God – Page 48 – thelifeididntchoose

Arguing with God

I don’t expect to win and I don’t think I’ll get an audible answer, but I will tell you I’ve had some rip-roaring, humdinger arguments with God.

Now the pious among us will probably be shocked. They may tell me I’m pushing the envelope of grace or even sinning by asking God what exactly He is doing in this Valley of the Shadow of Death.

That doesn’t deter me-there are plenty of scriptural precedents for asking God, “why” and begging Him for an answer to the pain of this broken world.

Moses wanted to know how come he got stuck leading a bunch of whiny migrants tramping through the desert.

Paul begged God to take away the thorn in his flesh.

Jesus and Job both asked the question.

Though He slay me, I will hope in Him. Nevertheless I will argue my ways before Him.
‭‭Job‬ ‭13:15‬ ‭NASB‬‬

We usually don’t quote the last half of that verse, do we?

We stop at the affirmation and leave off the doubt-Job’s desperate desire to understand just what God was doing when it seemed unfair and capricious.

Most of the book of Job is full of questions. Job asking why he was targeted and his friends asking him what sin he was hiding.

Come now, let us argue it out, says the Lord: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.

Isaiah 1:18 NRSV

God invites us to ask. He opens the door to questions.

He is willing to “talk”.

But He doesn’t always answer every question.

In the end, Job’s mouth was shut not by God giving him assurance of anything except His “otherness” and the fact that He IS God.

A difficult truth to embrace.

One I ponder often.

I hurt, I sorrow, I agonize over the loss that has come into my life. A precious life has been taken away. I feel great grief and pain. It sears my every waking hour and casts a puzzling dreary shadow across my life’s journey.

At a time like this, it is imperative that I remember that God has not promised to keep my life bubbling with pleasing sensations. I must not prostitute God by giving Him the responsibility of being an indulgent Santa Claus in the heavens. God is not my servant. I am His servant.

As I come to grips with my grief, I reject the sentimentalized, sickly religion so popular today. God’s comfort is not insulation from difficulty; it is spiritual fortification sufficient to enable me to stand firm, undefeated in the fiery trials of life. God’s provision is not always green pastures and still waters. Sometimes God leads into the valley of the shadow, but I may walk there with confidence, assured of the love and presence of God.

No longer can I offer a mindless, frivolous assertion that God always measures up to my every expectation of Him and always gives His children goodies. I must declare that some things are beyond my human understanding in the ways of God. Those mysteries have destroyed my comfortable existence, but I proclaim: ‘Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him’ (Job 13:15). I will hurt for years to come. A hundred times a day I feel keenly the void left by death’s cruel blow. That pain, however, must drive me to stronger trust in God whose providence is not always compatible with my desires.

~James Means, A Tearful Celebration

New Year, New You?

January is the month of resolutions and new beginnings!

So I boldly declare that THIS year I will (take your pick):

Lose weight
Eat only healthy food
Exercise more
Read more books
Declutter my house
Spend more time with family
Spend less time with electronics
Blah,blah,blah

Wouldn’t it be grand if all it took was the turn of a calendar page to make all things new?

How wonderful if I could wipe the slate clean and start afresh just because the earth had made another round of the sun!

But the average length of time these commitments last is just 7-10 days. (Which by now, most of us have already found out.)

Why?

Because we can rarely make sweeping changes that go against habits and character traits just because we say it aloud or write it on a special piece of paper.

Life’s not like that.

Life is an amalgamation of thousands of small and a few not-so-small choices that combine to make me who I am.

Choices become habits and habits become character.

And then there are the other things–the things I didn’t choose-that slam into me and violently reshape who I am-ready or not.

How I respond to what I can’t control continues to remake who I am.

There is ONE resolution that can remake me from the inside out.

There is one habit that that will not only make THIS year new, but will make ME new.

There is a single choice that I can make every day that will affect me and everyone around me.

It’s not hard, but there will be resistance. It doesn’t require special equipment, but it requires commitment. I don’t have to be in shape-as a matter of fact, the more out-of-shape I am, the more remarkable the transformation.

If I place my heart in the hands of Jesus by sitting in silence with Him each day, reading His Word and asking Him to open my eyes to the beauty He places in my path-even this rocky road of child loss-He will renew my mind and transform my character so that I am conformed to His image.

He is the Potter.

The work is His.

I am the clay.

Repost: God of the Day and God of the Night

I was afraid of the dark until I was almost forty years old.

