Impossible to eat

I was a bit surprised in the last few weeks when an old folk song (think: early 1960s and Peter, Paul and Mary) started rattling around in my mind. The lyrics (original with Will Holt in the late 50s) compared the bitter fruit of the lemon tree with fickle young love. Now, I wasn’t thinking at all about teen crushes (and their crushing aftermaths). Instead, the Bible’s perspective on bitterness had occupied my study and thinking.

Someone’s remark about realizing they had a problem with bitterness prompted me to review what the Bible says about it. The book of James, full of blunt counsel about religious pretention, didn’t spare a thing.  After characterizing “wisdom” as evidenced by a “good life, by deeds done in the humility,” he denounces its opposite:

…if you harbor bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast about it or deny the truth.  Such “wisdom” does not come down from heaven but is earthly, unspiritual, of the devil.” (James 3:15 NIV)

The writer of Hebrews offered a similar warning:

Pursue peace with all people, and holiness, without which no one will ever see the Lord: looking carefully lest anyone fall short of the grace of God; lest any root of bitterness springing up cause trouble, and by this many become defiled.” (Hebrews 12:14-16 NKJV)

Like the weeds in my flower beds, bitterness will take over and choke out what’s good if it’s not dealt with. In the relational realm, bitterness can divide families, strangle what could be healthy relationships, and poison both mind and body.  

Bitterness slips in when we respond to suffering in wrong ways.  Everybody suffers. But we make the choice to be bitter—or better.

Ruth of the Old Testament showed the “better” choice. Death took her husband, her brother-in-law and father-in-law. Rather than slink back in the shadows of her pagan homeland (Moab), she chose the compassionate and courageous route. Despite knowing it would be a difficult and dangerous journey, she decided to accompany her sad and bitter mother-in-law back to her homeland (Bethlehem), even though living there might be just as bleak.  Naomi, in fact, had started to call herself “Mara,” meaning “bitter.”

Of course, the rest of the story was that God rewarded faith. In turning away from her “bitter roots” of paganism and blaming, she received a fresh start and was grafted (via her marriage to a compassionate “kinsman-redeemer,” Boaz) into the lineage of the coming Messiah.

Bitter or better? Remember the lemon. Its main characteristic is sour. And bitterness turns us into sour people.

Rock on!

This super-size rocker has been a longtime

fixture outside a furniture store in Moscow, Idaho

I’m a big fan of rocking chairs—well, maybe not this big. But the soothing action of rockers takes me back to my childhood and sitting in the lap of my dad for story time in his spring-action platform rocker. When I started my first job three hours’ drive from home, and needed to assemble furniture basics, I could hardly wait to buy my own rocker.  My bed was third-hand. My ancient hand-me-down couch had wires poking through the frame. My passed-on dining set was, well, plastic and cheap. But in that first year I added a colonial style wooden rocker to my household.  When things got tough at work or in relationships, it was my “place to go” to read scripture and talk with my Heavenly Father.

More than a decade later, when I married and had babies, that rocker was moved to the nursery. Motherhood gave me a special appreciation for Psalm 131:

My heart is not proud, O LORD, my eyes are not haughty;

I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me.

But I have stilled and quieted my soul; like a weaned child with its mother, like a weaned child is my soul within me.

O Israel, put your hope in the LORD, both now and forevermore.

When my two older grandsons visit and take their naps at our home, the three-year-old still likes Nana to rock him. I ask what he wants me to sing, and it’s always “Mary had a little lamb.”  I follow up with “Jesus loves me” and some other Sunday school songs until he’s mellow enough to place in the portable playpen where he takes naps here. (His brother rates the crib in the guest room.)  As I cover him and whisper, “Nana loves you,” I’m taken back to those stretching times of trust when, quiet before God in my earthly rocker, I sought the spiritual strength to keep my hope in Him. When things in my life were going haywire, I wanted to be still and quiet before Him.

My mother died in 1978 when I was barely thirty, so memories of her are becoming more precious. One memory, captured by camera in an era when photos were rare and expensive, shows her as a newborn in 1919, propped up in an old rocker. I knew she was born in a log cabin in eastern Montana, the firstborn of a Norwegian immigrant and his wife, whose childhood polio left her with one leg shorter than the other. The family lived in poverty, tilling the land he'd homesteaded. I don’t know the story of that old rocker. Because my grandfather (who died when I was a few months old) had trained in carpentry in Norway, it’s possible he even crafted it.

I realize rockers have no inherent spiritual quality. But when I sit in my current favorite rocker, my heart waiting for the whispers of my Heavenly Father, I know He is there for me. I am stilled and quieted before Him, listening, and learning.

Varmints!

Mickey and Minnie they are not!  My husband’s benevolent spirit in feeding birds brought some unwanted visitors to the hanging feeder in our back yard.  Their bigger cousins (ugh) visited, too.  In past years, we’ve had raccoons hang around.  And we live in town!

My revulsion over the “real thing” causes me to stand amazed at how a disgusting animal could become a symbol of family fun, as in Disney’s playlands, touted (tongue-in-cheek) as the “Greatest People Trap Ever Built By a Mouse.”

