Month: May 2014

Because I said so!

For the past three days, I have been attending a conference on Christian Counseling and Spiritual Direction. One of the speakers Rev. Dr. Siang-Yang Tan, made a comment that immediately reminded me of a comment another great thinker and former roommate of mine, Gwen Sweeny, had said recently in response to my last post Loves you the Most. 

Dr. Tan was commenting that it is often important to help people find meaning in their suffering. Recent studies have shown that those who rebound more quickly and even experience personal growth through suffering are those who could determine some purpose within the experience. That does not mean that God will answer all our “why” questions. Dr. Tan said the final answer to all Job’s questions was not an explanation. It was a creation-wide demonstration that Job’s mind was too small, too finite to be able to comprehend the answers even if were God to provide them. “Where were you?” when the I AM simply spoke and every molecule of the entire universe came into being! Dr. Tan compared it to the tried and true parental response to the “why”. Because I said so!

I immediately thought of Gwen’s comments,

“Because of my kids I understand my Father better. Why He allows and does the things He does. Because of my kids, I have become a better child to the Father. In that alone my kids have given me more then I could ever claim to have given to them. They have answered so many of the “why” questions of my youth. As a mom, I understand better the answer to the “why”. “Because I said so” does not sound empty and uncaring, but more- I do not have the capacity to understand and just need to trust in the love of a caring Father.”

Amen Gwen!

If only in the midst of our struggles, we could relax from our fevered thrashing in the Father’s arms (Like trying to hold a tired, fussy two-year old!) and just let Him hold us and carry us. Isaiah 30:15“For thus said the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel, “In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength”. But you were unwilling.” What can we learn from those moments when we have to slow down; we have to be still, or our hearts are broken open from having experienced loss or betrayal?

  1. We are not really in control of our lives, or our future. Heb. 2:8 “Now in putting everything in subjection to him, he left nothing outside his control.”
  2. We are not indispensible, irreplaceable; the world will keep spinning even if we are not running our little hearts out on the rat wheel of life. Ps. 103 15 As for man, his days are like grass; he flourishes like a flower of the field; 16 for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more.
  3. Faith is believing in the love of God as a constant in our lives especially when we do not see or feel him. 1 Peter 1:8-9, 8 Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, 9 obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.
  4. Hearts that are hard, brittle with bitterness break more easily. Hearts surrounded by a rigid shell cannot give or receive love until the shell is broken through. Ezekiel 36:26 And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.
  5. The fellowship of His suffering is the place of experiencing the deepest most intimate moments of the love of God.
  6. What is most important in this world is not what we can gain, accomplish; it really is all about who you know…

Philippians 3:10 (Amplified) For my determined purpose is that I may know Him that I may progressively become more deeply and intimately acquainted with Him, perceiving and recognizing and understanding the wonders of His Person more strongly and more clearly, and that I may in that same way come to know the power out-flowing from His resurrection, and that I may so share His sufferings as to be continually transformed in spirit into His likeness even to His death.

Yes Father, because you said so…Thanks Gwen and Dr. Tan!

Loves You the Most!

Tangled [1]by Disney was a fun animated movie; I confess I liked it, except for one part. After the evil villain bogus “mother” sings her Mother Knows Best song, they have the following exchange:

Evil villain mother: I love you very much dear

Rapunzel: I love you more

Evil villain mother: I love you most

This dialogue offended me greatly coming from the evil villain “mother” since it has always represented an affectionate moment between my children and me. However, since nothing in our family can remain only a pleasant exchange without becoming competitive, each child attempted to find a better superlative to add to the dialogue. The final winning version ran as follows,

“I love you the most of the best to infinity, to googol, ha ha, I win.”

From that point on, the competition became who could still remember this phrase. (Yeah… we are weird) My youngest gave up recently on even attempting and it made me sad.

