There’s nothing quite like disappointment to reveal what we really think.
A.W. Tozer wrote: ‘What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.’
Disappointment then, can be a deal breaker for us, or a notice that we are about to be sent to take a course that will upgrade our knowledge and prepare us for a promotion. Disappointment can reveal weaknesses in our assumptions about God and either cause us to turn back or motivate us to press on and pursue him to learn about the aspect of himself that he wants to show us next.
Pioneers learn to handle disappointment well because they need to learn from their own mistakes, simply because there aren’t that many ahead of them who have gone this way before. Learning from one’s own mistakes has the unexpected bonus of appreciating the wisdom and experience of others when the opportunity is there. Pioneers also learn to discern the difference between the wisdom of those who have pressed on in spite of set-backs, and the negativity of those who are sitting in their own disappointment, watching it congeal into bitterness.
God is good and nothing is impossible for Him. There’s always more to learn about him and he wants to draw us into deeper relationship. Keep going.
Look how fears have presented themselves, so have supports and encouragements; yea, when I have started, even as it were at nothing else but my shadow, yet God, as being very tender of me, hath not suffered me to be molested, but would with one Scripture or another, strengthen me against all; insomuch that I have often said, “Were it lawful, I could pray for greater trouble, for the greater comfort’s sake.”
Last night my son and husband and I were talking about worship, and about how worship springs, not from our efforts to do something for God, but “Christ in us” jumping up to acknowledge the presence of the Father (who I call Abba.) It’s like the way the baby John the Baptist leapt in his mother’s womb when the Holy Spirit within him was conscious of the presence of God in Mary. Worship is being conscious of God making us his temple and of the perfect love and unity between Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Worship is what we carry in us. Worship is a gift God fills us with so we have something to give to Him. Music, art, dance, brick-laying, whatever, are merely the vehicles to express our praise.
Unity is when we are conscious of Christ in us, and the perfect Oneness of the Godhead, so we can recognize Christ in others and thus desire to worship together -because it is who we are. It’s in our new DNA.
This morning I had a dream of Jesus giving his children a gift that looked like maggots (ew) but it turns out they were living seeds. They just had to move it, move it, move it. Then he gave me a pack of playing cards and I heard the song, “Take a Chance on Me” -by Abba.
Jesus singing and dancing to Abba. I love his humour.
Our first place of victory [over fear] is in believing the truth concerning our relationship with God. Paul tells us that, “having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom 5:1). We reject the lie that insists God is our enemy. We come to believe He is our Helper in the healing of our souls!
Grandma was what they called “a character.” If you’re old enough to remember Tugboat Annie or Ma Kettle she could have been type-cast in either of those roles. I’ve written about my mother before so this Mother’s Day I’d like to honour my other mother.
She ran a boarding house in downtown east Calgary during the war years up until the end of the fifties. She told us it used to be the Northwest Mounted Police officer’s quarters before that. But it’s hard to know for sure. She was an honest woman, but facts underwent some sort of redistribution once they went through the shuffling process in her brain. Sometimes she just grabbed a date from one pile, a place from another and a name from a third and wound them all up in a story that we fondly referred to as “Grandma’s version.”
She could read if she was allowed to point to the words and move her lips, but bits of the information she gleaned that way ended up in scattered fact piles that just added colour to her already improvised histories. She said the one room school burned down before she was in third grade and the neighbours who helped build the first one never got around to help build a second so that’s all the learnin’ she got. Since the home she grew up in was thirty miles from the nearest road, that story was plausible.
Everyone all the way downtown knew her, including the shopkeepers, the bus drivers, the preachers at the Prophetic Bible Institute and the folks at city hall. She may not have been able to read books well, but she could read people and she was the ultimate extrovert and filled the house with all manner of friends, from the chief of police to the homeless guy with a three-legged dog. As a teen I remember her carrying around a camera with her and setting off a flash at some of the most inopportune times. (Maybe that’s where I got the habit.)
When my father had to reduce his worldly goods to fit into a room at the lodge I decided to put his photos on a digital frame. Since his memory is failing he asked me to label them. That’s when I found my grandmother’s photo albums with page after page of unidentifiable torsos. They all looked like healthy torsos but my grandmother had her own concept of photographic composition. She knew who they were. They make me smile. May I present some of her work?
