From One Generation to Another: A Tribute to my Gram

Posted on September 14, 2018 by Elizabeth

My Gram died this summer. I have been close to her and my Papa most of my life (in terms of relationship…for most of my life we were fairly far from each other in terms of geography), and the temporary loss remains deeply painful. This week I want to share the tribute I wrote for her funeral. May it be an example to you of how one generation can shepherd another generation in the ways of God.

Gram was so beautiful. She was always very concerned about her appearance, but she shouldn’t have been. She was beautiful. Death has a way of causing us to look back over the life of the one who has died, and as I did that over the past couple of weeks, my memories came almost in a series of vignettes that show her servant love.

As a child, I would sometimes get to be with Gram and Papa all by myself (this is almost as much about Papa as it is about Gram because, in my memory, Gram and Papa are inextricably linked together). I’m sure Gram was a very busy woman, but she set aside everything when I came to visit and gave unstintingly of her time.

She taught me how to bake and how to sew. She taught me how to swim and dive and play tennis. I’m sure she tried to teach me how to draw, but that lesson just didn’t take. She taught me how to welcome people into my home.

The next flash of memory is from my undergrad days at Harding.

So many weekends found me and a whole gaggle of my friends showing up on Vallejo Drive. It was a much closer drive than coming home, and I took full advantage. Copious amounts of home-cooked food (with many leftovers finding their way back into the dorm rooms of all who came), a listening ear to whatever problems I was dealing with, wisdom to share for how to be like Jesus, all of these were dealt out with a free hand in their home. Also, a few rescues from car troubles or accidents.

There are memories from my teaching days.

Again, I would escape to Gram and Papa’s for food, solace, and wisdom when life felt hard. Again, they would welcome me with open arms unconditionally. Always free to offer advice and counsel, but never holding it against me if I didn’t follow it. I learned quickly, however, that it usually worked out best when I followed it.

I remember bringing my choir students to sing at their little country church and give a singing class (they didn’t think bringing the band kids would have worked out quite so well…) and Gram and Papa throwing us a huge shindig out at The Place (their farm outside of Dallas). Those kids talked about the love that they felt and the food that they ate for months afterward.

The trips to Dallas didn’t happen quite so often after I moved back to Illinois, but I was very happy to discover a direct flight from Champaign to Dallas.

I flew pregnant, with an infant, with a toddler and pregnant…you get the idea. Every time, even when I brought with me a baby who wouldn’t sleep through the night, I was welcomed and loved. Gram would serve me so unselfishly every time I came so that I, as a young mother, could have a little break. She cared for me and my family, played with my babies so I could take a nap, sent me home with food so that I didn’t have to cook as much… Gram’s love always came out in service.

Which is the way it should be.

I’m not as good at it as she was, but I learned at her feet how to show Jesus love to those around me.

I am so grateful for the years we had with Gram living here in Springfield.

We were able to have so many more deep conversations about life and parenting and marriage. My girls were able to know her so much better than if she had still been in Dallas. I am grateful for the extra time my girls had with her, to be able to learn that kind of servant love from one who did it so well.

When I asked my girls about their memories of her, asked about what they loved about Gram, what came out most was her gift of her time and attention. Not everyone pays close attention to children, but Gram did. She played with them, did art with them, gave them little jobs like washing toys, and then did those jobs right along with them. My girls remembered Gram talking with them, taking them seriously. They remember her patiently explaining (probably for the one hundredth time) what every carved bird in her glass case was.

I’ll admit that I am greedy for more time. More time to just BE with Gram, more time to listen to her and soak up all of her knowledge and wisdom, more time to learn how to love like she loved, more time for my girls to know her, for my youngest to be able to remember her.

Yet I know that I have a choice in all of this. I can choose to be angry with God, letting my anger and grief drive me away from Him, or I can choose to be obedient and thank Him, clinging to Him and letting Him be all that I need.

So at least for today, I will choose this:

Thank You, Father, for the gift of my Papa and my Gram.

Thank You for giving me so many years with them, years of such close relationship and of so many beautiful times with them.Thank You for giving them so many talents and abilities and for giving them the desire to teach and share those skills with me and my family.

Thank You for their wisdom, for all that I have learned from them, for all of the wisdom that I now have stored in my own heart, wisdom that I can now pass on to their great-grandchildren. To the next generation.

Thank You most of all for making their hearts like Yours. Thank You for allowing me to see You in them, to see in their lives how You want me to live. Thank You for showing me through them how to live faithfully as a child of Yours, as a spouse and as a parent.

