Archive for January 2012
God’s dayplanner
Posted on: January 22, 2012
Ever notice how God doesn’t check with us before filling out His dayplanner? Last week I wrote of the somewhat harrowing journey to Seattle through the worst snowstorm in years to get a CT angio for my cousin. In the next two days, we had a major ICE storm as well, which knocked our power out for just over a day. Thankfully, we have a good fireplace, a gas water heater (with no electronic ignition!), and a gas stove, so we do very well even without power. We have huge branches from our 26 trees down all over our yard (10-20 feet long, some with a base 8-12 inches across), three that landed on the roof, one of which punched THROUGH. On the second day of that storm, with the weather abating somewhat, my cousin ended up in the ER here as her condition took a serious turn for the worse, and was transferred up to… a hospital in Seattle! I am thankful to say the roads were bare and wet pretty much by then as the temperatures had warmed. I have been there the last two days, coming home late last night to get one night’s sleep in my own bed and get a few things done – like updating this blog – before heading back to Seattle for two or three more days before another home visit, then back up. This may be a long affair! Would you believe our power just went out AGAIN 15 minutes ago? Another tree snapping the power line. (I came down to my mom’s to use her computer, as she hasn’t had ANY power outs.) The effects of this storm are also far from over – and we have more wind predicted. It feels very strange for me to be leaving my husband and daughter to deal with all the mess and insurance and everything, but there’s no way around it. Marie needs me more! None of us saw this coming – but God did. He had his dayplanner all filled out. He already had set things in motion to prepare the way. One example is that last week or so, I did another big batch of cooking freezer meals, and even wrote out a calendar of menus for the next two months, including side dishes. Now I don’t have to give a thought to what my dh and dd will do for feeding themselves. I mean, I know they’d have scrounged and not starved, but now I know they’ll be eating HEALTHY meals, and my dd won’t feel the burden of figuring out just what to fix. Cool way God fixed that up, huh? I’m keeping my eyes peeled for those things in these days of stress and uncertainty. I don’t know when I’ll get to update this blog again, but I hope you all are remembering, whatever you face, that God has already crossed over the Jordan ahead of you to prepare the way. Nothing catches Him by surprise, and He’s ready for the consequences! He is faithful and true, and He will accomplish it!!!
Dash it all, that snow
Posted on: January 18, 2012
I hate snow. Really. The only way I enjoy snow is on a pretty picture post card. I spent 6 years in northern Utah, and 4 years in eastern Washington, and had snow enough to last me a lifetime. One of the things I like about being now in WESTERN Washington, at the bottom of Puget Sound, is that we can go entire winters without getting a single flake. Most years that we do get snow, we get a maybe an inch or two that lasts for a day or two, once or twice the whole winter. Then there are the other years.
We’ve had a bit of snow – a few inches – the last few days. Big, fat, fluffy flakes came down thick yesterday morning for some time, but had turned to rain in the afternoon so most main streets were pretty bare and parking lots were fields of slush puddles. Last night, however, a major storm moved in. We were warned to expect up 11-14 INCHES here in Olympia, with total growing less as you move toward Seattle, about 60 miles north. Travel advisories. School closures. State offices closed, workers telecommuting. Only idiots and the desperate would go out in something like this. (We don’t have as much snow equipment to handle it – plows, de-icers, etc. – like places that regularly get snow do, so it really is more of an issue. Besides the fact that the vast majority of western Washingtonians freak out at the mere thought of driving on s-s-s-s-s-now.) So, naturally, it was THIS morning that I had to have my cousin, Marie, up to Seattle by 9:30 for a crucial medical appointment. Idiot or desperate? Not sure there’s a difference! This is the story of our dash through the snow.