My fear was rooted in scary childhood moments and even years of adult experience could not rip it from the soil of my psyche. I never could convince my heart what my head knew to be true: there was nothing in the dark that wasn’t also there in the light.

It was fear, not darkness, that controlled me.

There is great darkness in grief. So many unanswerable questions, so much anquish, so much pain.

Read the rest here: God of the Day and God of the Night

I Don’t Want to Know The Future

Many years ago my grandparents had a lovely Fiftieth Anniversary Celebration with family and friends.

My dad videotaped it and the tape was full of fun moments where my grandmother was smiling, laughing and having a wonderful day.

It was a short time afterward that she began to show signs of dementia and not very long after that she left us.

We watched the videotape a year or two after her leaving and I thought, “What a mercy she didn’t know what was coming!”

Those moments were full of unadulterated joy because a sorrowful future was hidden from her heart.

What a mercy that curves in the road obscure my vision and mountaintop to mountaintop hides valleys in between.

I am so very thankful that I did not live the 23+ years I had with Dominic knowing his accident was coming. I was free to love him without fear.

If I, like God, knew the end from the beginning my heart could never bear the burden of foresight.

But He, in kindness, withholds the knowledge from my feeble frame and leads me step by step each day.

The Power of Lament to Make Room for Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving was always my favorite holiday.

I loved everything about it: the color scheme, the food (I love, love, love to cook-it was never a burden), family and friends gathered around the table, and the wonderful slowness of the day as it lingered into nightfall.

It was more flexible than Christmas for including all sorts of folks who otherwise didn’t have someplace to go. Living near colleges meant that we welcomed students from around the world-we might have two or three dozen laughing faces milling about.

It was wonderful.

And I loved going around the circle, tummies bursting, to share what people were thankful for and why.

When Dominic left us everything changed.

Oh, I was (and still am) so very thankful for so very many things-my family, daily physical provision, ongoing care and love of friends, the enduring faithful mercy of God.

But there’s something else too: there is deep sorrow at the unavoidable FACT that when God COULD have stepped in and changed an outcome, He DIDN’T.

And I’m having to learn to open my heart to thankfulness while also bearing witness to this pain.

Praise and lament in the same breath.

I have plenty of company.

The world we live in is full of pain and suffering. Injustice reigns. We make our way through thorns and by the sweat of our brow.

It is just plain hard.

The psalmist acknowledges that. He doesn’t rush past the pain. He doesn’t gloss over the broken places.

He empties his heart of the feeling that God has forgotten. But he doesn’t stop there-he chooses to bring the emptiness back to the only One Who can fill it up again.

Like the psalmist, I’m learning that I must exhale before I can inhale.

I must admit the burden of hopelessness to make room for the blessing of hope.

“With my voice I cry out to the LORD: with my voice I plead for mercy to the LORD.”

I ADMIT I FEEL ABANDONED:

In the path where I walk
they have hidden a trap for me.
Look to the right and see:
there is none who takes notice of me;
no refuge remains to me;
no one cares for my soul.

AND YET I WILL CHOOSE TO TRUST:

I cry to you, O LORD;
I say, “You are my refuge,
my portion in the land of the living.”

IN THE HOPE THAT GOD HEARS:

Attend to my cry,
for I am brought very low!

SO THAT MY TESTIMONY MAY BE ONE OF PRAISE:

Bring me out of prison,
that I may give thanks to your name!

Psalm 142, selected

As I sit at the table, cherishing the companionship of those I love and missing the one I can no longer see, I will embrace thanksgiving and lament.

I will exhale and inhale.

I will beg for grace and mercy because I can no longer beg to be spared from sorrow.

I will ask for eyes to see and a faithful heart while I wait.

Yielded and Still

potter-clay

I can’t claim to be satisfied with this life I’m living.

I do not like this path I am forced to walk, this darkness that hides the light, this pain that burrows deep in my bones.

But I can say I’m learning not to fight it.

Sometimes I still pitch a fit.

Sometimes I still yell at the sky, “Where were You?” Sometimes I lie down in the floor and beg for relief. Sometimes I quietly rebel with only a single tear.

Most days though, I get up and give in.

I turn my face to the rising sun and choose to carry on. I submit my heart, again, to the One Who created it.

I don’t struggle.

I don’t fight the facts that greet me.

