Resurrection in the Desert

There was a chill in the air this morning that sparked a feeling of being awakened to new life. It conjured all kinds of memories of fall and the holidays and warm socks and pumpkin pie and sugar cookies at Christmas, and Bach playing while fire-colored leaves twist and fall like rain to the earth. There were a few days earlier this fall where it was chilly, but we knew those times were flukes fashioned to tease us, because we still had a few triple digits to come after.

Now, however, the chill and the hope are real because we know that the monstrous heat is gone, having released its death grip on us until next year.

While most of America turned their clocks back, our clocks remained steadfastly fixed where they were. Arizona is one of a few rebel states that doesn’t participate in daylight savings time. There is a little self-satisfied pride that comes with this I think. A kind of thumbing our nose at everyone else, because it’s the one little independence we still have to separate us from the status quo. Maybe that’s just me.

This morning I walked in the dark with a sweatshirt, a welcome change. Fall here means that life begins again. Winter visitors come back and spruce up their yards and repairs are made to bicycles and fireplaces and BBQ’s alike spark to life. Everyone comes outside.

Advent feels closer. Even saying it conjures peace. Soon I will put my little Christmas tree in the shop so I can have my quiet time with its cheery brightness sparkling from the little shelf where it shines to remind me of when Christ came near, when He touched down on this earth so long ago. And how He prays for me from the depths of the unapproachable Light of Heaven even at this moment.

Yes. It’s good, this time of year.

We Arizonans know it maybe more than most.

I turned Christmas music on today but it felt like betraying Thanksgiving, so I settled for some David Nevue on Pandora. It fit.

A Soul Cracked Open

We tend to think that religion is sitting stiff and antiseptic and a little bored and that joy is laughter and freedom and reaching out our arms to embrace the whole wide and preposterous earth which is so beautiful that sometimes it nearly breaks our hearts. We need to be reminded that Christianity is joy and that laughter and freedom and the reaching out of arms are the essence of it. Frederick Buechner, The Hungering Dark, Listening to Your Life, October 28

I came away from the news with a blackness threatening to cloud my mind as it usually does when I watch it at all now. Inasmuch as I think we all have a responsibility to know what’s going on in the world, here lately a little snippet goes a long way. It confirms what the Bible says: that human nature still hasn’t found a way of redeeming itself. There is a comfort for me in that, for the darker things seem in the world, the more I am finding true comfort from my Redeemer. The brighter His light shines.

How can I adequately describe the wild joy in prayer when I least expect it? Or how can I describe faith? It’s like blowing on an ember you didn’t think had any life in it, and watching it as it brilliantly flares from within. Writing these thoughts is almost painful because I want everyone to understand and know the hope that lays beyond all the beauty that is still out there. All the things we see and feel and touch……all of this, even if we can appreciate it, means nothing without God’s Spirit to illuminate it.

Beauty is one of the things God cracks our souls with so the Light of Heaven can get in.

When I think of all the places I have been and the beauty I have seen it almost breaks my heart for those who can’t see who is truly behind it all. Whose Spirit resides as the backdrop for it all, whose unapproachable Light gleams behind every flame colored leaf fluttering against the sky. One whose breath moved along the waters even before the world began. My soul is cracked open at the wonder of it all. That I am here at all.

Without God, and without His Spirit moving through it, all this beauty is dead even while it lives. And that is the weight, the heaviness we carry in this life, the burden we feel to keep it all going. God invites us to step off the carousel, just for a while, so that we can remember that He has kept it going all along. We feel the tiredness of this world because it echoes our own, but even as we share the burden of it, glimmering at its edges we see the brilliance of that other world. The Promise and the Joy of Heaven in the here and the now.

Joy is where the whole being is pointed in one direction, and it is something that by its nature a man never hoards but always wants to share. The second thing is that joy is a mystery because it can happen anywhere, anytime, even under the most unpromising circumstances, even in the midst of suffering, with tears in its eyes. Even nailed to a tree.

Frederick Buechner, The Hungering Dark, Listening to Your Life, October 28

He Delights in Us

If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 1 John 1:9

The LORD is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit. Psalm 34:18

“The Lord your God is in your midst,
A victorious warrior.
He will exult over you with joy,
He will be quiet in His love,
He will rejoice over you with shouts of joy.

