(In)Famous Last Words

“I don’t want to get my hopes up.”

Infamous last words.  A line we’ve all said and nodded knowingly to as we watch others commit a suicide of the soul unaware.  We agree because on some level we believe that hope is reckless, that good sense would dictate that it should be avoided, that it is only hope that causes the emotional plummet when disappointed.  It’s one thing to have events not go your way; it’s another thing to carry an unfulfilled hope.  Better not to hope at all.

Disappointment is hard to bear because of its accompanying feelings of grief and shame and humiliation.  Disappointment accuses us of foolishness; of unfounded optimism when cold hard pragmatism would have been an emotional shield from failure.    Something didn’t happen which you were counting on.  Someone didn’t come through.  Sometimes it feels as if God didn’t come through.  He didn’t protect you. He didn’t give you what you wanted.  Somehow, disappointment always feels like a betrayal.

As such, hope is a thorny word.

It is only human nature--our fleshly wisdom--to protect ourselves from disappointment because we imagine that we will be able to limit the amount of pain we will experience when the floor drops out from below.  We cauterize our hearts against hope believing that we are protecting ourselves. If I don’t hope, I can’t be disappointed.  If I don’t hope, I can’t be hurt.  We think we’re being pragmatic; facing life head on without wishful thinking.  We think that we’re being realistic.  We think we’re showing the wisdom of our experience.

We’re actually being deceived. 

 “It ain’t what you don’t know that that gets you into trouble.  It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” (Mark Twain)

The attack on hope is nothing less than one of the devil’s schemes; tempting us into a kind of resignation that says things like, “Well, whatever is going to happen is going to happen regardless.”  Don’t hope. Don’t believe.  Don't risk yourself that way.  And so, we abort our hopes like unborn children and then try to go on as though we carry no phantom pain.  

The resulting repercussions are many.  Resignation is only one step above despair.

 Hope deferred makes the heart sick but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life. (Proverbs 13:12)

Putting off hope is deadly.  Heartsickness is an ailing at the core of an individual.  An illness of body, soul and spirit.   We cannot live without heart.  It might limp along for a while, but when it fails, there is no alternative.  Hope is the antidote to despair.

“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1)

Faith is the evidence of our hope.  It is the proof.  Hope is the prerequisite for faith that is essential for pleasing God.

“Without faith it is impossible to please God; because anyone who comes to God must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who earnestly seek Him.”  

The rest of the chapter goes on to mention by name and detail the feats of faith of almost every major figure from the Old Testament.  

“All these died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar.” (Hebrews 11:13)

And yet, what they did see and receive was worth recording in scripture. 

"...who through faith conquered kingdoms, enforced justice, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, were made strong out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight, Women received back their dead by resurrection..." (Hebrews 11:33-35a)

But those miraculous answers from God paled in comparison to the promise of what was still to come.  There is a dangerous tendency as Christians to limit our expectations of God because we’re neurotically afraid we might get something wrong and then maybe God won’t come through and our faith will be shaken.   We don't want that for ourselves and we don't want it for others either. 

And so we neglect encouraging others to hope--whether it is for healing, or a spouse, or children or a career path or ministry--lest that particular thing isn’t ‘in God’s will’ and disappointment sours faith into bitterness.  Better not to hope at all: Lower your expectations just in case we find God inadequate. 

God must be sick of our incredibly low expectations of Him already. 

"And because of their unbelief, he couldn’t do any miracles among them..." (Mark 6:5a)

When Mary and Martha sent word to Jesus that their brother was sick to the point of death, they were already His friends.  They knew who He was. They knew what He could do.  They knew that He loved them and that He would care about Lazarus’ desperate need.  You can imagine their hopes as they sent urgent word to Jesus, “Lord, the one that you love is sick.”

Lord, please come and heal him.

