Tag: change

God Is In the Details

On By Charis PsalloIn Photography, Sky, WaterLeave a comment

A question I ask grandchildren who I don’t get to see often is, “What do you know now that you didn’t know when we last talked.” On this last day of the year, I am asking myself the same question.

What do I know now?

This year, I took a course from The Warrior Commission called, “Earthquake-proofing Your Faith.” It didn’t take long for earthquakes to start shaking my world. I’ll spare you the details. Personal earthquakes, like temptation, are custom-made. What rattles me may not rattle you. My unsettling experiences gave me the opportunity for some on-the-job-training in peace and trust though, as lessons in faith in real time do.

Let me put it this way: Pain is like a refiner’s fire. Personal pain, vicarious pain, multiple simultaneous pains and especially potential pain all bring out the best and the worst in us. It separates silver and dross. The silver is lovely. The dross is gross.

Pain provokes us to ask hard questions because we feel out of control and even betrayed (aka entitled). I have prayed for people and seen God heal them from the same things that keep me awake all night attempting to bargain with God. If ever there was proof that healing is from the Lord and not due to our own “giftedness” or “anointing,” it’s seeing someone else healed when you are not. If I had anything to do with it, I would have fixed myself first.

Pain makes us aware of wobbly foundations in the form of unacknowledged wonky beliefs or mindsets. We want the shaking to stop. God wants us to quit whining, get off the beach and build on solid rock instead.

What have I learned? This may sound counter-intuitive, but this has led to a stronger basis for faith via a route I thought I had left behind. I have written before about coming to faith out of fear of an angry, impossible-to-please wrathful God. This is not about the impossible-to-please angry God of my childhood. He has wooed me with his goodness and kindness for many years now, and that has not been withdrawn. I have finally come to a place of acceptance (most of the time) of his grace and love and patience that I have not earned. This lesson was about a deeper understanding of what “the fear of the Lord” means.

A dear friend pointed out a detail I had overlooked in a story found in Matthew 8:23-27. Again, God is in the details. When Jesus and the disciples were on a boat and while Jesus was sleeping peacefully, a dramatic storm blew in. The men were disturbed, annoyed, upset, distracted, and believed they were in peril (and probably bailing like mad.) They accused Jesus of not taking the situation seriously. When he got up, he asked them why they were so timid and faithless. But it was after he spoke to the howling winds and the succession of rock-the-boat waves and a whole weather system listened to him and calmed down, that they felt genuine fear. It was a different kind of fear that shook them. It was the fear that comes from experiencing a previously unknown level of truth in seeing an unknown aspect of Jesus that required a life-altering response. “Who IS this man that he can just speak to chaos in nature and it obeys him?”

I had a personal encounter with the untamed Lion of Judah early one morning (and that’s as much as I am saying for now). What I felt communicated directly to my heart was that the power differential between us is huge. God is God. I am not. It’s all about His will, not mine. God is love, but at this point in our story it’s important to know that his love is not just comforting and pleasant. God’s love utterly pure and terrifyingly holy. His love requires a response. It is not indulgent toward an unsubmitted personal agenda that thinks an expensive beach house on shifting sand is a good idea. He gives me a lot of latitude to learn, but no excuse to continue to do things my own way when we’ve already been through this before and he has spoken.

What have I learned in this year of speaking less and listening more? I’ve learned I am totally unable to change myself or anyone else after encountering the Lion who I cannot charm, or placate, or use in anyway to serve my own conscious or subconscious agenda. I have learned that godly fear leads to the resting place of utter dependence and trusting response. I can choose to run from his presence or trust him and align with him on the next thing.

The faith life doesn’t get any easier, it just gets more real.

He has seen me through many tough situations. He will see me through the next one. Christmas carols have reminded me that the Creator of the Universe deigned to come and live among us. That requires an honest response. At the end of a year of counter-intuitive wisdom lessons I can say, Bless the Lord, oh my soul, and all that is within me, bless His Holy Name.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

New Era

On By Charis PsalloIn PhotographyLeave a comment

“Love makes it impossible to harm another, so love fulfills all that the law requires.

To live like this is all the more urgent, for time is running out and you know it is a strategic hour in human history. It is time for us to wake up! For our full salvation is nearer now than when we first believed.

Night’s darkness is dissolving away as a new day of destiny dawns. So we must once and for all strip away what is done in the shadows of darkness, removing it like filthy clothes.

And once and for all we clothe ourselves with the radiance of light as our weapon.

