You can be sure that God will take care of everything you need, his generosity exceeding even yours in the glory that pours from Jesus. Our God and Father abounds in glory that just pours out into eternity. Yes.
(Philippians 4:19, 20 The Message)
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On the Outside Looking In
I love raiding people’s bookshelves when I am a house guest. It’s like a conversation that continues after everyone has gone to bed. Tell me more about who you are and what’s important to you.
My son-in-law caught me perusing his shelves one evening.
“Here,” he said, pulling a thin book out of the line-up. “You will like this author. He presents profound ideas in a palatable way, and he has your sense of humour.”
The author was Graham Cooke. The book changed my life. I ordered more of his books and devoured Youtube videos. He was teaching concepts that confirmed what I felt the Lord was showing me but I didn’t have words for yet. He was also teaching concepts that made me run to the scripture to see if this was true. It appeared I needed to make some major course changes in the way I thought, and who wants to mess up their head with changes if they don’t have to?
After paying attention to Bible passages I was in the habit of skipping over (to reach my “quiet time quota” for the day) I realized my thought processes needed a major overhaul in some areas.
I was pretty much on my own in exploring this new way of thinking (focusing on how God wants to reveal some new aspect of himself in every circumstance, living in my identity as a much loved child of God, praying as a bride and not a widow, realizing the old sin nature is dead and learning to jettison old sin habits in favour of making choices based on the fact that I have a new nature, understanding that Holy Spirit doesn’t merely drop by for an occasional visit because Christ is in me and I am in Christ etc.).
Progress for someone who needs to ditch a habit of overly cautious (okay, sometimes lazy) procrastination has been slow. I’ve had to back out of a few rabbit trails in my lifetime when I made the mistake of unquestioningly following guides who were more sure of themselves than they ought to have been. I am wary of following one person. I don’t believe anyone has the whole picture and I need confirmation from other sources and especially need to learn to hear from the Lord myself before I make big moves. But I like this guy. He provokes me to goodness and living in joyful trust in the Lord.
Imagine my utter surprise when I walked past a little church in my neighbourhood and saw a marquee announcing that Graham Cooke would be speaking there the following weekend. What was a writer and speaker who stood before thousands at events internationally doing here in my small remote city in the Canadian Rockies? It couldn’t be the same Graham Cooke. I phoned and checked. It was! Well, I’ll be… Of course I registered for the conference.
Have you ever been in a place where someone addresses the very issues you have been discussing with God lately? I soaked it all in.
Except for one thing.
Another speaker who accompanied Mr. Cooke talked about faithfulness to friends, family and community. He stressed the importance of honouring them, especially in keeping agreements.
A local group I belonged to scheduled a meeting for the same time as the last session of the conference. A few weeks before they had changed the evening they met on to accommodate my schedule. I had planned to make my apologies and skip the meeting when this guy (bless him) used a hypothetical example so similar to my situation I felt like he had been reading my mail.
I struggled. I wanted to be at the final session. I was so hungry for more. But that evening I walked out of the conference venue and went to the local group’s meeting as an act of obedience. I asked my husband to go to the little church and take notes. He obliged, loving man that he is.
As soon as I could get away I rushed back to the church and just about bumped into Mr. Cooke as he exited the building. He smiled, nodded, got into a waiting car and left.
Someone grabbed me, “Wasn’t that absolutely marvelous? Can you believe what he said? He came here to this little place because he had a prophetic word specifically for us!”
“What did he prophesy?”
“Weren’t you paying attention?”
“I just got here. I had a meeting…”
“He told everyone 55 and older to stand up because the Lord had something for every person holding out their hands to receive. Maybe someone recorded it. I’m so encouraged, so thrilled that the Lord remembers us here.”
I was 55. I wasn’t there. I didn’t hold out my hands to receive something special. I missed it.
I was new to this kind of stuff. I had come to see how prophecy, like healing, is still active and had been very influential and encouraging in the lives of people around me. I, however, had never received a prophetic word more specific than “God wants to be your friend” or other nice things one could write in terms so general they could apply to at least 1/12th of the population reading the newspaper on any given day. This was a specific word, and a good one. And I wasn’t there.
I tried not to let it bother me. But it did. When I got home I cried, remembering all the times I felt like I was left out as a child.
I have struggled my whole life with a pervasive sense of being on the outside looking in. Never fitting in. The girl from the religious family playing the records while other children danced at school. Too young, too old, too small, too big. The girl allergic to birthday cake and ice cream. Cinderella without a godmother. Never going to the ball.
It takes a while to recognize a set-up, especially a God set-up. I didn’t tell anyone about my great disappointment for quite a while. But the Lord used the occasion to point to a hole in my heart that needed healing. And he has been doing that. He’s also giving me connections in places I never expected, with people who understand.
One thing I have learned that I didn’t know before is that one of the jobs of a New Testament prophet is to teach people how to hear God’s voice for themselves. In Old Testament days the Holy Spirit came upon men and women to deliver a specific message. Since few had the Holy Spirit directly communicating with them, the role of prophet as conduit became extremely important. Messages from God were few and far between. Centuries even. You couldn’t afford to miss one.
Things have changed. Jesus changed them.
Waiting for a person with a gift of prophecy to tell us what God wants to say to us is a kind of abdication of our privilege to ask him ourselves. When we do hear from those who have heard God’s encouraging words for others, it’s nearly always a confirmation of something we have been feeling but haven’t assembled in usable form yet. It’s wonderful, but it’s a bonus. Holy Spirit himself makes his temple in hearts that are open to him now. And he promises to never leave.