Before leaving, I prayed, “Lord, please get us there.” The drive to the side street to Marie’s apartment complex at 6:45 was a breeze, since main roads and the freeway had been plowed not too long before. The side road, and the drive through the complex, however, had not seen a plow since the whole thing began. Snow was easily already at least 8″ high. I followed a set of tracks someone had already driven through. Got Marie in the car. Tried to back out the way I’d come in…. and was stuck! Tried digging out the wheels, rocking it, etc. All the usual tricks for snow. Nothing. “Lord, you got me this far. Please don’t let it end here. Send someone to help.” In my rearview, I saw a figure, snow shovel in hand approaching down the drive!
I got out to greet him, and explained WHY I was out in that snow. Jay is a maintenance worker with the complex, and he promised he’d get me out, whatever it took. After working for 10 minutes, though, he had made little progress. “Lord, either let this work, or send someone else to help!” Another figure approached, this time a resident who’d heard the noise. Together, it took them another 20 minutes or more, but they did it. God bless them!!!! By 7:30, Marie and I were on the freeway headed north.
For the first nearly 20 miles, it was just snow driving, which is pretty easy. Visibility was good, no one was being stupid, things were fine. Then the snow on the road turned into thick, mushy slush, at least 6″ deep. If you’ve never driven on it, let me tell you that driving in that is MUCH, much harder than on just nice, dry snow. Mostly, you just try to choose one set of tracks and follow them. Sometimes, though, there aren’t any clear tracks through a patch. Then you lose traction, and you can be forced hither and yon following whichever way has the most “give” to it. Hit a place where one set of wheels has traction and the other one suddenly doesn’t…. and you can find yourself in a spin out. You don’t have to be going very fast! You’re in the spin before you know it. Oh, yeah. Spun all the way from the left of the freeway across two other lanes to bump the front left corner of the car into the center barrier, coming to a stop at a 45 degree angle backwards to the oncoming traffic, but with just a bit of the tail sticking into the lane. Amazing what prayers can go up in that time. I don’t coherently remember them, but I know they were going. No one hit us. Everyone went around us, except this one little car that stopped in that near lane. I waited for it to move so I could maneuver more to the side, maybe turn a 360 if aI got a gap, when he flipped on his lights. Oooh, highway patrol, I get it. I got out, took a look at my front end, and shrugged my shoulders. The cop looked back to the road, and there was no more traffic for a MILE behind us. He grinned, told me to just back up in a U-turn and be on my way then! The whole thing took less than a minute. “Thank you, thank you, thank you….” repeat repeat repeat
Roads got even nastier toward Seattle, but we made it. (more “Thank you s”) Got off onto city streets. Had to climb about 7 blocks of a stiff hill to get to the medical building – and had green lights at all the right places, and reds only where it wasn’t a problem to stop. 2 hours drive time, which is pretty good for what would normally have been about an hour fifteen. I dropped Marie off at the patient drop/pick up, got back in the car, had a mini-sob session, and went to park. When we were done with the appointment, I got a suggestion from the doctor for a different way to go when we left that didn’t involve going back DOWN that hill. This time, too, the lights were always with us, all the way to the freeway. (More “Thank you s”. He got a lot of those today.)
Roads outbound were even worse than they’d been, for the first 15 miles, with the last being about terrifying, with not one, but TWO, misses-by-inches of big pick-up trucks barreling past us, slewing this way and that in the slush. (I kept a smile on my face for Marie’s sake and was inwardly, um, “crying out” to the Lord, shall we say? Something like a white-eyed, pee your pants “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!”) Then, for about 30 miles, we had bare, wet pavement with slush only down the middle and between lanes. Glorious! What a relief! Then the last 15 miles of the trip… Ever sit in one of those vibrating massage chairs at the fair? The kind that sorta make your teeth feel like they’re going to rattle out? Well, we hit slush again, but this time over FROZEN, chain-chewed-up ice! It wasn’t slick, but oh, my goodness, was it rough – and say goodbye to any sense of real control of where you were going! You just followed the ruts, no matter where they wandered. (I wonder if my prayers vibrated as much as our voices did if we tried to talk?) But we made it back to Olympia in about the same time it took the other way! I stopped at our house and picked up Rob and a snow shovel, unsure what we’d find back at Marie’s apartment complex, but Rob was able to pull in and back right out. (Yet another “Thank you!”) Got poor Marie back to her apartment and us back home. I think none of us are budging again until this snow is GONE!