You can imagine as they waited.  Counting the days and the hours that might pass before Jesus could be reasonably expected to arrive to heal their brother.  Hours painfully ticking by as Lazarus grew weaker as his immune system lost the battle.  Watching through the night, counting on the Healer to show up in the nick of time and save his friend.  You can also imagine the crushing weight of disappointment that fell upon Mary and Martha when Lazarus died and still there was no sign or word from Jesus.

Disappointment. Grief. Four days past hope.  Four days overdue.  Four days interred in the tomb before word reaches the sisters that Jesus is near and Martha runs the two miles to meet Him on the way.

“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

But here is the moment when true hope reveals itself and fans into flame even the faintest flicker of faith.

“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.  But even now I know that whatever you ask for from God, God will give you.”

She’s asking for a bigger miracle than healing.  She’s asking for a miracle that quashes the expectations of the possible.

Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.”

And Martha has the same questions that we do.  Jesus tells her that her brother will rise again and she doesn’t know if that is hope for the spiritual future or hope for the temporal; hope for eternal life or for a resurrection right now.  

Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again at the resurrection on the last day.”

She knows about future hope. It’s the present hope that feels the most uncertain; but in Jesus, they are one and the same.

Jesus said to Martha, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live and everyone who lives and believes in me, shall never die.”

And then He asks the crucial question:  “Do you believe this?”

“Yes Lord; I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world.”

The question of our present circumstances is answered in the identity of Jesus.

Even now, even four days in the grave. Is there something you can do?

It is hope that causes the pursuit. It is hope in who Jesus is that causes Martha to run two miles outside of Bethany to ask Jesus for a greater miracle. It is the same hope that caused the woman who had been bleeding for 12 years to push through the crowd and reach out in faith.  It is hope that caused the four friends to take up their invalid companion and carry him up onto a roof and take the building apart in order to get their need in front of the One who could do something about it.  

Then Mary comes to Jesus and her words are drenched in the same disappointment as her sister.

“Lord, if you had been here my brother would not have died.”  

And here come the most famous tears of all time when Jesus looks on their grief and disappointment and fear and weeps Himself.  He goes to His friend’s tomb and commands the stone blocking the entrance removed.  And Martha--precious Martha--of the hope beyond the faintest of hopes, lays out the practical realities of the human problem of death to Jesus.

It’s been four days. There’s an odour.  There’s decomposition.  That’s life--or rather--that’s death.  And Jesus answers, “Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?”

Our hope is in who Jesus is; in that fact that He is God. That He loves us.  That He can do something about our present circumstances.  And, that He wants to.

And this hope will not lead to disappointment. For we know how dearly God loves us, because he has given us the Holy Spirit to fill our hearts with his love. (Romans 5:5 NLT)

Jesus didn’t answer their request to come and heal Lazarus. It would have been strange if Mary and Martha had stayed disappointed after Jesus called their brother out of his tomb.  If they had focused their attention on the fact that Jesus hadn’t answered their call to come and heal their brother.  If they had made cynical statements about how Jesus might heal some sick and blind people but not the ones closest to Him.

Jesus waited to answer until all natural hope was lost; waiting instead for something supernatural to emerge in Martha, evidence of her hope in who Jesus is.  “But even now, I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you.”

Even when Lazarus’ body is starting to return to dust.  Even when there is no reasonable hope, there is hope because Jesus is here.  Each and every difficulty and lack faced in life is and opportunity to hope. Not the baseless, worldly hope that crosses its fingers and wishes for everything to work out.  Real hope.  Hope based on who Jesus is: The Son of God.  The Christ.  The Resurrection and the Life.   The Word made flesh.  Our living Hope.

This hope in who Jesus is, is the helmet of salvation. It is a critical component of the whole armour of God by which we are able to withstand the schemes of the devil.  

For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.  Therefore take up the whole armour of God that you may be able to withstand in the evil day and having done all, to stand firm.  Stand therefore, having fastened on the belt of truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness and as shoes for your feet, having put on the readiness given by the gospel of peace. In all circumstances, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one; and take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit which is the word of God. (Ephesians 6:12-17)

The helmet of salvation is the part of our defences that protects our minds.  Our hope in Christ’s ability and desire to save is what protects our thoughts and emotions.  It is our hope in Christ that allows us to raise up our shield of faith in order to extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one.

