Showers of Blessing, Seasons of Refreshing

On By Charis PsalloIn Photography, Sky2 Comments

IMG_2727 sunset shower

All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms because we are united with Christ. (Ephesians 1:3 NLT)

The main character on the old TV show “Maude” had an expression: “God is going to get you for that.”

It was funny in the way death and taxes and old age jokes are funny, because behind a lot of humour there is a vault of anger and feelings of helplessness. Some people who want to be in the business of speaking for God must be taking Maude more seriously than she took herself, because there are a lot of God-is-gonna-get-you-for-that doom and gloom prophecies abounding on the internet lately. Lots of shoulds with no hows. Given the dire predictions that God is fed up with our behaviour (and voting patterns apparently) and is going to switch from showering us with blessings to dumping nasty judgments on us, I have to stop and ask, Is that God? What does the voice of God actually sound like?

Lately I was totally rattled when I heard the voice of condemnation saying, “You are not good enough… you are a disappointment… you have failed… who do you think you are…”

All those things were factual. I have failed and disappointed people.  I had not lived up to even my own standards. I felt shame (more than “I did something wrong,” but “I am something wrong”) and I didn’t know how to fix it. I spiraled down rapidly. I stood on the precipice of depression again.

Then, in His kindness, the Lord brought words of correction into my life through a random podcast and when a page fell out of my journal He reminded me that this part of the journey is about learning to better discern His voice for myself.

“The fruit of the Spirit,” said the speaker, “characterizes the way the Holy Spirit speaks.” I understand that to mean that it’s His fruit, not something I have to conjure up on my own. It is His character. He is love. He is peace. When He speaks He speaks with the voice of love, of kindness, of the reassurance of His faithfulness in seeing me through and does not reject or condemn me. His tone is gentle, kind, patient and peaceful because that’s who He is.

A question: Even if it was firm, was the voice that told you that you are a failure gentle, patient, kind, joyful, inviting you to a deeper relationship? If not, it was not Him. Wrong voice. If God is asking you to change the way you think so that it shows up in your choices He gives you access to His patience and self-control. With every challenge that will help you grow there is a provision set aside – a spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms – that will enable you to change. You need to keep your eyes on Him to access it.

Of course we reap what we sow. That’s a universal principle so obvious that even toddlers get it. Pull the cat’s tail and there is a natural consequence. Act in a self-centered manner and there is a consequence. But the voice of God doesn’t condemn and leave us there. It goes beyond should to how – and the how is all about relationship and drawing closer to Him. His voice shows us how to hit the refresh button, to agree that we have been wrong and want to change the way we think, and to feel the joy of knowing we are forgiven and starting fresh.

Instead of “I am going to get you,”  He says, “Don’t worry. I’ve still got you – and I love you very, very much. I will strengthen you and help you. I began this work in you and I will complete it.”

Sometimes There Are No Words

On By Charis PsalloIn Black and white, Photography, Sky10 Comments

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Did any of you parents ever hear your child wake from sleep with some panic fear and shriek the mother’s name through the darkness? Was not that a more powerful appeal than all words? And, depend upon it, that the soul which cries aloud on God, “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,” though it have “no language but a cry,” will never call in vain.
– Alexander MacLaren

My friend’s handsome young son is dead.

In a moment of hopeless despair he took his own life.

All I can do is cry out.

I have no more words than that.

Grace and Glory

On By Charis PsalloIn Flowers, Photography2 Comments

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To live by grace means to know that there is light and there is shadow in our lives. There is glory and there is shame.

But grace draws us into the light. It coaxes us out of hiding. It wakens our dormant hopes.

Grace exchanges our shame for glory.

 

For the Lord God is a sun and shield;
The Lord will give grace and glory;
No good thing will He withhold
From those who walk uprightly.

(Psalm 84:11)

Haven

On By Charis PsalloIn Photography, Water9 Comments

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It’s so easy for us to turn the things God designed for pleasure into a task. As soon as someone says to me, “You have to…” it begins to feel like a burden, a chore.  I think we’ve done that to prayer – and especially corporate prayer – as well. Instead of thinking that we are privileged to spend time in the presence of the ultimate lover of our souls who brings us together in relationship with Him and with each other, we talk about scheduling meetings and getting down to the work of prayer. We bring our agendas and have our lists that must be covered in well-worded presentations. Okay, time to drop the pleasantries and get down to work.

