We are confident that God is able to orchestrate everything
to work toward something good
and beautiful
when we love Him and accept His invitation
to live according to His plan.
(Romans 8:28 The Voice)
Tag: inspiration
I Want My Daddy!
What do you do when God gives you a real live miracle?
First, you respond with thankfulness. Then you look toward the One the sign points to. Asking Him why we received a miracle brings as silent a response as asking why there have been times when we did not see a loved one healed. A better question is “What?”
“What would you have us do with this experience?”
“What does this mean?”
“What are you showing us about yourself?”
Or “How would you have us respond?” ”
My job during the crisis was mainly to care for the children. We knew people were praying and most of the time felt a cocoon of love around us, but to be honest there were times when this little boy in the photo felt the agony of not having his Daddy there with him, of not knowing why somber adults spoke in hushed voices or stopped talking when they noticed him playing at their feet or hiding behind the door. There were times when he cried inconsolably, “I want my Daddy! Where is my Daddy? I need my Daddy!” and no one, not uncles or grandmothers or even Mommy could comfort him. There were times when he refused to eat or sleep and trashed his room late at night when grown-ups insisted he go to bed.
Then there were times when he was the one with the strongest faith, when he sat on Mommy’s lap and looked into her eyes and said, “We don’t hass to be afraid, Mommy. We don’t hass to be afraid cuz Jesus is wiss us.” When doctors privately gave his Daddy a 0% chance of recovery from necrotizing fasciitis (flesh-eating disease) he and his sister set aside drawings and pine cones and other precious things to show Daddy when he came home. They sang songs about nothing being impossible for Jesus.
What do you do when God gives you a real live miracle? What you do with a miracle is tell the story truthfully, including the times of outrageous faith, and the times of soul-crushing disappointment. I appreciate our son-in-love Bruce and daughter Lara Merz’ efforts to be accurate when they tell the story of their miracle in the book While He Lay Dying. They are honest about their struggles, their fears. their set-backs. They are honest about surges of faith that came from beyond themselves. They are honest about the difficulty of pursuing being a community of love and being transparently vulnerable in times of crisis. They are honest about the way God accomplished the very tasks Bruce had once strived to accomplish, by bringing them about while he lay in bed doing absolutely nothing. At all. He couldn’t even breathe for himself.
One of the contributors to the book is a fine physician who witnessed the roller-coaster ride that this event entailed. He volunteered to verify the chronology and medical information and write a chapter from his perspective. Their pastor gives his story of how the event led to greater revelation for him and its significance for the larger church, and Bruce and Lara’s little daughter also expresses her point of view.
What do you do when God gives you a real live miracle? You stand up, relinquish your rights to life as you have known it and say, “This is what we saw. This is what God did. This is Who He is to us.” You become a witness to His goodness. You give him all the glory for the things He has done.
Last week I heard this little guy giggling as his Daddy tucked him into bed. God heard his cry. Daddy came home without any loss of limbs and with organs functioning better than before he becme ill.
This week the book telling this amazing story of how the Lord gathered an army of believers to pray for the life of one man and support one little family has been released. I think you’ll find it inspiring.
The website:
http://whilehelaydying.com/#
Book available from:
Amazon in both print and eBook form. (A free Kindle download is available for reading eBooks on computers and other devices.) Click on one of these:
Kobo (eBook)
Indigo/Chapters with free shipping until Dec. 15
Essence Publishers (print)
Your local bookstore by request
Profits beyond expenses related to book to go to charity.
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Bowls
The gift shop sparkled with luxury table settings -fine china, crystal goblets, bright jeweled napkin rings and silver cutlery in perfect formation. Totally impressive, and totally out of my price range. More utilitarian items for food preparations artistically occupied the shelves at the back, much like the way the mess of a kitchen is kept out of sight from a formal dining room. That’s where the simple bowls caught my eye.
My mother was a marvelous cook. It’s how she expressed her love for her family and friends. She loved being in the kitchen and throwing Martha Stewart-style dinner parties with her best china. I appreciate people with the gift of hospitality, but it feels like an awful lot of work. For me, time in the kitchen is an act of sacrifice. There are other areas of the house I enjoy more, but I extend myself to cook for those I love.
Those bowls stacked on a shelf reminded me of mixing pancake batter or homemade granola bars for my kids and grandchildren. I have a few nice pieces of china and silver and crystal and serving platters I inherited, but I seldom use them. I keep them on a high shelf so they won’t be knocked about, but they are a pain to get down, so they sit there looking pretty. My mixing bowls are chipped and the colour is practically worn off in places -and the finish is crazed where it is not. They are not as impressive as the pretty bowls in the shop, but they are the faithful servants in my kitchen.
I am often amazed by the “people vessels” God chooses to express his love through. Most of them are not “high shelf” people. They have chips and cracks. Their finish can be a bit crazed, but what comes out of them nurtures my soul. God loves ordinary people. What comes out is all about what he puts into them anyway.
Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life. I don’t see many of “the brightest and the best” among you, not many influential, not many from high-society families. Isn’t it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these “nobodies” to expose the hollow pretensions of the “somebodies”? That makes it quite clear that none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God. Everything that we have—right thinking and right living, a clean slate and a fresh start—comes from God by way of Jesus Christ. That’s why we have the saying, “If you’re going to blow a horn, blow a trumpet for God.” (1 Corinthians 1:26-31 The Message)
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Constantly
I pray for you constantly, asking God, the glorious Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, to give you spiritual wisdom and insight so that you might grow in your knowledge of God.
I pray that your hearts will be flooded with light so that you can understand the confident hope he has given to those he called—his holy people who are his rich and glorious inheritance.
