“I can’t pray about my problems. I was taught that it is selfish to pray for myself.”
I understood my friend when she told me this. I was also taught that asking anything for yourself was self-centered and we need to be other-centered. But at the heart of the message we were taught is the fear of not having enough to go around. Self-sacrifice can also be self-centered in a way, as bizarre as that sounds, because it is based on a fear that we will have to cover for God’s short-comings.
God is not on a budget.
While praying for ourselves and our needs can be a sign of self-focus, I am reminded of the airline stewardess’ lecture about affixing your own oxygen mask before helping anyone else. If our own love tanks are running on empty, if we don’t know how much God loves us and who we are in him, we tend to either ignore or sacrifice ourselves to meet other people’s needs, and eventually we will run out, burn out, and die out.
The problem is that we view prayer as a one-way conversation asking for things. I have learned prayer is seeking a closer relationship with the Lover of my soul. We give out of the abundance of his love. As one of my friends said “Invest heavily in worshipping God and soaking up his love, then give the interest and not the capital and you won’t run dry.” When I find myself feeling resentful of other people’s neediness and their expectations of me it is usually because I am running on empty. I need, like Jesus did, to go away and spend more time with the Lord.
As I look at the immensity of the sky I am reminded of the immensity of his love. How much sky do you need? How much love do you need? Ask. He’s got more for you than you ever imagined or dared to think. Then give freely what you have freely received. There’s more where that came from.
Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen. (Ephesians 3:20, 21)
Sometimes the bride of Christ looks more bedraggled than glorious. Sometimes she looks like she got all dressed up only to be caught in a rainstorm on her way to the church.
We have a covered deck on the back of our house that allows me to sit outside when it rains. As I sat there this weekend, surrounded by a sudden downpour, and contemplated how getting glimpses of the glory of God makes the reality that we all fall short of that glory all the more disappointing, I wondered if God tires of us. Then this song began to play in my head:
Listen to the pouring rain, listen to it pour,
And with every drop of rain you know I love you more.
Call my name right out loud
I can hear above the clouds
And I’m here among the puddles,
You and I together huddle.
Listen to the pouring rain, listen to the rain.
God spoke these encouraging words to his people through the prophet Jeremiah, ““I have loved you with an everlasting love— out of faithfulness I have drawn you close.”
Listen to the pouring rain and know that even in our bedraggled state he loves us.
ThreeRedDrops
Pouring
Jesus said, “I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”
Apples
I call your Name right out loud, “Abba! Thank you for Your love! Help us keep our eyes on You! Heal your people, oh Lord, that we may bear fruit that would be pleasing to You! Make us a glorious bride!”
This mountain range is called The Steeples. I love the name. Steeples point to the transcendent and remind us to raise our eyes above the dailiness of life to something greater.
At least that’s what I understand the architectural metaphor to mean.
Alas, I must admit that like a lot of other people who have been given the opportunity to forgive some of the institutions operating under many of those towers, at times disappointment causes me to lower my head in embarrassment. In fact, I avoided them for a quite a while. Buildings may express aspirations, but it is Christ himself living in the heart of his followers that enlivens those expressions. Without love they are simply stones, wood, nails, and glass. Without love there is more joy found in a field of wild grass than in a group of other members of the body of Christ.
Without love the steeples silently point to thin air.
Lovers point to Love.
“So I [Jesus] give you a new command: Love each other deeply and fully. Remember the ways that I have loved you, and demonstrate your love for others in those same ways. Everyone will know you as My followers if you demonstrate your love to others.” (John 13:34,35)
Without love, it’s all a gong show.