When I asked the Lord sometime later why I was left out that evening, I felt him comfort me and say I wasn’t left out of the promises given. They are for me as well. I can claim them. It’s just that he didn’t want me to be distracted or tempted to worship the messenger. He wanted me to seek Him so he could tell me himself.
It’s all about relationship.
Recently, there was an event which I longed to attend. Many of my new friends who support Graham Cooke’s ministry were there. Again I made the decision to honour the timetable of family and friends first and stayed where I have commitments. I am tempted to feel left out again, but when the Holy Spirit living in me connects with the Holy Spirit living in others, even though we are not in the same room, there is unity in the Spirit. I’m not on the outside. We are one in the Spirit. We are one in the Lord.
The Church, the Body of Christ, is wherever his people are, including here, today, on the internet, with you.
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Heart and Words
In prayer it is better to have a heart without words
than words without a heart.
-John Bunyan
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The Demands of Freedom
The rewards of freedom are always sweet, but its demands are stern, for at its heart is the paradox that the greatest enemy of freedom is freedom.
-Os Guinness
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Strength
I hear the Saviour say, “Your strength, indeed, is small. Child of weakness, watch. Pray. Find in me your all in all.”
But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”
Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.
For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities.
For when I am weak, then I am strong.
(2 Corinthians 12:9,10 ESV)
Jesus Paid It All. (lyrics by Elvina M. Hall, 1865)
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Upheaval
When I was a kid we looked forward to seeing cheesy old black and white movies about saints and Bible characters or missionaries and martyrs. They were the only non-TV movies we were allowed to go to because they were shown at a church and not in a theater. Sometimes the sound of the film projector was louder than the incredibly wordy dialogue, but still I was impressed. I wanted to be a martyr for God like that.
I remember the otherworldly holy gaze upward nearly all the actors displayed when faced with a call to lay down their lives to the glory of God. I practised it in front of a mirror.
Clutching my little red Gideon New Testament plus the Psalms to my chest I tilted my head slightly to the left and looked up at the desk lamp now shining down spotlight fashion from the top of a pile of books on Dad’s dresser. Moving only my eyeballs I checked my image in the long mirror on the back of the door to see if I had it right.
Maybe, someday, if I worked hard enough and pleased God enough He would use me in some dramatic spotlit way. I needed to get the holy look down.
The truth is half a century later I’ve never managed to look like the holy guys in the movies. Neither do any of the humbly honest people I know dedicated to keeping it real while placing high priority on getting to know God’s reality. They are just folks who know they are loved. All of them are still works in progress (although some seem to need less work than others.)
Even though I don’t always say it out loud, when the phone rings lately my reaction is more likely to be a full eye roll and a “Now what?” than the sacred upward half eye roll. (which is an improvement over total panic, but not where I would like to be as far as joyful response goes.)
So much news of major disruptions in the lives of family and friends has arrived by text message or phone in the last few months that I’m tempted not to pick it up when it rings. Marriage problems, health crises, business fiascos, loss of property, the sudden death of loved ones, unjust treatment, the revelation of corruption in unexpected places, misunderstandings bound in red tape, and dreams deflated like a flat tire… It seems I’ve mourned with a lot of people lately.
I know that in every situation there is a provision for more grace and that God is never stymied by human foibles or unseasonable weather or budget restraints or talking head prognosticators. I know Jesus is victor and the enemy is defeated. I know he has brought us through thus far and he promises to never leave. I know the outcome of walking through the storm is finding the gold on the other side.
But sometimes there’s a lot of upheaval in the process.
While I was praying about this (and confessing my lousy attitude) I remembered a dream I had a while ago. In the dream I was walking outside a schoolyard beside a chain link fence. Suddenly the ground began to shake. On either side of the path a wall of moving earth and rocks and boulders rose up. It looked like an animated scene from an old church basement movie depicting the crossing of the Red Sea – only the water was not parted. The ground was.
Boulders flew around pulverizing each other to dust and dirt flowed in massive waves. But all of it regarded the boundaries on either side of the path and never crossed the line, like the wall of water in the movies.
“What the…?” I asked, in my less than church movie-worthy holy stance.
“Don’t look to the right or to the left. Keep your eyes on the path,” I heard.
“What’s happening?” I asked, trying hard to ignore hurtling objects in my peripheral vision that made me want to duck – fast.
“I’m moving heaven and earth for you.” (I wish English had a plural for you. It felt plural.)
There are some things you can’t learn in school. There are some lessons about the character of God and Christ’s unrelenting love for us that can only be demonstrated in the midst of boulders shattering on either side of our heads and the ground trembling beneath our feet, when the things we relied upon to be stable are suddenly anything but.
Sometimes change involves the kind of upheaval that exposes things you would rather not know. Sometimes change creates such a dust-up you have to concentrate on where to place your next step because that’s as far as you can see.
Sometimes, when God is answering our prayers, he does it in ways we don’t expect. We think, “This can’t be from God. My Jesus is sweet and gentle and meek and mild, like a rose trampled on the ground. He wouldn’t be behind a messy upheaval of all the things we’ve worked so hard to build.”
I’ve learned that expecting the Creator of the Universe to squeeze himself into the limitations of what makes me feel good is a kind of idolatry. When the shaking starts he’s about to show himself a whole lot bigger than we ever imagined. Our concept is not majestic enough. We’re about to get an upgrade.
For some of us the scenery on this part of the journey is not exactly tidy or decent or in order right now. All I know is that Himself is right here walking it with us. Just like He did last time, and the time before that, and the time before that…
He’s just that good.
Charis: Subject to Change 