I also pray that you will understand the incredible greatness of God’s power for us who believe him.
This is the same mighty power that raised Christ from the dead and seated him in the place of honor at God’s right hand in the heavenly realms. (Ephesians 1:16-20 NLT)
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Something Beautiful
I love this view of the Steeples Range. I often stop here. I took this about a month ago when the grass was still rich and green.
But there’s a reason it’s so green -and why there is a place to pull off the highway. There’s a pump house near this spot. It pumps effluent from the nearby town onto the field as a way of dealing with sewage.
In others words it makes something beautiful out of something, well, considerably less than beautiful.
My parents used to love the Gaither show on TV. At least I think that’s what it’s called. The Gaithers created a bit of a revolution in the style of music we were used to in church back in the 70’s. There was a level of honesty and joy in the reality of grace and the goodness of God we hadn’t seen for a while. The music gave Mom and Dad a lot of comfort. Dad still plays it. I remember the words of one song:
Something beautiful, something good
All my confusion He understood
All I had to offer Him was brokenness and strife
But he made something beautiful of my life
If there ever were dreams
That were lofty and noble
They were my dreams at the start
And hope for life’s best were the hopes
That I harbor down deep in my heart
But my dreams turned to ashes
And my castles all crumbled, my fortune turned to loss
So I wrapped it all in the rags of life
And laid it at the cross.
Something beautiful, something good
All my confusion He understood
All I had to offer Him was brokenness and strife
But he made something beautiful of my life.
Many of us have been stopped in our tracks by disappointment in ourselves. The stuff that comes out of me sometimes is truly embarrassing.
Lord if you can use my mistakes somehow, you can have them. You said to give you everything, because you paid for it, and I don’t want to even admit some of this to myself, let alone have it flung out where everybody can see it, but here you go. I’ve done and said some pretty unpleasant things in my life, and I feel ugly sometimes, OK a lot of the time. But you can use anything, even my shame. So here. I lay it all down. The accomplishments, the failures. They’re yours. I know you can make something beautiful out of them.
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Laying It Down
In God’s economy nothing of value is actually lost. Theory is all well and good, but until our personal stories work something of Christ’s character into to us, we don’t know Him. Not really. He never asks for anything of us – even our lives – without plans to give us something greater in return.
“You notice that the Apostles got their revelation for the Church in practical situations. They never met around a table to have a Round-Table Conference, to draw up a scheme of doctrine and practice for the churches. They went out into the business and came right up against the desperate situation, and in the situation which pressed them, oft-times to desperation, they had to get before God and get revelation. The New Testament is the most practical book, because it was born out of pressing situations. The Lord gave light for a situation. The revelation of Christ, we might say, in emergencies is the way to keep Christ alive, and the only way in which Christ really does live to His own.”
— T. Austin Sparks
Those gathered around our son-in-love’s hospital bed while he was in a coma and expected to die, admitted they had no idea how to pray. As they cried out in desperation, the Lord answered. It started with one man who wanted to reconcile with his brother. Then another, and another until many people who were woken in the night to pray for him and were reminded they needed to go to a brother or sister and be reconciled before they could pray with authority. As they did, the miracles started happening, one tiny rise in blood pressure at a time. The Lord was asking for a united unoffended body of believers to come together to pray in faith.
They dug deep and found Holy Spirit had already planted the seeds of faith and love in their hearts long before they needed it. He was there all the time, in their story with them.
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Loneliness
“The wilderness is that season of our lives where God, through our loneliness, teaches us that his will is to do something in us, not merely do something for us. That is, by walking by faith and not by sight, he works in us a stronger faith, leading to a deeper worship that results in a greater joy.”
— Paul Matthies
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Remember, Remember
“I was not pleased, during my childhood, to have been born in November, as there wasn’t much inspiration for birthday party motifs. February children got hearts, May ones flowers, but what was there for me? A cake surrounded by withered leaves?”
— Margaret Atwood
Sometimes I agree with Margaret. November is not my favourite month. In the fading light of autumn it seems like a constant reminder that life is short. I keep warning myself not to compare but as the dullness of winter approaches my mind goes back to more pleasant sunny days. Maybe that’s why the theme of remembrance keeps showing up this time of year –Remembrance Day here, the chants of “Remember, remember the fifth of November” in the UK and Thanksgiving in the US. Thanksgiving is really the healthiest way to handle November I think.
We can choose to remember with bitterness or with thanks, but I’ve noticed that if we fail to re-cap the memories of the goodness of God and thank him, those strengthening moments eventually are lost to us under piles of bitterness and complaints. Without re-calling the good times we project disappointment for ourselves and others. Some elderly people in the November of their lives are a delight to visit; some are not. The ones who remember the good times and are appreciative give away a sense of hope. The ones who rehearse their disappointment give away a sense of impending doom.
I’ve been realizing how much negativity has robbed me not only of my past, but of my future. I need to change. I can compare my life to those who seem to have been granted hearts and flowers from birth and focus on my dead leaves, or I can recall memories of God’s faithfulness — even in those leaves, and glory in their colour, saying, “Thank you, Lord! You are good, and You have a wonderful plan for my life.”
And mean it.
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Suspension or Restoration
“We modern people think of miracles as the suspension of the natural order, but Jesus meant them to be the restoration of the natural order. The Bible tells us that God did not originally make the world to have disease, hunger, and death in it. Jesus has come to redeem where it is wrong and heal the world where it is broken. His miracles are not just proofs that he has power but also wonderful foretastes of what he is going to do with that power. Jesus’ miracles are not just a challenge to our minds, but a promise to our hearts, that the world we all want is coming.”
— Timothy Keller
Charis: Subject to Change 