Feelings

I learned about a word I wasn’t familiar with — orthopathy.

“Orthodoxy” is thinking in alignment with God.

“Orthopraxy” is acting in alignment with God.

“Orthopathy” is feeling in alignment with God.

It comes from ortho – right, and pathos – emotion. For those accusing people experiencing personal encounters with God in places like Asbury University as mere “emotionalism,” may I remind you that Jesus himself wept with compassion, cried out in agony, and danced in ecstasy -in front of God the Father and everybody? I’d rather follow his example than a stoic heresy hunter’s.

After this long season of crisis, all of us, but children and youth especially, have been subject to a campaign of fear, disappointment, and negativity. The result is rampant depression and anxiety. I continue to pray with weeping for emotional healing and freedom for this generation. I sing for joy when I see it starting to happen.

Love Song

In 1975, a month after we moved across the country to Vancouver, British Columbia, I had a miscarriage.

Between October and January that year, there was only one day I remember that wasn’t made even darker by oppressively low clouds. We lived in a dark closet-less basement suite with the circulated scent of our upstairs neighbours’ love of curried cauliflower wafting through the heat vents accompanied by the sound of their favourite ethnic music crackling through an intercom that didn’t shut off.

My husband worked long hours teaching and doing post-doctoral research amid the publish-or-perish culture of the university. The new church we went to had a nursery room without a speaker connected to the sanctuary. I sat alone with a hyperactive toddler in that room week after week just for the chance to connect with someone in the foyer after the service.

I was exhausted. I was depressed. I was profoundly lonely. I was in mourning for a child no one but my husband and I knew had existed. Not one to hide my feelings easily, I’m sure I probably gave obvious nonverbal clues that I was not exactly a ball of fun then.

One person reached out to me. On impulse, Sandy, the only other young mom in the congregation, bought a record album for us. Back in the basement suite, I put on earphones and played it over and over. Her kindness made a huge difference in my life. Love Song was the name of the band made up of hippies on the fringe of society in California. A pastor opened the door that allowed these diamonds in the rough play their new music in his church.

The story of that pastor and the people affected by his choice to open the doors is featured in the movie, “Jesus Revolution” which opens next week. The message that healed my aching heart is still real. Feel the love.

Clean

I love a clean house. I hate cleaning.

At various times in my life, I have hired people to clean for me. The problem is, they could never organize for me. I would need a staff for that, and even then it’s hard for them to read my mind.

I never noticed until it was time to pack up to move, that I am a collector of cleaning products – especially the ones that promise less scrubbing and heaven by way of the shower door. Somehow, I thought that by buying all these spray bottles and magic cloths I was creating the potential for spotless bliss.

The problem with that plan was this: Stuff must be moved, cleaning products must be applied and removed, and stuff needs to be dusted/washed/polished before being put back in a better place. All of this requires my participation. It was easier to give everything a quick flick of a damp rag, throw stuff I didn’t know what to do with in the storage room, turn off the light, shut the door, and get on with life.

I realize now that the storage room could be a symbol of every out-of-order thing in my life that I never got around to dealing with, until it threatened to avalanche into the living areas. When it was time to move, I felt overwhelmed. No one could do it for me and yet I couldn’t do it all myself. I had to ask for help.

My life has tended to have pockets of denial where broken, dirty, and embarrassing things collect. It’s easy to try to keep denying their existence until someone wants to look in all the dark corners – someone like Jesus.

Here’s the thing. God forgives because of Jesus, but when sin clutter spills out and blocks the way between us, communication is hindered. It’s hard to be perfectly, nakedly, candidly honest before the Lord when you are struggling to keep sin hidden. John the Beloved wrote about it this way:

Here, then, is the message which we heard from him, and now proclaim to you: GOD IS LIGHT and no shadow of darkness can exist in him. Consequently, if we were to say that we enjoyed fellowship with him and still went on living in darkness, we should be both telling and living a lie. But if we really are living in the same light in which he eternally exists, then we have true fellowship with each other, and the blood which his Son shed for us keeps us clean from all sin. If we refuse to admit that we are sinners, then we live in a world of illusion and truth becomes a stranger to us. But if we freely admit that we have sinned, we find God utterly reliable and straightforward—he forgives our sins and makes us thoroughly clean from all that is evil. For if we take up the attitude “we have not sinned”, we flatly deny God’s diagnosis of our condition and cut ourselves off from what he has to say to us. (1 John 1:5-9 Phillips)

Confession means admitting we have a sin problem. God forgives and cleanses us, but we need to be bravely honest and ask him to take away all the junk hidden in our hearts. I love a clean house, but a clean heart even more.

Creative Meditations for Lent, Word prompt: Clean

Words That Both Pierce and Heal

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No one speaks words so anointed as this one—
words that both pierce and heal,
words like lilies dripping with myrrh.

(Song of Songs 5:13 TPT)

A woman told me how excited a doctor was when he diagnosed her mother with an extremely rare disease. He was quite proud of himself.

“The problem,” she said, wiping tears from her eyes, “was that he could offer no cure. She died soon after.”

Living under religious laws is like that. Performance-based religious systems are quite good at telling you what you are doing wrong and why, but without empowering grace to change the heart, well, nothing changes. The law is like a doctor who can tell you what you’re dying of, but can’t fix it.

I have learned that truth hurts, especially when I’ve been avoiding it for too long. But I’ve also learned that unlike people who have knowledge without power, the Lover of my soul never puts his finger on a pain in my heart that he doesn’t intend to heal. Like a surgical laser, His words both pierce and heal and the result is always greater freedom.

For if you embrace the truth, it will release more freedom into your lives. – Jesus

 

Come What May…

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I have heard a song in the night. Abba (Father God) sings over his child.

Listen to my heart, can you hear it sing?
Telling me to give you everything
Seasons may change, winter to spring
But I love you until the end of time

Come what may, come what may…

(From “Come What May” Songwriters David Baerwald, Kevin M Gilbert, Rudy Amado Perez)

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Ask, and it will be given to you;

seek, and you will find;

knock, and it will be opened to you.

For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.

Or what man is there among you who, when his son asks for a loaf, will give him a stone?

Or if he asks for a fish, he will not give him a snake, will he?

If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask Him!

(Matthew 7: 7-10 NASB)

Our heavenly Father sings over you. Can you hear Him?

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