Wonders

To my way of thinking (admittedly, not everyone’s), it’s hard to beat a prolonged time of paying attention.  My favorite place to do that is (thank you, Annie Dillard) my own backyard.

Today I observed a flock of tiny sparrows.  They scratched for food in the marshy grass and hop-flew en masse into a tangle of honeysuckle; then, unstartled, they returned in a grace of flurry to the grass to scratch again.

Sparrows (I have learned by paying attention) are quite handsome little creatures.  Today’s variety I admired for the warm brown stripes on its head and body:  a song sparrow (Melospiza melodia).  I frequently spot white-throated sparrows (Zonotrichia albicollis) and chipping sparrows (Spizella passerina), and how these richly-painted masterpieces came to be considered common I’ll never know.

Someone has said that if the stars appeared only one night a year, everyone would camp out to see them. I say that this kind of wonder blooms everyday in the heart of every two year old.  

It is learnable.

Reading--Just Reading--the Psalms

I am not the first person to find the Psalms to be a source of survival.

Recently I came to these pages and brought a shriveled up soul, worn and parched.  I am known in my family for a sometimes annoyingly optimistic outlook, an even keel.  These resources had deserted me.  

I simply read, beginning with Chapter One.

. . . .Like a tree planted by the rivers . . . whose leaf shall not wither . . . the Lord knows the way of the righteous . . .Blessed are all those who put their trust in Him . . . You, O Lord, are a shield for me . . . Have mercy on me, O Lord, for I am weak . . .The Lord has heard . . . I have trusted in Your mercy . . . Goodness and mercy shall follow me . . .


The mercy there has fed my soul.  So far am I from having to perform in order to receive what I need.  So far am I from having to be strong.  I simply come with a great need.

This is my God, and in the Psalms He speaks to neediness.

Isn’t that the gospel?

Love hopes all things

Once I explained to someone who had been in a particular need for a long time that I was confident the need would be met.  My reason for that confidence was both objective and subjective:  I had prayed about the need for many years, soaking my requests in the good brine of Scripture (objective, that); and over those years my heart had grown more and more full of Hope in God's grace working through my prayers (subjective, somewhat).

It was a lovely moment when I read this validation of my experience.  I refer once more to the words of Phil Ryken:

        Love hopes all things.  Understand that whenever we give up hope, this is really a failure to love, because love hopes.  Love hopes that someone lost in sin will believe the gospel.  It hopes that a broken relationship will be reconciled.  It hopes that by the grace of God, sin will be forgiven, and forgiven again.  It hopes that even after a long struggle, there will still be spiritual progress.  It hopes that someone who has fallen away can be restored to useful service in the kingdom of God.  It even hopes that when a body gets sick and dies, it will be raised again at the last day.
       Love hopes all these things and then holds out that hope to the people it loves.  Love is willing to hope because it desires the very best in someone else's life.  It is able to hope because it puts its ultimate confidence in the God of love and in his grace for people in need. (p. 108, Loving the Way Jesus Loves, emphasis mine)

The people we love most are certainly the ones whose needs most heavily weigh upon us--often with profound disappointment, perhaps disappointment in the persons themselves.  What if we treat that disappointment with a refusal to give up hope?

Ryken's 'Loving Jesus' on Patience

Underneath our impatience with other people lies our impatience with God.  When we truly surrender our homes, our jobs, and our relationships to the lordship of Jesus Christ, we are able to wait patiently for his timing.  But until then, we are always struggling for more control and are very impatient when we fail to get it. (p.82)


Yes!!! I want to be in control!

However, I’m happy to say that I want to be in control less than I used to.  This patience that the Lord has been working into my character is probably best illustrated in my attitude toward intercessory prayer.  There are requests on my list--old, old requests--that I used to routinely grieve and mourn over.  I just knew that they were in accord with God’s will and that He should delight in answering .  But I also “knew” that His delay in answering was causing big problems.  The very situations I was addressing in prayer were being exacerbated by God’s failure to answer.  Now. Yesterday. Immediately.

Thankfully, all of those prayer requests are strictly tied to Biblical truth about God’s character and how He wants to work in people’s lives.  And as I have laid (and continue to lay) those scripture prayers before His throne, I have meditated on and studied what the scripture actually means so that I can pray The Truth accurately.  As a result of that prayerful study and studious praying, I have begun to understand that God’s workings in people’s lives takes the long view.
  