“I don’t think the way you think.
    The way you work isn’t the way I work.”
        God’s Decree.
“For as the sky soars high above earth,
    so the way I work surpasses the way you work,
    and the way I think is beyond the way you think.
Just as rain and snow descend from the skies
    and don’t go back until they’ve watered the earth,
Doing their work of making things grow and blossom,
    producing seed for farmers and food for the hungry,
So will the words that come out of my mouth
    not come back empty-handed.
They’ll do the work I sent them to do,
    they’ll complete the assignment I gave them.”

Isaiah 55:8-11 MSG

I am not God.

His thoughts are not my thoughts.

His ways are not my ways.

His plans are bigger than me, bigger than my hopes and dreams, bigger than anything I can imagine.

He has created me for His glory-not the other way around.

So I join with thousands who sing:

Have Thine own way, Lord,
Have Thine own way;
Thou art the Potter,
I am the clay.
Mould me and make me
After Thy will,
While I am waiting,
Yielded and still.

Have Thine own way, Lord,
Have Thine own way;
Wounded and weary,
Help me, I pray.
Power, all power,
Surely is Thine,
Touch me and heal me,
Savior divine.

Repost: Time Change

pocket watch

Every spring and every fall we dutifully make the rounds to our clocks and digital devices, putting them first forward an hour and then back in an attempt to make the days “longer”.

As if time was in our hands.

The sun rises and sets according to the Creator’s schedule, we can neither speed the world’s turning, nor slow it down. We can only choose whether to be present in the moments He grants us.

Read the rest here: Time Change

Homesick

desire-for-another-world-c-s-lewis

Forty years!

Forty years Israel wandered in the desert, unable to claim the promise given them through Moses.

Forty years forbidden to set foot across the Jordan and partake of the bounty that lay on the other side.

Forty years of death as the rebellious ones were laid to rest because of their rebellion.

I bet they got tired of traveling. I bet they were weary of moving on. I bet they wondered (even though they had sure knowledge) just when this would be over.

And all that time, even in the midst of their heartsick longing to go back, have a do-over, make it right and the heavy weight of knowing, knowing, knowing there would be no going back, the LORD was in their midst-a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night-He was there.

I understand completely.

Sundown yesterday began the Feast of Tabernacles for Jews around the world. It’s a seven day period to celebrate God’s faithfulness in the wilderness and to remember that this world is not our home.

Feast of Tabernacles Transp.png

I think it is a beautiful tradition and a wonderful way to speak truth to our hearts.

Because it’s easy to forget.

Unless something happens that sharpens the homesick longing that lies latent in all our hearts, it’s easy to get comfortable here. Life seems pretty good-we gather our people and our stuff around us and think, “I could stay here forever.”

But no one stays here forever.

This world is not my home.

It never has been.

And I am tired of traveling. I am tired of moving on. I wonder just when this is going to be over.

But even here, God is in the midst of it.

Emmanuel-God With Us-is near.

Jehovah-Shalom-The LORD My Peace-is speaking peace that passes understanding to my weary spirit.

I was created for a place where love and light reign and sickness and death cannot enter.

I feel it every day.

“I began to try to define the pain I felt. Yes, it was sorrow, but it was something more, something infinitely deeper. I felt it all the time, even when I was happy. It wasn’t just sorrow. It was a longing; a pining for a better place and time … no, not just a better place and time, a perfect place and time; a different reality. It felt like longing for home, but not for a home I had ever been to. I began to see that it was something like homesickness …. Perhaps Christians are the most consistently homesick people in the world because they know this world (as it is) isn’t their true home. Yes, I was home, but I was still homesick.”
~Elyse Fitzpatrick, Home

Eternal Atonement: Hallelu Yah!

The Fall Feasts of Israel are a beautiful reminder of Who God is and what Christ has done for us.

Beginning this evening and continuing until sunset tomorrow, Jews around the world are observing Yom Kippur or The Day of Atonement.

According to Scripture (Leviticus 16), The Day of Atonement was commanded by God for Israel to remember the terrible debt of sin and the only acceptable payment–blood.

The high priest would enter the Holy of Holies and apply blood to the horns of the mercy seat, thus covering over for another year the individual and corporate sin of Israel.

According to Jewish tradition, God inscribes each person’s fate for the coming year into a book, the Book of Life, on Rosh Hashanah, and waits until Yom Kippur to “seal” the verdict. During the Days of Awe, a Jew tries to amend his or her behavior and seek forgiveness for wrongs done against God and against other human beings. The evening and day of Yom Kippur are set aside for public and private petitions and confessions of guilt. At the end of Yom Kippur, one hopes that they have been forgiven by God.

