Tag: hope

Soli Deo Gloria

On By Charis PsalloIn Mountains, Photography1 Comment

 

Soli Deo Gloria
Soli Deo Gloria

I am pleading with the Eternal for this one thing,
my soul’s desire:
To live with Him all of my days—
in the shadow of His temple,
To behold His beauty and ponder His ways
in the company of His people.

His house is my shelter and secret retreat.
It is there I find peace in the midst of storm and turmoil.
Safety sits with me in the hiding place of God.
He will set me on a rock, high above the fray.

God lifts me high above those with thoughts
of death and deceit that call for my life.
I will enter His presence, offering sacrifices and praise.
In His house, I am overcome with joy
As I sing, yes, and play music for the Eternal alone.

(Psalm 27 The Voice)

When Hope is Hidden in Disappointment

On By Charis PsalloIn Black and white, Flowers, Photography8 Comments

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His divine power has given us everything we need to experience life and to reflect God’s true nature through the knowledge of the One who called us by His glory and virtue. Through these things, we have received God’s great and valuable promises, so we might escape the corruption of worldly desires and share in the divine nature. (2 Peter 1:3,4 The Voice)

I knew a dear lady who became profoundly disappointed with God. She made a bargain with him, that if she threw herself into church work to the edge of her physical energy he would give her the desires of her heart — a husband and children. He didn’t keep up his end. When menopause hit and she realized she would never have a child and would probably remain single she was devastated. Her hope was the hope that disappoints.

I’ve realized lately that many of us test God with our presumptions. We tend to present him with bargains of our own design and don’t hang around long enough to find out if he agrees.  It hit me last night that praise and worship services can fall into this category as well. I went to a large gathering of believers at a conference not long ago. I was really looking forward to it because I had heard stories about how “God showed up” last year. I had hoped that if I joined in singing loud rock-style praise songs for 55 minutes, if I knelt or waved a flag or swayed or shouted, whatever, I would feel experience a sense of God showing up — because it happened to those guys over there.

I felt nothing and was profoundly disappointed because I had thrown my whole heart into it. Other people seemed to be experiencing some sort of ecstatic moment while I felt nothing.

The truth is, I was presenting God with a bargain presuming that he would agree to it. “If I move out of my comfort zone and really get into this music even though it is a style and volume I personally find irritating, if I stretch out of my introverted personality and do things I fear would draw uncomfortable attention, if I sacrifice my time and money to be here, You will give me the desires of my heart, right, Lord? Because this is the way praise and worship is done, right? Because if You are pleased with my efforts You will take away the feelings that come with burying my dad yesterday and fill me with happy happy joy joy and allow me to experience Your Presence, right? ”

Can I confess I was actually angry when I left? I spent days wondering what is wrong with me that I was more aware of an out-of-tune guitar string than the majesty of God. Then I remembered an experience I had in Israel.

I was standing in the shell of an abandoned building in Gibeah — that place that was known as “The School of the Prophets” in the time of Samuel. I was excited when I found out this would be included on the itinerary, because the story in the Bible was that the presence of God was so strong there that even King Saul prophesied. I was secretly hoping for some special experience — at least some goose bumps.

Nothing.

The same thing at Bethel… and Shiloh… and Jerusalem. I told the Lord I was disappointed I didn’t have a sense of his presence there. That’s when I felt him say, “Because I’m not there. I’m in you now.”

In the past God has made his presence known in a burning bush, in a wind, in a voice like thunder, and in other ways. I believe that he has delighted the hearts of many people who have gotten together to offer him full-out singing and playing, but he doesn’t visit them by “showing up” like he did for a few in the Old Covenant. He inhabits them now. We are his temple. Worship is not something we do to earn a feeling. Using singing-style worship to manipulate our emotions so we can escape the unpleasant ones is making ourselves the object of worship. If I feel good this must be God, right? No. I was treating a praise and worship service like a drug.

I was wrong.

It made me re-think the point of actions we turn into rituals. It’s like giving a loved one the same birthday gift every year because we remember how happy their reaction made us feel the first time we gave it to them. We sensed God`s pleasure and his presence in us when our hearts turned to him and we expressed it through contemporary music. Now every meeting starts with obligatory rituals of a praise band and repeated choruses  — because that worked before. For those whose hearts are in the right place it still does, but it’s not the method that connects them; it’s the heart.

Yesterday I read Psalm 109. It is not a feel-good psalm. In fact it’s rather embarrassing the way David spills out his feelings. I wish that one had been edited out. But in spite of his intense anger, grief, and disappointment, the psalmist offers the sacrifice of his right to want revenge and offers it to God.