Now, the fact that God got me to Marie’s didn’t mean He was obligated to get me back out. Even the fact that He sent people to HELP didn’t obligate Him to let it be successful. The fact that He got me out didn’t mean He was obligated to keep us from spinning out on the way. The fact that He kept us safe in that spin out didn’t mean He was obligated to get us to Seattle. The fact that He got us to Seattle didn’t mean He was obligated to get us to the medical building. The fact that He got us there, didn’t mean He had to …. You get the idea.
I know a lot of people who would talk about this trip and say something like, “It was just so obvious that God was with you!” But I can’t say that. That is, yes, He WAS with us – but He would have been just as much with us if at any of those points, things had gone another way! Some would say, “Wow! God really answered our prayers!” But I can’t say that. That is, yes, He DID answer our prayers – but He would have been answering our prayers just as much if had things gone differently, for, at heart, our prayers are essentially all “Thy will be done”, aren’t they? And it always is! I admit it’s easier to be thankful when things go all “cool” like they did this trip, but we should always be just as ready to accept the difficult as the easy from His hand.
All day I’ve had a rhyme going through my head that a friend taught me years ago. “Has He taught us to love Him and call on His name/And thus far has brought us – but to put us to shame?” It’s a rhetorical question, of course. No matter what happens to us, whether the trip goes well or we spin out, we get hit or we escape, His purposes are always good. He will never put us to shame.
Now (my snow-loving friends, forgive me) I hope He’ll take away this dashed snow….
“Pay” to pray? No way!
Posted on: January 13, 2012
- In: Christianity | freedom | prayer
- Leave a Comment
We get some odd ideas about God, don’t we?
My first pregnancy was pretty easy. My second was not. From early on in that pregnancy, I resented that fact. I was so mad at God about it that I basically sat and pouted about it for nine months, refusing to look at Him. When it came time for delivery, things got really, really bad. It was an induced labor done way too soon, and was terrible, awful, horrible, horrendous…. You get the idea. Worse than all the physical pain, though, was that I had this idea that because I’d spent the previous nine months in a tantrum, I had no “right” to ask God to help me through it. So I went it alone.
It was several months after the birth before I finally dared to look at Him. Honestly, I expected Him to be mad at me. I expected Him to resent my tantrum, my lack of trust. I pictured Him standing there with His arms crossed, one toe tapping impatiently, lips pursed to the side, eyebrows raised…… just waiting to chew me out as soon as I came crawling back. I figured He’d tell me the birth experience was payback for not walking right during the pregnancy. “It’s just as well you didn’t pray, kid. I sure wouldn’t have been listening, not after what you pulled!”
Of course, that’s not what happened. While I was sitting pouting, thinking I had my back to Him as He stood somewhere aways away, He was sitting right in front of me. Instead of arms crossed, His arms were held out to me wide open, just waiting for me to fall into His lap. His face was lit with a warm, sympathetic smile, and His eyes glowed with a loving gaze that still held a trace of a tear – and I realized that while He had been sad about my tantrum, it had never – NEVER – “offended” Him. He had never been mad back at me. And I saw that I had never been alone. I had cut myself off from FEELING His presence, yes, but nothing I could do could ever cut me off from His presence. He had still been the One carrying me through that awful time. Had I cried out to Him during that delivery, He wouldn’t have held His love hostage to a confession of my sin; He would have immediately rushed to reassure me of His love.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot this week after reading a prayer request that left me so, so sad. It’s not the first time that I’ve run across the sentiment, of course, but to see it in this particular situation just grieved me. It was written by a dad requesting prayer for his little girl who is very, very ill. The blog post basically stated that because God is holy and righteous, unless we have our act together, hands all clean and hearts all repentant, before we pray, He won’t listen to us. If we have unconfessed sin in our life, our prayers won’t work. This poor, sweet father whose heart is so burdened for his little one was worried that unless those praying for her were coming to God repentantly, confessing their sins, their prayers wouldn’t really ring “loud and clear” in His ears. So, so sad. What a misperception of God!
