LIGHT-BEARERS

The summer and winter Olympics begin and end—so appropriately—with a torch. From Greece, birthplace of the Olympics, a torch is ignited via the sun-reflected heat in a parabolic mirror, then begins its journey to the current games site. There’s a lot of pagan mythology in the torch background, but it’s a good cousin to this décor saying:

Be the light.

The Olympic flame has an on-again, off-again world-wide life.  In contrast, Jesus is all-on.

[Jesus] said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” (John 8:12)

To this statement, the religious types of His day complained, “You’re just saying that about yourself.  Who would back that up?” (John 8:13).

He replied that He did have a witness to His claim to be the light: His Father in heaven (John 8:14-19).

That was tough teaching for folks who figured “righteous living” depended on keeping umpteen hundred little laws handed down (and invented) through antiquity. Of such people, the apostle John wrote, “The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it” (John 1:5). They weren’t expecting God to visit this planet!

Later on, in the letter written in his old-age, the apostle John urged right and “light” living, as opposed to religious “pretenders” whose man-imposed rules for living and behavior just kept them in spiritual darkness:

God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.  If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth.  But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin. (1 John 1:5-7)

That quote is powerful.  Re-read it. It reviews two choices: to walk down life’s road in the darkness of grudges, bitterness, fear and other negative attributes. Or to get so close to Jesus that we bask in His glow.  The ritual for the Olympic torch begins with the heat of the sun. We have so much better: the Sun of Righteousness, who has risen with healing in His wings (Malachi 4:2).

PATIENCE!

Somewhere, long ago, I saw this sign. I should have bought it, because it is so "me"!
I want patience, and I want it right now!
With maturity comes the realization that patience is a slow-brewed quality. It takes time to ripen that personality trait.  Like sauerkraut.  Well, maybe cabbage to sauerkraut isn’t the best illustration. Maybe cheese? Instead of the petulant “right now” slogan, I’ve mellowed to appreciate this one:

Often, when things aren’t going my way, or happening as fast as I want, I am drawn back to an old friend, Psalm 37.  It has hard words like “fret not,” “trust,” “delight,” “dwell,” “commit,” “be still,” “refrain from anger,” and “a little while.”
I once heard “fretting” called a “spiritual heartburn.” It’s the acid of impatience that wants its own way and timing, not God’s. Over and over, God has to remind me:

“Be still before the LORD and wait patiently for him.” (v. 7)

Sometimes He wants me to stop and change direction.  Sometimes He just wants me to stop trying to manipulate an improbable or impossible situation. My Plan A or Plan B are just plain wrong.  His Plan C, even though it may take more time, is far better.

That’s where prayer enters into the situation. The unchangeable God is the One who can break down stubborn wills or circumstances thought to be unchangeable. That’s why I keep praying for people and circumstances that left me wounded.  I can’t change them. But God can. My job is to aspire to greater godly character. It’s what the psalmist describes as righteousness, blameless, generous, faithful, uttering wisdom, speaking what is just.

I’ve been the victim of someone’s “rage”—an angry outburst full of lies and misinformation. When that person left, I realized I was trembling from this emotional wounding. But I also asked the Lord to help me look with His eyes on this troubled person. I can’t fix the world. But I can leave those problems in God’s lots-capable hands. 

Do not fret, trust, delight, commit your way to Him, be still.  Good things do take time, when they’re left to God’s perfect time.

OLDIE BUT NOT MOLDY

Several years after our parents died, my sister brought me my dad’s old Bible, which she had stored away and thought I should now have. She had kept a lot of family “heritage” things as I was still single at the time of their deaths, and moving a lot. Now that I was married and "settled," she felt I should have our father’s old leather-bound Bible. As I leafed through it, noting portions he had marked, I was grateful again for a Christian dad. But now this old Bible had a strong, stale odor from storage. The best I knew to do was seal it in a plastic bag and put it in a bin with other family “heritage” things that had interest but not regular usefulness for me.

Some day my family will have to decide what to do with that plus my Bibles in various versions. My current one, a quarter-century worn and marked up, wouldn’t win any beauty contests. But when I open it, it is my old friend who leads me to the throne room where my Savior waits to chat with me.

I thought of such aging and antique Bibles when I saw this sign:

My most valued antiques are my old friends.

One such human “antique” called the other night. Our friendship goes back more than three decades, with part of that time her living on the other side of the nation. She’s now back in my town, but often on the go helping her adult children and grandchildren in another state. 

