Scraps

The tattooed young man giving his testimony at my church didn’t try to hide the messy details. He grew up in a dysfunctional home. Got into substance abuse. Sold drugs. Fathered a child with his girlfriend. He ended up in prison....where he found a Bible and started reading it. Ended up trusting Christ to turn his life around. Able now to say, “Jesus saved me.  I’m headed in the right direction.”  I’d rather hear that, than this, which I've also heard from a young adult: “I grew up going to church. I hate my life.  I hate my mom/dad. God hasn’t been fair to me. I pray and nothing happens. Just leave me alone.”

The first person is holding out the ragged scraps of his life, saying, “Jesus, use these as you wish.”  The second person is clutching rotted rags, unwilling to let God trim and rearrange to craft “a new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17).

My ministry “hobby” involves scraps of flannel or soft cotton, which I find at yard sales or thrift stores or am given. I cut them into five-inch squares, which I sew together, seven rows across and seven down.  These create a "patchwork" side to go with a one-yard piece of soft backing fabric. With batting between, the sides are joined with yarn ties at each square and stitching around the edges. Two hours later a new baby blanket emerges, destined with others for a local hospital to be distributed to babies born to needy families. In the last five years, I have sewn and given away more than 600. 

Redeemed-scraps-turned-blankets finished and delivered in July

Six hundred? Gasp. My initial “big goal” was fifty.  But when God calls you to a task, He will carry you through it until He pronounces it “done” or sees that you need to take a break (which is now my situation). So what does this have to do with the ragged scraps of a human life? It's this: God wastes nothing.  Those who come to God, sadly holding the scraps of their lives, can experience Jesus as Redeemer. He is a Master at trimming and fitting those scraps into something new, beautiful, and useful in His kingdom. It may hurt and cut and prick at times, but it's all part of His master pattern.  For unique beauty, and service for Him.

Let's sing the second verse!

Sometimes, snatches of scripture or phrases from a hymn will come to me when I least expect them. It happened again recently when we picnicked with friends at a public park by the Methow River in Central Washington state. There’s nothing like a river, roaring over worn rocks on its way to a mightier water—in our case, the Columbia. I snapped a photo of the sight as I vaguely recalled a classic hymn that mentioned “streams of living water.” I found the verse, “You give them drink from the river of your delights,” in Psalm 36:8a.

 

The hymn I vaguely recalled was “Glorious Things of Thee are Spoken,” whose author also penned “Amazing Grace” in recounting his conversion. His name, of course, John Newton. His devout, praying mother died when he was very young. Growing up, he plunged into the life of an infidel, ending up running a slave ship and being temporarily enslaved himself.  Wonderfully, through God’s amazing grace (and as the answer to his mother’s prayers), he became a Christian and went into the ministry in England. He also wrote hundreds of hymns, some still sung three hundred years later.  Besides the two I just mentioned, there’s “How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds.” I can’t sing that one without choking up.

My church’s worship style has changed to “contemporary,” but for those of us who grew up with the old hymns, there’s also a “hymn sing” two Sunday evenings a month in our church’s chapel.  Hymnals are passed out, and requests taken with the inevitable question, “Which verses?”  Often the answer is “1, 3 and 4.”  Poor verse 2!

Let’s hear it for verse 2 of Newton’s “Glorious Things of Thee are Spoken,” sung to the majestic music composed by Newton’s contemporary Franz Haydn. Even as I type its words, I’m envisioning a river like the one we saw at the Methow Valley, bursting out of the mountains and proclaiming, “I’m part of the workmanship of God!”  I’m also reminded of the lyric’s analogy to “living water,” the Lord Jesus Christ, who nurtures and refreshes us along a journey on this planet.

See, the streams of living waters,

Springing from eternal Love,
Well supply thy sons and daughters,
And all fear of want remove.
Who can faint while such a river
Ever flows their thirst to assuage?
Grace which like the Lord, the Giver,
Never fails from age to age!
 
Remember, a man who once lived an utterly wicked life wrote this hymn. If the “old” John Newton could turn to God, we should never give up praying for those who still need to taste of the Living Water.

Bed of thorns

Imagine three sets of robber-masked eyes staring at you from a nest next to your back-yard fence. It happened to me one morning, working in the back yard, when I sensed our cat unusually nervous. Following his gaze, I was shocked to see three raccoons just feet away in this half-hidden perch on the roof of a ramshackle shed. I grabbed the garden horse and aimed it at them, yelling “shoo!” as they reluctantly turned and left. Then, remembering reading how such critters despise urine smell, I sprayed the nest with household ammonia.