I actually have a very remote connection to the man who began it all, who died the year after I graduated from high school. A few blocks away from our family home in Western Washington lived a retired teacher who had once taught at the school my mother attended in childhood, in rural eastern Montana.  Her teaching career later took her to another state where she had a grade school student whom she remembered as being quite a “dreamy little guy.”  His name: Walt Disney.  I don’t recall how she ended up in our hometown, but she certainly had a brief claim to fame.

Enough fun memories....As for the real, dirty, annoying furry critters that came uninvited to our bird feeder, I thought how their presence at the ledge for feathered friends doesn’t make them a bird any more than “going to church” makes one a Christian.  Jude, known for his blunt language, made that a major point of his letter, the next-to-last book of the Bible.

After scorning Sodom and Gomorrah for giving into sexual immorality and perversion (is our culture doing the same?) and naming other rebellion recorded in the Bible, Jude zeroes in on the faith-pretenders:

These men are blemishes at your love feasts, eating with you without the slightest qualm...These men are grumblers and faultfinders; they follow their own evil desires; they boast about themselves and flatter others to their own advantage. (Jude 12, 16)

My point? Be wise. Pray for your church.  Pray for those whom you discern to be “playing church” and who need the authentic heart transformation possible only through Jesus Christ. 

Mice nibble and steal.  Birds sing. 

The sold-out-for Jesus hymn

When you grow up singing familiar hymns, you're apt to grow cold to the passion behind their words. I thought of that recently when I read through the words of "Take My Life," by Frances Ridley Havergal. It's actually a dangerous hymn because it cuts "self" and "selfishness" out of the picture in its stated desire to be totally consecrated to the Lord.  With each new year, we often pause to reassess the coldness or fervor of our faith. I hope reading about Miss Havergal's commitment will challenge you (as it did me). And then, after reading this blog, I hope you'll find a hymnal (or search for the words on line) and let them settle into your soul.

Frances Ridley Havergal has been called a bright but short-lived candle in English hymnody. Born in 1836 at Astley in Worcestershire, England, her father was a clergyman, writer, composer, and hymn writer. Her middle name, which shows her family’s strong religious allegiance, honors Nicholas Ridley, a prominent English bishop in the 1500s who was burned at the stake for opposing the accession of the queen English history calls “Bloody Mary."  Frances’ brother was a priest in the Church of England and an organist, and she was baptized by another hymnist of that time.

Her father’s nickname for her was “Little Quicksilver” because she had a quick and hungry mind.  She learned to read by four and began writing verse by age seven.  Her mother died when she was only eleven.  Her mother’s last words included this charge to Frances: “Pray God to prepare you for all He is preparing for you.”  Frances learned Latin, Greek and Hebrew, and memorized the Psalms, the book of Isaiah, and most of the New Testament. At ages 16 to 17 she studied in Switzerland.  Because of health problems, she led a quiet life and was known for writing verse and prose. She also had a beautiful voice, and frequently sang with the Philharmonic. But she came to a point of believing she should no longer use her gift for secular purposes, and only in singing about the Lord.

As an example of her gift for rhyme, for New Year’s Day when she was 23, she wrote this poem based on Deu. 33:25:

As thy days thy strength shall be,

This should be enough for thee.

He who knows thy frame will spare

Burdens more than thou canst bear.

At age 38, her faith deepened with a complete surrender to Christ, which came after reading a little book “All for Jesus.” A couple months later she visited friends for five days.  Of that time, she later wrote:

"There were ten persons in the house; some were unconverted and long prayed for, some converted but not rejoicing Christians. [God] gave me the prayer, 'Lord, give me all in this house.' And He just did. Before I left the house, everyone had got a blessing. The last night of my visit I was too happy to sleep and passed most of the night in renewal of my consecration, and those little couplets formed themselves and chimed in my heart one after another till they finished with "ever only, ALL FOR THEE!"

Today those couplets are known as part of the the hymn “Take My Life and Let It Be.” She wrote the lyrics for 88 hymns, the still-sung ones including "Like A River Glorious," "I Gave My Life for Thee," “From Glory to Glory,” “I Gave My Life for Thee,” “The Half Has Never Been Told,” and "Who Is on the Lord's Side?"

A special note about the last verse to “Take My Life.”  It says:

Take My silver and my gold; Not a mite would I withhold.

Frances had a lot of nice jewelry, but decided she should donate it to the church’s Missionary Society to sell for God’s work.  She wrote a friend, “I retain only a brooch for daily wear, which is a memorial to my dear parents; also a locket with the portrait I have of my niece in heaven...I had no idea I had such a jeweler’s shop; nearly fifty articles are being packed off.  I don’t think I need to tell you I never packed a box with such pleasure.”

Frances suffered poor health much of her life. At 42, after a cold, rainy day when she met with some boys to talk with them about the Lord, she became very ill and feverish.  As she died, she whispered, “Come Lord Jesus, come and fetch me.”  She tried to sing and her last sweet, high note was “He--.”  The cause of death was listed as “peritonitis,” an inflammation of the abdomen. She was buried near her father in her birth town. Her tombstone includes what she claimed as her life verse: “The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth us from all sin. 1 John 1:7.”