Do not forget Your promise to Your servant;
through it You have given me hope.
This brings me solace in the midst of my troubles:
that Your word has revived me.
(Psalm 119: 49, 50 The Voice)
Tag: hope
I, I, I count my blessings
This song is playing in my head this morning. “I Count My Blessings.”
As the sun dawned on me (lying in bed but awake far too early) the thought dawned on me: You know, life is pretty good when your fret quotient is filled with worries about stuff and lack of storage space.
I have stuff.
I have a beautiful family.
Our children are excellent parents.
Our grandchildren love and are loved.
I have friends around the world with whom I can connect in the Spirit.
I have a Saviour who brings me into the throne room of the King of Kings and Creator of the Universe.
I have the Holy Spirit who lives in me and reminds me of songs about counting blessings.
And I have an old CD of the Nylons that I found again after one of my kids hid it twenty years ago because I played it on every road trip.
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Verbal Assault or Verbal Healing
I had a picture in my mind this morning of those little yellow markers placed on the ground in movies and TV shows when experts investigate a crime scene. In this case they did not mark bullets or shell casings. They marked deadly words.
I saw words shooting out of semi-automatic weapons and mowing down parents and children, homeless and housed, believers and doubters, victims and perpetrators, sinners and saints.
“What is this?” I asked.
“Verbal assault weapons.”
Is it my imagination or is verbal assault on the rise? Do people feel the need to arm themselves with harsher and stronger words to defend against rogue offenders on the internet – or complete strangers in news stories, for that matter?
We are becoming accustomed to hearing the insults and nasty innuendo that is politics-as-usual, but this week I am sick at heart at the cruel words aimed at parents who have lost children in freak accidents, friends who have lost friends in acts of violence, and hostages held hostage by hostages of the evil one or even ordinary bystanders who post opinions on social media. This week I have witnessed mass shootings of entire groups of people via verbal assault weapons.
After a tragedy we read the words of Mr. Roger’s whose mother’s advice was to look for the helpers. I am looking for those who help with healing, hopeful words. Those who have themselves received the healing comforting words of Jesus should be first on the scene.
Here’s the thing, you can’t give what you have never received. We can’t expect those have received cruel criticism or absorbed vicious lies about themselves to overflow with kind words for others. In the economy of Kingdom of heaven giving away healing, encouraging, kind words is the way to receive more from the One who is the Word of Life himself.
The loving response for those who have been forgiven is to forgive. It is the joy of those who have been changed to bring encouraging, restoring and sheltering words of hope.
At the very least we can resist the urge to escalate verbal violence ourselves by shooting off our mouths in public. Lay down your verbal assault weapons. If you can’t say anything nice it’s time to seek healing for your soul.
Jesus advised us to guard our hearts because our words flow from there. What do your words say about what you really believe?
For a man’s words depend on what fills his heart. A good man gives out good—from the goodness stored in his heart; a bad man gives out evil—from his store of evil. I tell you that men will have to answer at the day of judgment for every careless word they utter—for it is your words that will acquit you, and your words that will condemn you.” – Jesus
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Amazing Love
We’ve often heard the buyer-beware expression, “If it looks too good to be true, it’s probably not true.”
That expression is not always true.
Darkness is all around us in this world. We read about it every day, and for those of us who have known loss and deep depression it feels like darkness has saturated every cell of our being. It wraps itself around our thoughts and imprisons our dreams. Sometimes it’s been so long we stop looking for the light. Sometimes we chase something that appears to be light, something that soothes our pain for a while, but it only leads to a path of even deeper darkness – if that’s possible. We come to distrust flickers of light as cruel illusions.
There is no greater depth of darkness than loss of hope.
I know. I was there – for far too long.
But I had friends who were relentless. They had light and love in their lives and I resented them for it. That light didn’t go out when their circumstances were bad. They had a weird kind of joy even in tears and brokenness. I dared to raise my eyes to the source of light that shone in them.
Charles Wesley wrote these words:
Long my imprisoned spirit lay,
Fast bound in sin and nature’s night;
Thine eye diffused a quickening ray—
I woke, the dungeon flamed with light;
My chains fell off, my heart was free,
I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.
My chains fell off! My heart was free!
I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.
He understood the risk of trusting something that seemed to be too good to be true. What? How can it be?
And can it be that I should gain
An interest in the Savior’s blood?
Died He for me, who caused His pain—
For me, who Him to death pursued?
Amazing love! How can it be,
That Thou, my God, shouldst die for me?
Oh, my God! You did that for me? Can it be?
