This morning, on Resurrection Sunday, our son-in-love, who has been unconscious and in critical condition for over a week, opened his eyes.
He went back to sleep again and there is still much to pray for towards his recovery, but we thank you, Heavenly Father that you have overcome death by death and you have already won the victory.
For the past two weeks my four-year old granddaughter has asked for the same song, “Strings” by Misty Edwards to be played over and over again. Today as I took all three little ones to a friend’s so I could rush to the hospital after learning her daddy’s condition had deteriorated, I asked if she wanted to hear “Strings”. I thought it might calm my soul as well.
She said, “No. Play the next song.”
It was, “I believe that you’re my healer.”
“That’s the one!” she said.
I didn’t tell her what was happening with Daddy, but she sang so sweetly and innocently and confidently in the back seat:
Nothing is impossible for you
Nothing is impossible
Nothing is impossible for you...
Daddy was so unstable this morning they didn’t dare move him across the hallway into the O.R., but rather did further surgery on him in the ICU.
He lives.
We cling to hope.
One night as I was praying I heard, “Those who are afraid to pray, ‘Thy will be done,’ do not comprehend My love.”
Abba, I pray we might know your love more and more so we would fearlessly say yes to everything you have for us.
There’s something about perseverance through suffering that grants an authority which can be gained no other way.
This is not a drill.
This is the real thing.
Tonight I choose to bless the Lord as I cuddle our three little grandchildren while their beloved Daddy clings to life in the ICU with our precious daughter at his side.
I trust You.
There was a time when I could have gladly smacked one of those smiling, happy, praise-singing, weirdos upside the head with a hymnbook as they had their own little personal in-love-with-Jesus experience in a church service. The guy up front leading the choruses, who insisted we all needed to plaster on a smile as big as his, particularly irked me. Did he not know the scripture that said, “Whoever sings songs to a heavy heart is like one who takes off a garment on a cold day, and like vinegar on soda?” I was tired of faking it. I didn’t need to add hypocrisy to my considerable growing list of sins.
“So your Christian experience is wonderful. Goody for you,” I thought, “Well, mine sucks. I am exhausted trying to raise rebellious teenagers, maintain some sort of relationship with a workaholic husband, dutifully meet the expectations of church and parents and maiden aunts, and appease picky people everywhere I go, all while coping with depression and chronic fatigue and pain that nobody, even doctors, understands. His yoke is easy? Hah!”
Finally I quit trying. I just gave up.
I gave up on my ability to try any harder, or to try at all.
I didn’t give up on Jesus though, unlike some of the outsiders I formed friendships with at the time. I felt like one of his left-over disciples standing around after he said something about eating his body and drinking his blood. Many religious keeners found that statement extremely offensive and said, “That’s it. I’m outta here.”
Like the ones who stayed with Jesus I said, when he asked if I wanted to leave too, “Where else can I go? The stuff you say is really hard to understand but I have no hope in anything else. I don’t get you and this whole church thing drives me nuts, but I recognize that you alone have the words of life.”
When I finally gave up, he could finally start to change me.
Recently I heard someone go on a mini-rant that sounded very familiar. It was along the lines of, “If someone is having a great personal spiritual experience they should just keep it to themselves! It is insensitive to talk about what God is doing for them when so many are suffering.”
How strange it is to be sitting on the other side of the table. I realized the irritating person he was talking about was me. God has been so good to me in the past few years. I have come to understand his love in a way I never did before. Like a person who goes on and on about a new love, I just want to talk about him, brag about him, praise him. I had forgotten how annoying that can be when you are in a place where the relationship feels duty-based, when prayers aren’t answered, when pain and suffering without an end in sight is a way of life.
Here’s the question I have been pondering: Should I shut up? Am I somehow increasing the pain of disappointment in God by talking about his goodness to those who can’t feel it right now? Should I just keep a lid on it?