Martha answered Jesus, “Yes Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world.”

And even now--right now--You save.

Hidden in the Open

(Previously published in the Sept/Oct issue of Live Magazine www.baptistwomen.com)

“We know what we are but not what we may be.”

(Hamlet, William Shakespeare)

Some time ago I found a wad of twenties I had hidden in a small aluminum tin decorated with cats. Over the course of a few years, I had tucked away the periodic bill into that unassuming receptacle; amassing a tidy sum which I eventually forgot all about.  The tin sat ignored on the shelf amid well worn paperbacks and ceramic cat figurines. I got so used to seeing it that I ceased to see it all, let alone the money it contained.  Years passed with my treasure hidden in--well, not quite jars of clay--but a small cream coloured tin adorned with dancing felines. It wasn’t until much later when I was cleaning out my bedroom and having a stone cold truth discussion with myself about my girlhood cat decor fixation (and perhaps how it might be hindering my future) that I noticed the tin once again and vaguely remembered something to do with both it and money.

“How could you forget about four hundred dollars in cash?” my friend asked incredulously when I told her of my nifty discovery.  

How, indeed?

The thing is, I never knew that I had four hundred dollars.  I just had a twenty dollar bill that I tucked away here and there whenever I had more than one. I was ignorant of the wealth I had at my disposal. 

The greatest danger of tragedy exists when we don’t know what we should know.  It is for this reason that we often miss laying hold of by faith the attributes of Christ available to us as children of God.  We forget what we know by faith and habitually choose to rely on our own abilities and wisdom instead; valuing and regarding as true the conclusions based on subjective experience over what God reveals in His Word.   We need to remember what we know.

Virtue is discovered in affliction and developed into a treasure hoard collected one small victory at a time. The transformation of faith--of trusting the truth of Scripture enough to obey it--is like saving one twenty dollar bill at a time.  Sometimes it seems like a lot to save, a hardship; while in other moments of abundance, it is almost inconsequential.   This is the humility of faith, that we surrender the right to our own wisdom and trust God instead. 

Sadly, I think I have spent much of my life with the mistaken belief that by taking God’s view of things, I would somehow be impoverishing myself. Nothing could be further from the truth.  It is only in God’s paradigm of faith that His child can be pressed and not crushed by circumstances that would destroy anyone else.  The world and the enemy will do everything in their power to deform and mutilate us into their likeness, but we are being conformed into the image of God’s own Son. We are more than conquerors through Christ.  Greater is He who is in us, than he who is in the world.

But here lies the most deceitful trap of all: it doesn’t feel that way.  When hard pressed on every side and suffering acutely, I feel like I’m drowning, not conquering.  Trusting God when the stakes are mountain high has often felt like wishful thinking and a fool’s hope not grounded in reality.  My feelings--particularly my feelings amid the storm--cannot be trusted for they are generally based on reactionary emotions, hunger, sleeplessness and fear. It is in those moments more than ever that I need to cling to what I know to be incontrovertible truth.  It is the Truth that makes us stronger than we are; braver than we are; better than we are.  It is the Truth alive in us by faith that overcomes the world.  

I had four hundred dollars at my disposal but I didn’t remember it.  We have riches available to us that allow us to conquer in life but we forget we tucked them away in plain sight; one battle at a time.  We are made in the image of God who is eternal and while our bodies will wear out, we were made to endure, to thrive, to be victorious.  It is not our identity to be crushed when pressed on all sides but to retain the shape of Christ; to spring back into the form and pattern of Jesus no matter what the world or the devil throws at us. 

Resilient.

An Embarrassment of Riches

(Previously published in the July/August issue of Live Magazine. www.baptistwomen.com )

(This is not my church.)

