Friendship with God

“In all places and at all times, we can have that familiar friendship, we can have Him with us;
and there may be through the day a constant interchange of private words, of little offerings,
too small to have any name attached to them—by which the bonds of that familiar friendship
grow closer and more real, until it comes to that special personal intimacy, which we call sanctity.”
Janet Erskine Stuart, 1857-1914

When I was a girl, about age seven, I prayed to God from a berry patch under my mother’s clothesline. I felt so awkward talking to the air and hoping for something back. I told myself how silly I was to talk to nothing. But there was enough faith attached to it, I imagined, to ring a bell in eternity. When I think about that moment, my heart nearly bursts open knowing that even in my clumsy state of reaching out to God that He heard me and reached back. If I had understood the brevity of God’s timeline, I would have probably exercised more patience. I imagine now that just about the time I looked up at him from my mother’s strawberry patch that he looked down on me and then I was sixteen, and then twenty, and thirty and all along he was slowly taking me into his confidence, a relationship that eventually translated into an intimacy between us, and now friendship.

It’s not easy to explain the intimacy you feel with God to someone who hasn’t experienced Him. I know that intellectuals and others demand a clear and tangible explanation before embracing a belief. I understand pragmatism and truth and clarity and specificity because I need those things to create intelligent thought on paper. But even imagining how I might explain God’s presence to one of the teeming thousands who visit my blog, words fail me.

I don’t mean to sound mystical. I’m not even trying to rouse an argument. But the fact in my life is that if I don’t walk every second in this intimacy I now know as God’s presence, I flounder. Does that make me a weakling, or am I just being honest about my need for God? If I learn to lean on another human for support, don’t the two of us make a stronger cord, a better team? That’s how it is when I lean on God. He supports me in a way that is beyond words. God doesn’t stumble and he doesn’t miss anything. Not a falling bird feather or a girl sitting in a berry patch beneath a clothesline.

Forgiving the Hard Offense

Forgiveness is a purposeful act. Self-help gurus will tell you that you need to forgive someone because it will help you feel better. It does help you feel better to forgive, but a good feeling may not be the best motivation for the long-term practice of forgiveness.

Because memory is hardwired to our brain and emotions, so are the negative emotions that form unforgiveness. It may seem is easier to maintain, but over time, a burden to manage. So to practice forgiveness is paramount to good emotional health.

There are practices that we can put into play to help us along the road to forgiveness. First off, we can know that when we forgive someone, we’re not agreeing that they did not hurt us or that what they did was acceptable. To absolve a person of all responsibility will be left to a higher power or a Higher Power. But you can forgive without trying to take on the burden of proclaiming their innocence. We’re not responsible for wiping a person’s slate clean of their sins—that work was taken on by Christ on the cross. So laying that burden aside, we can begin the simple process of forgiveness as nothing more than a gift that we are passing along. It may or may not cause that person to change toward us, but that is not our worry either. If they are a danger to themselves and others, we don’t even have to make contact with them and tell them they are forgiven. There are other ways to express forgiveness.

One way is to journal out a letter to that person expressing how you’ve chosen to forgive them. Write out what you know about that person’s past—was he abused as a child? Does he have a mental illness? Is she eaten up with anxiety or compulsions? Is he blind to his own ambitions? Do insecurities hamstring her choices? Write out what you know of his or her past and then attach their bad behavior to their past so that you are connecting the dots of their failure, showing how when their path collided with yours, it was doomed to fail.

Next imagine what they did in relation to mistakes that are similar to mistakes you’ve made. Have you ever gotten angry and abused a relationship? Did you need to ask forgiveness for your actions? When you compare sin to sin, it helps you realize that just as God forgave you or a friend forgave you that this person who has harmed you needs the same forgiveness.

Forgiveness is more than a good feeling. It is like removing a millstone from around your own neck.

Treasure

I don’t know what’s gotten into me lately. I think about heaven often and its contents, the people we love who have beaten us to the place we long to see. I shouldn’t assume everyone thinks about heaven all the time. But if you’ve lost someone you love and miss them then perhaps you’ve caught yourself thinking about where they are and what their eyes are seeing right at that moment.I didn’t realize until now that when my sights are truly fixed on heaven, it causes everything in me to shift. I have grown so uncomfortable with accumulating things. It all seems so cumbersome. No,I’m not going to make my hubby and seventeen-year-old move into a refrigerator box. But I have grown weary of filling up rooms with furniture that often sit empty, closets with clothes that hang for weeks and months unworn. It is as though this mental window into heaven has given me a glimpse into the pain of humanity. So how can I sit comfortably when others have no place to sleep?