I was reading today about Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem: “And as they were untying the colt, its owners said to them, “Why are you untying the colt?” And they said, “The Lord has need of it.” And they brought it to Jesus, and throwing their cloaks on the colt, they set Jesus on it. And as he rode along, they spread their cloaks on the road. As he was drawing near—already on the way down the Mount of Olives—the whole multitude of his disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen, saying, “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!” And some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, rebuke your disciples.” He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.” Luke 19: 33-40
And the events in the temple after his arrival: “And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he healed them. But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the wonderful things that he did, and the children crying out in the temple, “Hosanna to the Son of David!” they were indignant, and they said to him, “Do you hear what these are saying?” And Jesus said to them, “Yes; have you never read, “‘Out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise’?” (Matthew 21:14-16)
Jesus did not allow expression of praise to be limited to a level that was comfortable to those who felt indignant, like I once was. The reason I was so uncomfortable around people who had joy and a deeper personal experience with Christ was because I was like the older brother in the prodigal son story who had worked so hard for the Father and felt angry that I even though I had been so dutiful, I had seen so little reward. The wandering irresponsible younger brother had done nothing to deserve special treatment! My pride was in my effort, and that’s the very thing that was getting in the way of seeing that everything he owned was already mine. It wasn’t until I gave up my need to prove my worthiness that I could start to receive.
Will I stop talking about his goodness? No. My focus is on the Lover of my soul first. I have tremendous empathy for those who are frustrated and feeling left out. I really do, but I desire to bring hope and not merely sympathy. I don’t intend it to, but sometimes that just may appear to be offense-worthy. I know there is nothing in me, or the millions of others who have known His favour, which has earned a single drop of his blood by my own effort. I weep with those who weep, yes, but now I can finally rejoice with those who rejoice without feeling offended myself.
I’m not going back. In the words of the old spiritual, “If I don’t praise Him, the rocks is gonna cry out, ‘Glory and honour! Glory and honour!”
God is good.
What a lovely word.
adjective \bi-ˈnīn\
b : having no significant effect : harmless <environmentally benign>
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Sex stories in the Bible
God is not nearly as prudish as some of His followers are and He doesn’t avoid metaphors and imagery that make us uncomfortable. The Bible uses plenty of stories, polite and impolite, to get a point across. English translators tidied up some of the scatological and sexual terms, but the situations are still there. (My Grandma once said if you read the whole Bible to a kid there wouldn’t be much left to tell them about sex, but a whole lot of ‘xplaining to do about why it’s not meant to be a manual.)
Some of the prophets were way out there when it came to being politically and socially correct. Jeremiah didn’t exactly hold back on his descriptions of Israel as a whore. God had his sold-out guys with eyes and ears use some pretty provocative performance art in their attempt to get His message across. Ezekiel’s mother must have rolled her eyes sometimes. I don’t imagine it was easy to parent Isaiah or John the Baptist either. (What do you do with a son who prefers grasshoppers to your brisket and wears that stinky camel skin when your friends drop by for tea?)
Sometimes a prophet’s whole life became the metaphor. I feel sorry for Hosea who was told to love a hooker who didn’t love him back. And I do believe he had a true love for her, sent from the Father and placed in his heart, that drove his life-as-metaphor.
Allured
One day, while waiting for my kids, I picked up a Bible someone left lying on the car seat. For years I found the Bible had been about as exciting as a phone book to read, but this time the words I saw on the random page stood out as if they were in neon lights. That hadn’t happened much before that day, but that time there was no doubt in my mind Himself was talking. I read:
“Therefore, behold, I will allure her,
Bring her into the wilderness
And speak kindly to her.
“Then I will give her her vineyards from there,
And the valley of Achor as a door of hope.”
It made such an impression that later I looked up ‘Achor’. It meant ‘trouble’. Great.
I read more of that second chapter in Hosea:
“And she will sing there as in the days of her youth,
As in the day when she came up from the land of Egypt.
‘It will come about in that day,’ declares the Lord,
‘That you will call Me Ishi [husband]
And will no longer call Me Baali [master].”
I’ve written before about my years in that valley of trouble. They were long dark years of depression and anger at a God I grudgingly acknowledged as a master –a cruel master. I missed the ‘allure’ part when I read those verses. I didn’t know he was taking me to a desolate place to remove distractions so I could hear his love song. I didn’t know he wanted to be like a lover. I never really understood the verse about singing to him other than as a job description.