My church split painfully in two when I was in the fifth grade.  Between one Sunday and the next all the girls my age seemed to evaporate into memory with only their family portraits in the pictorial directory giving evidence of their former presence.  While God had preserved a remnant of peers--my cousins and another boy our age--I was suddenly bereft for female companionship at church.  Potlucks were ubiquitous in the post-split period as the remaining members of the congregation drew together for a sweetness of fellowship that can only be attributed to the presence of the Holy Spirit; a balm to the wound of fracturing.  But for my pre-teen self, many hours were spent wandering through the empty Sunday School rooms while the boys played floor hockey in the gym (hitting balls disturbingly hard to my way of thinking) and the adults talked downstairs.  I wanted to be a part of what people were doing, but the gym was echo-y and downright dangerous in my tights and patent leather shoes and the adults were talking, talking, talking about things that only made sense to me in retrospect.

I wanted a friend like a parched plant wants water.  One Sunday while I wandered through our now roomy building, I found myself sitting in the balcony of our hushed sanctuary and crying.  I prayed that God would send me a friend at church. If God had sent me a friend the following week, I doubt I would remember my prayer or His answer.  Countless Sundays passed without the arrival of any families with girls my age.  In a desperate play against my total isolation, I pushed myself to understand and participate in the adult conversations. I got to know my cousins better and grew comfortable in Sunday school, and then youth group as the only girl among the boys who were all like brothers.  I invited my school friends to come on Wednesday nights, but the seas of adolescence are tumultuous and none of those friendships survived the raging storm.  Like Anne Shirley, I longed for a kindred spirit. 

(But these are my friends.)

 Five years passed as I watched for God to answer my prayer for a sincere friend.  I expected He would send a girl my age, but God has repeatedly revealed that all my expectations are too small for the kind of answers that He delights to give. God made me wait for my friends so that I would undertake the challenge of conversing with adults and befriending those more mature than myself; so that I would learn to appreciate the boys as cheerful and forthright companions; valuing the community that God had placed me in rather than the one I thought I wanted.   Then, He began to send His answers.  Friends came from corners I did not expect. These women were not my peers, but grew to be my dearest friends.  If I hadn’t had to ask and wait and stretch myself, I probably wouldn’t have been able to appreciate them, indicating that I wasn’t ready for the friends God had for me. The waiting years weren’t meant to be idly passed as time arbitrary ticked away.  Like waves on a shore, God has been faithfully adding to my friends ever since.  My little church has become an embarrassment of riches to me.  Just when I think that God couldn’t have answered that old prayer more completely, He multiplies His answer again.  

One of our most profound hungers is for that of connection, but our human nature desires it through the easiest of pathways.  I wanted a friend partly to occupy and shield me from having to exert myself in groups in which I felt uncomfortable.  By delaying His answer a little while, God grew in me a love and appreciation for parts of the Body of Christ that I might have ignored otherwise.   Many Christians have forsaken church for a gallimaufry of reasons.  As a result, they wander as exiles looking for a utopian community that meets all their needs, not recognizing that perhaps God showed them the gaps so that they could pray and see Him answer above and beyond what they could think or imagine.  

Lingering in the Light

(Previously published in the May/June 2016 issue of Live Magazine www.baptistwomen.com)

 The Town and Country station wagon my parents bought second hand was a two-toned cream and wood paneling affair and is the first car in which I can remember a family trip.   New cars--even ‘new to you’ cars--have a unique smell; like adventure and hope and upholstery.  My dad would navigate that boat of a car onto the TransCanada West while it was still dark; my brother and sister would determinedly fall back asleep, pillows cold against the windows while I watched the mountains grow larger.   As the trees grew thick and the city lights fell away behind, I watched; I wanted to catch sight of the wild things that live in the expanse between people; hopeful that a momentary flash of delight would punctuate the tedium of hours on the road.