Imagine the most loving parent you possibly can – one who would do (and has done) absolutely anything for his child. Suppose the parent has told the child not to eat a cookie, but the child “sneaks” one anyway. Before the parent has chosen to scold the child about it, or the child’s conscience has moved him to confess it, suppose the child falls from a tree and breaks his leg. Imagine that parent listening to that child scream in pain and standing there saying, “Well, I’ll help you, of course, but FIRST there’s that matter of the cookie to take care of.”
Seems ludicrous to even think of it, yet that’s exactly how we picture God if we lay ourselves under the expectation that unless we have gotten ourselves all straightened out first, He’s going to put His fingers in His ears and sing “La la la Can’t hear you!” when we cry to Him in time of need. What bondage to believe that we have to essentially EARN the “right” to have our Father pay attention to us.
Christ died for us while we were sinners. God gave us His Son when we couldn’t have cared less. He extended His grace to us while we still hated Him. So, now that we have become His dearly beloved children, fellow heirs with His Son, indwelt by His Spirit – NOW we think He’s going to stand in a huff at us when we trip and fall short? NOW we think He holds it against us that we’re not perfect? Do we really think that in a time of dire need, He is going to withhold His help until we get our act all together, or use just the right words, or whatever? The God Who sends rain on the just and the unjust, Who instructed us to bless those who curse us, and do good to those who do us evil – now that we’re His children, He’s going to take an “I’ll only be nice to you if you do everything like you’re supposed to” position?
There is no sin which we have to take care of before He can hear our prayers because the things that we need to repent of and confess have already been covered by the Blood of the Lamb. God’s holiness and righteousness have been satisfied on the cross. Our acceptance by God is not conditional on how clean our hands are or how repentant we are. We are His children, beloved, warts and all. NOTHING – not even our failures, our not-yet-repentant hearts, or our not-yet-confessed sins – can separate us from His love. If we have “cookie” issues, He’ll deal with those because they aren’t good for us and distract us from the right path, but they’ll never be something He’ll hold against us and use as an excuse to withhold His love or His attention from us.
No matter what other issues we may have in our life, God will NEVER turn a deaf ear to the heart-cry of the children He gave His Son’s life for.
Name dropping
Posted on: January 5, 2012
I heard a sermon recently by a young pastor on the subject of waiting on the Lord. He had a lot of good things to say about how hard it can be to wait. He illustrated the theme by telling of a visit to the doctor some years back that had involved cooling his heels in the waiting room for an hour and a half. He then went on to describe in vivid, scathing detail what ensued in the visit – a disagreement with the doctor as to whether or not his elevated blood pressure was due to a medical condition or simply to his extreme anger at having had to wait so long. The pastor named the doctor, the city where he practiced, and stated that he was still practicing, “though I don’t know how”.
For a long time now, God has been “tenderizing” me over my own loose tongue when it comes to such name-dropping. Although name-dropping by public speakers bothers me because of the wider audience they have, it is no different than what most of us do with all too great a frequency in our own conversations. There is something in us that seems to delight in airing not just how we “done been wronged” but who in particular “done it”.
My high school years were hellish. For most of those years, I was under the leadership of a particular pastor, with occasional contact with a student ministry director at the college my siblings attended. Both, through commission and omission, influenced my life for the worse, missing what (to ME) seemed like obvious opportunities to have helped me. By God’s grace, I survived those years without killing myself or getting involved with the drugs my friends used. Once in college (in another state!), He turned my life around and set my feet on a new path. But the hurt from those earlier years didn’t just disappear. For many years after, when I told my story of God’s redemption, I included a full description of just what poor leaders those two men had been, and I named names.
