What's next, Lord?

Here’s my second grandson, Zion—and what a winsome smile!  He was born with a cleft lip and palate, and next Friday, the day he turns four months old, he will undergo his first surgery to repair his cleft lip. We have known he had this condition since several months before birth, when an ultrasound revealed both “it’s a boy!” and the cleft. It has complicated feeding, but not taken away his endearing baby ways. He now smiles and coos when we hold and feed him.

Cleft lip and/or palate occurs in varying severity in about one in six hundred births. Especially when a mother was diligent about healthy living during her pregnancy, there are “why” questions. But as we have walked alongside our son and daughter-in-law, I’ve learned that “why” isn’t the right question. Instead, it’s “What’s next, Lord?”

Once when feeding Zion, I was reminded of some Bible verses that speak of  physical challenges evident at birth. They’re packaged with the story of God calling Moses to lead the Hebrews out of slavery in Egypt. After a hot-headed murder forced Moses to flee Egypt, abdicating his privileges as an adopted son in Pharaoh’s family, he roamed the wilderness for years, pushing sheep around.

When the time was right, God caused a nondescript shrub to burst into fire and get Moses’ attention. Then, establishing that place as “holy ground,” God told Moses his next step would be leading a nation, not sheep. Moses reacted, “Who, me? You’re kidding. Send someone else. I’m a clumsy speaker” (Exodus 4:10, personal paraphrase).

God’s response was a reminder that our entire selves--physical, emotional, intellectual, even societal—are part of God’s permissive plan. None of us is perfect. Some have more visible “not-perfect” parts. Others have imperfections buried deep in their thinking. “Perfection” ended when sin entered the world.

When Moses focused on his imperfections and refused God’s high call on his life, God replied, “Who gave man his mouth? Who makes him deaf or dumb?  Who gives him sight or makes him blind? Is it not I, the LORD?” (Exodus 4:11). God knows all about the “not-perfect” parts of our lives, and none limit His power. If He insisted on using only perfect people, His work force would number “zero.” But He takes us where we are, and promises His help to do His work. He told Moses, “Now go: I will help you speak and teach you what to say” (Exodus 4:12).

As for “help you speak and teach you what to say,” I think of the learning curve his brother Josiah (older by 17 months) is experiencing with language skills. Josiah learned the usual “mama,” “dada,” “papa,” and “nana” (grandma/banana), and not too long after that came “duck” and “drip.” Right now, his favorite word is “cocoa.” As I warm up the milk for his cocoa, I smile and wonder, “What’s next, Lord?” in his language acquisition.

The same phrase comes to mind as I pray for little Zion. Right now, he loves to be held and is unaware of the discomfort ahead to fix his sweet, gapped grin. We’re at the beginning of a journey, one best navigated with hearts that ask, “What’s next, Lord?” and then go forward in faith.

View from the Thinking Bench

Think-stops are good in life.  Sometimes, spiritual wisdom needs to settle in our hearts before we can share it with others. Recently, someone who is going through faith struggles asked, “How can I hear God speak?”  The easy reply is, “The Holy Spirit helps us hear Him.”  But that’s not always enough for the people seeking more of God.

A good answer to that comes from writings of respected Christian author and pastor A.W. Tozer (1897-1963).  Tozer knew how to reduce deep issues to terms that people could understand.  In the last chapter of his book, The Knowledge of the Holy (New York: Harper & Row, 1961), he said the secret of knowing God is to:

1. Forsake our sins. 
2. Commit our whole life to Christ in faith.
3. Reckon ourselves dead to sin, alive to God in Christ Jesus, and open to the Holy Spirit and the disciplines He requires. 
4. Repudiate the cheap values of the fallen world and become detached in spirit from it.
5. Practice the art of long and loving meditation on the majesty of God.
6. Obey the imperative of greater service to our fellow men as knowledge of God becomes more wonderful.

I’m glad my friend wants to have a deeper relationship with God. But working through this list with honesty will bring pain. It’s apt to pry open festering problems that need a spiritual antiseptic.

Such cleansing doesn’t happen easily when our worlds are cluttered with media and other false busyness. It often helps to get off alone, to some sort of “thinking bench.” When open-hearted and alone with God, we’re apt to be more receptive to the Holy Spirit’s teaching.  He’s already waiting to teach us how God sees us through the sacrificial lens of Calvary love.