God made us for delight.  If you go way, way back to the beginning--to the genesis of it all, if you will--you’ll find He made man and woman and placed them in a garden He planted and walked with them.  He made them to delight in Him and in one another.  He made them to delight in their surroundings and the manifold other creatures He had made.  He placed in them an awe for beauty. No other species on Earth writes poetry and yet the poets include all of creation in their verse; prompted by our delight for such splendor as the regal stripes of the tiger or the a delicate lace of a web slung with dew in the first light of morning. We alone glory in the bending of light over the horizon; find water falling from a height to the earth below a sight to be cherished.  There is no instinctual imperative to explain humanity’s appreciation for loveliness; it serves no survival purpose.  We delight because delight is His way and we were made in His image.

But delight seems hard in these days of ours where bombs explode with astonishing regularity. Where life is not a miracle but a parasitic inconvenience to be removed. Where we hurry to self-identify rather than rise to the mantle God has given us. Where people campaign for healers to be complicit in suicide. Where truth is subjugated and intemperate feelings guide morality. Where fools and tyrants are celebrated and the eyes of the people drift closed in a somnolent haze of anesthetizing narcissism.  

We almost cannot bear to look at all that there is to see. 

But beauty is always worth opening our eyes for; and we are not satisfied with a single look, either.  We long to behold beauty again and again. To immerse ourselves in it. To possess it, but we live as though it is a transient emotion; a flash of fur moving through the trees sighted from a car traveling a hundred kilometers an hour, rather than our God-given inheritance.  As though joy and delight were only ever a passing fancy.   

And if we look no further than the reflected images of glory, our delight will always be transitory.  Creation is subject to the frustration of passing away and so we feel the forlorn desperation of flowers wilting and summer ending and the whirling spin of the Earth on its axis counting out our years inexorably to their conclusion--so that even our delight wears a forlorn melancholy like a veil. This is the shadowed delight of the World.

This is not our fate, though.  We the Redeemed are invited to stare into the face of Beauty Himself and linger, Son-bleached and golden in the effect of His presence.  True delight has no beginning and no end--eclipsing time by higher authority--and transforms the beholder by glory. As the active footsteps of faith, invite and expect the Holy Spirit to speak to you constantly; in prayer, through Scripture, in sermons, through the natural world, circumstances, stories, people, dreams, science, art, music--everything. What He reveals always spurs delight because He is speaking to you.  Like the rising of the sun increasingly reveals the lay of the land, so delight in God reveals more and more of God--which in turn, delights in a marvelous feedback loop.  Do what the Word says so that nothing will hinder your desire to be with God, for it is disobedience that causes us to hide from Him. Obey and leave the outcomes to God.  But with Him our wounds are fully healed and forgotten; the grime of sin washed away and our true nature, the one born by water and blood and the Spirit shines forth in harmony to delight the Creator who formed it.  For who we truly are is revealed in the perfect light of God’s presence and that identity--the one He gives--is the one that overcomes the world.

I'm Reviewing the Situation: A Lament for Bonnie (by Anne Emery)

I recently finished reading, A Lament for Bonnie, by Anne Emery.  The story--as the title suggests--is about a missing girl from a large musical clan in Cape Breton and touches on the lives of a sprawling cast of characters that populate some of Emery's other mystery novels.  The book helpfully contains a family tree for reference.  Unfortunately, those of us who read the electronic copy only know that the family tree would have been helpful if we had been able to flip back and forth to it as the narrator changed from chapter to chapter.

Alas.  Long live the printed book with its easy page turning. This was the first ebook I have ever read and when mulling over my thoughts at the end of it all, I realize how amorphous the story seemed.  I am not sure if this is the fault of the electronic medium or the author.  Perhaps it is a little of both.  But when two hundred electronic pages stand between the present page and the family tree, you just push through hoping that clarity will be forthcoming.

 Emery certainly writes in clean, readable prose with an obvious understanding and knowledge of police procedure and criminal law that felt a little too expositional at times.  She weaves a believable tapestry of Cape Breton history, culture and music and the sense that the missing girl exists in a real community.  The weaknesses, however, I felt were threefold: pacing; character development and narrative leaps.  That said, Emery's technical capability as a writer meant that I didn't mind finishing the story even when it seemed that the pacing lagged in the lead up to the quickly completed climax of the story.