I have a son who will be graduating this week, barring disaster and unforeseen circumstances. This son is my true middle child, not the oldest, not the first boy. Since that was also my position in my family of origin there is much I can understand about his struggles. However many parts of his personality come straight from his father. He has a tremendous wanderlust. Checking off new countries visited and new stamps in his passport is a game to him. In fact, everything becomes a game or competition to him, also a trait that comes from his father. He also shares his father’s intense love for all things historical. He loves to debate international politics, but you need a degree in geography to follow his conversations. I assume this would explain why, similar to his father, he has an excellent sense of direction. That should serve him well if he continues to tramp the globe.

He is my skeptic and my risk taker, my Mr. Charisma, which explains why I have been much in prayer for him recently as he will very soon be making his own way in the world. As I prayed today I repeated words that I have prayed many times before, “God, I know you love him the most!” However, this time the answer returned in my spirit,

“Yes, I love him the most, I showed that when I died for him

I love him the best, which means I will always do what is “best” for him, even if that seems difficult at the time.

I love him to infinity and beyond! My love for him will never end!

I love him beyond even googol; I will show my love to him in more ways than you can even count!

Yes of course in any competition of love for my boy, I win!”

 So I sit here with tears on my face committing another child, who never in reality was mine to keep, back into the hands of the Father who “loves him the most of the best to infinity, to googol, ha ha, God wins.”

…but I will still cry at his graduation…

[1]

Tangled. Dirs. Nathan Greno and Byron Howard. Disney. 2010. Film

How do you tell your Mom, “thank you”

My mother is an amazing woman, and today just happens to be her birthday. She never wanted to marry or have children, yet somehow managed to raise seven children. When I think realistically about how difficult it was for her; that feat becomes even more incredible to me.

The church my father pastored was small, the congregation was not wealthy.  Dad had to work a full-time secular job as well as pastor. In the early days, my mother would clean house for his boss’s wife. I still do not know how they managed to feed us. I do know we had a garden, we picked berries, my brother and Dad went hunting for small game. She baked bread and stretched everything to the absolute limit. Even now, my family has decided when the apocalypse hits, we are going to Grandma’s; she will be stocked up and ready.

One of my earliest memories is of my grandmother rocking me to sleep in her old wooden rocking chair. The reason is for that memory is that my mother and father were both working in either the shoe factory or the pickle factory at that time. Olfactory memories are also some of the strongest earliest memories. I remember my mother’s hands always smelled like wet tissues because she had been crying. It was hard, and there were conflicts.  Somehow, God enabled my parents to stick together in spite of it all. Perhaps as children, we should have been shielded from the realities of what they were facing, but there was no way for them to do that. It was our reality, and we just had to deal with it.  

Somewhere in the chaos of trying to keep us all together, my mother, out of desperation I believe, came to a place of total dependence on God. If we were going to survive, God was going to have to intervene in our lives. Each of us was given a Biblical name that had a promise connected in some way to it. We were intentionally dedicated to God. She always prayed that if we were not going to follow God as adults, He would take us to heaven as infants when we were still innocent. We are all still alive, so therefore, we had better live up to her, and God’s expectations.

She also learned to pray continually, fervently, and wholeheartedly. Someday, as one of my favorite preachers says, “I want to see the video” of the lives that have been impacted by her prayers. My mother does not tell people lightly that she will pray for them and then forget about it. She carries them on her heart and lifts them to God continually. She also, whenever it is in her power, puts feet to her prayers. She has taken people into her home, fed them, counseled them, nursed them and covered them with prayer– literally, she crochets blankets for people and prays for them while she makes them. She has never been too busy for anyone in need.

How do you thank someone for being this sort of mother? Impossible really.  However, now that I have adult children myself, I feel I have a different perspective. What would make me feel most blessed by my children?  I know my mother would be blessed if her children would do the following:

Surrender our lives to God and actively follow His will, completely.

Live with awareness and compassion for the needy people around us.

Do not whine and complain, recognize that all we have is a gift from God and be thankful.

Accept the mantle to pray for our children with the fervency and faith that she has shown in her prayers for us.

Share our lives with her. So, yeah, call her more often; visit her as often as humanly possible.

