Guard cats and fear alarms

Because it had a likeness of our black-and-gray tabby, named Augie, our neighbor couldn’t resist buying me this sign for the window: “Beware: Guard cat on duty.” Ha! The only thing he guards is his food dish. Whenever he comes inside, he pads over to his water and food dishes and sits about eighteen inches away from them like, Read my mind. Thus I was a bit amused the other day when I answered the door to a muscular fireman and his petite woman assistant. I was expecting them for a smoke alarm program the fire department is conducting. But I wasn’t prepared for his opening remark: “Do you have a cat? Would you please put him out? We’re allergic to cats.”

Dutifully I scooped the lazy lug from his sleeping corner and deposited him in the chilly shock of “outside.” They proceeded with their ten-minute smoke alarm business. When they got ready to leave, Augie was waiting on the front porch, eager to get back to the warm indoors. The sight of him alarmed (no pun intended) the woman assistant, who again pleaded “allergy!” So once again I had to remove the cat, this time from the porch. Funny, there were no allergy flare-ups while they were in our home (which has eleven years' worth of cat dander in it). And our overweight, geriatric feline is the antithesis of vicious, with the rare exception of guarding the back yard from Pancho Villa and Ho Chi Minh (my nicknames for the local desperado cats who dare to invade his home turf). They haven’t been around much since I threw a rotten tomato in their yowling direction.

Our cat’s wimpy representation of the idea of “guarding” helped me appreciate even more the spiritual concept of “guard.” Even a thousand burly firemen (not the “allergic” ones) can’t come close to the “guarding” we’re promised in Philippians 4:7: “And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus” (KJV). One of the key words in this passage is “keep” (more accurately, “guard” in NIV, NASB, ESV, and the New King James). The Amplified version puts it: “shall garrison and mount guard over your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.”

The translation makes a difference. “Keep” has a passive sense, like putting a keepsake in a cedar chest. “Guard” implies deliberate, powerful action. The original Greek, phroureo, was a military term and referred to guarding in a garrison. Of this, Greek scholar W.E. Vine remarked that it described not just protection but “inward garrison as by the Holy Spirit.” One Bible scholar said it’s the peace of “holy repose” that floods the believer’s soul when he leans hard on God. It’s being able to say, “The news or situation is bad, but God is bigger than this and I will trust Him.” Or, as Frances Ridley Havergal wrote in the refrain to the beloved hymn “Like a River Glorious”:
Stayed upon Jehovah,
Hearts are fully blessed;
Finding, as He promised,
Perfect peace and rest.
Remember that, next time your “fear alarm” goes off. Your Holy Guard stands ready.

A vine at a time

Last week, I “retired” our tomato plants. About the middle of October, I realize that few of those tight green marbles will ripen as we inch toward the first frost. We have only five tomato plants, but they may as well be fifteen. Clipping a branch at a time, I save out the tomatoes with a yellow blush of potential. These I wash and put in a covered box with a red apple, whose off-gassing helps them ripen. Finally, I yank out the main stems that seem to be super-glued into the soil. Goodbye, a couple hours. It’s the down side to having fresh tomatoes the last part of the summer. It’s not my favorite chore, but I get through it.

In the midst of this chore, I thought of tough things in life that loom much more tangled and messy than my autumn tomato patch. One story I’ve often shared with people needing encouragement comes from the life of Dr. A.B. Simpson (1843-1919), a Canadian preacher, theologian, author, and founder of the Christian and Missionary Alliance. Think back a hundred-plus years, before cars, air travel, phones or the internet. Dr. Simpson was preaching in Ireland when he posed the question, “What is it to abide in Jesus?” Then he gave this answer: “It is to keep on saying, minute by minute, ‘For this I have Jesus.’”

That phrase of trust lodged in the heart of the event’s pianist, a young woman whose family lived across the Irish Sea. During the service she received a telegram asking her to come home immediately because her mother was dying. “I have never traveled alone,” she told him. “But for this I have Jesus. I must make a long journey to the south of England. For this and all else that goes with it, I have Jesus.” As it turned out, in those days of slow travel, she arrived home ten minutes after her mother died. Her family was so distraught that responsibility for the funeral service and legal details fell to her. She later told how she kept claiming, “For this I have Jesus,” as she had to do things she couldn’t have done in her own strength.

The message from Simpson’s sermon is echoed in Philippians 4:13: “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me” (KJV). Or, as the Greek-to-English translation is clarified in the Amplified Bible: “I have strength for all things in Christ Who empowers me—I am ready for anything and equal to anything through Him Who enfuses inner strength into me, [that is, I am self-sufficient in Christ’s sufficiency]." My copy of the Amplified version was once my late mother’s, given her in 1962 by a godly aunt. Fifty years later, as I read the same words that my mother had underlined in red, I sense how she embraced this truth for her own overwhelming life challenges. They ranged from being the firstborn of nine in a family that knew profound poverty, to her life-long battle with asthma, to her final, hard-fought battle with cancer.

“For this”—for the intimidating, scary, impossible things of life—“I have Jesus.” The best part is that besides coming alongside in our challenges, He sees the eventual spiritual outcome. Leaning on Him, stretching with Him, and depending on Him are all part of growing in the faith. “For this,” there is a purpose.

I just checked the tomatoes in my “ripening box,” and a few are turning red. There’s another parable here, about God at work in the dark places, but I think Simpson’s hopeful counsel suffices for today.

Sniffing out Truth

Dogs! Take them on a walk and they only want to sniff the bushes that gazillion other dogs have “marked.” Pictured at right is “Molly,” a neighbor’s dog whom I take care of when they’re away, and incurable shrub-sniffer.

