The Stakes Are High

Posted on September 25, 2015 by Elizabeth

From my high school band director days:

Mrs. Giger! My bassoon solo actually sounds good now!!

Well, I’m glad. What did you do differently?

I finally followed your advice to practice the song. And it worked!!

Aha.

It is something I’ve been trying to teach my seven year old. Working hard at a challenging task brings such a sweet reward.

Any excellent and beautiful ending is the result of working hard at something difficult.

We know this in our adult lives ~ we feel most satisfied after a day full of meaningful challenges that we tackled wholeheartedly; challenges that ended with accomplishment.

Why do we think that life should be different?

If this life is preparation for the life to come, why would we expect it to be easy? Shouldn’t we expect it to be more like boot camp?

…suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope…

We think that life should be comfortable, full of the things and people we desire.

For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.

We are offended and outraged when things don’t go as planned.

Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline.

We decide that this is too hard.

Life is too lonely, too full of hurt, too saturated with grief.

True.

And this loneliness, this hurt, this grief can have purpose.

For it was fitting that (God), for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering.

Eternity is high stakes. We shouldn’t be surprised that the preparation can be grueling.

Each day we have a choice. We can choose to accept what we are given and let God use it to mold us or we can dig in our heels and choose to look for the easy way, the way of least pain and effort, the way of bitterness and discontent.

Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different than it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing into a heavenly creature or a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself. ~ C. S. Lewis

Life is. We can fight against it and live in a state of war. Or we can surrender to God and be molded into someone who is perfectly ready for eternity.

The stakes are high. Are you ready for the challenge?

The Weight of Holy

Posted on September 18, 2015 by Elizabeth

I am evangelical all the way down to my toes.

In many ways I am proud of my faith tradition. I will be the first to admit that we have our troubles, things with which I don’t agree, but there are many things I think we get right.

I am grateful for our emphasis on the Bible, our insistence on a personal relationship with God, our reliance on Jesus’ sacrifice to make us clean.

There are a few pieces of Christianity I think we miss out on, though.

One of those pieces is our loss of depth when we focus on individual relationship with God over communal relationships with God. This is a subject I’ll have to explore in a different post.

For this week?

We also lose a sense of the sacredness and holiness of God when we focus solely on a personal, intimate relationship with God.

In our casual services, in our emphasis on God as friend, we forget sometimes how other God is. He is holy, which means separate. Apart.

He is not like us. He is so far above us that we cannot begin to comprehend Him. We are not worthy to stand in His presence. We cannot meet His gaze. To see His face is to die.

We attended a Lutheran church service a few Sundays ago.

I was struck by the ceremony, the honor and respect with which they treat all things belonging to God: in particular, the Word and the Lord’s Supper.

Every move was accompanied by a genuflect before the table holding the Bible and the Communion. There was a reverence to that portion of the service that was weighty.

There was a hush of holiness over the proceedings that I do not see in my own tradition. As each person came up to receive the bread, they were looked in the eye and told “This is His body which was broken for you”. As each person came up to receive the cup, they were looked in the eye and told, “This is His blood which was shed for you”. As each child came past with their parents, a hand was laid on their head and a blessing given on them.

It was holy and it was personal.

As each server of the bread and wine came to their turn to be the receiver, they bowed before the Word and the Communion. Not in worship of those items, but in reverence for the One they represent. In a recognition that God is holy and has declared these things to be sacred.

Our whole lives are to be sacred. I recognize that there is no separation between sacred and secular in our everyday lives. That is the premise behind this very blog. Yet it serves us well to be reminded every now and then of the absolute holiness of the One who makes everything sacred.

Nothing is sacred without God.

Sometimes we forget how much more sacred is the Giver than the gifts.

Sometimes we lose the weightiness of holy and in that shallowness can float upward until we believe that we are closer to God than we truly are.

…and behold, a throne stood in heaven, with one seated on the throne. And he who sat there had the appearance of jasper and carnelian, and around the throne was a rainbow that had the appearance of an emerald…From the throne came flashes of lightening, and rumblings and peals of thunder…Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come!

