Prime-pickin'

This photo bothers me! Taken in a farming area about thirty miles from our home, it shows how the quest for the “perfect” (and prime-market-price) apple means that apples that don’t measure up are simply dropped to the ground to rot.  Such waste!  You have to understand that my husband and I absorbed the Depression-era thriftiness of our parents.  Gleaning goes along with habits like fixing-up, shopping sales, couponing,  checking second-hand sources (thrift stores, want ads, yard sales),  and making-do with less.

I thought of all the applesauce those rejected apples could make! Or apple desserts. Apple juice.  Apple leather.  But complete use of food resources doesn’t happen.

Could there be a spiritual lesson here?  I quickly rejected the idea that God only takes the cream of the crop, so to say, to join Him in Heaven.  Two verses verify His desire for us, His created beings:

This is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth (1 Tim. 2:3-4).

The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance (2 Pet. 3:9).

Unlike those “prime-pickers,” God doesn’t look for perfection to in order to bring us into His family. As Jesus hung in agony on the cross, He accepted the confession of a filthy, miserable thief who hung on the cross next to Him.  He encountered an immoral woman at a Samaritan well and offered her Living Water, Himself, which she eagerly accepted. But, Jesus had harsh words for the Pharisees, who counted on pedigree and keeping long lists of religious rules for so-called favor with God.

I’m sorry, but I have a hard time with people who claim, “I prayed the salvation prayer in Miss Percival’s first grade Sunday school,” but they aren't living out that faith.  Twenty-some or more years later they’re like apple saplings that withered up and never produced fruit.  The apostle Paul explained the need of true change, too:

 At one time we too were foolish, disobedient, deceived, and enslaved by all kinds of passions and pleasures.  We lived in malice and envy, being hated and hating one another. But when the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of righteous things we have done [remember the phony faith of the Pharisees!] but because of his mercy.(Titus 3:3-5a,comment added)

What does this look like in real life? Paul’s list (Titus 3:1-2) included:

*Subject to rulers and authorities

*Obedient
*Ready to do whatever is good
*Slandering no one
*Peaceable and considerate
*Showing true humility toward men (and women)

If such qualities were apples, they’d go in the “prime market” picking bag right away! 

 P.S. Need another standard for prime-market spiritual fruit?  Try Colossians 1:10-12.

If trees could preach

After a long, dry and smoky summer, we’re delighting in the colorful turn of seasons to autumn. Within days of our first truly cold night, trees and bushes around here were spiking fall’s neon colors. That includes my neighbor’s tree.  As I enjoy seeing it turn to a glowing orange, I realize it soon will drop its dying leaves to the ground for raking and disposal.  The term “death to self”  came to mind because of some recent personal devotional reading of an old classic: Humility by Andrew Murray  (1828-1917), a South African writer, teacher and pastor, also known for his book, With Christ in the School of Prayer.

Reflecting on my last couple years of relational and spiritual challenges, I affirmed with Murray how “humility” isn’t high on a typical believer’s “want” list.  We gladly receive God’s gifts of life, sustenance, purpose, comfort, maybe even fame.  But if He calls us to let go of them, that’s another matter. It’s hard to see His purposes in loss, in the shedding of what is familiar.  Yet Murray says:

Accept with gratitude everything that God allows from within or without, from friend or enemy, in nature or in grace, to remind you of your need of humbling, and to help you to it. Believe humility to indeed be the mother-virtue, your very first duty before God, and the one perpetual safeguard of the soul.  (Whitaker House, 1982, p. 90)

Some people confuse “dying to self” with “death of self.” They’re not the same.  “God treasures your divinely created self,” writes Christian author Jan Johnson, “He doesn’t want to obliterate the part of you that makes you uniquely you. God works within you and reshapes you into the person your renewed-in-Christ self is meant to be: not selfish with what you own, not concerned about how circumstances affect only you, and not crabby when others seem to get what you want. “ *

 Murray concluded his book with this poem:

Oh, to be emptier, lowlier,

Mean, unnoticed, and unknown,

And to God a vessel holier,

Filled with Christ, and Christ alone!

 Or, as the apostle Paul said it to his pastor- protégé  Timothy: “The saying is trustworthy, for: If we have died with him, we will also live with him” (2 Timothy 2:11 ESV).

*“Dying to Self and Discovering So Much More,” By Jan Johnson, Decision Magazine (August 25, 2011), accessible at: https://billygraham.org/decision-magazine/september-2011/dying-to-self-and-discovering-so-much-more/

Some ripe, some not

My winterizing chores include “the last rites” at of the small tomato patch on a sunny side of our garage. It’s my husband’s attempt at farming, and he pampers the soil to grow the best tomatoes he knows how. But when the nights chill in October, and the leaves start withering, I know I add “tomatoes” to my yardwork chores.  It’s too bad, as some of our biggest tomatoes are struggling to redden, and there are dozens of tiny ones that will never make it. After I pick the “possibilities,” I feel badly about pulling up the rest.

