Reflections on Grace

On July 30, 2018   /   The Journey   /   1 Comment

If you were sick and knew the sickness led to death, how much money would you be willing to pay for a cure? If your heart was broken and there was no chance of repair, what would you give to stop the ache?

It was very cloudy today, and cool. I got up early to take my dogs for a brisk walk. It was a real treat since warmer temperatures have made regular walks impossible due to overheating. We bounced and jolted as my puppy followed her nose and my older dog tried to maintain a steady gait. I wasn’t feeling particularly excited about my jaunt around the neighborhood but I always feel better after a little exercise so I pressed forward. There was no pretty sunrise because of the clouds and therefore it was a little gloomy. But that didn’t bother me. I had turned on a talk a friend of mine gave on the promise of grace and I found myself lost in the glory of his words.

For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people. Titus 2:11

Sometimes the clouds are filled with grace. They hide the suns hot rays. They make it possible for rain to come and water a parched earth. They billow and curl in majestic sweeps of vapor that tantalize the imagination. But unfortunately, they also hide the sun when we most feel like basking in it.

I arrived at work and proceeded to stock the fridge with my salad fixings for the week. One of the gentlemen I work with was filling his coffee cup when I said to him, “Happy Monday! Isn’t it a beautiful day?” You see, I was all filled with light from my reflections on God’s grace before work and, to be honest, I was just so glad for the clouds and cooler weather. He said, “It’s interesting that you say it’s a beautiful day outside when its so cloudy and gloomy. Margaret, why do you say that?” I know Eric well enough to know his question was sincere so I refrained from sarcasm. I said, “You know, even when the clouds hide it, the sun is still shining.” And he smiled. “I like that,” he said. “I’m going to use that today.”

It was a typical Monday; frenetic and challenging. There was more work to do than hours in the day to complete it. Right before I planned to eat lunch I was asked to stay in a two hour meeting. Worse, I was wearing tight pants.

I wore them because I wanted to look stylish. I promised myself when I put them on this morning that I would stand at my desk all day so I could breathe. So when my boss asked me to sit for two hours to run the technology for a meeting, I died a little inside. Two agonizing hours of trying to find a position that didn’t cut off the circulation to my bowels was an exercise in futility.

Sometimes not dying of tight pants syndrome is a reason to practice gratitude. So when I finally escaped the workplace and began to drive home I took particular delight in the fluffy clouds that clustered on the horizon. You see, I often watch the sky with hope, imagining what is to come; namely, Jesus. I believe that one day He will come with the saints that have died before me. They will cover the sky with shining armor and flashing swords. And then, my Savior will defeat the enemy (Satan) forever. I can’t wait for that day. The promise of it fills me with hope.

As I drove home, the sun shone through the clouds in sparkling rays of gladness. And then suddenly it began to rain. A great, big, dark cloud attempted to blot out the sun for a moment but with no success. And then I found myself driving through a beautiful rain shower that looked like a shower of diadems because of the sun streaming through the water. Everything sparkled in that moment like, well, magic.

Maybe you will say there is no God and I’m just full of silly fairy tales. But I see him on days like today. I sense his presence. Maybe that is why I came home and called someone I love dearly and began to talk to him about the Jesus I love and the grace he so freely gives. This grace is especially for people like me; those who least deserve it.

Grace is unmerited favor. It is love that cannot be earned. It is a gift–not unlike the rain–that falls when we least expect it and cools the hot flesh of our face. Grace removes the stain of sin and guilt. It promises me that we are not forsaken.

Waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works. Titus 2:13-14

The cure for all that ails us is Jesus, the God man.

The salve for all our heartaches is Jesus, the Christ.

Today if you feel you have lost hope, take heart! The heavens declare the glory of God and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. He is real and he is ruling in Heaven. One day he will return. Trust Him with your life and you will never be disappointed.

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Harvesting Wild Blueberries

On July 9, 2018   /   The Journey   /   Leave a comment

“Welcome everything broken and everything beautiful. Trembling and holy and drifting and brave.” Rebecca Reynolds

Have you ever felt broken? I’m not talking about blithe sadness, but rather the bone-crushing weight of disappointment. Have you ever looked at your hands and wondered if you would ever hold happiness in them again? You remember what it felt like. It was like caramel corn in your mouth by the seaside on a mild summer day. The breeze was blowing and your skin was warm and cool at the same time. But now your grasp is weak. The clouds have rolled in and the breeze is just like ice blowing through your heart. Have you ever felt that way?