Perhaps that is what would have made a finer gift of praise that day at the conference — my tears, my grief for what would never be on this earth ( a fully restored relationship with my dad), my honest feelings — the pure distilled worship of lament that says, Nevertheless I will give You first place in my heart because I choose to trust You. Christ is in me, and right in the middle of my disappointments You continue to show me the hope of glory.

Worship is acknowledging that God is God and he is good.  And that does not require a sound system.

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Oh, That We Might Know

On By Charis PsalloIn Photography, Trees and forests1 Comment

 

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Oh, that we might know the Lord!

Let us press on to know him,

and he will respond to us as surely as the coming of dawn or the rain of early spring.

(Hosea 6:3 TLB)

Something Else

On By Charis PsalloIn Photography, Water4 Comments

 

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“When we lose sight of God we become hard and dogmatic. We hurl our own petitions at God’s throne and dictate to Him as to what we wish Him to do. We do not worship God, nor do we seek to form the mind of Christ. If we are hard towards God, we will become hard towards other people.”
— Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest

 

Disappointments in life come because we had expectations. Not dreams. Expectations. When we have a picture of love in our heads it can become our definition of love. We may not all say it out loud to parents, or potential partners, or even friends, but we all think, “If you love me you will ____________.” It’s a test that we ourselves mark. And sooner or later we are disappointed. Sometimes profoundly so. Either the false expectation goes, or the relationship slips into the slow death of lost hope.

Sometimes we think we are praying when we are actually putting God to a test. We are saying, in essence, “If you love me you will ___________,” or “If you are really God you will ___________.” When we put someone to a test we have decided in advance what the right answer is. We are putting ourselves in a position of judge over someone when our expectations must be met for them to pass the test. We make ourselves superior.

God doesn’t play that game. You may have noticed.

We have expectations that if he loves us he will give us a good marriage, robust health, intelligent grateful children, a rewarding career, financial security, a life of peace with reasonable neighbours, and a good reputation that reflects our glory. When God doesn’t meet these expectations of our own design it is easy to allow disappointment to harden into resolution. Instead of finding out who he really is we create another false god, one who is uncaring, or capricious, or inaccessible or hard and dogmatic – at least this god doesn’t disappoint us. Instead of searching for God’s true nature we build our own constructs and dogmas, then we preach that god with our actions and attitudes. We can become hard, graceless, or apathetic.

I think disappointment and loss of hope is the greatest pain known to mankind. We can forge through almost anything but hopelessness. Without hope, what’s the point? It takes the courage of hope to take the risk of pursuing God through the pain of disappointment, to humbly admit that we do not hold the answers, to seek the mind of Christ. Sometimes the ultimate form of worship is simply to make an offering of our pain and say, “You are God and I am not.”

When Moses (who up until that point had settled into the disappointment of his life’s circumstances) asked God to show himself, the aspect God chose to show was his goodness, which was so overwhelming Moses had to be hidden in the cleft of the rock. God’s goodness doesn’t always fit our definition. It is something else, because God is Something Else – holy other, entirely unique, and worthy of seeking out. We don’t come to him so that he can reflect our glory, but so that we can reflect his.

We can rejoice, too, when we run into problems and trials, for we know that they help us develop endurance.

And endurance develops strength of character, and character strengthens our confident hope of salvation.

And this hope will not lead to disappointment.

For we know how dearly God loves us,

because he has given us the Holy Spirit to fill our hearts with his love.

(Romans 5:3-5)

When the Master Speaks

On By Charis PsalloIn Black and white, Photography10 Comments

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Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty
The earth belongs to You
We’ll prepare to go with You, Lord
But until the day we do, Lord,
Minute by minute, we’ll continue in the story
This mystery, Christ in us the hope of glory

– Marty Goetz (from “Hope of Glory”)

This song has been playing in my head for the past two nights. I’ve been thinking about hearing God’s voice, the means he uses, and the discernment he develops in us to know when the voice is his and when it is not.  This line particularly was on repeat in my dreams, “Glory to glory, even by His spirit, moment by moment, when the Master speaks I’ll hear it.”

I talk about learning to hear God’s voice, but honestly hearing a little bit leaves me feeling frustrated that I can’t hear more.  I want the unmistakable thunderous voice from the clouds giving explicit directions. I know one fellow, equally frustrated during a period of unemployment, who stood under thunder clouds with a metal rake balanced on his head and shouted to God, “Talk to me!” I know the feeling.