Creative use of negative space
Portrait of Grandma’s favourite TV evangelist, Rex Humbard
Grandma truly perfected the candid reluctant pose
Colour photography thrilled her, especially when she chose the outfits.
“Happy Irthday Ladies”. A cake and a record of someone’s efforts to attach mauve lace to a green tablecloth. Perhaps it had ecological significance.
I can just hear her saying, “Here, Daddy. Hold my purse while I take a picture of you.”
Romantic anniversary shoots were her specialty.
Grandma taught her family her photographic techniques so they could pinch-hit in an emergency. This is Grandma and Grandpa’s 50th anniversary.
Choosing the right setting communicates so much, and what could be more appropriate for a family from the dust bowl than a Saskatchewan sandstorm.
The truth is, she may have embarrassed me half to death, but I adored my grandmother. Since my own mother was often ill or working she was my main caretaker. She was a camp counselor at 81 years old and her cabin of girls loved her because she knew how to have fun -and she never read the rules.
I love You, Eternal One, source of my power.
The Eternal is my rock, my fortress, and my salvation;
He is my True God, the stronghold in which I hide,
my strong shield, the horn that calls forth help, and my tall-walled tower.
That was the message from a little boy sitting beside me at the end of a conference table in my dream last night. At the other end was a person I admire who was talking about practising the fruit of the Spirit – especially peace.
When I woke up I argued with the Lord that I am really trying to be positive, and I’m much better than I used to be. I also want to be honest (integrity matters!) and isn’t speaking only positively and not acknowledging the darkness in the world just a form of denial? How can you pray about a problem if “there is no problem?” The Bible says nothing about “speaking that which is as if it is not.” That’s not faith! That’s sticking your head in the sand!
Oh God, there is so much darkness and evil and unbelief in this world! I can say that I have peace, but my body reminds me that stress is churning my stomach right now. I feel like a hypocrite when I deny the experts’ dire predictions.
The answer came: Negativity is denial when it gives more weight to what the enemy of your soul says than to what I say. Negativity is denial when you neglect to give thanks for all the ways I have already blessed you. Negativity is denial when you forget that I love you relentlessly. Negativity denies that I AM is sovereign and that I have overcome the one who came to steal, kill and destroy. Who is the talking head authority in your life? Which “expert” do you choose to listen to? The one who devours, or the One who loved you so much He overcame death just to set you free from it? Who do you choose to yoke up with?
So where do I find peace when darkness is all around? How can I change atmospheres?
Jesus said: “I have told you all this so that you may find your peace in Me. You will find trouble in the world—but, never lose heart, I have conquered the world!” (John 16:33 JBP)
OK, Lord. Today I choose to keep my eyes on You. I will enter your gates with thanksgiving and your courts with praise.
For it is you who light my lamp; the Lord my God lightens my darkness. For by you I can run against a troop, and by my God I can leap over a wall.
It is only imperfection that complains of what is imperfect. The more perfect we are, the more gentle and quiet we become toward the defects of others.
The creek is filled with water again. Sometimes the waters are gently stirred back to life, and sometimes spring happens suddenly and dramatically . Last week we shivered in the deep, deep freeze of winter. Some nights felt like the coldest nights of the season and snow fell upon mounds of snow. But a couple of days ago temperatures rose so rapidly that the snow turned to rain and the ice melted rapidly, turning streets into impromptu streams and lakes. Since the ground is still frozen the water is making a mess of our town -and a lot of it is pouring into people’s basements. Lots of pleas for plumbers and pumps and wet shop vacuum cleaners are going out on Facebook today. We have a small lagoon in the center of the family room ourselves.
So, the thing we have longed for, a break in the cold, is finally here, and it’s messy and inconvenient and costly – but the prospect of promise fulfilled feels so good.
Change is like that sometimes.
Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life.
One night I kept dreaming about a big ship out on the deep blue waters of the ocean. I’ve learned that when a dream repeats several times it is worthy of attention, so I prayed, asking about the significance of the image of the ship. Then I remembered that before I fell asleep I asked the Lord what “in the world, but not of the world” meant.