It’s not the usual “girlfriend” relationship that’s stereotyped by coffee dates or shopping trips. But it's been built by years of personal contract, and now safe enough that she entrusted me with a key to her house in case she ever locked herself out. (That has happened with her on-the-go life). If there’s a big family concern, she knows I will pray, and vice versa. We share articles of interest to each other—the observation of Proverbs 27:17: “As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.” One time she remarked, “We’re friends who can just pick up and keep going where we left off.” We’re low-maintenance in our friendship, but stay in touch enough to know we’ll always be there for each other. I’m reminded of Proverbs 17:24 (and I change the last word to “sister”): “There is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.”

One person I pray for has few up-close-and-personal friends like this. Oh, this person is on social media, but that's not the same as face-to-face contact (and hard work) of truly nurturing a friend. You can't hug a screen. While contemporary media can encourage “sharing,” it also enables the faceless "out" of “unfriending” someone. It doesn’t nurture the honesty and loving admonition that comes from just being together--particularly the believer-to-believer friendships that can grow deep and sweet with time.

And isn't that also true of spending time with our Truest Friend, Jesus? 

FLYING TWEETS AND TWITTERS

When I married and moved to a small central Washington town, mornings just got better. In Portland, greater Los Angeles and Chicago, I woke to the roar of traffic. Now, the twitters and tweets of birds come through the open window. It’s so peaceful and a poignant reminder that the same Creator God who made things that fly also made me, and has never gone out of business!

I’m not famous as a “morning person.” Like a diesel engine, I need time to warm up, and more so as I age.  My morning routine now includes a heat pad on a painful knee. But my new “normal” is okay. “Wake up and be awesome,” urges one of the signs I liked. Sometimes upon wakening, I pull on old concerns like a ratty old robe. I’m prone to identify with King David in Psalm 5. There he rehearses how mean and demeaning people have made his life miserable. But there’s a golden verse toward the beginning:
Listen to my cry for help, my King and my God, for to you I pray.
Morning by morning, O LORD, you hear my voice; morning by morning I lay my requests before you and wait in expectation. (Psalm 5:2-3)

One of my morning habits is making the bed before starting on the day’s duties. It’s like closing the night chapter and opening the day chapter for whatever God has ahead. No matter what yesterday brought, this is a new day. David also wrote:
Weeping may remain for a night, But rejoicing comes in the morning. (Psalm 30:5)
Then, as part of morning devotions (besides reading the Bible), I often pick up a hymnal kept next to my devotional "spot." Dozens are part of my spiritual heritage, their tunes easily recalled, and their words uplifting with praise and Biblical truth. Godly men and women who condensed spiritual lessons to rhyme continue to speak.

Fortified by song and God’s Word, I’m ready to add my voice to the day, remembering another psalm:
This is the day the LORD has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it. (Psalm 118:24)
When I look in the mirror and acknowledge the aging process, I also remember that God created me for more than this earth. But for now, the morning tweets and twitters (which have nothing to do with the cyberworld) outside my window declare that I can wake up and be awesome—in God’s sight.

STRETCHED

“If it doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t change you.”  I’m not sure what the author of that saying intended, but it takes me back to a book that profoundly impacted me as a young adult. It’s The Shadow of the Almighty, the biography of missionary martyr Jim Elliot, written by his widow Elisabeth Elliot. The book traced his passion for sharing about Jesus (including the remote Ecuadorean tribe that killed him and his colleagues in the 1950s) and shared his devotion to God in journal entries that included quotes like this: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”  About three years after reading his biography, I found myself on the campus of Wheaton College, where he graduated decades earlier and where he had first met “Bets” (Elisabeth) and knew she was the one—but not quite yet. (They would marry years later in a simple civil ceremony on the mission field.) I hoped to earn a master’s degree in communications at Wheaton as a door to work in Christian publishing. But often as I walked on campus and gazed at the same buildings where he studied, I wondered if I could ever have such audacious faith.

            I had no idea how God would stretch me—to give what I could not keep to gain what I could not lose. My neat-and-tidy plan to sprint through the program was interrupted by my parents’ deaths just six months apart. I found myself stretched in new areas through nearly unbearable grief and intimidating after-death tasks, including emptying the very full family home.

            A year later, I returned to graduate school. At times I wondered if I’d make it—physically, intellectually, and financially. Then, as graduation neared and I finished my thesis, I started job hunting. One by disappointing one, my inquiry letters trickled back with curt “not hiring” replies.

            That faith-stretching time of my life is one reason I resonated with “If it doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t change you.”  Those bewildering, stretching, humbling years of higher education left me with this important lesson: When life belittles, God is bigger.  My job offer—a God-thing--came just days before I had to vacate college housing with no place to go.

            That job was a good experience, but marriage and motherhood changed my address and vocational direction. Four diplomas hang on the wall in my bedroom (high school, college, Bible school, graduate school). But I’m still “in school” for a degree that Jim Elliot described in his journals: the A.U.G.—“approved onto God.” He took this from 1 Timothy 2:15-16:

Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth.