On a recent trip to the country I sat down with a neighbor who spoke to me of this kind of disappointment. As she tried to clean her pool—a seemingly impossible task because there was so much algae and the filter kept clogging—she shared with me how weak were the fingers of someone she loves. She spoke of a series of familial suicides. She spoke about financial difficulty. She spoke about discord with another family member and the ache of daily rejection. As she exposed her wounds and talked about depression, I sensed a deeper despair she was not ready to reveal. Still, she spoke of the goodness of God.

“I wouldn’t be here today if not for His help. He has carried me through.”

We sat in a newly built cabin that was filled with her treasures. Her “peaceful enclave” contained an old wood burning stove, special antique furniture, and a bevy of plaques on the walls that pronounced the grace of God in flowing script. She had written peace all over the place and it certainly felt like an oasis from sadness, but I have yet to find walls that are truly strong enough hold out the tentacles of sadness and despair.

Our family had gone camping against my better wishes. My husband longed for a country getaway while I longed for the seaside. I said, “Can’t we just get in the car and drive to Gulf Shores, AL? We could be on the beach in a few hours’ time with our toes in the sand. But he shook his head adamantly and my heart fell like a stone into muddy water. My middle son voiced the soft thrums of my disappointment.

I don’t want to go camping!

“Mom, please don’t make me go. I don’t want to sleep in a tent. I don’t want to be in the woods with the ticks and chiggers and mosquitoes.” Because while we certainly love the country, past trips have proved stressful, uncomfortable and just plain hot. And then we come home covered in bug bites and scratch for weeks until they heal. Still, I tried to encourage my boy to find something positive to focus on, things like swimming in the river, catching toads and crawdads, and staring at the stars by the campfire. Still, he sobbed great big tears of disappointment and my sad momma heart ached with him.

What do you do when you feel like that? When (like my son) you are forced to walk a path you do not choose. When the earth shifts after a loved one’s life is cut short. When the doctor’s knife misses its mark and leaves you with permanent numbness or pain. When the Harley is repossessed. When you tear your SI joint while loading the truck with camping supplies. How do you respond?

This is not the beach!

We woke up that first morning in a haze of sunlight through the trees. It shone into the tent as if to say, “Wake up! The day is here and you’re missing it!” I stumbled through the morning routine; get dressed, spray on more insect repellant, rub my aching back, fumble for the coffee. Meanwhile my youngest son was gesticulating about exploring the woods while I wanted to sit back in my camp chair and let the ibuprofen take effect. I tried to ignore him—after all, the last thing I wanted to do was going exploring the woods at the height of tick season, but after a little nudge from the Holy Spirit, I reasoned it was probably right to go with him.

Gulf Shores, Alabama

He sprinted down the hill and into a dry creek bed while I leaned heavily on my walking stick. He hollered, “Mom, come look at this cool rock. Is that what the Indians made arrow heads out of?” I said, “No, dear one. That’s sandstone.” He said, “What’s sandstone?” I said, “It’s what’s on the beach in Gulf Shores, AL only harder and not as pretty.” Okay, I didn’t really say that last bit but I wanted to. Still, I tried to take my own advice to Randy, my middle son (who was still hiding in his tent on a rapidly deflating air mattress). I looked for toads and cool rock formations and listened to my younger son prattle on about acorns. And there in the midst of my wandering I saw them, the little purple berries growing on a green bush no taller than my shins. I recognized the leaves because we had tried to grow blueberries bushes in our yard for several years. Unfortunately, they all died. They berries were small but unmistakable. So I ate them. And guess what? They were very sweet.

Blueberries are my favorite fruit and there they were—on a dry and rocky hillside in Salem, Missouri, in the midst of a trip I had not wanted to take. And when I looked more closely, I realized that all of the low growing plants around me that I thought were just useless scrub brush were actually blueberry plants, I marveled at the goodness of my God. And then I sprinted back to camp for a Ziploc bag so I could start collecting them.