It’s hard to think deep thoughts when you’re trying to keep up with a dog that wants to check every bush on the block in record time, but I tried. While Molly kept her nose in greens, I kept mine on the sky (with the exception of times I needed to whip out the plastic bag for her “deposits”). And it struck me: a lot of people spend their lives sniffing out the bad stuff instead of embracing the beauty around them.Poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning put it so well: “Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God; But only he who sees, takes off his shoes. The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.”

The “bush” reference is to Moses’ encounter with God in Exodus 3. Like Moses plodding through shepherd duties, I tend to grind out the days by getting through my to-do lists. (Nothing against to-do lists—they both remind and motivate to do what’s needed.) But two books given me this past week by spiritually-sensitive friends have reminded me to look for those common bushes, afire with God.

One was by Ann Voskamp, who as a farm wife and mother of six home-schooled children knows the distracting tyranny of having too much to do. But in One Thousand Gifts (Zondervan), she traces her journey of finding splendor—no, God-joy, in the ordinary. She calls this eucharisteo, the practicing of giving thanks in all things. Her book is the chronicle of that: thanks for the rainbow hues in soap bubbles, of the glory of a harvest moon, even “ugly-beautiful” like mismatched socks.

Author Ruth Meyers encourages focused praise through 31 Days of Praise: Enjoying God Anew (Multnomah). Her month of scripture-based praise-prayers targeted some course-corrections needed in my own prayer life. Touching where we all live, she invites us to thank God for our weaknesses (and His power to remove or change these), for His power at work in untangling the “snarls in my soul,” and for what He’s doing through the people in our lives who cause more pain than joy. Meyers said that as she follows the psalmists’ example of praising God, “sooner or later (often sooner) the Lord releases me from being a slave to my distressing emotions” (p. 29).

She also included a heart-stirring, one-line prayer from the writings of missionary Amy Carmichael (whose Dohnavur Fellowship in India rescued hundreds from temple prostitution): “O Lord Jesus, my Beloved, may I be a joy to thee.” You can’t pray that and say, “I don’t have any purpose in life.” Our purpose is to bring joy to the One who created us. Praise is one avenue, and living day-by-day for His glory through vocation and relationships is another.

So back to Molly the dog. Yes, life stinks at times (like those “marked” bushes along the street). But God invites us to look up, to His glory, and declare it through the praise of our lips and the praise of our lives. And, in so doing, to realize that we stand on holy ground.

Navel-grazing

I’d just sent my husband off to his substitute-teaching job after one of his favorite breakfasts. I was virtuous and made him waffles with bits of bacon in them. Before going to the computer for my “work,” I took some time after washing dishes to glance at headlines in the morning paper. On the rug in front of me, Augie our cat began his morning routine, licking his already-overgroomed belly. Parts are so bare they look shaved. I thought of the cliché “navel-gazing,” except in his case it’s “navel-grazing.”

“Navel-gazing,” which gives a word picture of constantly inspecting one’s belly button, has come to mean excessive introspection, self-absorption, self-analysis or focus on a single issue. In other words, people start singing a one-note solo, often a pity-party song.

I was thinking about that when I read this headline: “Hit-run victim helped men at homeless shelter.” My momentary sadness deepened when I learned the victim was born with cerebral palsy and was driving his motorized wheelchair when hit by a suspected drunk driver. Tonight, as I do the first Wednesday of every month, I will speak to convicted drunk drivers at an “educational panel” required as part of their sentencing. Two others also speak out about the dangers and prevalence of this serious problem, of which the audience members, because of their arrests, are now a documented part. They’re surprised by the statistics that 12,000 a year die on American roads because of impaired driving. That’s 1,000 a month, about one every 45 minutes. And just as many people grieve their deaths as those who lose a loved one in other tragic circumstances, like war. Most important, drunk-driving deaths are 100% preventable: by not drinking and driving.

Why am I there, since I don’t drink alcohol? Because my family was almost killed by a drinking driver in 1997. Alcohol so impaired his driving abilities that he crossed the center line at too high a speed and smashed into our car. We were about 250 miles from home, headed home from a vacation.Though injured, we survived. But that incident, like the deaths of my parents six months apart when I was 30 and still single, became a defining incident in who I am. Yes, I grieved those losses for a season, but I moved on. I knew I needed to transform the pain into something good instead of prolonging a pity party. In other words, moving past navel-gazing.

Back to the 57-year-old man with cerebral palsy. Despite his disability, he graduated from a university with a major in business and later got a master’s degree in psychology. He was an advocate of handicap-accessible streets and volunteered at several charities, including a shelter for homeless men. For that he received a distinguished award for community service. In an interview after that honor, he said, “I have two choices. I could stay home and be bitter and think ‘poor handicapped me, wah wah,’ or go out and help people and think positively.” Upon reading that, I put down the paper and said “Wow!” That’s a message able-bodied people need. He didn’t spend his life navel-gazing (or even navel-grazing--massaging a certain area of his life to get more sympathy). He pursued compassion and excellence to the limits of his abilities.

I can’t do much about my cat’s excessive grooming. Because he seems healthy otherwise, we’ve decided it’s not that big a deal. We did switch to a gluten-free cat food (more expensive, of course!) upon hearing that it sometimes helps aging cats who overgroom. In a way, I’m glad he has that somewhat-bare belly. For when he does his feline acrobatics to groom, God usually sends me a message: to check where I might be navel-gazing and turn my eyes instead to how He helps me through difficult times. The Bible is full of reminders of that, and one came as I read my Bible just after reading about drunk-driving victim.
But as for me, I will always have hope; I will praise you more and more.
My mouth will tell of your righteousness, of your salvation all day long, though I know not its measure (Psalm 71:14-15).