Even our times of worship can turn into hurried rituals of sound checks, singing songs, or genuflecting, or waving incense or flags, or lighting candles, or shuffling the two square foot pew-side hokey-pokey, whatever, trying to think of ways to get God in the mood to respond to us (or manipulate our own emotions to be in the mood to worship and pray. It’s hard to tell sometimes.) Why does it sometimes feel like one more thing to check off the to-do list before we can get on with the program?

What if the Lord just wants to sit on a deck chair beside us and be welcomed into our conversation? What if Father, Son and Holy Spirit want to welcome us to sit with them and be part of their conversation? What if entering his rest is realizing that he is not hurried or anxious or stressed like we are? What if worship is enjoying him in that place of rest?

What does it mean to enter his rest together?

So there is a special rest still waiting for the people of God. For all who have entered into God’s rest have rested from their labors, just as God did after creating the world. So let us do our best to enter that rest. (Hebrews 4:9, 10 NLT)

I’ve Gotcha

On By Charis PsalloIn Black and white, Just folks, Photography5 Comments

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Spiritual identity means we are not what we do or what people say about us.

And we are not what we have.

We are the beloved daughters and sons  of God.

-Henri Nouwen

Restore, Confirm, Strengthen and Establish

On By Charis PsalloIn Flowers, Photography8 Comments

 

IMG_2656 may tree sky he restores my soul green

The year I started writing this blog our valley was hit by an explosive wind storm. Many homes were damaged and thousands of trees fell. (I wrote about it here.) I grieved for my beautiful shade tree, one of the victims. We carted the big old May tree away in pieces to a place where a wood chipper re-purposed it as mulch. I hated the gap left, but the back garden has improved with the increased sunlight. The roots were too hard to remove, so I left two shoots to grow and kept hacking away at the others that sprang up.  Yesterday I was doing a spring clean up in the yard when I saw the first blooms on the two shoots that have become young trees. Today most of the rest of them opened.

 

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In all the years the big tree stood there it never blossomed before May 1. At this altitude and latitude it was often closer to June 1 than May 1 when the sweet-smelling flowers appeared. Because the root system established by the old tree was so deep and wide these two new trees springing up from it are growing faster than I could have imagined. They are filling in the gap and are taller than the house now. Hundreds of flowers cover them.

As I watched them sway in the golden sun of evening the word that came to mind was “restore.”

Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you. 

Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. 

Resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world.

And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you.

(1 Peter 5:6-10 ESV)

The Lord is faithful. He himself has restored. Now I have two May trees – and they are blooming sooner than expected. The first signs of promise of the restoration of many things. I wait and watch with anticipation.

 

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Sustaining

On By Charis PsalloIn Animals, Fields, Mountains, Photography3 Comments

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The clouds, too, drink up their share,
raining it back down on the mountains from the upper reaches of Your home,
Sustaining the whole earth with what comes from You.
And the earth is satisfied.
Thus You grow grain for bread, grapes for wine, grass for cattle—
all of this for us.
And so we have bread to make our bodies strong,
wine to make our hearts happy,
oil to make our faces shine.
Every good thing we need, Your earth provides;
our faces grow flush with Your life in them.

(Psalm 104: 13-15 The Voice)

Deeper

On By Charis PsalloIn Mountains, Photography6 Comments

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Solitude is the place where we can connect with profound bonds that are deeper than the emergency bonds of fear and anger.

– Henri Nouwen

When I was a child I asked Jesus into my heart because I was afraid of God. I hoped Jesus would protect me from the wrath to come. I heard stories about how the world was going to get worse and worse and then a terrible tribulation was coming. My unspoken prayer was really, “I’ll do whatever you want. Please don’t hurt me.” I was essentially accusing God of soul-rape.

The way something is established is often the way it must be maintained. A relationship built on fear needs more fear to keep it going. I heard plenty of dire warnings.

Eventually I became tired of being afraid. I let go of that angry controlling God. I didn’t care if he killed me.

That’s when I began to hear a sweet alluring song in the wilderness. The quiet Voice of love sang to me in the place of solitude where the harsh lying voices that provoked fear of Him no longer motivated me.

