Summer and winter and springtime and harvest,
Sun, moon, and stars in their courses above;
Join with all nature in manifold witness,
To Thy great faithfulness, mercy, and love.
Great is Thy faithfulness!
Great is Thy faithfulness!
Morning by morning new mercies I see
All I have needed Thy hand hath provided
Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord unto me!
(from Great is Thy Faithfulness by Thomas Chisholm)
I love this place. This is one of my favourite spots in British Columbia. My dear friend and I drove past it yesterday on our way to Starbucks in Fernie for an October treat: a pumpkin spice latte. We stopped to take photos and noticed the fly-fishermen wading in the river down in the valley. I soaked in the abundance of beauty, a gracious gift from God, and my soul felt refreshed.
The autumn colours remind me that even in change there is beauty. There is abundant grace.
Thank you, Lord.
And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that always having all sufficiency in everything, you may have an abundance for every good deed.
(2 Corinthians 9:8 NASB)
“Gratitude as a discipline involves a conscious choice. I can choose to be grateful even when my emotions and feelings are still steeped in hurt and resentment. It is amazing how many occasions present themselves in which I can choose gratitude instead of a complaint. I can choose to be grateful when I am criticized, even when my heart still responds in bitterness. I can choose to speak about goodness and beauty, even when my inner eye still looks for someone to accuse or something to call ugly.”
-Henri Nouwen
Seek to cultivate a buoyant, joyous sense of the crowded kindnesses of God in your daily life.
– Alexander MacLaren
“The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy.”
– Henri Nouwen
You have turned my mourning into joyful dancing.
You have taken away my clothes of mourning and clothed me with joy,
that I might sing praises to you and not be silent.
O Lord my God, I will give you thanks forever!
(Psalms 30:11,12)
This is a photo taken by my three-year old granddaughter. I think it’s rather good. Her subject is something important to her: her dancing feet and her ruby slippers.
We watched part of The Wizard of Oz together. In the story the sparkly red shoes the girl was given had the power to take her home but she had not realized it. My granddaughter was enamoured with Dorothy’s shoes because they looked just like a pair I bought her for Christmas. No whining and crying in the store asking for the latest movie merchandise. She already had them. She had been dancing in them all along.
Yesterday I read something Jesus said about the generous father’s heart in the story of the prodigal son. He went out to his oldest son, the one who was upset that Dad threw a party and gave honour to his self-centered, self-indulgent, immature younger brother. The Father appealed to him to be gracious to his brother when he complained that he had never had a party. “Don’t you know that everything I have is yours already?”
I also read something Jesus said about his cousin, John the Baptist, the guy who had set the entire country on it’s ear.
“Truly, I say to you, among those born of women there has arisen no one greater than John the Baptist. Yet the one who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.” (Matthew 11:11)
As those who have who hold the Bible in high regard do we take him seriously? I have skipped over that verse so many times because it seemed too good to be true. But Jesus appealed to us to believe him. Truly I say…
Sometimes we fail to notice that the ruby slippers, and the power they have, are right there on our feet already. We can travel for miles looking for someone to rescue us without realizing that if we have been adopted into God’s family we have access to everything He has for us already.
We can feel thoroughly put out when we see those who have not worked nearly as hard or shown even a fraction of the self-control we have exerted receive visible signs of God’s grace and favour. Like the resentful older brother and the frightened Dorothy we have not yet begun to imagine everything we need has already been provided.
Do you know who you are?
Truly. Do you have any idea?
“Let all of God’s angels worship him.”
Regarding the angels, God says,
“He sends his angels like the winds,
his servants like flames of fire.”
(from Hebrews 1)
Other thirteen-year olds asked for the new Beatles album for their coming of age birthday gift. I asked for a recording of opera singer Joan Sutherland’s greatest hits. I’m sure it caused a few eye rolls in my country and gospel music loving family, but Grandma bought it for me anyway. I thought the singer’s voice was “angelic” although I’d never actually heard an angel sing. I could only play the record when no one else was around but I still managed to almost wear it out. Handel’s Let the Bright Seraphim became one of my favourites.