Yet year after year, this sacrifice was not enough.

The blood of animals is insufficient to pay the debt owed by men to a perfect and holy God.

But the blood of the Perfect Lamb, Jesus Christ, has completely paid the debt I owe-I no longer cower in the shadow of my sin.

When I chose to apply that blood to my heart by faith, I was made right with the LORD.

As a believer in Jesus the Christ, I have a High Priest that has offered His own blood as the Perfect Sacrifice once for all (Hebrews 9).

I can rest assured that I’m not sealed only for a day, or even a year, but for all eternity!

Because Jesus is the eternal and sufficient propitiation for my sins, I need not fear death.

It is sin which gives death its power, and it is the Law which gives sin its strength. All thanks to God, then, who gives us the victory over these things through our Lord Jesus Christ!

I Corinthians 15:55-57 PHILLIPS

We do not have to bring a sacrifice to the altar and hope that our sins are forgiven. The Law holds no power over us who believe-Jesus fulfilled its every obligation.

But it is a good thing to take a day to reflect on the cost and the gift

Too often we grasp the gift and forget its cost.

Today, remember what the LORD has done for you. Remember the burden He lifted by His sacrifice. Remember His claim on your life–the life He purchased with His blood.

revelation-5_9

Remember.

If you are withholding grace and forgiveness–remember, and repent–give to others what God has graciously given to you.

If you are walking outside the will of God for your life–remember and repent-fall back in step behind the Lord Jesus and let Him guide you.

If you are dabbling in sin–remember and repent-turn from your wickedness and back to holiness.

Remember and be thankful.

“Blessed is he whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered.”

~Psalm 32:1

Dig the Well BEFORE You are Thirsty

I am not a fan of church signs.

Most of the time they try to be cute and reduce eternal truth to a few words that often leave room for [mis]interpretaion.

But I saw one today that I DID like: “Dig the well before you are thirsty”.

It takes time to dig a well.

And it’s hard work.

You can’t wake up one morning, decide to dig and expect results in a couple of hours. If you want a reliable source of water to quench your thirst you have to plan ahead.

It’s been my habit for about 25 years to wake early in the morning, read my Bible and journal. I started this practice when my children were young and boisterous and our active household meant once they were awake I’d have no time for quiet meditation.

But after reading Scripture for so long, I’d noticed the stories had become too familiar. I would read through some of them with a “yeah, yeah-heard that before” attitude.

So I committed to SLOW DOWN and force my heart to look carefully and listen closely to what the Spirit was speaking from the page.

I decided I would read just a single chapter each day and copy out a verse or two that stood out into my journal along with notes and comments. I found as I went along that it was harder and harder to choose only a couple of verses, so I began to copy whole chapters.

Of course I missed a day or two here and there so it took about three and a half years.

Just a few months before Dominic left us, I finished my slow journey through the Bible. I had copied out most of it by hand in six journals. I had underlined and circled and annotated the pages, making it my own.

I was digging my well.

I had no clue that I would be desperately thirsty in such a short time.

The morning I received the awful news-my heart shattered, my world spinning, my life undone-words of Truth bubbled to the surface unbidden.

Living Water sprang forth from the deep well of promise that was dug before I knew I needed it.

When I began my slow walk through Scripture, I didn’t know what the future held.

But my Shepherd-Who knows the end from the beginning-was leading me.

When my hands trembled too much to open the pages of my Bible and my eyes were too full of tears to see the print, the words stored up in the well of my heart spilled out to soothe my soul.

I continue to draw from this deep well and drink the Living Water.

It is a source of life and hope and sustaining strength until that day when a well will no longer be needed-when faith will be sight and I possess what has been promised.

Then he showed me a river of the water of life, clear as crystal, coming from the throne of God and of the Lamb, in the middle of its street. On either side of the river was the tree of life, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit every month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. There will no longer be any curse; and the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and His bond-servants will serve Him; they will see His face, and His name will be on their foreheads. And there will no longer be any night; and they will not have need of the light of a lamp nor the light of the sun, because the Lord God will illumine them; and they will reign forever and ever.

And he said to me, “These words are faithful and true”; and the Lord, the God of the spirits of the prophets, sent His angel to show to His bond-servants the things which must soon take place.

“And behold, I am coming quickly. Blessed is he who ^[e]heeds the words of the prophecy of this book.”

Revelation 22:1-7 NASB

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