Over time, however, God gave me some different perspective. He pointed out that I was still looking at those men’s actions as I had as a confused, hurting, immature teen – not as the adult I had become. I had accused both men of not caring, but on re-examining the issue, I realized that they did care, but were untrained and inexperienced in dealing with my type of situation. Did they make some really poor decisions, give some lame responses, take some inappropriate actions? Absolutely – just as I have myself in my own ministry and parenting. God showed me that what I was doing was, in fact, slander – speech for the purpose of defaming or unjustifiably attacking a person’s reputation. Yes, they did what they did – but those were not the ONLY things they did. On the whole, both men had successful ministries in their respective spheres. My stories unfairly ignored all the good they did for the sake of the particular “failures” involving me – and I wanted the rest of the world to condemn them for my sake. (Sounds ugly, but it’s the truth.) My slander of these men was just as wrong as the actions that I held against them!
[I wrote to both men and asked forgiveness for having spoken so, which may or may not have been the wisest thing to do, since, as far as I know, they had had no idea I held such a grudge against them in the first place. Writing made me feel better, but it may have been easier for them if I hadn’t! Anyway, I told them that they didn’t have to respond, I just wanted to get it off my chest, as it were. One wrote back anyway, and his gracious words of forgiveness, and humble request for the same for anything he had done to give rise to that hurt, are among the most treasured letters I’ve ever received. ]
Because of this experience from my own life, I do think about some questions now that I didn’t used to, whether the story is told for illumination, comparison, or just entertainment. Are you absolutely sure you have a godly perspective on this? If you’re honest, would you have to admit that you’re telling the story less for the benefit of the hearers and more to satisfy a sense of revenge, or just to make yourself look good by comparison? Are you sure you are judging justly? Do you truly believe that all of that person’s character or career should stand condemned because of what you hold against him? That is, if your story is all someone ever knows about Mr. X, will it be a fair representation? What if, unknown to you, the person now regrets what she did? How would you feel about having spread the story then? How do you think the person (or their family or friends) would feel to hear that story told about him? Even if the story isn’t slanderous, but simply puts the subject in an unflattering light, would you want to be talked about in that way? Could you tell the same story using a fictitious name, or “a friend of mine”, or “someone in our family”, instead?
I still trip up on this point far too often, but I’m trying to remember that if the name isn’t germane to the point of my story, rather than name-drop, I should just drop the name!
Peas and thank you, Glenn!
Posted on: January 1, 2012
Back in college, a friend and I had a conversation one day about ships and shoes and sealing wax and cabbages and ….. peas. I grew up with a dad who never met a food he didn’t like. Oh, he’d admit that some he liked better than others, but the concept of “not liking” a food was totally outside his comprehension. This meant that we kids were raised with the expectation that WE would like all foods….. sooner or later. “I’ve tried it a million times and I DON’T LIKE IT!!!” we would politely screech. “But maybe THIS TIME you will!” was his never-changing reply. No quarter given. Unless it sent you into anaphylactic shock, you were expected to eat it.
He wanted us kids to be adventurous eaters, welcoming all foods, as easy to please as he himself was. Admirable goal. However, the effect his method had on me was quite the opposite of what he intended. I reached adulthood a terribly picky eater, with sharply defined lists of Foods I Like (a not terribly long list) and Foods I Do NOT Like (a veeeery long list, indeed!). I could go to a potluck at church with tables brimming over with dishes of every variety, and barely find enough “safe” food to fill my plate. No anonymous casseroles for me, thank you! And that one looks like it might have something strange in it. I don’t recognize that vegetable. … You get the idea.