Zephaniah 3:17

God delights in us! Is it possible the One who hung the moon and the stars, personally delights in me? Is is possible the One who created the earth and sky and sea and everything in them, personally looks forward to my little prayer time with Him?

Yes, a resounding yes!

Even when I bring all my junk from the past week, even when I drag it all in with me, He still delights in me and looks forward to our meeting. Can there be anything more astounding than that? Scripture also uses words like “passionate”and “jealous” to describe His love for us. In God’s world there are not 50 shades of grey, there is only light and dark and no room for anything in between. He loves us with a love that is total and complete and perfect, lacking in nothing.

He went to the ends of the earth and all the way down to hell for us. He left perfection to come to this soiled planet to rescue us, and He smoked the Dragon of death forever. That’s the kind of God worth knowing, worth committing my life to. His commitment to me is total. He said, “Never will I leave you, never will I forsake you.” When He said, “I do” to me, He meant it.

I don’t know about you, but that’s the kind of God I want.

Big enough to create everything we see and hear and touch. Small enough to fit inside my heart. He delights in me and loves our time together and I love that about Him.

Morning Journal, October 12

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, I took the one less traveled by and that has made all the difference…….Robert Frost.

I walked out with blank pages but somehow I knew that words would come. They usually always do when I am outside under the sky. I have kept a journal for years and years now. I quit for a while when all the days started to sound the same and it was more like me whining. When I started again it turned into more of a prayer journal. I started it because I didn’t want to forget all those little miracles that happen in a day. I wanted it on record, my way of thanking God on paper. Now when I go back and read all the answered prayers, all the big and little moments I smile and remember just how big He is and how small my little worries were.

Where does the time go? Now the morning air is cool–a co-worker joked, here the leaves don’t change, the license plates do. He and I both got a kick out of that one. I do miss seeing the leaves turn. I miss the red, yellow and brown spiraling to the ground, tossed by the wind. But I always feel them in my heart just the same. Up North they are turning and we don’t go to see God’s spectacle. There always seems to be something pressing here.

Had the first fire in the fire-pit. That means fall here in the valley of the sun. My friend at work will be in Yosemite today. I remember fall there–the big gold leafed oaks in the meadow, standing like sentries there in the sun. I remember the crunch of leaves mingled with pine-needles underfoot. And the smoke from campfires filling in all the crevasses way up amongst the tall pines. I remember the one year we got snow.

We all went out to the edge of the meadow to watch it settle on the granite cliffs like a master baker somewhere up above was sifting powdered sugar down. So many good memories.

Too doves are resting on the wall soaking in the early sun, one just now came to drink at the fountain. The all made it through dove season and that’s a good thing.

Another good thing. When I was just writing these words, I wasn’t worried or stressed about anything at all. That is some kind of a small miracle.

Thank you God, for such a good start to the day. It always amazes me that I can go through a dry spell for weeks and have no words at all, but then I get two or three blog posts one right after the other.

That’s how writing is, it’s like faith. Somehow you know the words are there somewhere and that maybe right now you have nothing, but tomorrow or the next day you will. Always there.

Life beyond the Grid

I awoke to a cool and cloudless morning after a deep and almost dreamless sleep. I have been stressed about many things lately and was looking forward to my morning of prayer, a sliver of quiet to start the day right. Everything was going along quite nicely. It was good to empty my mind and open my heart to God and scroll through the pages of His book. I drew a name from the “prayer bowl” and prayed for a co-worker, and everyone on my heart. Then I opened my “Jesus Calling” devotional book and my eyes landed on the first verse of Scripture:

“Truly my soul silently waits for God: From Him comes my salvation, He only is my rock and my salvation; He is my defense; I shall not be greatly moved.” Psalm 62:1-2

“Perfect,” I thought. I had taken a picture on our road trip this past May of two big rocks and that verse would be perfect superimposed against the backdrop of those big rocks. I ran in the house to get my phone to use the handy dandy “You Version” picture App. I am having a lot of fun with that one. After I posted this picture to Facebook I made the mistake of scrolling through my timeline. I never take my phone out to the shop during prayer time and I should have taken it back in the house. It was an intrusion and I knew better.

Next thing I know I am watching a video on how Isis is plotting to take us down by shutting down “the grid” and how easy it will be to do it and how grossly unprepared we would all be if that happened. I marveled at the fact that only as few as 50 years ago there was no grid to worry about.