Let the bright seraphim in burning row, their loud uplifted angel trumpets blow. Let the cherubic host in tuneful choirs touch their immortals harps with golden wires.
I could imagine myriads upon myriads of fiery angels singing and blowing brilliant trumpets that sent their sound spinning through the galaxies.
I am on a quest to understand worship. I don’t think I understand it yet. Okay, I know I don’t understand exactly what it is or the nature of its expression yet. It is going on non-stop in heaven as the angels and the elders and the creatures, overwhelmed with God’s majesty spontaneously bow before the Great Throne. What must it be like?
Then I looked, and I heard around the throne and the living creatures and the elders the voice of many angels,
numbering myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands, saying with a loud voice,
“Worthy is the Lamb who was slain,
to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might
and honor and glory and blessing!”
(From Revelation 5)
One of the jobs of angels is to help us to worship. Somehow our worship is connected to theirs even though we can’t hear it all yet. It starts in the throne room in heaven.
I remember the chorus of a song my mother sang:
Holy, holy, is what the angels sing,
And I expect to help them make the courts of Heaven ring;
But when I sing redemption’s story, they will fold their wings,
For angels never felt the joys that our salvation brings.
I hit a milestone today. My 1001st blog post. I could thank my readers and post links to most popular past blogs, or discuss the experience of blog writing, but as I sit here at the end of a beautiful summer’s day preparing a post for the morning I find I have nothing profound to say. All I want to do is thank God for his goodness and for the hope that does not disappoint. I thank him for a blog on which to express praise that can be flung into cyberspace, if not the galaxies. Today I all I want to do is sing redemption’s story.
God is good. For some reason I will never understand, He loves me — and you. Any other thing I could celebrate pales in comparison.
Praise the Lord from the heavens;
praise him in the heights above.
Praise him, all his angels;
praise him, all his heavenly hosts.
Praise him, sun and moon;
praise him, all you shining stars.
Praise him, you highest heavens
and you waters above the skies…
(From Psalm 148)
Worthy is the Lamb.
The year I started writing this blog our valley was hit by an explosive wind storm. Many homes were damaged and thousands of trees fell. (I wrote about it here.) I grieved for my beautiful shade tree, one of the victims. We carted the big old May tree away in pieces to a place where a wood chipper re-purposed it as mulch. I hated the gap left, but the back garden has improved with the increased sunlight. The roots were too hard to remove, so I left two shoots to grow and kept hacking away at the others that sprang up. Yesterday I was doing a spring clean up in the yard when I saw the first blooms on the two shoots that have become young trees. Today most of the rest of them opened.
In all the years the big tree stood there it never blossomed before May 1. At this altitude and latitude it was often closer to June 1 than May 1 when the sweet-smelling flowers appeared. Because the root system established by the old tree was so deep and wide these two new trees springing up from it are growing faster than I could have imagined. They are filling in the gap and are taller than the house now. Hundreds of flowers cover them.
As I watched them sway in the golden sun of evening the word that came to mind was “restore.”
Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you.
Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.
Resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world.
And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you.
(1 Peter 5:6-10 ESV)
The Lord is faithful. He himself has restored. Now I have two May trees – and they are blooming sooner than expected. The first signs of promise of the restoration of many things. I wait and watch with anticipation.
The clouds, too, drink up their share,
raining it back down on the mountains from the upper reaches of Your home,
Sustaining the whole earth with what comes from You.
And the earth is satisfied.
Thus You grow grain for bread, grapes for wine, grass for cattle—
all of this for us.
And so we have bread to make our bodies strong,
wine to make our hearts happy,
oil to make our faces shine.
Every good thing we need, Your earth provides;
our faces grow flush with Your life in them.
(Psalm 104: 13-15 The Voice)
Charis: Subject to Change 