We live toward the edge of our little town, with a large undeveloped, junky lot on the other side of our fence.  Our trees disguise the “view,” but they also provide an up-and-down staircase for local raccoons searching for berries or the small bowl of dry cat food we once left outside. (Not any more!) After drenching the tree-needle-padded “nest” with ammonia, I stacked it with prickly dead tree branches and thorny branches pruned from our roses. These, I hoped, would put the perch into their “don’t-visit” list.

 I was reminded of my “prickle-the-nest” incident while recently reading J.I. Packer’s Knowing God. In chapter 16 about God’s “goodness and severity,” Packer said we need to appreciate the discipline God chooses to put in our lives. Too many people, he said, look at God as a celestial Santa Claus who supplies happy times and gifts on demand. But such attitudes trifle with God. God may, Packer said, put “thorns in your bed…to awaken you from the sleep or spiritual death—and to make you rise up to seek his mercy.”  For believers, such “bed-thorns” may be part of God’s discipline “to keep you from falling into the somnolence of complacency and to ensure that you ‘continue in his goodness’ by letting your sense of need bring you back constantly in self-abasement and faith to seek his face” (Knowing God, IVP, 1973, p. 166).

When our life’s “nest” settles into a comfortable spot, and we find thorns in the way, there may be a spiritual reason. Packer pointed to two scriptures for “why.” Hebrews 12:5, reminds us not to make light of the Lord’s discipline. And second, Psalm 119:71 takes us to the higher ground of thanking God for correction:  “It was good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn your decrees” (Psalm 119:71).

Early one morning this spring, I again saw a backyard raccoon--one that looked to be twice the size of our cat. When he saw me, the 'coon scampered up the tree and away. Thankfully, our cat was inside this time. I checked the condition of the “nest” and found it needing a new supply of “prickles.”

I'd like to have prickle-free living, but I also want God to shape my life. Sometimes that brings temporary discomfort until I move on to His much-better plan

Food Forgetfulness

His favorite place to perch is the rug right in front of his feeding area. It doesn’t matter if he’s been out snooping around the yard for just an hour after the last feeding. When he comes in, he heads for the feeding place and presents his practiced look of please-feed-me-I’m-starving. According to the

cat-age calculator you can find on the internet (for real), our 16-year-old rescue cat, Augie, is comparable in age span to an 80-year-old human. Maybe that explains his apparent memory failures regarding his last meal or snack.  Despite frequent snacks, he has neither cartoon-cat-Garfield girth nor wild-cat-scrawniness. When we take him in for his license-required rabies shot, the vet assistant who weighs him often remarks, “Wow, he’s a big fellow.”  Not that he’d break any records like some You-Tube tubbies....

 

One thing Augie’s “hunger pose” reminds me of is my own hunger for things that really matter.  I’m not talking about personal favorites, like split pea soup, green bell peppers, and chocolate ice cream.  Rather, it’s spiritual hunger, as in this “appetite” metaphor of Jeremiah 15:16: Thy words were found, and I did eat them; and thy word was unto me the joy and rejoicing of mine heart: for I am called by thy name, O LORD God of hosts. (KJV)

Jeremiah didn’t actually chew and swallow the scriptures (leave that for another prophecy, found in Ezekiel 3:1-3). A more recent translation of Jeremiah 15:16 goes:

Your words are what sustain me.  They bring me great joy and are my heart’s delight, for I bear your name, O LORD God Almighty. (TEV)

Basically Jeremiah was saying, “I’m hungry for the Word of God.  It satisfies me spiritually like nothing else because I belong to the Author.”  The verse comes in the context of a lament about how far his nation had strayed from God.  In fact, he even wishes for a moment that he hadn’t been born (v. 10). He’s preaching God’s judgment on national sins, and nobody wants to hear that message. His only solace is going back to the pure spiritual food of God’s Word.  For him, this meant the Pentateuch (first five books), psalms and proverbs.  God tells him not to give up the spiritual learning curve or preaching about God’s holiness.  “If you speak words that are worthy,” God told the prophet, “you will be my spokesman” (v. 19). As I witness the spiritual decline of my times, I realize God could use many more as spokespeople speaking out Truth, no matter how unpopular.

 Our adequately-fed cat also has “cat treats,” little nuggets of intense flavor (one package we bought on sale boasts of “catnip” flavor). But we don’t get true spiritual nourishment by gobbling devotional treats—the “in-and-out-in-a-minute” type. They’re better than nothing, but real spiritual nourishment comes with thoughtful, application-oriented reading of scriptures. And even though I make fun of my cat’s senile forgetfulness about his last meal, it’s okay to have a healthy appetite for the Word of God, finding in it the joy and rejoicing of my heart.