You matter. He knows your name and every detail of your life down to the number of hairs on your head. You are not an accident. Darkness cannot put out the light. In the battle between light and dark, light always wins. There is no such thing as a flashdark – only a flashlight.
Jesus is the light of the world. This is amazing love!
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But He Did Say
He did not say: You will not be assailed,
you will not be belabored,
you will not be disquieted,
but he did said:
You will not be overcome.
-Julian of Norwich
For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith. Who is it that overcomes the world except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?
(1 John 5:4,5 ESV)
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Keep Your Head to the Sky
Sometimes God’s voice shows up in the strangest places. I expect to hear him speak through the Bible and through people who spend a lot of time in his presence. God also speaks to me through nature and through innocent children. Both can be remarkably profound. I’ve learned to pay attention to dreams that stand out and to listen to hymns and worship songs that play in the night and on repeat during the day. But movies and pop songs always surprise me.
Today God spoke through a chance encounter with a Mariah Carey song from the last decade. But first some background…
Beautiful friends prayed for me last night. I was glad I sat at the back of the auditorium because I cried through most of the service that ended a conference where I feasted on solid food. The speaker talked about Jesus setting a pattern of descending in humiliation and ascending in exaltation. (I will probably write more on this as I process the image of Jesus as our great high priest.)
Part of Jesus’ descent involved taking on human form with all its frailties. Satan attacked his identity when he was in a weakened state in the wilderness after a forty day fast. Christ’s exaltation involved ascending to heaven in his glorified body where he sits on the right hand of God as one who identifies, intercedes, and intervenes on our behalf. He made a way for us into the holy of holies with his own perfect blood sacrifice.
One of my life verses has been “That I might know him,” but I can’t ignore that the scripture combines knowing him with “and the fellowship of his sufferings.”
Life on this road is full of ups and downs – ascents and descents, mountain tops and valleys. I have known the elation of seeing God perform miracles before my own eyes. In the past year or so I have also known what it is like to be misunderstood, misrepresented, rejected and even had false accusations levelled at me. I have not always handled these well. Mostly I have not handled them at all (other than to ruminate and drive my husband to distraction with rehearsed re-enactments). I’ve been withdrawing and becoming emotionally and spiritually numb. (Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between shunning negativity and outright denial.)
Last night I began to realize that Christ was allowing me to share his experience in a tiny homeopathic-size dose. He knows what it is like to be misunderstood, misrepresented, rejected, hated, and lied about. I wanted to experience the ascension to a new spiritual height after a wilderness experience, like others talked about, but all I felt was pain. The pain of not fitting in anywhere. My pain. His pain.
I wept.
And I thanked him.
Afterward a kind man and two women who love the Lord and understand this journey prayed for me. They told me what the Lord was showing them. Amongst other things (precious and private) they mentioned they saw me as one who was meant to live at altitude, like a bird living above earth-bound entanglements in the presence of my Creator, but that striving will not get me there. I thought of the scripture, “Humble yourself in the sight of the Lord and He will lift you up.”
Prophetic words are usually a confirmation of what the Lord has been saying to our hearts all along, but words we have forgotten or ignored or dismissed as something meant for someone better than ourselves.
I didn’t tell them about having dreams of being a song bird that flew to the top of trees where the growling predators couldn’t reach, or of the very dramatic vision of a bird with bright red feet. When I asked what that was about I was told it was a “red-footed booby.” I had to look it up. It’s a sea bird that spends years at a time in the sky, riding on thermals, living on fish and touching land only to raise its young. I remembered encountering these things when I was trying to understand my identity in Christ and asking God how he saw me.
Today I came across the lyrics of Mariah Carey’s “Fly like a Bird.” I heard the Holy Spirit repeat the message in some of the phrases:
Weeping may endure for a night
But joy comes in the morning
Trust Him
Somehow I know that
There’s a place up above
With no more hurt and struggling
Free of all atrocities and suffering
Because I feel the unconditional love
From one who cares enough for me
To erase all my burdens
And let me be free to
Fly like a bird
Take to the sky
I need you now Lord
Carry me high
Don’t let the world break me tonight
I need the strength of you by my side
Sometimes this life can be so cold
I pray you’ll come and carry me home…
Keep your head to the sky
With God’s love you’ll survive…
Carry me higher, higher, higher
Carry me higher, higher, higher
Carry me home
Higher Jesus
Carry me higher Lord
I don’t know how long the descending bit of the road is, but I know Joy comes in the morning. I trust him.