The phrase translated as “she will sing there” in the version I first read is from the Hebrew word “anah”. It’s translated differently in other versions. Some use the word answer, or respond –as to a lover and not a master/owner. Elsewhere it is frequently used in the context of ,”Oh God, hear our cries! Please answer us! Take us seriously and come to us!”
I don’t know how to love him.
I used to teach this song from Jesus Christ Superstar to musical theater students because of the challenges of interpreting its emotional complexity.
In Lloyd-Webber and Andrew Rice’s own fictional version of the story of the life of Jesus, Mary Magdalene is another prostitute who is used to having a power over the men she has both needed and held in contempt. She has used and been used. She has been the object of desire and the object of loathing. She, like Hosea’s wife, can go through the motions without giving her heart. Jesus is someone who is wholly different to all her previous experience. He is “Holy Other.”
She sings, “I don’t know how to love him” because she has no idea what love is. She can’t tell love from manipulation, or fantasy, or the need to scratch an ego itch -or a physical itch, or from something to trade for a bauble that might distract from the pain for a while. Her “lovers” have always let her down. Now she faces the frightening prospect that if this man, who is more than a man, offers her his kind of pure, unselfish, un-needy love that cannot be manipulated or exploited, it would demand an authentic response –an “anah.”
This kind of love is terrifying.
“But if he said he loved me, I’d be lost, I’d be frightened. I couldn’t cope. Just couldn’t cope. I’d turn my head. I’d back away. I wouldn’t want to know.”
That’s the response of most people to the pure love and goodness of Jesus. Love like that requires a response –and we know we can’t love back like that. We are entirely inadequate. We feel like we have to clean ourselves up, to earn his attention somehow. We don’t know how to love him. Yet we know deep inside we cry out for union with perfect love.
“He scares me so. I want him so. I love him so.”
When is sex not about sex?
In Christian dream interpretation people are embarrassed and often reluctant to talk about dreams with sexual content, not realizing that intercourse in a dream is usually symbolic of union or being in a covenant with whatever the other participant represents. God will use powerful, evocative imagery that we understand on a personal level to speak deeper truths. He will give us upsetting or embarrassing dreams to make a point. This symbolic response, this “anah” to God is no mere one-way intellectual nod to his sovereignty. This is a total giving of oneself. This is a promise to remain in permanent union. This is a marriage. This is an unbreakable covenant we are making when we sing to him. It’s our “anah” moment.
But look what He says further down in that passage in Hosea.
“It will come about in that day that I will respond,” declares the Lord.
“I will respond to the heavens, and they will respond to the earth,
And the earth will respond to the grain, to the new wine and to the oil,
And they will respond to Jezreel.
“I will sow her for Myself in the land.
I will also have compassion on her who had not obtained compassion,
And I will say to those who were not My people,
‘You are My people!’
And they will say, ‘You are my God!’” (Hosea 2:21-23) NASB
Again he uses the sexual imagery of a husband who makes his wife a part of his people, who sees her as a rich fertile land full of possibilities, as someone who will partner with him in creation. He uses the same word “anah” when he says, “I will respond.” I will hear! I will answer! I will sing to her! I will be moved in my whole being by her response to me! I will purify her and make her the perfect bride.
It was easier for me to spend hours in intellectual debate about the attributes of God and His legal requirements than it was to hear his voice as he knocked at the door. When I began to wake to his relentless love I was terrified. A theoretical God, a master, did not require my entire self –my body, my mind, my emotion, my will, my heart; that god required only that I obey his instructions. This God, revealed in a man who has experienced everything I have, and still loves purely, is not satisfied with that. He is not be satisfied until I know the laser heat of his pure love that penetrates right to the center of my being.
Jesus has a beautiful voice
I hear Him sing to me sometimes. In the night -and in the day- I have heard him sing love songs. Don’t get me wrong; Jesus is not my boyfriend. I married mine. Jesus is not my sex partner; I have one of those – the same one I’ve been married to for over forty years, bless his beautiful heart. Jesus is the Lover of my soul. His love is far, far greater than any human can imagine and the longer I know him, the more he loves to demonstrate that no matter how wide, how high, and how deep I understand his love to be, it is much greater still.
God is good.
Be clothed with humility, for
“God resists the proud,
But gives grace to the humble.”
(1 Peter 5:5)
Charis: Subject to Change 