But the real trouble I had with the novel was that after a while, I just didn't care.  I didn't care about Bonnie since as far as I was concerned she was likely a goner from the get-go and even her bereaved family seemed to be handling her absence with a surprising degree of equanimity.  No parental breakdowns at the thought that their preteen daughter was raped and murdered.  No family strife despite characters mentioning that there had been rifts in the past.  Instead, everyone participated in benefit concerts for Bonnie and got together for kitchen ceilidhs.  As a result, I didn't particularly care when the RCMP's glare of suspicion was cast over red herring characters because I wasn't invested in anyone.  If each of these characters were developed, I think it happened in one of the other novels.  

Most frustratingly for me, however, were the narrative leaps that made the story feel like the author needed to take another pass at the manuscript and fill in the weak places.  The rule of thumb for writers is to show, not tell; but it seemed I was being told a whole lot of the time.  When the police inexplicably decide some characters couldn't be guilty despite suspicious circumstances because so-and-so 'simply didn't have it in' them, but zero in on another character that was barely mentioned in the first two thirds of the novel over something that happened in the past, it gives the reader the sense that the police--for all their procedure--are more akin to palm readers or judicial commissars than detectives following where the evidence leads.  I never worried that a favourite character might be the guilty monster because I had no favourite character.  I didn't know any of them well enough.  If a book must be read in sequential order as part of a series in order for the characters to have depth that should be clear to the potential reader on the book jacket.  (I mean--if I'd had a book jacket…)  I couldn't shake the feeling that these were either the most undeveloped characters ever, or else Emery was resting on her published laurels with the assumption that readers already knew and were invested in her cast of characters.

The catch-22 of multiple narrators--and I have run into this problem myself-- is that while they offer  multiple angles on the story, they can only convey to the reader what they themselves know. As a result Emery gives us a look at the missing person case from multiple family members, a lawyer, as well as the local RCMP.   But when one of your narrators is the investigating detective and yet the actions  of the police during the rising action of the story are totally incomprehensible, it seems like the mystery author is asking the reader to accept the whole direction of the story resting on the reasoning of 'Just Because'.

Despite these drawbacks, however, I have learned a couple of valuable lessons:

1. I should never buy eBooks. They're obnoxious in their claim of supposed ease while in actual fact they're useless to the power of ten.  Maybe all of these problems listed above would have evaporated if I'd had a printed book that would have allowed for me to hold my page and flip backwards for reference. 

2. Actually, no one should buy ebooks.  They are an insult to the art form.  

April 28th

It has been twenty years.  

Twenty years since David left his place. I remember the crab tree was white with flower and the sky blue as only Calgary skies seem to be.  I remember coming home from school to find everyone at home, gathered in my mom and dad’s bedroom weeping because David was gone.  David, who I admired. David, who was kind.  David, my cousin who I loved.

Twenty years is an absurd number.  

Time is this widening expanse from everything except the loss that still brings tears to my eyes in this public place where I sit this morning.  David passed through water into eternity.  And I wonder if the Holy Spirit is revealing something, and I want to keep my fingers typing so that the thoughts keep coming even though it makes me cry, smearing the eyeliner that I so carefully applied this morning for no reason.

I woke up thinking about David because the twenty-eighth of April never passes without notice, like the birthdays that you learned as a child never leave your recollection; so too the holy days of loss.  Loss, that jagged possession that stabs and draws blood and tears when you think you finally have a handle on it.  That lump in your throat that can’t possibly be swallowed, but must be in order to survive.

I read the first couple of chapters of Genesis this morning because my fingers turned there, conscious and unconscious in the grey light of a clouded day that doesn’t look anything like that blue day, except that the crab tree is white with apple blossoms again.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.  Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep.  And the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. (Genesis 1:1-2)

It dawns on me that the Spirit of God still hovers over the waters.  The waters that wash over us when we are formless and empty with loss that feels bigger than the Earth as someone’s place at the family table sits vacant. The Spirit of God hovers over the saltwater tears that burst forth when the worst news comes.  