A relationship established on God’s love is maintained by God’s love, not by my performance or my ability to love someone I was afraid of.  It’s about His faithfulness, His joy, His peace, not mine. I had only to respond to that love and his peace became mine.

It was not difficult.

It’s Like…

On By Charis PsalloIn Fields, Mountains, Photography, Sky11 Comments

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When my uncle from Saskatchewan came to visit I took him to one of my favourite lookouts to see the mountains. I asked him what he thought. He thoughtfully stroked the stubble on his cheeks that reminded me of the stubble covering his flat fields after harvest.

“They’re okay I guess, but they kind of block the view, ” he said.

A talented musician I once worked with told me she had a similar reaction. She grew up in The Netherlands and although she had seen pictures of mountains she never actually climbed even a hill until a visit to Scotland when she was eighteen.

“The mountains in Canada make me feel claustrophobic,” she said. “I miss the sky.”

 

My beautiful picture

 
I must admit that when I take trips back to the prairies I appreciate the sky and the marvelous sunsets, but I feel so exposed. My Dad joked that on his childhood farm he could see the train coming two days away and it was this environment that necessitated the invention of the outhouse.

Communication involves so much more than the facts of terrain and topology. Words and images don’t always contain the same meanings to different beholders.

I loved the annual “Missionary Convention” at my church when I was a kid. The missionaries on furlough brought costumes and articles from far away exotic cultures and told stories of eating local comfort foods that made kids raised on Jello and Wonder bread gag. I remember one guy telling us the problems he had translating the Bible into the language of a society whose only previous outside contacts had been oil and mining company workers and anthropologists. He wondered how to translate, “Behold the lamb of God.” Somehow “Behold the fuzzy creature of God” didn’t seem appropriate. “Behold the little pig-sized animal covered with curly whiskers like the ones on Jake the geologist’s face” seemed too cumbersome to repeat more than once. He finally went with “Behold the piglet of God” because these people raised pigs and often took the little ones into their homes as pets. He knew that word could be shocking in other cultures, but it conveyed the meaning of something innocent, valued and loved. A lamb, in a way, was like their piglet, but then again, not really. There are limits to how far an analogy can go. Sometimes you need more than one.

Jesus told stories to explain a kingdom outside the experience of the people who gathered around him. “The kingdom of God is like a pearl. It’s like a coin. It’s like…”

 

“The disciples came up and asked, “Why do you tell stories?”

He replied, “You’ve been given insight into God’s kingdom. You know how it works. Not everybody has this gift, this insight; it hasn’t been given to them. Whenever someone has a ready heart for this, the insights and understandings flow freely. But if there is no readiness, any trace of receptivity soon disappears. That’s why I tell stories: to create readiness, to nudge the people toward receptive insight. In their present state they can stare till doomsday and not see it, listen till they’re blue in the face and not get it. I don’t want Isaiah’s forecast repeated all over again:

Your ears are open but you don’t hear a thing.
Your eyes are awake but you don’t see a thing.
The people are blockheads!
They stick their fingers in their ears
so they won’t have to listen;
They screw their eyes shut
so they won’t have to look,
so they won’t have to deal with me face-to-face
and let me heal them.”

(Matthew 13: 10-15 The Message paraphrase in modern clichés)

 

God still speaks to us today in stories and similes that come from our own cultures. His language is not always English nor any other spoken language. He can speak through nature and pop music and babies and even international politics – and many other ways that connect us with his heart – but most people don’t hear because his imagery means little without a desire to understand the story-teller. His language is relationship. He is the Word.

I’ll be honest and say that I enjoy poetry and I write poetry, but I don’t read a lot of it. It’s work and I want to know the poet has something of value to say before I invest mental energy in interpreting the imagery. You can’t read poetry (except perhaps limericks) without taking time to ponder over what the writer is trying to communicate. Taking time to listen to God develops eyes to see and ears to hear what the kingdom of God is like, but more importantly what the Lover of our Soul is like.

“But you have God-blessed eyes—eyes that see! And God-blessed ears—ears that hear! A lot of people, prophets and humble believers among them, would have given anything to see what you are seeing, to hear what you are hearing, but never had the chance.” (verses 16-17)

 

“Oh Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder consider all… I see… I hear… Then sings my soul, my Saviour God to Thee.” (How Great Thou Art)