This was a loaded expression for me. In the culture I grew up in “worldliness” was the biggest enemy. “In the world, but not of the world” meant I had to go to public school, but I couldn’t look good doing so. Dressing fashionably, wearing make-up or having an up-to-date hairstyle was considered worldly -as was just about every other fun thing my friends did. The list of worldly activities seemed to grow with every request to do anything. I couldn’t play the same games, go to the same places, watch the same TV shows, or listen to the same music -at least not with permission. My grandmother gave me a transistor radio to listen to her favourite evangelists, but I may have tuned to a pop rock station after I figured out how the ear bud worked. I realize her intent was to protect me, but I often felt isolated and well, just weird. It didn’t help that my school mates re-inforced the weird label.
One of the sad results of having fences around fences was that I became very good at spotting worldliness breaches in others. If I couldn’t get away with it, why should they? I learned to be pretty judgmental.
Another consequence was not learning self-control or moderation when I was young. Since the rules often made no sense to me I depended on others to determine what was right or wrong. Choices were based on fear of punishment more than on caring and loving myself or others. I had a fear-based relationship with a God who specialized in saying no with a “shame-on-you” scowl behind that great white beard in the sky since he was mostly evoked to make me more compliant.
The end result of striving to obey all the rules, ironically enough, was that I never realized I had the right to say no. No to religious authority figures who abused power, no to bullies in the workplace, no to those who wished to make me their personal servant, no to people with ulterior motives — not even no to salespeople I felt sorry for. I bore a lot of scars for a long time. The hardest part of breaking free was constantly living with a sense that God, when and if he showed up, was on somebody else’s side -because they had already gone and tattled about me.
It’s been a long journey to learn that God is love and relentlessly kind and is not very much like the god I grew up with. So when I asked, “What does in the world, but not of the world mean?” the question carried a lot of baggage.
“Like a ship,” I heard.
I thought about it. A ship sails on the water; it depends on the water, but it remains separate in substance. Even a submarine avoids becoming one with the sea. When a reed raft, like the one used on the Kontiki expedition absorbs too much sea water, it sinks. When an iron ship has a hole under the waterline like the Titanic, it takes on water and is dragged down to the bottom. But a ship in dry dock, safely away from dangers of sinking, is a boat going nowhere. It serves no one and has no influence no matter how modest its paint job or how clean its decks.
Then, much to my surprise, I found the expression held over my head for so many years, was not actually in the Bible. The closest passage I could find is Jesus’ prayer in John 17:
13 “Now I am coming to you. I told them many things while I was with them in this world so they would be filled with my joy. 14 I have given them your word. And the world hates them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. 15 I’m not asking you to take them out of the world, but to keep them safe from the evil one. 16 They do not belong to this world any more than I do. 17 Make them holy by your truth; teach them your word, which is truth. 18 Just as you sent me into the world, I am sending them into the world. 19 And I give myself as a holy sacrifice for them so they can be made holy by your truth. (John 17:13-19)
He asked for protection from the evil one for his followers and that they would be set apart by the word, which is truth. I may come to the same decision about choices I make now, but a lot of times I don’t – especially if pressured to make decisions based on negativity (God’ll get you for that) or fear (What if there is not enough?) or impatience with God (I guess I’ll just have to fix this myself) or a need to control others to remove the temptation to worry (You really should…). Boxing God into the limits of human reasoning no matter how impressive the brain (and I have met some incredibly intelligent people) feels like absorbing soggy ideas laden with questionable presuppositions sometimes, and when I neglect to dump the bilge water of too many scornful talk shows or scary shark movies my thinking is affected. I start going down.
The Greek word used for Spirit in the New Testament is pneuma, meaning air. I can live on the ocean and appreciate its beauty and its dangers, but I am not called to be one with the ocean. I need air. I need to be in a boat that floats so I can enjoy the ride. The Holy Spirit is the one who fills our sails and leads us into the truth that brings about real change. Repentance doesn’t mean doing penance. It means cooperating with Holy Spirit to change my way of thinking and choosing to go in a better direction in a boat that can be as colourful as I like.
God’s language is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control, and when decisions are based on these things, there is no need for rules.
Charis: Subject to Change 