How did we get here and how did we get so dependent on it? It’s hard to imagine a life without technology. Now my mind was turbulent again and thinking I needed to get a backup supply of canned food and water.

It’s easy to panic when you forget the end of the story. My next verse in the devotional reminded me that there was no need to panic. The enemy’s favorite tactics are to instill fear and try to steal our peace. Isis is only a new version of the same old evil that has been here since before the fall.

I ended the session with these verses of promise continuing in Psalm 62:1,2

Truly my soul finds rest in God; my salvation comes from Him. Truly He is my rock and my salvation; He is my fortress, I will never be shaken…….and further on down we read:

Surely the lowborn are but a breath, the highborn are but but a lie. If weighed on a balance, they are nothing; together they are only a breath. Do not trust in extortion or put vain hope in stolen goods; though your riches increase, do not set your heart on them. (vs. 9-10)

One thing God has spoken; two things I have heard: “Power belongs to you, God, and with you, Lord is unfailing love; and, “Your reward everyone according to what they have done.” (vs. 11,12)

Nothing to fear really.

Easy to Believe

It’s easy to believe in Heaven on mornings like this one……

when the air is sweet and the stars are still winking but

just about to depart from sight.

I walk on tasting the day, knowing how sweet and precious it is.

How fleeting each moment and how important it is to think of time how God does.

Like each day is as a thousand years and how a thousand years a day.

Weightless and free and yet bound to this earth.

I walk on and I flush out a dove, startled from her place.

In wonder, I pray in my place of silence

I wonder at how I can cry the tears of the bitter waters of Marah

and in the next breath have streams of living waters to

flush out my sorrow and replace it with joy.

I marvel at my God.

Whatever happens here:

I have at the very most 35 years this side of Heaven

and then a permanent vacation where peaceful waters flow

and there is no crying only endless joy

a ribbon of eternity stretching out further than my eye can see.

Yes, I grab my cup of coffee and settle in my chair.

I can see it from here.

Those “little Gethsemane” moments

“Now my soul is in turmoil, and what should I say—’Father, save me from this hour’? No! It was for this very reason that I came to this hour.

“Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done.”

No doubt about it, Jesus had the real Gethsemane moment. None of us will ever come close to going through what He did that awful night in the garden. And even though He knew that all that suffering would be over in 3 days time, even though He knew that Heaven was just on the other side of it:

He still wrestled…….He still struggled…..He still resisted. But ultimately He trusted in His Father to see Him though.

What about you? You know you are headed for Glory eventually. You know where your real home is, but does that minimize the Gethsemane moments while you are going through them? I admit, knowing that the end of the story is victorious takes the sting out, but when you’re in the dark groping around, the pain is real. It feels like your own personal mini Gethsemane.

Wednesday was a day like that for me. It felt like God was hiding behind a cloud all day. I knew He was there alright, but I couldn’t feel Him. The night before I had slept fitfully. Taunted by the worry demons, they danced around my mind like shadows. I tried to recite the 23rd Psalm but I could hear Satan whisper…..”There are no green pastures or still waters for you….” He’s such a liar.

Right now it seems ridiculous. Yesterday and today I felt like my old self again, but Wednesday was a battle. I went out to my car during break to get some alone time with God. I had visions of playing some quiet music as the breeze wafted through the car windows, but when I got there someone was sitting in the car right next to me with their window open. So much for that.

I even moved my car to the next shady spot, but lo and behold, there was another person in the car next to me again with their windows rolled down. I know God’s sense of humor well enough by now to know that He was playing a little private joke on me.

Guess He didn’t think I needed any alone time.

Sometimes, God likes to play a little hide and seek with us. He hides Himself for just a little while, and it’s good for us. Those times stretch our faith like nothing else can.

Awhile back I was talking to my Dad, who was going through his own mini-Gethsemane moment at the time. He has a lot of those lately. He is 87 and dealing with all the changes that go along with that. He needed some bolstering up. Thinking to be helpful, I started to tell him about someone else who I felt was in a much worse situation. He told me something that I will never forget. He said, “Hearing about someone worse off doesn’t help me because my situation is what matters to me.

It’s my pain that’s real.