I also know I am not the only one in this place. If this is also you, keep your head to the sky…
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The Scent of Freedom
Oh how I love the scent of lilacs. I stuck my nose in a cluster and inhaled deeply.
“Don’t you just love lilac season?” I asked a woman standing near the bus stop.
“Dot so buch,” she said and blew her nose in a tissue.
“Pardon me?”
“I’b allergic to theb,” she answered. “As sood as I sbell theb I can’t sbell adythig else. I’b so stuffed up. I avoid theb like the plague.”
Her wiped her red runny make-upless eyes. I wanted to cry for her. What a tragedy not to enjoy the fragrance of lilacs.
For me the smell of lilacs brings back memories of the introduction to freedom. In Calgary and Edmonton, where I grew up, lilacs bloomed around the time I took my Trinity College of London or Royal Conservatory music examinations. I stood outside a theatre auditorium feeling relieved I had remembered all my words and the sharp in the second run of the fourth song. On either side of the steps huge old lilacs bushes loaded with purple flowers swayed in a warm breeze gently wafting their fragance around my head. The test was over. A new summer vacation season stretched before me like a an open invitation to joy.
They could remind me of studying and exam anxiety, I suppose, but to this day when I smell lilacs I smell freedom.
When the poor lady with allergies smells lilacs she smells dread.
Paul (the man who once hated Christians so much he persecuted them until he met the real Jesus) wrote something interesting about fragrance in his letter to the young believers in Corinth. After chastising them for bad ideas that didn’t leave such a great odor behind he wrote:
Thanks be to God who leads us, wherever we are, on his own triumphant way and makes our knowledge of him spread throughout the world like a lovely perfume! We Christians have the unmistakeable “scent” of Christ, discernible alike to those who are being saved and to those who are heading for death. To the latter it seems like the very smell of doom, to the former it has the fresh fragrance of life itself.
(2 Corinthians 2:14-16 Phillips)
Sometimes people’s reactions to you have nothing to do with you. (Okay, and sometimes they do because everyone has moments of weakness when they don’t smell so good.) My point is we don’t always know why people have negative responses to expressions that other people experience as beauty. Sometimes merely being genuinely joyful irritates a person who has lost hope.
Should the lilacs stop blooming to keep from offending someone who has negative reactions? (Full disclosure: I have some allergies myself so I do understand the limits of this analogy.) Put it this way, should those who carry the fragrance of Jesus’ gift of eternal life hide away to avoid offending those who smell death?
Paul tried to stifle those irritating smelly followers of Jesus for a while. (He condoned the cutting down of Stephen in his prime.) Then he met the One who changes everything – and the scent they carried began to remind him of freedom.
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A Beautiful Broad Place
Again friends and neighbours face crises as homes burn, jobs disappear, false accusations pop up, loved ones make foolish choices, doctors predict dire outcomes, marriage promises evaporate, supervisors exhibit incompetence, and leaders cloak corruption in meaningless words. Sometimes it seems like the trolls and curmudgeons on social media have created an alliance to keep folks living in a place of fear and disappointment.
And the fear of disappointment is perhaps our greatest fear.
What if all this effort is in vain? What if the things that have always defined success for us disappear, or fail to meet our expectations? What if the good job isn’t there to go to in the morning, or the city burns, or our marriage fails, or our kid becomes an addict, or the judge believes the liar?
How do we keep the faith when we want to put up thick walls to protect ourselves from disappointment?
I wonder if the point where people position themselves on the gullibility/cynicism spectrum has to do with how they handle disappointment. I wonder if trolls and curmudgeons are using negativity as a shield against the expectation of disappointment. Romans 5 talks about the hope that does not disappoint. The question is, what is that hope and how does it stand up in the face of the very real possibility of loss or deception?
Times of loss can become times of gain when they cause us to pause, assess, and change our way of thinking.
When our hope is in perishable things – or even perishable people – we will inevitably suffer disappointment. When our hope is in the Eternal One we have a handhold in the future. David, the warrior poet, understood this.
Oh Lord, the God of faithfulness,
you have rescued and redeemed me.
I despise these deceptive illusions,
all this pretense and nonsense;
for I worship only you.
In mercy you have seen my troubles,
and you have cared for me;
even during this crisis in my soul I will be radiant with joy,
filled with praise for your love and mercy.
You have kept me from being conquered by my enemy;
you broke open the way to bring me to freedom,
into a beautiful broad place.
(Psalm 30:5-8 The Passion Translation)
May the radiant joy of freedom in Jesus Christ be your shield today. May your heart settle in a beautiful broad place.
Charis: Subject to Change 