Thank You for the beauty that is their lives.

Thank You, God, for Your grace.

Gone From My Sight
Henry Van Dyke

I am standing upon the seashore. A ship, at my side,

spreads her white sails to the moving breeze and starts

for the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength.

I stand and watch her until, at length, she hangs like a speck

of white cloud just where the sea and sky come to mingle with each other.

Then, someone at my side says, “There, she is gone.”

Gone where?

Gone from my sight. That is all. She is just as large in mast,

hull and spar as she was when she left my side.

And, she is just as able to bear her load of living freight to her destined port.

Her diminished size is in me — not in her.

And, just at the moment when someone says, “There, she is gone,”

there are other eyes watching her coming, and other voices

ready to take up the glad shout, “Here she comes!”

And that is dying…

Our Manner of Death

Posted on April 27, 2018 by Elizabeth

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Death

We all will experience it.

Does it matter?

Does it matter how we die?

Death is something we all must think about, especially as physician assisted suicide becomes more and more accepted in our world.

If, as I argued last week, there is a created order to all things and therefore the way we think about and live out all things matters, then it matters how we think about death and dying.

If we do not, our culture will.

And we may not like our culture’s decisions.

As life becomes more individualistic, so does death.

Most of us, when asked our preferred manner of dying, would say that we would rather slip away peacefully in our sleep without any warning.

For most of Christian history, the answer would have been different.

A common prayer was A subitanea morte, liber nos, Domine – From a sudden death, deliver us, O Lord.

Why? Christians understood that they existed in community. They understood that they were interwoven with the people around them and they wanted the chance to say their goodbyes, to make right any lingering feuds.

We seem to have become more frightened of death.

There are two extremes in our culture, neither of which seem to fall within the confines of our Christian faith.

The first is to preserve life at all costs.

The quality of that life receives no consideration; doctors are asked to keep people alive regardless of the misery in which they may be existing.

It is a fear of death that keeps people clinging to a pale semblance of life.

The second is to end life prematurely.

It is autonomy run amok, autonomy that says I have the right to do whatever I wish with my life, including the right to end it, autonomy that rejects our creatureliness, our dependence on God.

It is a fear of a life that is “less than” that sends people seeking the oblivion of death.

We, as Christians, can accept death. We can recognize that God holds all times in His hands, that there is a time to live and a time to die, and when it is our time to die we are held close in those hands.

I have watched one I love recognize this and choose quality of his last days over the miserable clinging to a side-effect filled life that might have gained him a few months in the span of a full life well lived.

We, as Christians, can resist death. We can use the power of medicine to heal and see it as a gift of God for gaining more time to love those around us and to do His work, to bring His kingdom rule here on earth.

I have watched many I love fight for life while there was still hope and accept whatever was given to them by the hands of God.

What we, as Christians, cannot do is to accept either extreme of avoiding death at all costs or aiming at death with all purpose.

Death

We must all consider it.

Does the manner of our death matter?

Culture is making its decisions.

Will we make ours?

Thanks to Dr. Todd Daly for his research and thoughts on this topic.

all photographs are copyright Made Sacred 2018

God’s Lenten Love

Posted on March 2, 2018 by Elizabeth

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Lent is a time of self-denial, a time of sacrifice.

Lent is a time of giving up, a time of letting go.

Lent is a time of death.

Perhaps it seems strange that a God Who claims to be Love would ask for His beloved to practice such harsh disciplines.

The difficulty often lies in our idea of love.

We see love as sweet and soft, as gift giving and hugs, as making someone happy.

God’s love, however, is a fiery love.

God’s love is a love that cares so fiercely about His beloved’s joy that He refuses to leave anything in His beloved that might diminish that joy.

God Who is love asks us to die to ourselves because He knows that you cannot have glory without suffering.

He knows from experience that you cannot have resurrection without death.

Lent has already begun, but it is not too late to begin practicing how to die to yourself.

Fast for a meal or two; give up television for an evening. Use that time to read God’s words and pray.

Set aside thirty minutes to practice solitude and silence. Go somewhere you can be completely alone and try to still your mind and listen to God.

These habits take practice, so start small.

Let God’s Spirit teach you how to deny yourself, to give up, to sacrifice.

Learn how to die.

Only then can God give you His resurrection.

Learn how to Lent, and God will give you Easter.

all photographs are copyright Made Sacred 2018

Living on Isaac’s Altar

Posted on October 27, 2017 by Elizabeth

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

I awake each morning and climb onto Isaac’s altar.

I feel much like I imagine that Isaac felt, fearful and yet trusting.