I have learned to see my prayers not as Associated Press updates that would be old news in a matter of days, but rather as things permanent and precious that God collects and keeps: Revelation 5:8 says that the prayers of the saints appear in heaven as golden bowls of incense, offered before the throne.  The prayers do not bear a sell-by date; they are ever timely, ever rising before Him as pleasing, worshipful incense.  I can trust Him to give His attention to answering them in the fullness of His time.  I can continue to pray.

This is patience, and it is a work of grace in me.

Loving the Way Jesus Loves

For a long time I've been persuaded that the combination of home, family, wifeliness and motherhood is the best school for learning to live a godly life.  So when I first read about this book I suspected it would offer me needed lessons in that very school.  (Not that I want to humble myself before the whole WWW world, but I am sometimes astounded at how un-loving I am, especially with those I love best.)

I should have known that I was in for a convicting, bumpy ride.  Here is some indication--and I've only gotten as far as Chapter 3--"Love is not irritable."

Most of us tend to think of irritability as a natural response to life's little frustrations. . . . We should take our irritability much more seriously, because it is the very opposite of love.  We know this because 1 Corinthians 13:5 says that love "is not irritable."  Irritability is the antithesis of charity.  It is not merely a way of complaining, therefore, but actually a way of hating.

Ryken writes of the disciples' irritability with the five thousand who came to listen to Jesus teach all day and then had the audacity to become hungry.  He contrasts their attitude with that of their Teacher:

Notice the way Jesus loves.  His love is drawn to people in need.  Rather than pushing them away, as the disciples did, Jesus brought them close . . . This is what love does:  it lets the needs of others set our agenda, rather than letting our agenda limit how much we are willing to serve. . . .

When people come to us with problems that are beyond us--asking questions we do not know how to answer, or requesting something we do not have, or expecting us to do something we do not have the strength to do ["Mamaaaaaa!!! . . . Honeyyyyyy!!!!"]--it is easy to get irritated with them for approaching us.  But love takes what it has on hand, lifts its eyes up to heaven, and asks God to make our lives a blessing to people in ways that go far beyond what we are able to give.

If I stopped to think, I would realize my worst irritation rises from the thought "It's never enough, is it?  I never do enough.  There's always another meal, another load of laundry, or some fault found with the service I've just rendered."  These are the inner flash point words that ratchet up my irritability.  I've always dismissed that attitude as just "a natural response."  (And then maybe I've flung the dishtowel in the sink and stomped away.)

Now I see that I need to plead for grace to give me a "supernatural" response.

Love is not irritable.

Which End of the Telescope?

The prophet Isaiah describes the sweeping magnitude of Jehovah's saving work in the Messiah:

"It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to bring back the preserved of Israel; I will make you as a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth."  Isaiah 49:6

I have an impoverished mind when it comes to figuring out my God.  The salvation I imagine is always "too light," too small.

I desire--and pray for--deliverance from stress, from mindless work, from disappointment; but God often says "it is too light a thing," and then He brings about weightier salvations:  strength to my bones and soul; spirit-grown patience, love, and forgiveness.  His plan is not accomplished in small, compensating handouts, but in an incomprehensible work bearing the prints of infinite Hands and part of a great glorifying salvation to the ends of the earth.

In Which the Author Betrays a Deplorable Lack of Self-Loathing

Often, the quickest way I can adorn myself with "the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit" (1 Peter 3:4) is to take a walk.  It un-does tension and cabin fever and unseats me from the center of my little indoor, task-oriented universe.

Today I moved along through the final sparse raindrops of a heavy shower, listening to the preface and first chapter of J.I. Packer's Knowing God, the January 2012 free-download-of-the-month from ChristianAudio.   I re-read the book every few years, and although each reading finds me more "grown," each reading also finds me more apt to think highly of myself.  Appropriate, then, is Packer's warning from C.S. Lewis: 

Those like myself whose imagination far exceeds their obedience are subject to a just penalty; we easily imagine conditions far higher than any we have really reached.  If we describe what we have imagined we may make others, and make ourselves, believe that we have really been there--The Four Loves

I sighed and stopped the audio to mull over my motives. 

But the afternoon was rich and fresh; my blood was oxygenated; grandchildren were coming for dinner. I've never been one to wallow very much, preferring to promptly make confession, ask for grace, and go on.

So I switched my iPod to Tamacun and Diablo Rojo and all but salsa-ed back home.