In his book The Treasure Principle, Randy Alcorn talks about the Macedonian believers who “gave as much as they were able, and even beyond their ability.” (2 Cor. 8:3), a people who became so zealous in their generosity, they had to be compelled to stop.Compelled to stop. So I’m not just talking about the surrender of one's own pocketbook but the transformation that God does in us to bring us to this point. Generous giving can become an addictive compulsion. We become like Scrooge having awakened to find that we can celebrate Christmas every day of the year. “I’m as giddy as a schoolboy!”

Randy Alcorn says “Giving is the only antidote to materialism.”

It’s so completely true that I want to etch it into my desk. When I am blinded by materialism, my soul becomes sick and my eyes grow dim. I can no longer see out that spiritual window into my brother’s pain. Please, God, let my prayer be that I will give until I’m in a race to try and out give You! Let me run that race free of the weights that would tie me down. Make my life a clearing house for your wealth of righteousness, but let it not linger for even a day, not as long as a child is in need of bread or a world in need of compassion.

“I have held many things in my hands and I have lost them all. But whatever I have placed in God’s hands, that I still possess.” --Martin Luther

Rising Above the Big Divide

We’re told in church growth circles and books that we first need to realize that there’s not only a sin divide but a cultural divide. The cultural divide gets talked about as though it’s something new.

Paul, Peter, Timothy, all of those guys waded in dripping wet with culture; but then following their respective transformations, were nudged by God right back into the cultural pool. But what they came out of culture possessing, and what they returned newly containing, had to be subjected to Christ’s scrutiny and infused with the Spirit’s Power. Without that, when they begin to organize the Church into groups that did everything from waiting tables, to sewing clothes for the needy, to feeding the poor, and then training those who would teach others about Christ, the works could have become what I guess we mean by a social gospel. But they didn’t, and from that point forward the message of Jesus Christ literally infected the globe. The difference was the Big Invisible that infused the visible.

Without the Power of the Spirit steering and transforming me, I might naturally embrace helping the poor and lending grace because I sincerely leaned toward those things early on; but pursuing that work without God’s Spirit is shy of transformative power. I can’t transform a soul, especially my own. While helping the poor and the sick and the displaced with God’s Power on my life “ministers grace” through the delivery system of works, it’s the Spirit that causes a life to turn around and go a different direction. While the Spirit inscribes the good work, he also identifies me to others as genuinely His. People can sense/feel the Spirit’s presence (or whatever you want to call that identification with God that people detect in us) and that’s what draws them, that courting thing that God does that is personal and often unseen by us. But while the avenue of good works compels people, we still must consider motives and we can use those who were first drawn to Jesus as a model. Some came out of curiosity, some desperate but all gathered around Jesus waiting to see if he might perform a miracle. Humans may be drawn to our works out of a care for that work or a need for it; it could be that their interest is piqued by our good works and that’s not a bad thing. But we can easily take credit for good works. We can’t take the credit for God’s power and Spirit performing human transformation through the ridiculous conduit of bones and flesh.

Wilderness Knees

I believed for much of my Christian life that in order to be able to pray effectively, that I had to follow the guiding principles of Mark 18:20, “For where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there in the midst of them.” Jesus was giving the believers an assurance knowing they would eventually gather fearfully at times after He had ascended to heaven. But it was an erroneous assumption on my part that my prayers alone were not potent enough. . . that I had to have a partner or a group of people to reach the ears of God.

That was until the year I discovered the power of wilderness knees. I use this term to describe the times of hard-fought spiritual battles, the ones that are fought invisibly in the heavens on our behalf because we have spent some knee time before God and often in isolation. I think of John the Baptist crying in the desert and his words falling on only the sand and the wind. But it was in the isolated wilderness that God lifted him up and used him like a town crier. . . Make way! Make Way! God is come to earth!