When the precious are lost at sea the Spirit of God hovers over us. 

We are mostly water.

Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit.  (John 3:5)

Jesus says some difficult things to understand and I feel as though the meaning of this is almost revealed, but lies hidden so that my fingernails are grasping at the edges of it, looking for a way in.  Last Sunday, I saw twelve people baptized.  I heard them declare their faith in Christ and then pass momentarily through water to the applause and tears of witnesses.  

We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life. (Romans 6:4)

Water never meant death for me until it buried my much loved cousin. 

“But God raised him [Jesus] from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him.” (Acts 2:32)

It is impossible for death to keep its hold. 

For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his. (Romans 6:5)

David left his seat among us.  Wreathed in love and memory, his earthly place rests vacant because he has gone ahead, the first to take his place at the real table where the former things have passed away and the imperishable have been raised.

And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus.  (Eph 2:6)

Since then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. (Col 3:1)

In the elapse of these twenty years others have joined David at that Table.  Auntie Judy.  Grandpa.  Their faces don’t grow dim in my memory because what I recall is faces filled with joy and delight.  Every shadow gone.  Every tear wiped away.  The children of God fully revealed.

If God Had Let Me

[The following was published in the Jan/Feb 2016 issue of Live Magazine. Check them out at www.baptistwomen.com]

Six years ago I gave myself six months.  “Six months,” I thought, “is a real shot.”  Six months would be enough time to finish the comic book mini series that I had already been working on piecemeal for three years.  Six months of focus and I would know whether I would make it or not.  Besides, didn’t God remove the obstacles for me? Didn’t He put the words, “I think you should quit your job,” unprompted, into my dad’s mouth?  That alone was a miracle. Starting out was exhilarating and if my life had a soundtrack it would have been full of orchestral swells in those days. I remember being two weeks into writing full time and thinking that this was the life I was meant to live. I was a seed unexpectedly planted in the wild fullness of the stuff of which my dreams were made.  Six months soon lengthened to a year; to two years and more. The sprouting of many small green shoots pushed up through the soil of my imagination and stories, articles, poems and speeches all amassed in a clot of documents on my laptop; filled notebooks and random papers scribbled with notes to recall lost ideas.

But the invigoration of the new dissipates when the the harvest doesn’t follow in due time. I sent off armloads of submissions to deafening silence. Determined to improve, I got critiques to find out what my problems were. I overhauled and edited, but still the results were not forthcoming.  Doubt crept up to the margins of my thoughts.  “Maybe God didn’t plant you here.  Maybe you just spiritualized coincidence.”  When the road got harder and the climb more intense and still there was no reward, I began to listen to doubt and then spoke the lies to my soul--thinking I was being pragmatic--only to free fall into despair.  

I would have been a coward if God had let me. I was looking for a way to run; to turn back. I was murmuring against God with my own version of, “Were there no graves in Egypt that you brought me out here to die?” I tried to replant myself. I applied on jobs all over the place but the silence from those applications twinned the silence of my writing submissions. I began to get tense about money even though God had kept me inexplicably solvent all along. Ignoring this provision, I wept and complained and beat myself up and cried out to God in an extremely tiresome manner.  I did this for a time frame that is best tallied in years. Despair is an ugly muse and my inspiration dried up. What had once been a joy became an indictment of my failure. I was hemmed in on every side and my life felt shrinking and small.

Deliverance came in a flash of revelation, not a rush of success. It was in the midst of one of those conversations with God in the middle of the night that He interrupted my litany of personal dissatisfaction. 

“Why don’t you ask me who I say you are?”  

This little question was the whisper that caused an avalanche of change. My fears were exchanged for hope. My criticisms melted like wax next to the flame of my Creator speaking over my life.  “Who do you say that I am?” is Jesus’ question to every person.  But then He invites us to ask Him who He says that we are; and we can trust the answer like it’s good math, because what God speaks is always true.