We must live honorably, surrounded by the light of this new day, not in the darkness of drunkenness and debauchery, not in promiscuity and sensuality, not being argumentative or jealous of others.

Instead fully immerse yourselves into the Lord Jesus, the Anointed One, and don’t waste even a moment’s thought on your former identity to awaken its selfish desires.”

(Romans 13:10-14 TPT)

You can’t fight hate with more hate. You can’t fight darkness with more darkness. These are not your weapons. Put them down.

Instead be transformed. Rest in God’s love so you have an overflow of love to give away. Be empowered by the grace to change to become who God created you to be. Walk in the light as he is in the light. Clothe yourselves in the light of Christ.

It’s a new era.

Hope Deferred & Hope Restored

On By Charis PsalloIn Flowers, Photography, spring2 Comments

Last year, in this part of the world, a sudden drop in temperature killed a lot of buds on the fruit tress that had started to form too soon. The vineyards suffered severe damage as well. Most of the soft fruit and a lot of the grape crop for the Okanagan a was loss.

The orchards are not only pretty this spring, they are full of promise.

They remind me of hope deferred and hope restored.

Thank you, Lord.

The Exile of Passivity

On By Charis PsalloIn Art, PhotographyLeave a comment

“The church of Jesus needs to wake up from the exile of passivity and embrace liminality and adventure or continue to remain a religious ghetto for culturally co-opted, fearful, middle-class folk.”

-Alan Hirsch

Wisdom and Discernment

On By Charis PsalloIn autumnLeave a comment

My child, never drift off course from these two goals for your life:
to walk in wisdom and to discover discernment.
Don’t ever forget how they empower you.
For they strengthen you inside and out
and inspire you to do what’s right;
you will be energized and refreshed by the healing they bring.
They give you living hope to guide you,
and not one of life’s tests will cause you to stumble.
(Proverbs 3:21-23 TPT) 

Clean, Pure

On By Charis PsalloIn Flowers, Photography, Uncategorized2 Comments

Who can possibly ascend the mountain of the Eternal?

Who can stand before Him in sacred spaces?

Only those whose hands have been washed and hearts made pure…

Psalm 24:3,4 (The Voice)

Transformer

On By Charis PsalloIn Flowers, nature, PhotographyLeave a comment

Before we give real attention to the ways Jesus wants to transform our lives, we must reach a better understanding of his complete familiarity with our lives. He’s comfortable with us. He knows us intimately—even those things no one else knows. When we come to him with our needs, when we realize that we can bring our emptiness to him, we’re finally in a place where we can see his power at work in us. -Max Lucado

Purple

On By Charis PsalloIn Flowers, Photography, spring5 Comments

When God made the color purple, God was just showing off.

-Mae Jemison

Like many teenage girls, when I finally had a room of my own, I chose to decorate it in shades of purple. It fit the person in process that I was then. Purple takes the innocent sweetness of posie pink, the audacity of in-your-face magenta, the rage of raw red, the perfect peace of prairie lake blue, the hopeful ascension of sky blue and the deep reverence of mystical indigo and swirls them all around in an unsteady mix of hot and cold. If I look long enough, I can see the colours that make up purple dancing and spinning in a nervous partnership that leaves evidence they are never really fully committed to their roles. This is purple, the colour I chose for the first space I could call mine.

I may be a retired seventy-year old, but I’m not content to squeeze my accumulated years into a single conclusive expression. In my dreams I’m still a bewildered child, a wizened saint, a mischievous flirt, an introspective ponderer, an angry idealist, a conscientious servant, a lover of the unlovely, a reconciled plodder, and an every-which-way-at-once teen trying on each mood and personality in my cache before coming out of my room to run and catch the day. I wonder if, in ancient times, this may be why purple was a colour reserved for priests and royalty (aside from expense). Perhaps only those with the assumed freedom and time to appreciate the tenuous stability of paradox (and its influence on helpless bystanders) could wrap the heights of humility and the depths of pride around themselves in the ambivalent glory of purple and sally forth.

I too shall wear purple. It fits the person in process that I am now. I am, after all, with millions of others, part of a royal priesthood of believers. That’s qualification enough.

My thoughts at least, before I make the same to-do list for tomorrow as I made for today, prop my arthritic knee on my purple pillow, and turn off the light .

Opening

On By Charis PsalloIn Flowers, nature, Photography, springLeave a comment

Worship is the submission of all our nature to God. It is the quickening of conscience by his holiness, the nourishment of the mind with his truth, the purifying of the imagination of his beauty, the opening of the heart to his love, the surrender of the will to his purpose. -William Temple