalks and ran from raindrops yesterday afternoon. 

However, as exciting as it was to see all of that, what I loved best was recognizing faces, not the faces of the teenagers, but of their youth leaders bearing the papers needed to register their groups,  Eileen’s smile still lights up a room, and though Johnny did not recognize me, I recognized him.  And I could name a bunch of other graduates, still in ministry, graduates even from the last century – now that sounds impressive.

We hear so much negative about young people (I’m in my sixties, so young encompasses a pretty big group), but the one word that kept echoing in my mind yesterday was faithfulness.  These young men and women are still living lives of faithfulness.  They are still loving God in practical ways, the evidence of which was written all over the really young people they brought back to campus.

I’m sure influencing me was the last thing on their minds yesterday, but they influenced me – all those kids who once sat in my (our) classrooms, our chapel services, our dorms.  I loved reading the peace and excitement (yes both) on their faces.  I know they have lived through lots of pain, because if you work with kids and love kids, you will face pain with them.  But their faces also bore a lightness, a tenderness, the marks of that love, not the tough cynicism, the hardness, the sadness, the resignation I see on the faces of so many.

Today, I am influenced and encouraged by young alumni, who bless us all by their fidelity.

It's a matter of choice!

I have been thinking about choices in relationship to our thought life and relationship, but this morning was challenged by other choices we make.

We are, I am, so rich we/I get to make many choices – which kind of bread, which kind of meat, which kind of potato or rice or pasta….not whether we will or can eat. 

Maybe a year ago I read Ann Vos Kamp’s book – 1000 Gifts and was challenged to each day record three blessings….the ordinary to us, but blessings nonetheless. I write yesterday’s blessings in my journal each day, and it dawned on me this morning, the blessings we have in choice.

I would imagine most of my stateside readers had a cupboard and refrigerator full of choices to select from already today.  And that is after the choices you made from your dresser and closet full of clothes.  I remember in Africa being admonished to be careful about the laundry I hung out because the Chadians generally seldom had more than one change of clothing – if they had that…and I hung out six or seven pair of underwear per family member and more than that number of dresses or pants and shirts for my family each week – more because it was so hot and kids get so dirty. 
 
Here’s a side note: a neighbor had a new baby and my seven-year-old and her Chadian friend often carted the infant around.  Because Chadians cannot afford diapers, well you can imagine,  and because diseases are often transmitted through bodily fluids, I told Amy she could only hold baby Dorcas if she would come home immediately and change her clothes if the baby wet on her.  So Amy’s laundry piled up fast.

Anyway, I wonder how often we thank God for the privilege of having so much and so many choices.  Then I wonder whether we should have quite so many choices.  For thirty plus years I worked and stuff piled up because mostly I was too busy to really notice.  This summer one of my chores has been to declutter, and I have been shamed by the choices we get to make when too many have no choices.  They truly live in the moment. Because that is all they have!

So, feeling too rich today, I am going to continue pruning, making choices..and some are difficult.  We do get attached to our stuff. 

Infidelity: Is it a way of life? Even my life?

Do you believe in coincidences?  I do, sort of – divine coincidences that is, the kind only the Spirit of God could and does orchestrate.  Yesterday I wrote about infidelity in marriage and the way it could look on the outside and the reality of what it is on the inside.

Then today, I read from The Best of Andrew Murray on Prayer, as is my regular routine and came upon the following line: Everything in life is to bear the signature of the name of Jesus. Wow, what a thought!  And what a challenge…does everything in my life bear the signature of the name of Jesus?  What I eat, what I wear, what I do, where I go, what I read?  And well you get the idea.  And if it doesn’t, what then?

After that time of challenge and prayer, I went on to read James 4 (our church is working through James this summer and we have been encouraged to read the book through each week and in a different version.)  So, I am using The Message this week.  Here’s is what chapter four sounds like in verses four and five:

You’re cheating on God. If all you want is your own way, flirting with the world every chance you get, you end up enemies with God and His way.  And do you suppose God doesn’t care? The proverb has it that  “he’s a fiercely jealous lover.”

Is this the theme for the week? I wondered, infidelity?  And when I choose, without consulting, or even ignoring God’s mind, am I actually cheating on God?  I think of the woman I read about yesterday and her record of her response to her husband’s infidelity.  My husband and I spent four years at our church as grief counselors, running a small group for those who had experienced loss, and the language Wendy used as she described her feelings and choices sounded just like the language of those who had lost a loved one to death.

Desolation! Absolute abandonment! Hopelessness!  Emptiness and purposelessness! NO motivation to take even the next step! An inability to make choices!

Certainly God goes on, whether we are faithful or not, but I could not help wondering how our choices make Him feel.  Certainly we have feelings because He did, so what we do does cause Him to feel.  Love always results in emotion!

And today I am driven to examine my record of fidelity – not over my lifetime.  I could not handle that, and I am grateful for His forgiveness. But what about the choices I have made today?  When I think about the vivid images that come to mind when I read the word “flirting,” I am forced to consider whether that is what we do when we watch a TV show or movie, knowing we probably wouldn’t if Jesus were sharing the couch with us.  Would we tell or listen to that joke if we could see Him in the circle? 

You can fill in the areas of your life where you are most vulnerable to temptation, and we can both pray that we will be so sensitive to the leading of the Spirit that we will notice when the real temptation is to flirt with the world and then perhaps cheat on God.

Like charging on a credit card: the pleasures of sin for a season---And then the awful price!!

And then the awful price.

Reading good literature – read that well written literature – makes me better as a writer.  So after I had my stack of Latin American works last week, I passed by the new nonfiction section, and picked up two, by title alone.  One was the book about a child raised by monkeys; the other was subtitled A Memoir of Marriage.  Since I am up to my elbows in a memoir, that seemed a good choice

However, it was not what I expected.  Instead it was the story of a tragedy, the author’s early betrayal of her wedding vows, and her husband’s betrayal later in their marriage.  The marriage counselor she saw told her to confess her transgressions to her husband, and from the outside looking in, it appears that gave him license for his infidelity.

In the early chapters of the book, she recounts her affairs, painting them with the brilliant colors of desire and passion and adventure, but she subsequently paints them also with the greys and blacks of lies, deceit, subterfuge, fear, and regret.  Lies had to be made up, remembered, pulled out again as history until eventually the affair swirled down the drain like dirty water after a storm.

Except that, as in the aftermath of a hurricane, the storm does not leave the landscape untarnished.

She somehow never expected her husband’s final affair to last ten years and birth a child by the time she discovered it.  She never expected him to leave her and their two sons, to lose their home, to lose the dreams she had maintained since she stood in a white dress and pledged her heart and body to her husband.

As I read the book, I grew steadily more grieved, for all of the lives touched by this nightmare because there seemed no reason not to live that way, nor did she seem to have any idea of how to right the mess.

She, they, did not know God.  She writes, as she reflects on 18 years of marriage and then five years of recovery after her husband finally walked out, that she still believes in marriage,” that there is no better way to get through adult life than as a married person.”  She goes on to say, “I used to think that marriage was based on passion and love.  Now I see that it’s based mostly on loyalty.  Loyalty with warmth.”

She also seems to believe that few people are hard-wired for fidelity, for monogamy. As I read that near the end of the book, I wondered if she realized she was saying that most people were doomed to the “hell” as she described it consequent to infidelity.

And finally, I wanted so much to tell her that it did not have to be that way.  That people could learn how to love, that love means finding joy in blessing your mate.  I labored over that last line, but I think that is what it comes down to, caring enough about someone to day- by- day seek ways to bless them, and you can only know and do that if you are aware of how loved and blessed you are by God first.