On the other hand the Bible tells the story of that time when God spoke in a loud booming voice from the sky. Some heard him clearly but others said all they heard was thunder.

The thing is, for his re-born, Spirit-filled sons and daughters the voice is no longer up in the sky. The voice is in us.

In a dream I saw people throwing huge lasso ropes into a city that was crumbling faster than a set for a sci-fi dystopia movie. One of them looped around  a young man who was almost entirely buried in debris. I joined in pulling on the rope and hauled him out of the city of destruction. He stood up, brushed himself off and began running.

I yelled, “Hey! You’re not cleaned up yet!”

He shouted over his shoulder, “Do you recognize Christ in you well enough yet to know that he has called me?” and kept running.

Then I saw a word I had never seen before written in the air. When I woke up I googled it.

I found it could mean a tight Somalian hat, it was an acronym for a number of obscure ventures and technical terms and it was part of a rude name I’m sure the Facebook police have banned by now. I gave up and came back and gave up and tried again. Pages deep on the search something caught my attention. The entire page was in a foreign language and it included this word only once. I was about to abandon this site as well when I saw numbers interspersed with the words and something like II Korint written on the top. I realized it was a page from the Bible.

I found the verse in my own bible in 2 Corinthians 13:5 and it said: Test yourselves to see if you are in the faith; examine yourselves! Or do you not recognize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you—unless indeed you fail the test?

My eyes fell on a phrase in verse 3 where Paul wrote, “since you are seeking for proof of the Christ who speaks in me...”

It “resonated.”

At first I felt quite privileged that God set up a riddle for me this way, the way I felt quite puffed up when I learned I was a descendent of European royalty. But just like in the way that I learned that the odds of anyone of European descent not springing from the loins of Charlemagne are one in 17 million this hearing God’s voice thing is not a unique experience. It’s for all his children. It’s matter of paying attention to the mystery of Christ in you, your hope of glory – however he chooses to communicate.

Minute by minute we’ll continue in the story.

Showers

On By Charis PsalloIn Photography, WaterLeave a comment

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Should pain and suffering, sorrow, and grief, rise up like clouds and overshadow for a time the Sun of Righteousness and hide Him from your view, do not be dismayed, for in the end this cloud of woe will descend in showers of blessing on your head, and the Sun of Righteousness will rise upon you to set no more.

– Sadhu Sundar Singh

Out of the Box, Out of the Phone

On By Charis PsalloIn Flowers7 Comments

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I remember my aunt’s Kodak box camera that required her to look in the top at just the right angle or she would decapitate the heads off her subjects in the image. She kept her brownie box camera long after others had moved on to other cameras that used colour film. Photos were precious in her time – and expensive and time-consuming to make. Making up her photo album required my aunt to mail the whole camera away to have the film extracted and developed and then sent back. Kodak obliged.

This past weekend, my young granddaughter used my phone camera to produce a video of her little cousins sliding down the curved stairs at my uncle’s house. The same day I posted it on Facebook and friends across the country commented on it.

Changes.

This article from Holy Soup  by Thom Schulz on “The Church’s Frightful Kodak Moment” fits with what I am sensing. Photography has taken off in the last few years. More people have better access (even on phones) and quality has improved enormously. It’s not left just to the professionals anymore. There is freedom to make mistakes and forgive ourselves by hitting delete or re-framing and re-lighting the experience with a photo editing program. It’s about seeing worth in the moment and making meaningful images we can enjoy and share in the future.

But Kodak missed it because it saw only one expression of photography. Nothing wrong with print. I still use Kodak paper but 99% of what I do is digital photography and artistic expressions using those photos on the computer now.

I feel something like this is happening to the church – something out-of-the-box is about to take off, improve in quality, be more accessible, offer greater grace to grow, and thrive in ways we never imagined, but we can miss it if we measure success in terms of sales of traditional product (aka bums in seats on Sunday morning.) I am meeting more and more people who love the Lord deeply but who are finding the current structures and expectations of the institutional denominational church-in-the-building are limiting their ability to pursue the desires God has placed in their hearts to know Christ, and to know who He created them to be, and to be placed in true family. There is more. I know it.

It’s about worshiping God, enjoying Him forever, making disciples – and loving one another.

I have not read the author’s books, nor have I seen his documentary (although I will probably be checking them out). We may disagree on what this out-of-the-box thing looks like. I don’t know. My attention was just grabbed by the comparison to Kodak and rather than feeling despair that church attendance is falling in North America, I am filled with hope that soon all the promises in Christ will become more accessible to the ordinary folks He loves – and they will know they are the church.

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)