All photographs this week are by Kirk Sewell. You can purchase canvas prints of many of his gorgeous photograph artwork on his website: photographybysewell.webs.com

Go Act Like It

Posted on September 11, 2015 by Elizabeth

Sometimes, when I forget who our King is, this world makes me want to run away and hide.

In a week when refugees number in the millions,

In a week when a friend, a friend with a wife and three small children, dies much too soon,

In a week when fellow believers choose to scream about gay marriage across the country rather than to do something about the poor on the other side of town,

It is easy to believe the lie that I can do nothing against the darkness of this world.

It is easy to believe that the darkness is too strong.

It is easy to believe that ISIS wins, that cancer wins, that politicism wins.

In a week like this, I want to give in to despair. To give up. To gather my babies around me and sit and wait for Jesus to come back and make all of this right again.

And then I remember.

I remember that Jesus calls us to fight. He calls us to be a royal priesthood. A people who rule on His behalf and a people who represent Him to the world around them.

If we hide from the darkness, the darkness will certainly overcome. At least, it will overcome those to whom God asked us to be the light. Perhaps it will overcome us as well.

God is light and He has commissioned us to bring that light to the world.

I often tell my children:

You are beautiful. You are loving.

Now act like it.

So now I tell myself and I tell you:

We are royal. We are priests.

We should act like it.

Go dish out food at a soup kitchen.

Go babysit the children of a parent who has lost someone they love.

Go take a meal to an elderly friend who broke their hip.

Go have patience with that tantrum-throwing child one more time.

Go bake some cookies and take them to the gay couple down the street. Without a note that tells them how wrong they are.

Go find out how to help those refugee children who are lost and hungry and afraid (here’s a good place to start: http://wewelcomerefugees.com/).

We are royal. We are priests.

Act like it.

Be the light that overcomes the darkness.

And take heart; Jesus has overcome the world.

My Capricious Heart

Posted on September 4, 2015 by Elizabeth

I’m back.

Tentatively, yet determinedly back.

I’ve been a little paralyzed, waiting for the perfect post to form itself before writing. I’ve been a little hesitant, thinking I should have time to dig deep into books before pouring forth out of my emptiness. I’ve been a little prideful, believing that my troubles are not of value to others because they do not deal with death or poverty or persecution.

I will cast off these lies and write. I will write and pray that God will use what is inside of me whether or not it is perfect or brought from research or developed from great suffering.

Since when can God only use greatness for His purpose?

Moving is hard.

There is a loneliness that comes from knowing that deep, local friendships lie months, even years away. There is fear in the understanding that your introverted self is going to have to be bold and take risks in order to find those new friends. There is a sadness when grieving the friendships you left behind.

There is the ache of watching your children struggle, seeing them cry before trudging off to a new school and holding them when they rant and rage with an anger that is really stress they don’t know how to handle. It hurts to hear them talk about what they miss from our old home.

There is the exhaustion of too many sleepless nights. Sleepless from a six month old baby who still wakes up multiple times a night, sleepless from older sisters who wake with nightmares or because they can’t find the bathroom in their new place, sleepless from your own desire to unpack just one more box and try to make this house a home.

And?

Moving has within it a hope for future grace.

There is the freedom of a house in which your children have the space to spread out a bit, a house big enough to host a gathering without sitting in each other’s laps, a house with room for you to grow.

There is the excitement of a town you know you can enjoy, a town that’s just the right size for you, a town with potential for serving and for fun.

There is the joy of being near my brother and his family, the joy of good neighbors who might become good friends, the joy of a job my husband enjoys and doesn’t dread every day.

Underneath it all there is the peace, when I look for it, of knowing that we are where God wants us to be. My heart is capricious and ever-changing; the loneliness and grieving will not always be so strong. Until my emotions catch up, I will know that God has purpose for us here. I will know that He will use us in beautiful ways we don’t yet see and that this is what will make us happy.

Until that happens, I will trust Him and cling to Him even when my heart would tell me otherwise. The joy and peace will come. This I know and this I hold on to.