I guess it’s my personality to offer second and third chances, hoping people will lift their hearts fully to the Sun of Righteousness, the Lord Jesus.  When that doesn’t happen, I grieve, and have to reconcile myself to an imperfect world.  Even as I pulled those tomatoes, I thought of the many still-unanswered prayers. I just don’t understand,  I mused, then halfway remembered a little-known hymn with those opening words. I’d learned of it another time of uncertainty and trial.

Searching through the indexes of several hymnals, I found it in a small hymn collection gifted to me forty years ago by classmates at then-Multnomah School of the Bible in Portland.  It was their way of thanking me for playing piano in morning worship sessions that year. Within a year and a half, both my parents would die, and that paperback hymnal become part of God’s “comfort kit” as I worked through my grief. That hymn begins:

I am not skilled to understand/What God has willed, /What God has planned, /I only know at His right hand /Is One who is my Savior.

I never gave much thought to the author of the lyrics except to surmise that this person must have also had a great sadness that they had to leave in God’s hands.  A few clicks on the computer mouse brought me to her story. The author, Dora Greenwell (1821-1882), in the language of the late 1800s, was especially concerned with “idiots” and “imbeciles.”  Today we’d call them people with severe physical, emotional and mental disabilities. She visited asylums for these people, lifted spirits of society’s “lowest,” and raised money to help them. One biographer spoke of her personality as “rippling sunshine.” 

 She was born into a wealthy family but her father’s financial troubles and death sent the family into poverty. She moved in with a brother who was a vicar and devoted herself to the less fortunate. One friend said of her, “Her life was hid in Christ in God, but it was also wonderfully transparent to all who knew her...She had a wonderful knack of making one happy in her presence.”

Frail in health, she supported herself as a writer. She wrote essays mostly about women’s education and suffrage and the slave trade, and published biographies about French priest Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire and American Quaker John Woolman. Her book The Patience of Hope was published when she was 39.  (I was 48 when my book on patience was published!) Her poetry had a style similar to that of Christina Rossetti.  In 1873 she wrote eight “Songs of Salvation,” which included “I Am Not Skilled To Understand.” Prolific Gospel musician William J. Kirkpatrick set it to music.

The last verse goes: Yes, living, dying let me bring/My strength, my solace from this spring;/That He who lives to be my King/Once died to be my Savior.

It was just the message I needed that day: to leave with Jesus the problems that only He can solve.

Spoon squabble

"How come Zion has two spoons?”  my four-year-old grandson Josiah complained one recent lunch

about his  2 1/2-year-old brother’s “place setting.” When they eat at Nana’s house, they have “assigned” child sets. Josiah’s is a sectioned toddler plate that looks like a barn and has “fat-handle,” child-friendly knife/fork/spoon. Zion is using a family “heirloom” set from his dad’s babyhood,  a “Peter Rabbit” plate with Peter Rabbit child-size spoon and fork. Plus—and this is where the problem came in—I got him a toddler bent-handle spoon.  Still ambidextrous, he finds eating applesauce a challenge with either hand.  The bent spoon helps.  Thus, “spoon number 2.” 

The so-called “inequity” in place settings had never been brought up—until that day.

Deciding to solve the problem himself, Josiah took Zion’s Peter Rabbit spoon and put it by his plate. I reprimanded him and put it back by Zion’s plate. Josiah grabbed it again.  We had war on our hands.
Just then—I am telling the truth—I recalled another “sibling rivalry” that merited a discussion in the New Testament. 

The setting was the Sea of Galilee, after Jesus’ resurrection. Any appearance after His death and resurrection was awesome anyway, and this morning Jesus showed up on shore and performed a miracle for the up-until-then empty-netted fisherman, Peter and John among them. By the time they dragged the bulging net to shore, Jesus had built a fire to cook some for breakfast.  (I like this detail. Jesus knew practical skills like starting a fire without matches!)

After breakfast, Jesus had a penetrating conversation with Peter about how much Peter loved Him. After all, before Jesus’ crucifixion, Peter denied Him three times. Then Jesus predicted Peter’s death scenario: “When you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go” (John 21:18). He wasn’t suggesting Peter would fade away in a nursing home, but that he’d have a difficult, helpless death that would glorify God.  Tradition says that Peter died of crucifixion, upside-down, the opposite of Christ’s death.

After that stunning revelation, Peter pointed at John. “Lord, what about him?”  In other words, if I have to die in misery, shouldn’t John, too? Jesus replied, “If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you?  You must follow me”(21:22).

Historians say John died in extreme old age on a prison island.  But the lesson of this passage isn’t who-dies-how, but that living according to Jesus’ plan has no place for entitlement.  We can’t demand that Jesus give us a certain life that’s full of the things we want.  Health, education, employment, nice housing, a nice car, marriage, family, or even public recognition are not “givens” of the Christian life. Demanding them from God is the sin of coveting. We’re simply to trust and obey. Do our best with what God has given us. 

The rest of the spoon story? We’re back to “normal.” And Zion still makes a mess of eating applesauce, even with the bent spoon.  Someday….