“Rest, rest, rest in God’s love.
The only work you are required to do now is to give your most intense attention to his still, small voice within.”
-Madame Jeanne Guyon
Tag: inspiration
Because You Are Good
The older kids had already run out the door to catch the school bus. She was in her jammies, her hair matted in a wad of fine blonde fuzz at the back of her head and a greying blankie hanging like a loose toga over her shoulder. Her voice, crackling with the residue of sleep was hard to hear.
“What would you like, honey?” her Mommy asked, as she added raisins to my little granddaughter’s oatmeal.
“Can you put on worship?” she asked again, a little louder this time.
“Sure. I can do that. Which one?”
“Kids worship, please.”
Mommy started a video on the computer on the kitchen desk.
“She asks for music every morning,” she told me. “This is the way she likes to start her day.”
The song played and my little three-year old granddaughter grinned at me.
Your goodness never stops
Your mercy follows me
Your kindness fills my life
Your love amazes me
I sing because You are good
And I dance because You are good
And I shout because You are good
You are good to me!*
Yes, my beautiful young one. You continue to teach me. This is how to start the day.
*From Bethel Music Kids/ Come Alive
Share this:
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.
Share this:
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.
Share this:
Grow There
Fall on your knees and grow there. There is no burden of the spirit but is lighter by kneeling under it. Prayer means not always talking to Him, but waiting before Him till the dust settles and the stream runs clear.
– F.B. Meyer
Share this:
I Waited and Waited for God
I waited
and waited
and waited some more;
patiently,
knowing that God would come through for me.
Then, at last, he bent down and listened to my cry.
He stooped down to lift me out of danger,
from the desolate pit I was in,
out of the muddy waters I had fallen into.
Now he’s lifted me up into a firm, secure place,
and steadied me while I walk along his ascending path.
A new song for a new day rises up in me
every time I think about how he breaks through for me!
Ecstatic praise pours out of my mouth until
everyone hears how God has set me free.
Many will see his miracles; they’ll stand in awe of God,
and fall in love with him!
(Psalm 40:1-3 The Passion Translation)
It was no one’s fault. Doctors get sick, equipment breaks, the critical displaces the urgent. It just happened to take a long time between symptoms showing up and getting the results of a biopsy. Months actually. The first time I was told I might have cancer I was sick with worry and too distracted to concentrate on work a lot of the time. This time I was more patient. I’ve had the experience of seeing the Lord come through for me. We went for walks together and talked about something else.
Today I finally got the report. Benign.
I still need healing for an underlying problem that, although I have tried and tried, I can’t fix myself. So even though it has been the source a lot of rejection in my life, I continue to come to God, just as I am. My only plea is that Jesus’ blood was shed for me.
He’s good with that.
Share this:
When truth’s pillars are destroyed
Lord, don’t you hear
What my well-meaning friends keep saying to me:
“Run away while you can!
Fly away like a bird to hide in the mountains for safety,
For your enemies have prepared a trap for you!
They plan to destroy you with their slander and deceitful lies.
Can’t you see them hiding
In their place of darkness and shadows?
They’re set against you and all those who live upright lives.”
But don’t they know, Lord, that I have made you
My only Hiding Place?
Don’t they know that I always trust in you?
What can the righteous accomplish
When truth’s pillars are destroyed and law and order collapse?
Yet the Eternal One is never shaken –
He is still found in his temple of holiness
Reigning as Lord and King over all.
He is closely watching everything that happens.
And with a glance, his eyes examine every heart
for his heavenly rule will prevail over all…
(from Psalm 11 The Passion Translation)
His law is love.
Share this:
Blossoming
There are four degrees of love:
1) Love of self for self’s sake.
2) Love of God for self’s sake.
3) Love of God for God’s own sake.
4) Love of self for God’s sake.
– Bernard of Clairvaux
When you love God, you love what he loves.
And he loves you.
Charis: Subject to Change 