            Or, said another way, don’t resist when God is taking the “raw you” and stretching you spiritually and vocationally to better serve Him. People who don’t change and grow, stagnate. Those who turn away from challenges backtrack…and lose, not gain.

SIMPLE GRATITUDE

The busy bee is the black spot in the middle of the pink cluster.

The window outside my writing corner has quite a boring view: a weathered fence and the attic air vent of my neighbor’s home. The exception is May, when tall, decades-old rhododendrons burst out in glorious color. Even though the windowpane I can hear bees busily flying from one blossom to another. When I sit in a funk, unable to turn keystrokes into uplifting or helpful words, I remember that praise is the best antidote for a negative outlook. So I thank the Lord for the brilliant colors of these blossoms. The happy buzz of the bees. The water to nourish these plants. The changing skyline at the top of the window. Electronics that link me (and my writing) to the world. People who’ve affirmed me.

In his book Healing for Damaged Emotions, pastor-counselor David Seamands gave several practical suggestions for dealing with depression. Over the past year in this blog I worked through the 48 psalms he commended for study during “down” times. He also advocated developing a mindset of praise and thanksgiving. Such was one way that a saint of a previous century, Salvation Army leader Samuel Brengle, dealt with the depression that came to him from time to time. “When he couldn’t feel God’s presence or really pray,” Seamands wrote, “he would thank God for the leaf on the tree of the beautiful wing of a bird” (p. 129). That’s the principle of 1 Thessalonians 5:18, which many cite for expressing gratitude. Seamands remarked that Paul didn’t write the Thessalonians to “feel thankful for everything” but to “in everything give thanks.”

In agreement with that, another popular sign says “Cherish life’s simple treasures.”

The other day my grandsons were here at what should have been the toddler’s naptime. He’s a little guy who can be fussy about where he sleeps, his preference of course being his own crib. While my husband kept the 4- and nearly 6-year-olds busy, I took the 19-month-old into the bedroom where I had set up a folding playpen next to my rocker. Snug under a warm fleece blanket, he’d settled down and closed his eyes. His breathing said “asleep!” so I tried to move him into the playpen. Disaster. Part of the problem was the “comfort” nursing he gets at naptime from his own mom. His granny wasn’t up to that! So I ended up rocking him asleep for nearly two hours. I thought of David’s tender picture in describing spiritual contentment:
I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me. But I have calmed and quieted myself. I am like a weaned child with its mother, like a weaned child I am content.(Psalm 131:1b-2)

Our culture promotes the bigger-and-better, wild-and-crazy, off-the-top. Just watch television’s quiz or daytime prize shows to see what people will do for vacations and “stuff.” Or hang around a convenience store advertised as having sold winning lottery tickets in the past.

Simple treasures that prompt thanksgiving aren’t the extravagant man-made entertainments and baubles. They’re the ordinary yet extraordinary gifts of God all around us. Even as simple as a bee buzzing into a blossom.

DOWNSIZING

Can “downsizing” be “uplifting”?  Well, it depends on who you talk to! These days you can either pare down to the minimum stuff that “brings you joy” (then fold it into an origami bird) or you dispose with abandon in “Swedish death cleaning”—before you die. Somewhere, there’s a happy medium.  I lean toward “less stuff,” probably due to once facing the enormous job of cleaning out my deceased parents’ home, plus having to minimize for many moves myself during my single years. And yes,  it’s time to pare down again….
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So here come two signs that wag accusing fingers at our tendency to accumulate material possessions:
Live simply. 
Gratitude turns what we have into enough.
Both distill Jesus’ teachings about “stuff”:
Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions. (Luke 12:15)
Even fabulously wealthy King Solomon saw how “stuff” can entrap:
I have seen a grievous evil under the sun: wealth hoarded to the harm of its owner.(Eccl. 5:13)
For 18 days in 1947, the New York times chronicled the story of the reclusive Collyer brothers. Police eventually found both deceased and buried under 103 TONS of clutter and garbage in their multi-story brownstone home. One had apparently died when piles of junk fell on him, burying him alive.

It’s not just having too much stuff.  It’s wanting more and more when we can get by with less. Far less. Back in the 1970s there was a popular faith conference series which passed out hearty red-covered note-taking binders to participants. The speaker addressed needs across the age spectrum, including being grateful for whatever material possessions God entrusts to us. The speaker’s teaching was this: “Contentment is understanding that if I am not satisfied with what I have, I will never be satisfied with what I want. Contentment is realizing that God has already given me everything I need for my present happiness.” I'd call that the uplifting side of downsizing!