What if I speak in the most elegant languages of people or in the exotic languages of the heavenly messengers, but I live without love? Well then, anything I say is like the clanging of brass or a crashing cymbal. What if I have the gift of prophecy, am blessed with knowledge and insight to all the mysteries, or what if my faith is strong enough to scoop a mountain from its bedrock, yet I live without love? If so, I am nothing. I could give all that I have to feed the poor, I could surrender my body to be burned as a martyr, but if I do not live in love, I gain nothing by my selfless acts. (1 Corinthians 13:1-3 The Voice)
But, bless God, I have seen love starting to awaken in the big C Church (the one all believers are a part of and not just the folks who go to the building on the corner.) I have seen those who are willing to lay down their lives for others. I have seen less-than-perfect people get over themselves and rise to care for each other, to pray, to watch and wait, to give, to serve, to raise others up. I have seen, with my own eyes, folks who haven’t spoken to each other in years forgive and reconcile their differences. I have seen families torn apart by separation change and sacrifice for each other, encourage each other and see each other the way God sees them.
Only God could do this. This kind of love points to Him more than any building -or any mountain- ever could.
I stood outside the door of our son-in-love’s room and listened to the most beautiful sounds I have ever heard yesterday.
“Look at me, Daddy! Look at me!”
“I love you, Daddy!”
“Tickle me again, Daddy!”
Then laughter and fake groaning and the sounds of a daddy and his little ones wrestling.
Later I watched as all three little ones cuddled their daddy and watched a movie. The baby was smiling in his lap, the two-year old flopped over daddy’s shoulders and the four-year old leaned her blonde head on his chest and asked her hundreds of why questions.
I watched mommy and daddy and the three little ones share a dinner of steak and chocolate -except for baby, of course.
I sat and talked with “John” about the journey we have been through since March 23. When I told him the stories of how people who had never prayed much were woken in the night with a burden to pray, of how people who had never seen God heal were following every report on Facebook, of how some were hearing the voice of God for the first time, of how a student’s mother told my daughter-in-law that she was receiving prayer updates from her mother in Vegreville who was receiving them from someone up there who knew the mother-in-law of this guy, of how friends stood by his bed and filled the waiting room day and night , of how his mother and I took turns holding each other up, of how his wonderful, quiet father was a bulwark of faith who said in his delightful German accent, “We will have no negative words here. We will only speak truth,”, of how his father-in-law wept as he cried out to God, of how his wife gave thanks in the middle of the worst days of her life and was a beacon of hope to everyone else herself, of how hospital staff from other wards found excuses to come by ICU to see what was happening, of how my friend told me she had renewed faith to pray for her own sons, of how the church is waking to come together, to pray together for healing of this land….
He cried. He cried tears of sorrow for what his family and friends endured and of joy for the kindness of strangers and for what God has done.
He said, “He didn’t have to do it. I could have died, and I would have been okay to go to be with him, but God healed me. He has given more years to be with my wife and my children. I have always loved Jesus, but now there is something much deeper.”
“Do you know how much of your effort, how many of your outstanding natural talents and abilities God used to do this thing?” I asked him. “Nothing! None. Not a thing. Boy, you were the most helpless a man could be. You couldn’t even breathe on your own. You had no blood pressure without a constant drip of medication. You had no kidney function without a big machine to clean your blood. You couldn’t move without a nurse doing it for you. You couldn’t say one charming, intelligent thing. You couldn’t move a single athletic muscle. You even needed other people to give up their own blood to replace yours. And let me tell you, the handsome thing wasn’t working for you much in those days either -and when you finally opened your eyes they weren’t even going the same direction. God used other people in the process, but none of this came about by a single effort of yours. Not one.”
He cried some more. “There is something much, much deeper about God’s love that I know now that I just can’t explain,” he said softly.
Then we received a text message from someone who had been speaking to the physician who headed the large skilled team of specialists who treated “John.”
“You know it’s only by a miracle that guy survived,” he told him candidly. Another physician dropped the f bomb and said, “That guy should be dead.”
We know.
So this is love. This is what a miracle feels like. He still has rehab work to do, but in the meantime, we laugh, we cry, we praise God. Mommy and Daddy and the kids cuddle together and we pass the popcorn while we watch a movie.
The words of an old song taken from Isaiah come to me as I write this in the early morning hours before the baby wakes up:
Charis: Subject to Change 