We spent the better part of that morning pulling the tasty fruit from the scruffy plants. And suddenly my disappointed fingers didn’t feel so weak. My heart was a little less achy and my hopes were a little less dashed. As we climbed up and down hills—bending low to capture the sweetness in a bag, I thanked God for his care and comfort. And my little son, Ephraim—whose name means “God has made me fruitful in the land of my suffering”—helped me to collect the berries even though he doesn’t like to eat them. He delighted to see me glad and I enjoyed his cheerful, exuberating, gesticulations. And when we picked all of the ticks off later and cooled ourselves in the Meramec River, I gave God the praise he deserves. For he made something sweet grown in a barren place that I never would have expected, and brought joy to a hope-depleted heart.

Are you walking a path today that is filled with sharp stones? Does your burden cause the shoulders to sag, the heart to dip low, and the back to ache? Give your disappointment to the One who wants to comfort you and ask him to come near. For if you love him, he has promised to never leave or forsake you. And maybe, if you look closely, you might find a harvest of wild blueberries.

My country neighbor was weighted with many worldly woes and so I showed her the wild blueberries growing close to her cabin. She has lived there for many years and never noticed them before. I also noticed the prickly bushes with bright red berries growing around her small pond and asked if I could pick some for her. I then brought a few pints of blackberries for her to eat or bake with, and then we sat in her air conditioned oasis for a while and talked. I think friendship is good balm for the broken heart and so does she. So when the time came to depart she hugged me and said, “Will you come back soon?” And I nodded enthusiastically. “I have to pick more blueberries.”

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The Paths of Peace

On June 27, 2018   /   The Journey   /   Leave a comment

Grief has a jagged bite. With rows of sharp teeth it sinks into our flesh and refuses to let go. So we sit in the ashes and mourn what can never be regained. The finality of death is like the bite of a viper; filled with fury and poison.

I am noticing the various reactions of those who grieve around me and remarkably, many of those who have previously walked these dark paths are stoic. There is a certain calmness, an acceptance, and a knowledge that death finds all of us eventually. It terrifies me. If death is an amputation, I find myself screaming like a soldier whose leg has been shredded in battle. “Don’t cut it off!”

We don’t like to speak of such things. We whisper. We deflect. We pretend we are okay and smile.

While speaking to one of my cousins, she shared with me the sad story of a woman she was collaborating with on a project at work. The woman seemed well put together, professional and, well, happy. They spent several months working on a project through a local hospital and were nearing the end when Erin learned she had committed suicide. “I had no idea she was upset.” She said. “She never gave me any inclination she was hurting. Why didn’t I notice something was wrong? What if I could have done something to help?” And beneath all the questions and shock of the situation I heard her heart weeping for the missed opportunity, as if to say, “What if I somehow contributed to her despair by not noticing she was in pain?”

The world is filled with perilous paths, and the human heart carries the weight of a thousand wounds most people will never see. My family has walked these paths more often than not. My beloved cousin died from a drug overdose. My grandmother died in a car accident. My cousin’s mother died from drug related use. My uncle died from a brain aneurism shortly after the birth of his son. Our hearts howl with rage over the removal of the appendage we so desperately need to function.

The paths of peace we have not known. So how do we find them?

When I was a child, maybe seven or eight, I stood next to a garden on my grandfather’s property in the country and looked up into the sky. I saw there the most magnificent clouds and the sun streaming down through them with golden beams that warmed my face. I felt so small and silently wondered if that was what heaven looked like. The incredible beauty stirred a longing in my soul for something more. The specter of grief hovered around us due to the loss of my grandmother a few years earlier but no one talked about it. No one helped me to process it–maybe because they thought I was too young to understand. Still, in my little girl-ness, I wondered where she was and if I would see her again. I heard people talk about heaven and assumed she was there. With all of that pain raining down around me all of the time, I subconsciously longed to be in that sunny place where hearts no longer ached. (Today I am an adult and I long for the same thing.) I had heard that God was in Heaven and that if I believed in him, he would be a father to me. But in that moment he became real to me as never before. I somehow sensed he was looking down at me with love and that each beam of light was a promise from him to me; “Margaret, one day you will be with me.” And candidly, I was filled with impatience.

Many people do not believe in God. We want something we can touch and taste and smell. We want to see this God. We want to hear him. Without these affirmations of the five senses, we reject his realness. We say we will not believe in something that does not satisfy our senses. I understand this need because I too have felt it at times, especially when I am hurting. I have shouted into the darkness, “Prove yourself, God. If you are real, I need you to show up right now!”