He’s right. There are times when it does help to talk or hear about someone worse off than you, but there are other times when you desperately need a loving ear with an open and sympathetic heart. And here’s the thing:

Anytime you hold out your heart to someone you are taking a risk. You hold it out with trembling hands with the hope that someone will treasure it and take it from you gently and treat it with care, instead of dismissing it or ignoring it altogether.

That was an important lesson that I needed to learn and I thank Him for trusting me enough to speak the truth and speak it kindly. I truly believe the best lessons we can learn are the ones we can learn from each other. We’re all still learning.

None of us is perfect and very few are actually out to get us. The best thing we can do is to ask the Holy Spirit to make us humble and able to receive the lessons He wants to teach us through the classroom of each other.

Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.

A person isn’t who they are the last conversation you’ve had with them, they’re who they’ve been throughout your whole relationship.

Rainier Marie Rilke

My “War Room”

^“But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you………” Matthew 6:6

I have yet to see “War Room” but I plan to soon. Miss Clara has her closet I have heard. And me? I have this little shop which has become so very dear to me. I guess you could say it’s also the birthplace of this blog. When I determined to take the first portion of my day out here back in 2009, I didn’t know what would come out of it, I just knew it’s what I needed to do.

I can’t begin to say how this one simple thing has enriched my life. I miss it on my work days when I can’t come out here. On those days, my car turns into a “prayer closet.” Of course we all know we can pray anywhere, that to me is the essence of a relationship with God, that we have this ongoing communication with our Heavenly Father, anywhere at any time.

But there is something to be said for having a central place to go when you need to be alone with God with only the silence as your backdrop.

I love being out here surrounded by all the buckets, storage bins, paint, projects, Christmas decorations, you name it.

“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” Ephesians 6:12

And when he had taken it, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb. Each one had a harp and they were holding golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of God’s people…….Revelation 5:8

It’s a miracle isn’t it? That we have this gift, the knowledge that God Himself hears our every prayer, that every little whisper is captured in His bowl for all eternity. Every word we speak will be saved, every word is treasured………My bowl isn’t exactly gold, it’s a Longaberger ceramic.

After my Birthday I took the names of everyone who posted on my timeline and placed them in this bowl. Each day I draw a name, and then I add whoever else God brings to mind. And sometimes, I am just silent for a while.

Sometimes I like to think of what’s going on in Heaven right at that particular moment. I like to think of Jesus interceding for us, for He is you know……

My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one— I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. John 17:20-23

The world is outside…….but in here it is well with my soul. The world batters us, and like shipwrecked survivors we come in out of the cold…… we cling to the promises because we know the gates of hell are powerless against them.

I encourage you to find that quiet place. Carved out a little niche somewhere, just for you and God. I promise you won’t regret it.

Until next time……..

Meet me at the Cross

One of the most unifying factors of our Christian faith is the simple knowledge that we’re all failures at it. And directly on the heels of that thought comes another, that God loves me anyway. That failure, that weakness, after all is what drives us again and again to the cross. He has promised that He will never leave us. He’s there in the morning and He’s there at night when I whisper my thoughts before welcoming the great eraser that is sleep.

I am reading Madeline L’ Engle’s book, “The Irrational Season.” In it, she describes how against the backdrop of her faith there is doubt and anger at times at why God would seemingly direct and allow evil things to happen, and yet in the midst of that doubt and anger is the bright ring of hope and assurance that yes, God does know exactly what He is doing, even if she doesn’t always understand His ways.

God is not surprised or threatened by our doubt or our anger because it’s also that same doubt and anger that is also an expression of our faith, for you can’t doubt someone you don’t believe in in the first place. You can’t be mad at someone who is not there.

The fact that we are driven again and again to the cross allows no room in our faith for pride. You can know the Bible backwards and forwards, but until you find yourself driven to your knees in humility at the misery of our human weakness, you will be separated from the world, the people whom Jesus most wants us to help.

One of the most confounding and misunderstood paradoxes of our faith is that even though we fail, even though we are weak, God still considers us Holy. When He looks at us, He sees us washed in the robe of righteousness because of Christ’s redemptive work on the cross. That should not make us proud, it should make us more humble. That God would grant us with the stamp of His approval by indwelling us with His Holy Spirit is a staggering thought that must never get old. Our faith and the miracle of it, should never be old hat.