Fresh starts

The “Dynamite House”—the local ramshackle house whose basement cache of unstable TNT forced evacuation of our neighborhood two summers ago—is gone. Bulldozed into a splintery pile and clawed into dump trucks, the old house left us. Now a new one is taking its place. As I watch the progress, I think of how the Bible likened Christian growth to house-building. I also allow the process to remind me to pray for those who need to let go of “old stuff” (like the crumbling TNT of anger) and let Christ rebuild them from the ground up.
            “Unless the Lord builds the house,” says Psalm 127:1, “its builders labor in vain.” This well-known verse opens one of the “ascent” psalms sung by ancient pilgrims going to Jerusalem for worship. The first verse is well-known, but a closer study shows the psalm actually uses four common activities to teach how God needs to be at the center of all things.
            House construction (v. 1): We can move ahead on a project or dream, thinking we know it all, but forget to ask God’s blessing until it’s all done. The alternative is looking to Him every step of the way.  Little is much if God is in it, and, conversely, “much” is nothing without God. I see that in how my vocation moved from rookie newspaper reporter to Christian writer/speaker. Many agonizing, prayer-bathed changes marked the way.
            Security (v. 1b): “Unless the LORD watches over the city, the watchmen stand guard in vain.” How thankful I am to live in a land of police and fire protection, just one 9-1-1 call away. But while God has permitted these agencies to be a part of our lifestyle, our ultimate security is in Him.
            Work life (v. 2): “In vain you rise early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat, for he grants sleep to those he loves.”  This was a favorite verse of college finals week and parenting a sleepless, wailing newborn!  Seriously, the Bible does teach us that it is normal to work, and sometimes that requires long hours. After all, it’s called “work.” We’re to supply our own needs, those of our family, and those around us. But if we work without a thought to God, there’s an ultimate emptiness in what we do. As for the “sleep” phrase, that, too, is a gift from God. When we’re really tired, sleep is sweet.
            Family life (vv. 3-5). More than half the psalm is taken up with the blessing of family:
            Sons are a heritage from the LORD, children a reward from him.
            Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one’s youth.
            Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them.
            They will not be put to shame when they contend with their enemies in the gate.
This verse needs to be understood in the context of early history, when jobs were labor-intensive (like farming or building). Having many sons meant many hands to support the family. (Though it’s not added, many daughters helped the mother on the home-side). It’s also assumed that those children are believers. Otherwise, they’d bring heartache and shame to the family, not blessing.
            An unbroken chain of godly families is not the norm.  But God is in the business of taking away the rubble and doing a new “build” on top:
            Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has come, the new has come! (2 Corinthians 5:17)
            Before we know it, that house down the block will be done and a new family moved in. But I’ll still remember the old “Dynamite House,” and be glad that in real life, God does lead the way for fresh starts.

Reconciliation Day

Flowers that bloom at Easter include my favorite, daffodils,
whose trumpet shape reminds me of the verse, "The
trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised" (1 Cor. 15:52).

Everybody knows about April Fool’s Day. But special interest groups have made April the month to make people aware of poetry, autism, math, humor, gardens, guitars (my son will like that!), frogs, the military child, and financial literacy. April 13 is Scrabble day, April 16, Richter scale day; and April 30, the birthday of Eeyore (of Winnie the Pooh fame). Those are all just a sampling. You could celebrate one or two “somethings” all month long.

But one “special day” marks emotional pain. April 2, “Reconciliation Day,” cuts to the core of our spiritual values and compassion. A nationally syndicated advice columnist started it about 25 years ago to encourage her readers to write a letter or call someone to mend a strained or broken relationship. Yet her “advice” is thousands of years old. Jesus said: “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors” (Matthew 6:12 KJV, emphasis added). Or, as put in plainer language: “Forgive us our sins, just as we have forgiven those who have sinned against us” (NLT).

We want to have our sins forgiven. But to reach out to those who have hurt us—and don’t seem to care—that’s another matter revealing how seriously we take our faith. My pastor recently finished a powerful sermon series on the life of Joseph, with the last two messages focusing on Joseph’s forgiveness of his spiteful, reckless brothers. The sermons took me back to when applying Joseph’s story to my own life helped me forgive those who’d hurt me, and to seek forgiveness from those I’d wounded. Such actions are messy, humbling, but necessary if we’re to wear the label of “Christian.”

Wanting to study Joseph more, I checked out of our church library a study by Charles Swindoll, whose church in Fullerton., Calif., I attended in the mid-1970s. Swindoll said this of Joseph’s amazing forgiveness of the brothers who sold him into slavery, recounted in Genesis 45:

Attitude is so crucial in the life of the Christian.  We can go through the Sunday motions, we can carry out the religious exercises, we can pack a Bible under our arms, and sing the songs from memory, yet we can still hold grudges against the people who have wronged us.  In our own way—and it may even be with a little religious manipulation—we’ll get back at them.  But that is not God’s way. (Joseph: A Man of Integrity and Forgiveness, Word, 1998, p. 147)

There’s no guarantee that “forgiveness” will turn things around and result in a warm and loving relationship. We live in a world of sinners, which includes each of us. But those of us who know a Savior, who reconciled us to Himself through the agony of a Good Friday cross, know we’ve been forgiven much ourselves. We cannot fully comprehend the depth of love and divine patience bound up in this, the amazing statement of Easter’s reconciliation:

But God demonstrates his own life for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans 5:8 NIV)

How will you celebrate Reconciliation Day?