Someone recently spoke to me about the things we cannot live without but that we cannot see. He said to me, “I cannot live without love.” And for a moment I tried to imagine that I could, but alas I failed. What is a human being who has never known love?

I saw this realized in a movie recently called, “Unleashed”. Jet Li plays a man who has never known love. He is raised by a vicious loan shark who keeps him in a collar and takes it off only when he wants to collect a debt. He “sicks” Danny on his victims to coerce them to pay, and it is only when Danny meets the kindly blind piano player, Sam, that he begins to understand what it means to be loved. This love transforms him and he finds he can no longer kill people. Love opens his eyes to the sacredness of the human soul.

I know what it is to be loved by God, therefore I cannot believe that he does not exist. But I don’t believe it just because I looked at the clouds one day and thought, gee, that’s pretty, I hope I get there one day. This is not a path of peace. I believe God is real and that he loves me because I read the bible and I believe it is true.

There are others who will vouch for the veracity of the bible. That is not my intent in this discourse. (If you are interested in chasing those questions try books like Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel, Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus, by Nabeel Qureshi or I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist, by Norman Geisler and Frank Turek). I also like this webpage.

These are the paths of peace; great truths that bring real and lasting comfort, healing and hope, after the viper strikes.

“Behold, I am coming soon, bringing my recompense with me, to repay each one for what he has done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” Revelation 22:12

There are some for whom this verse will offend, but I am glad for consequences. I am relieved that God is just. I want to know that for every evil act there is punishment. This knowledge gives me peace. We live in a world where Batman and Superman do not always save the day. My best friend was raped in college and the men were never prosecuted. My neighbor, Shawn Daugherty, died in the street and they never found the person who killed him. Our media feeds are filled with examples of injustice every single day but the bible says God will repay every person for what he has done. For the child who is abandoned in the slums of Honduras, who is trafficked, who dies of starvation, God is just.

Sin is a curse punishable by death. For that reason I believe we all fear death because we all subconsciously know we will stand before God and have to explain ourselves. It’s a horror to even consider. How can I possibly justify myself before God for tormenting my brother and sister when we were younger? I would wake them in the night to terrify and torture them for no reason other than I enjoyed it. You may say, “Well Margaret, you were young! You didn’t know any better.” But if that was the case, why did I work so hard not to get caught? Now maybe that raises the hackles on the back of your neck because you don’t want to hear that you are a sinner. But the bible doesn’t just say, “Ha, ha! You’re a sinner and you are doomed!” It says, “For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins.” (Romans 3:22-25)

“And the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.” Revelation 20:10

I know the end of the story and God wins. This gives me immense peace. The bible begins with the story of how Satan deceived humanity and contributed to our loss of innocence (Genesis 3). I believe this broke God’s heart because he created us to love him and be in relationship with him. Meanwhile Satan continues to work to deceive humanity. He is described as a roaring lion (1 Peter 5:8) seeking whom he may devour. Satan is real. We feel the fire of his breath. But one day God will extinguish it forever. I love how John Owen phrases it in his work, “The Death of Death in The Death of Christ”, “Thus clear, then, and apparent, is the intention and design of Christ and his Father in this great work, even what it was, and towards whom,–namely, to save us, to deliver us from the evil world, to purge and wash us, to make us holy, zealous, fruitful in good works, to render us acceptable, and to bring us unto God; for through him ‘we have access into the grace wherein we stand.’ Romans 5:2.”

Jesus, the God man, entered the world to kill death forever. He said, “The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Matthew 20:28). “The last enemy to be destroyed is death.” (1 Corinthians 15:26) I have on my desk at work a sketch by John Hendrix which imagines the death of death as a deep chasm in the earth sucking up and swallowing bleached bones. I look at this image when I grieve the curse of sin in the world (death). I look at this image with hope because I am sure that one day we will rise to either eternal death (hell) or eternal life (heaven). This temporal life is just the seed that falls to the ground. When we pass through “the veil” we will see what living really is. “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” (Revelation 21:3-4)

“The sum of all is,–the death and blood-shedding of Jesus Christ hath wrought, and doth effectually procure, for all those that are concerned in it, eternal redemption, consisting in grace here and glory hereafter.” – John Owen

These are the paths of peace. They run by still waters. They restore my soul. They deliver me from the bite of the viper that is filled with fury and poison. They enable me to hope when all hope seems lost.

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