We should wake up each day in astonishment that He has forgiven us yet again. And yet, time after time, I have taken that fact for granted……stepped over it on my way to something I feel is more important. That is why I feel so strongly about giving God the first few moments of our day. It’s a way to say and acknowledge all over again that yes, I am grateful beyond measure for the grace I never deserved.

The Apostle Paul perfectly describes our imperfect weakness here: “Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, on the one hand I myself with my mind am serving the law of God, but on the other, with my flesh the law of sin.” Romans 7:24,25

Are you going through something today that is an extreme test of your faith? Right now, stop what you’re doing and hear God say: “What part of always do you not understand?” Remember when your parents used to say, “What part of no do you not understand?” God has promised never to leave or forsake us and He never will.

Love is in His limits, for He gives us exactly what we need to know in the Scriptures, the rest we must take on faith.

I get like the Israelites wandering in the desert, complaining and grousing despite the pillar of smoke by day and the pillar of fire by night. Instead, all I can see are the hordes of people contentedly settled in the land He has already promised me. I used to blame them, I used to say, “I would have believed God if I had seen those signs.” God smiles and says, “No you wouldn’t.”

Because if I really and truly had a perfect faith, I would look back at all the times in my 56 years that He has provided for me and never failed to be there for me, and that fact would erase every last fear. And yet, I can truly say that I am getting closer to the goal than I was before.

“but thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” 1 Corinthians 15:57

Pressing Pause

I’m here marveling that yet another work week has come and gone, here standing on the shore of another 4 days off and the first prayer out of my lips when I awoke in the early dawn was, “Where are you Jesus?” And this is the miracle of it all. He spent the next hour announcing His presence in a myriad of little ways.

My God is an action word. I guess you could say if God were a state He would be Missouri. God is a “show me” God. I puzzle at people who ask for proof. The proof was in the sky last night and the moon this morning. It was peeking out at me from between the palms, all yellow and present.

The God of the old Testament was bigger than life, I don’t think anyone could deny that. And Jesus……I don’t think you can get bigger than coming out of the grave and revealing yourself for 40 days. And the Holy Spirit transformed a handful of cowering men and women into a church that changed the world.

And God hasn’t changed. He took my question seriously this morning and proceeded to take pleasure in cracking little doors of joy open everywhere I turned. He is the God of undoing just as much as He is the God of doing.

You can get up slogging in your slippers toward the coffee pot, with only the whisper of hope on your lips but God can do something with that. He rewards an attitude of expectation however small, and hopelessness can turn into hope when it runs in tandem with gratitude.

God holds all of time in His hand. I was thinking a lot about time this morning. How it seemed like just yesterday I was staring down the tunnel of a 48 hour work week and now I’m looking at 48 hours of me time. How will I use it?

I’m thinking of my Dad who is facing time in much more of a monumental sense in the beating of his own heart. Nothing makes you more aware of the ticking of time than a heart that is fluttering out of control. Right now he is aware of little else than slowing his wildly beating heart down. He has a procedure tomorrow to do just that. Because of him, we are all just a little more aware of time today than usual. His and ours.

The thing about time is that it has a beginning and an end. We are never not conscious of it. It never speeds up or slows down and yet it seems to. It rolls out wildly out of control like a spool of yarn rolling down a flight of stairs, and sometimes it sits like a car tire stuck in the mud, spinning madly but going nowhere.

There are wild exultant joys in life and there are times that are so low we don’t see how we will ever get out the other side. And there are stretches of time where there are no big joys just lots of little joys and that’s okay. Some might call that complacency or settling but I call it contentment of the kind the Apostle Paul was talking about when he said, “I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.”

The other thing about time is that we have a choice as to how to use it. We can squander it, waste it, use it wisely, cherish it, or use it up until we look around and it’s all gone. I believe the best way to honor the time God has given us is to be fully present in it. Sometimes I succeed at that but many more times I fail.

But when you realize just how precious of a commodity it is, it changes how you live. You learn to look for the little things.

This morning one of the little things was pausing to watch a hummingbird take a bath. It’s not everyday you see that. He was only there for about 30 seconds, but if I hadn’t been staring at the fountain right at that moment I would have missed it. But I think God wanted me to see it. He likes giving us little surprises that make us smile.

He is after all, a “show me” kind of God.

Lori's Prayer Closet

"And when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done is secret, will reward you……"Matthew 6:6

Prayer