And so it happened that I had read an article one year in a local newspaper about a mother who was asking a librarian to remove a pornographic magazine from the eye level of her young child. She wasn’t trying to be prudish or fracture anyone else’s rights but was asking that the magazine be removed from plain sight of her young child as they entered the library door. Emotional intelligence ought to prevail. But instead the librarian refused to move the magazine out of sight claiming First Amendment rights. The story was buried on the back page of the local newspaper. I bowed my head at my desk at the office where I worked and prayed. I asked God what he thought ought to be done about it. I then quietly picked up the telephone and called the local mayor’s office. I asked him about the article and if he had gotten any complaints from parents. “No, none at all,” said the mayor. He seemed sympathetic but told me that without a consensus, he had no call to act. “Would you respond if it seemed that more parents cared?” I asked. “Of course. But no one cares. You’re the only one who’s called,” he told me.

I got off the phone and studied the matter thoughtfully. I took some time during my lunch hour to pray some more and called church offices around our town. I summarized the article to each secretary and told them what the mayor had said, that no one seemed to care.
After an hour, I went back to work. By the end of the day, I wondered if my quiet prayer and the hour spent in phone calls could have possibly done any good. After all, I was a nameless mom. Out of curiosity, I called the mayor’s office before the close of office hours. I was surprised to find his office in a frenzy. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “Little woman, I don’t know who you are but we have been getting phone calls not only from local parents but from all over the country. Even the ACLU is calling and a TV news magazine. What kind of strings did you pull? You must have a lot of clout,” he told me. “No,” I told him quietly. “I prayed and made a few phone calls. “Are you pulling the porn out the library?” I asked. “It’s gone,” he told me. He never gave out my name to any of the media. I was glad. I liked the solitude of wilderness knees.

The Satisfied Writer

“The taking up of the cross of Christ is no great action done once for all; it consists in the
continual practice of small duties which are distasteful to us.”
John Henry Newman

Today I was salivating over a job that would take me away from home for several weeks, a writer’s residency in another state. The writer-in-residence would teach one class a week and then spend the rest of her time doing nothing but writing. It sounds heavenly except for the fact that during those weeks away from home my duties as a wife, mom, and ministry leader would fall into neglect. But the thought of it lured my thoughts into a tranquil reverie.

Seriously, do you ever daydream about a life where all you have to do is write? No taking care of children or spouses or church duties. No answering emails or telephone calls. No strain or stress of the responsibilities to hold body and soul together. Morning and night, writing and more writing.

In the middle of my daydream, reality broke through. I imagined that hour in the afternoon where my youngest son comes lugging his book bag up the stairs, grinning, telling me about his day, the prom and the girl he’s invited to escort there, or the good grade he made on a test. And then I imagined missing that or missing my oldest running in between college classes and his job to give me a kiss. I get a kiss in the morning and one at night. He never forgets me. Then there’s that spoon thing I’d miss every evening when my husband crawls into bed next to me and we talk about all that happened that day and what the Lord did and how hard it was or how amazed we were. Or excited. Or let down, but still, even that is living. Or what would I miss if I couldn’t attend my small group? Would I continue to grow and stay challenged to mature in my faith? And what of the myriad of people I meet in my life because the Lord has seen fit to place me right here in this tiny apex of the universe that is occupied only by me and God in me? How would my life be enriched without those generous souls?

Then I wondered what in the world I’d write about if all I ever did was write, write, write. Would there be another story to tell and would it be worth telling? In Jeremiah, God says, “I will satiate the soul of the priest with abundance, And My people shall be satisfied with My goodness, says the LORD.” There are times when carrying the load of wordsmith feels too heavy and I want to give it a new shape, dissatisfied with the old shape. I strain under it and fantasize about relief. I forget what goodness is poured into my life through, as John Newman once said, “the continual practice of small duties which are distasteful to us.” I have to remind myself that the load I carry is not one of words but of souls. My hope is that I’m able one day to say to God that the things I carried in life were, okay, heavy; but only with humans.

. . . and don't forget to take off that capo

Addison Road church team members apparently are not shy about posting worship bloopers on the blog. As you open this, you’ll see the audio link at the top of the blog, double click and it should open. Thought you’d appreciate this.
http://addisonrd.com/WordPress/?p=729

The audio link is posted at the top of the blog.