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. 

Grace at Last

Today I started working on a long long-range project, henceforth called The Project of Mystery, TPM for short. 

There are worthy things in life that require time to develop, ripen, become.

 A quilt, for example—at least for me, in my time of life—is something that grows, bit by bit, over months.  (I have completed all of two—three, if you count the grandchild’s small playquilt.)  Yeast bread is a lazy half-day process, and soup may be “done” in an hour, but the flavors blend best after a couple of days of heating up and cooling off. 

Intimacy—the closeness of a life-mate, of sharing the spectrum of life’s moments together--this fragile (and maybe rare) gift is a slow-growing one

But I ask myself if some of the things that have come to me slowly would have appeared sooner if I had been a better learner.  I think especially of earlier days in my life that took  their shape from an underlying framework of duties, ought-tos, ought-nots, dos, don’ts. 

The “ism” of my days was “legalism.”  The thing that I missed for so long was grace.  Was there a way I could have speeded the process up?  Or was it necessary for me to spend time on the hamster wheel, to be concerned about pleasing God but not being pleased in God?  Did I somehow need to be unenlightened for a long time and then come to a kind of enlightenment?

Psalm 1 promises that the righteous man brings forth his fruit in its season.  I know that I have learned to enjoy the increments of the long-range projects—the processes of imagining, planning, performing the requisite steps, seeing the slow blossoming of a hand-sewn gift, a recipe, a relationship.  The means have become as satisfying as the ends.

Perhaps the fruit of grace, too, has its own season.

A Few Weekend Thanksgivings

Sharing books in bed with the grandchildren, sweet-smelling and still damp from a raucous bathtime . . .

Time at the sewing machine to finish a project (the pin cushion was custom made for me by the proprietor of this Etsy shop)  . . .

A surprise package in the mail, with gifts of fabric from Colonial Williamsburg . . .

Leftover pizza and election returns with my soulmate . . .

A Sunday morning musical offering from my friend and Authentic Mississippi Picker . . .

Banana bread (as I celebrated my favorite verse from Proverbs 31:  “Give her of the fruit of her hands.”)

Contentment Briefly Revisited, Or, The Trophy Wife

I have seen another benefit of contentment, one that is profound in its consequences:  when I am content with what I have, my husband’s calling as provider is almost perfectly fulfilled. 

The fact that I do not live my days in want means that he is doing a good job of taking care of me.  My needs are provided; therefore in his role as the wage-earner, the bringer home of bacon, he’s at the top of his game because he has a happy wife.

It's a sobering thought that my attitude may be the most important measure of this very important aspect of my husband’s success.

Reminiscence While (Finally) Taking Down the Christmas Decorations

If we have food and covering, with these we shall be content.

Godliness with contentment is great gain.

Better is a dish of vegetables where love is than a fattened ox served with hatred.

Make sure your character is free from the love of money, being content with what you have, for He Himself has said, “I will never desert you nor will I ever forsake you.”

(1 Timothy 6:8 NASB, 1 Timothy 6:6 KJV, Proverbs 15:17 NASB, Hebrews 13:5 NASB)

For many years I subscribed to these Scripture verses with the same attitude I showed for the fourfold adage Use it up, Wear it out, Make it do, Or do without!

Those years were a little on the lean side, and I made it a point of honor to man up to the challenge.  If I couldn’t grow it or make it, I didn’t need it.  I was a stay-at-home Mom by choice, and by golly, I was not among the softies who couldn’t learn to do without!

But my contentment was often bundled up in a smug conception of how resilient/creative/humble/ resourceful/strong/clear-sighted I was.  I managed to bend away from the world’s material values right back toward my own proud flesh.  (How appropriate Luther’s definition of sin:  mankind curved in on itself.)

Oh thank God for growing in grace!  Along the Way (and over a space of many years—decades, in fact) I have learned that contentment is not so much a battle to be fought as it is eyes to be opened.  After all, as Hebrews 13:5 says, the one unfailing blessing that can crown each second with contentment is the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ.  By Him and with Him I can know He has perfectly designed the details of the moment. 

It is He that provides joys for the taking—the everyday bliss of babies and poems and candlelight.  It is He that provides peace in misery, the buoyant hope that there will not always be darkness/pain/emptiness/sin.  It is He that, over the long haul, becomes the Companion, Confidante, Friend, Whose presence transforms a prosaic concept like “contentment” into a quest to Seize the Day.

His fruit is love and joy.  Not just making do.

Two Projects

I’ve two projects to share today, one finished, one yet-to-begin.

Project One:  

The days after Christmas were chilly and quiet and ended each evening with a lovely fire.  How could I not pick up my knitting needles?

I wanted something to keep my neck warm that was not scratchy and would not dangle into the dishwasher or my Tuscan Spinach Soup.  My yarn stash included this cream colored cotton; I knitted a stockinette stitch but added a bit of ribbing on the edge to avoid curling.  

And I guess you could say I “designed” this (although it was more improvised than truly designed).  

So that project is completed.

Project Two: 

 I am going to join Becky as she and others memorize the book of Titus.  We will begin on February 4 and end on Easter Sunday, learning just a few verses each week.  The approach is to study and memorize--to get this truth into the mind and heart.  I like that!

This is a beginning, a new way for me to share new things--things I'm doing, learning, making, enjoying.  It is a new way for me to say what is important to me--to say it to myself and to my readers, whoever you may be.

My purpose in blogging is reflected in the words of the Old Testament prophet Isaiah:

O Zion, that bringest good tidings,
get thee up into the high mountain;
O Jerusalem, that bringest good tidings,
lift up thy voice with strength;
lift it up, be not afraid;
say unto the cities of Judah, Behold your God!
                                               --Isaiah 40:9

(I cannot read Isaiah's Chapter 40 without hearing in my mind Handel's joyful expression of these words.)

This blog is my "high mountain."  This is a place where I proclaim "Behold!"