For some reason, my intense resentment against my dad’s insistence on liking everything, and on eating things which I already knew I didn’t like distilled itself most distinctly in a hatred of …. Little. Green. Peas. I hated them with a passion usually reserved for black mold, athlete’s foot, or lice. Early in my friendship with Glenn at Whitworth, he had revealed to me that he, too, found the tiny, round things repulsive. Nothing like a shared hatred to cement a growing camaraderie, right? So, imagine my surprise – no, shock – when one day I discovered him eating peas. Deliberately. On purpose. With willful, though not suicidal, intent. When I asked him for an explanation, he gave an intriguing reply. “I’m trying to get away from thinking about foods only in terms of what I ‘like’ or ‘don’t like’. I’m trying to just train myself to think, ‘Ok, this is just what peas taste like.’”
I confess that, at the time, I didn’t really get it, and I can’t say it had much impact on my eating habits. At least, not consciously. But over the last ten years or so, little by little, I have been breaking out of my food prison, and those wise words of my friend have come back to me many a time. In particular, I set myself the task of revisiting those foods that I was so sure I Did Not Like, to simply explore “What do those foods taste like, anyway?” You see, for most of them, it had been so long since I actually even tried them that I had no idea! The results have been pretty fun. Many of those previously-rejected foods I have discovered I now like. Even LOVE. Cherries, avocados, figs, kiwi, oh, my! Some foods I have confirmed the reason they were on my Do Not Like List in the first place. Even the smell of canned salmon still makes me ill. A host of other foods I have found that I can eat with equanimity by simply accepting that “this is what this food tastes like”. I even gave peas a chance, and found that, cooked right, they’re not bad. I’m still not the adventurous eater my dad was, and I don’t expect I ever will be. That’s ok. I’m me, not him. But at least now I when I go to a potluck, I’m not worried about starving! I’m gaining food freedom.
I’m finding a wider application of this principle as well. Not surprisingly, food isn’t the only area of life wherein I have been so busy consigning things to specific positive or negative categories based solely on my own bias that I haven’t had time to learn to simply appreciate them for what they are. People. Music. The way people dress. Decisions people make. By concentrating on evaluating these so that I can categorize them to a “Like” or “Do Not Like”, “approve” or “do not approve” I think I’ve missed out on a lot of life.
Obviously, some people I will immediately feel an attraction to, and some I will feel repulsed by, but the most important thing about someone shouldn’t be whether or not I like him, but who he IS. I have found that I can learn to appreciate many good characteristics of someone that I don’t feel any particular affinity for. I can even appreciate abilities of people I can’t stand when I look farther than just the fact that I don’t like them. And for those few who I do not like and are consistently obnoxious, accepting that that is simply the way they are frees me from feeling in any way “surprised” at their actions and stops them from being able to control me by jerking my emotional chain.
I know all the reasons many people are prejudiced against tattoos, and I’ll agree that there are a lot of really ugly tatts out there. For a lot of years, I had a reaction of “Ugh. I don’t like tattoos.” But in more recent years, I have learned to appreciate the beauty of the art that is in many of them, and more importantly, I have found that engaging someone in the “whys” of their ink can give me important insights into their life. If all I do is say, “I don’t like tattoos”, then I have shut the door. Tattoos are just art on PEOPLE. Ordinary people. I don’t want to give a tattoo the power to blind me to the person wearing it.
I don’t enjoy my son’s screaming mimi (Christian!) rock music – but if just say, “I don’t like it. It’s bad. It’s not really music.” I’ve shut the door on ever being able to learn to appreciate what it is about the music that my son LIKES. If I can accept the music as being what it is – “This is just what this music sounds like” – perhaps I can find a new way to relate to my son. (…OK, there’s gotta be another way!!)
I have enough to do in this life without wasting so much time worrying about other people’s business, and whether I “like” or “do not like” what they’ve done. In this new year ahead, I want to learn to just appreciate the experiences of life more and more, in and of themselves. Whether I “like” it or not, I want to taste the flavor of life in all its fullness!
Happy New Year! Peas, choy and loaves to all!
the susie solution 