I trust that my Father knows. I trust that He knows what will happen and I trust in His love for me.

I trust that whatever He brings me to this day He also will bring me through.

I give this body that He gave to me, give it back for whatever His purpose might be.

I am fully awake to the truth that it is only by His mercies that I am acceptable to Him. Only because of His sacrifice that I am made lawful for sacrifice. Only because of His grace that I am made holy, made pure and spotless as the ancient lamb.

This death of myself leads to resurrection of self, myself as I was created to be. I am raised to live in worship, my life as worship to Him.

I climb off Isaac’s altar and onto the mountain of Jehovah Ra’ah. The LORD will provide. Like Abraham, I trust in the Lord’s provision. I trust in His promise that I will love Him and love others, trust that He will provide what I need to obey.

My body remains my sacrifice, my life remains my worship.

By His mercies, I belong to Him and I will not take that lightly.

I often fall off my altar, but I climb back on, and at the end of each day I sleep in peace, knowing that His mercies are new each morning.

Knowing that He will help me, when I wake up, to climb onto Isaac’s altar once again.

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. ~ Romans 12.1

Art credits: The Sacrifice of Isaac by Adi Holzer; The Sacrifice of Abraham by Rembrandt; Abraham Sacrificing Isaac by Luca Penni; Abraham Sacrificing Isaac from the Phillip Medhurst Picture Torah

Fearing Death

Posted on June 23, 2017 by Elizabeth

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Death.

It is not something we want to talk about.

It is not something we want to think about.

Death.

It is uncomfortable at the least and terrifying at the most.

It is coming for all of us, yet we rage and fight against it.

Death is common to all of us, yet is a topic avoided by most of us.

Even among those of us who claim to follow Christ, death seems to be a frightening event and so we try our best to ignore it.

Death will not be ignored.

This week I attended a funeral for a young man who was a close friend of my youngest brother growing up.

We all know people for whom death came at a young age.

Death will not be ignored.

Yet death does not have to be feared.

Jesus Himself teaches us this.

He allowed Lazarus to remain in the grave for several days, rather than healing his illness, to show us that He could control death.

He interrupted funeral processions to raise up the dead, just to show us that He could.

He spoke lightly of His own death, telling His followers that He would die but soon rise again.

Jesus teaches us that death does not have the final word.

We serve a God who has all power over everything that we fear, even power over death.

We serve a God who has all power and who loves us as His children.

Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death He might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery. ~ Hebrews 2.14-15

He became flesh so that through death He could conquer death.

He conquered death and we do not have to be slaves to the fear of death.

Lift up your heads. Look to Jesus and do not be afraid.

Art credit: Three Crosses sketch by Rembrandt

Expecting both Crosses and Empty Tombs

Posted on March 17, 2017 by Elizabeth

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Crosses and empty tombs.

This is what life is made up of. Death and rebirth.

Seeds that die in the ground in order to bloom glorious, winter death that must happen in order to burst into green, the dying to self that is the only way into joy.

Crosses and empty tombs.

We are facing a couple of crosses in our family right now.

Really, just the possibility of crosses.

Although, as I sit quiet in candle-lit dark, it occurs to me that perhaps this waiting, this living in the possibility of a cross is, in itself, a cross.

What will I do when the cross looms large in my sight?

Where will I place these fears when all that crowds my vision is rough-hewn wood and sharp metal nails?

Will I continue to hope in the promise of an empty tomb at the end of the cross?

I must. If I have to drop to my knees and beg God to help me, I must remember.

If I am to survive any cross, whether heavy or light, I must pray, I must fast, I must fling myself by any means possible into the hands of the One who bore the heaviest cross of all…the One who then emptied that tomb.

Jesus promised us crosses. We are to expect them. And He also promised us empty tombs in the end. It may not happen until the end, but He gave His word that He would make those tombs empty again.

So I must remember. I must remember that God broke into time to show us that the empty tomb will always follow the cross.

I must remember the times in my own story when God brought an empty tomb after a cross.

When I cannot see beyond my cross, when I cannot trust on my own, I must look to Jesus who proved that His power and love are strong enough to bring forth an empty tomb after every single cross.

I must remember

and hope.

Crosses and empty tombs. They always go hand in hand.

Lord, we pray we never find ourselves without hope, without a glimpse of the empty tomb each time we happen upon a cross. Help us begin our daily journey expecting both crosses and empty tombs and rejoicing when we encounter either because we know you are with us. Amen. ~ from the Book of Common Prayer

Art credit: The Three Crosses by Rembrandt; Empty Tomb ink drawing from Catholic Hymns, 1860

from the archives

Crosses and Empty Tombs

Posted on May 6, 2016 by Elizabeth

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Crosses and empty tombs.