Promise her that she will see us in heaven someday.

Proverbs 31:28-31

“28 Her children rise up and call her blessed;
    her husband also, and he praises her:
29 “Many women have done excellently,
    but you surpass them all.”
30 Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain,
    but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.
31 Give her of the fruit of her hands,
    and let her works praise her in the gates.”

Thank you, Mom!

Keeping it Clean

“Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is like shoveling the sidewalk before it stops snowing.” ― Phyllis Diller

Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled; the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day. —Simone de Beauvoir

Laundry is, of course a state ,of being never a completed task. The perpetual requirement of housework can be a bit of a grind. No matter how spotless it was five minutes ago, unless you live alone, chances are good it will not remain that way. It seems every time you turn around, chaos theory explodes before your very eyes.  You want to hunt down that bothersome butterfly!

It would seem wise to keep things clean, rather than indulge in sudden manic attacks of OCD. Keeping clean requires a vigilance to detail that does not seem to come naturally to any of the members of my household. Then I face the Shakespearean question- to do (it myself) or not to do (wait for teenage boys to suddenly feel the need for order and cleanliness).

I was thinking of this in a spiritual context today, while I was pondering the futility of cleaning the glass door to the laundry room.  While I was growing up in the church there seemed to be a very great emphasis on initial experiences of salvation, sanctification, total surrender, being filled with the Spirit etc., and precious little on how to maintain and grow in one’s spiritual life. I remember feeling clean on the inside and thinking…what now?  To the best of my remembrance, I was told to read my Bible, pray and share the good news with others. Therefore, I started reading a chapter a day to keep the devil away, prayed until I fell asleep and would have shared with someone if they had asked and I could not find anyone else to help them.

Needless to say, this particular way of Christian living did not lead to overwhelming growth and tremendous spiritual fruit in my life; it also, unfortunately, went on for way too long. Sudden manic attacks of conscience resulting from life pressures would lead me to clean up my spiritual life, but I was not keeping it clean.

Temple cleaning is described in 2 Corinthians 6:16-7:1 (ESV)

For we are the temple of the living God; as God said,

“I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them,
    and I will be their God,
    and they shall be my people.
17 Therefore go out from their midst,
    and be separate from them, says the Lord,
and touch no unclean thing;
    then I will welcome you,
18 and I will be a father to you,
    and you shall be sons and daughters to me,
says the Lord Almighty.”

7:1 Since we have these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God.

Let me make some suggestions for consideration:

We are more aware of what might be defiling to our body, but what might be defiling to our spirit? What entertainment, fantasies, critical spirit, judgment, prejudices, and plain old mean-spiritedness are putting dark smudges on the windows of our temple?

The other lesson I wish someone had told me is that I was responsible for my spiritual growth, not some other preacher, or teacher. I could be as close to God as I wanted to be, but it was up to me.

James 4:7-9 (ESV) says it well,

7 Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. 8 Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.

You draw near and He will draw near.  Whatever works to challenge you to seek God, do it! I found I needed the discipline and accountability of weekly in-depth Bible study. If I am teaching or facilitating the group, I work even harder.

There are also the footsteps of the great followers who have gone before us. Obviously, they figured something out or we would never have heard of their lives.  I started finding my heroes and putting my little size fives into their big footsteps.  At first, when my children were small, I did not have time to sit down and read, so I listened to audio recordings while I worked and cleaned and cooked and drove (well you get the picture).  My children would probably find the voice of Elizabeth Elliot, Corrie Ten Boom and several others familiar if they heard them today. Challenge yourself with those who make you take big steps not just those who make you feel comfortable. 

Everyone needs discipleship, even if they have grown up in the church and heard the stories all their lives. Matthew 28:19-20 (ESV)

19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

I think we sometimes skip over the fact that we will need to be taught to be able to do what He has commanded us. We need to be taught and we need to teach others. Ahead of us on the path of life, someone’s light is shining that we can follow. Behind us, someone is desperately straining to see our light. Let’s keep the glass clean so we will shine brightly before them.