It is inconceivable to us that God might have us labour in a hard place for a really long time before He uses us for anything. God told Joseph who He was and then had him learn obedience in hardship, slavery and prison before moving him into position. Moses was effectively exiled from Egypt and the Israelites for forty years before God raised him up a leader. David was anointed king and then was on the run from Saul for years before actually being crowned. It is the wisdom of the world that teaches us to judge by immediate and visible results.  God’s word shows us time and again that He works a different way.  

All this makes me think of the Church and how often we get discouraged by hardship and the lack of visible fruit. We look to escape to better churches where the road isn’t as perilous and steep, or the people aren’t as irritating. In doubt we pronounce failure rather than declaring God’s faithfulness and steadfast love and asking Him to speak over our identity and circumstances. The danger of not doing so is twofold. Roaming from place to place robs us of the experiences that will refine us for the position that God wants to place us in. And, when we uproot ourselves from where God has planted us, we cheat the Body of Christ. He has arranged each member exactly as He wants it, but we voluntarily amputate limbs to suit our own will, rather than His. It is little wonder then, why we so often stagger. We have crippled ourselves.  Difficulty is not a sign that you are in the wrong place. I gave myself six months. That was the time line that I--in my ignorance-- imagined was appropriate. Only God knows what truly is.

What We Won’t Search For

“ ‘Little did he know’?  I’ve written papers on ‘little did he know’.  I used to teach a class based on, ‘little did he know’.  I mean, I once gave an entire seminar on ‘little did he know’.   'Little did he know' means there is something he doesn’t know”.  ‘Little did he know’ means that there is something you don’t know--do you know that?” 

(Stranger than Fiction)

The other night I locked my keys in my car. I had the terrible foreboding that I had done just that as I pressed the lock button on the outside of the door.  But still, I frantically searched my purse and my pockets for something that I knew was beyond my grasp.  Sometimes, the thing that you most need is out of your reach.  It is locked away.  It requires a lot more effort to lay hold of.  It requires searching. 

It’s interesting to me that when the Bible talks about wisdom it is often personified. It isn’t likened to the state of being smart.  It talks about befriending wisdom; calling her your sister. Wisdom is the voice that cries out on street corners while the world goes by unaware progressing toward destruction. Wisdom has to be sought, like the thoughts of a friend have to be asked rather than guessed.  Wisdom has to be searched for, not selected from a multiple choice list.  It is a hidden thing.  It takes effort to find it, because if you’ve ever lost something, you know that finding isn’t so much an intellectual exercise as a perseverance game. It is a treasure hunt with a paucity of oblique clues.  It is turning your world inside out until you find what you are looking for. But we want our answers faster these days, and we want popular answers most of all.

Culturally speaking, I’m not sure that we’re much willing to search out wisdom anymore. I think mostly we are happy to take on the set of opinions that endear us to the kind of people who appeal to us and then move on without following the thinking to their inevitable conclusions.  We don’t really want to think about things too deeply.  We don’t want to be disliked.  We don’t want to walk hard pathways because usually we find out we’re going to walk down them alone while a noisy crowd heaps mockery from the sidelines.

Wisdom is an intangible treasure, but its outcomes are not. The absence of wisdom should be felt keenly--but like that old friend or family member that you never see--eventually you get used to it. Eventually, you forget to miss them. This is more dangerous than anything: losing wisdom and forgetting to miss her.  This is the ‘little did he know’ that will be our undoing.

We live in sensationalized times with a megaphone media and a collective soundbite attention span. We need to be willing to search out wisdom no matter how long or uncomfortable the task.  We need discernment.  We need the Spirit of Wisdom--which is the Holy Spirit-- to show us what to do and believe.

“But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears and he will tell you what is yet to come.” (John 16:13)

Wisdom is the ability to perceive the truth and judge accordingly; and as Christians we have access to it. But we have to ask.  We have to seek. We have to knock.  

“If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him.” (James 1:5)  

We have to believe expectantly that God is going to answer and provide the discernment and wisdom that we are looking for in every situation.   We need to be looking for it.  We need to be watching.