This is what life is made up of. Death and rebirth.

Seeds that die in the ground in order to bloom glorious, winter death that must happen in order to burst into green, the dying to self that is the only way into joy.

Crosses and empty tombs.

We are facing a couple of crosses in our family right now.

Really, just the possibility of crosses.

Although, as I sit quiet in candle-lit dark, it occurs to me that perhaps this waiting, this living in the possibility of a cross is, in itself, a cross.

What will I do when the cross looms large in my sight?

Where will I place these fears when all that crowds my vision is rough-hewn wood and sharp metal nails?

Will I continue to hope in the promise of an empty tomb at the end of the cross?

I must. If I have to drop to my knees and beg God to help me, I must remember.

If I am to survive any cross, whether heavy or light, I must pray, I must fast, I must fling myself by any means possible into the hands of the One who bore the heaviest cross of all…the One who then emptied that tomb.

Jesus promised us crosses. We are to expect them. And He also promised us empty tombs in the end. It may not happen until the end, but He gave His word that He would make those tombs empty again.

So I must remember. I must remember that God broke into time to show us that the empty tomb will always follow the cross.

I must remember the times in my own story when God brought an empty tomb after a cross.

When I cannot see beyond my cross, when I cannot trust on my own, I must look to Jesus who proved that His power and love are strong enough to bring forth an empty tomb after every single cross.

I must remember

and hope.

Crosses and empty tombs. They always go hand in hand.

Lord, we pray we never find ourselves without hope, without a glimpse of the empty tomb each time we happen upon a cross. Help us begin our daily journey expecting both crosses and empty tombs and rejoicing when we encounter either because we know you are with us. Amen. ~ from the Book of Common Prayer

Art credit: The Three Crosses by Rembrandt; Empty Tomb ink drawing from Catholic Hymns, 1860

He Has Made Promises

Posted on March 11, 2016 by Elizabeth

I lost a friend this week.

In high school, she was one of my best friends. We played and sang together. We did show choir and musicals together. We volunteered together. We even had secret names for each other. (Yes, we still did that in high school. We were nerds.) I got to be a part of her life when she was baptized. We lost touch over the years, but I still loved her.

I’ve lost three friends over the past year and a half. This weighs heavy on me.

There is nothing that makes this okay. Jesus Himself wept at the death of His friend.

Death and pain, sorrow and grief. These are not how life was created to be.

There is nothing that makes this okay. Only one thing makes this bearable.

Our God.

He has made promises to us that He will make it turn out all right in the end. He has made promises to us that when we see Him face to face, all the horror that came before will seem as insubstantial as a morning mist blown away by the rising sun. He has made promises to us that He will remain with us and in us until that beautiful day arrives.

How do I know He will keep His promises?

I know because God loves us enough to put on skin and come down to live with us, to suffer for us, to die for us. I know because God has enough power to rise from the dead and conquer death for all time.

He loves us enough and He has power enough.

I don’t know why God didn’t put it all right from the beginning. I don’t begin to understand why He places so much importance on human freedom of choice or why our sin and redemption are so closely intertwined with creation itself.

But I know He keeps His promises and I know that His promises are beautiful beyond imagining.

And for that I will trust Him.

This one’s for you, Jenna. Until we meet again.

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Not About Me

Posted on March 4, 2016 by Elizabeth

It is not about me.

This is disappointing. I want it to be all about me.

I want all that happens to be for the sole purpose of making me happy, comfortable, and a better person.

But it’s not.

When darkness fills my life, when loneliness weights my soul, when grief deadens my heart,

it’s not about me.

Yes, God loves me and wants the best for me, but what is best for me is not that everything (or anything at all!) revolves around me.

When circumstances occur that I don’t like, when hurtful or even ugly things happen, will I try to make it about me or will I let God use it to glorify Himself? Will I be able to let go of my own self long enough to let God use it to bring others to Him and bring His kingdom closer to fulfillment?

Huh. God glorified, loved ones brought to Him, His kingdom brought close to earth? As I think about it, this all benefits me.

Even though it’s not about me.

Funny how God makes that all work out.

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

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.

She taught me how to bake and how to sew. She taught me how to swim and dive and play tennis. I’m sure she tried to teach me how to draw, but that lesson just didn’t take. She taught me how to welcome people into my home.

The next flash of memory is from my undergrad days at Harding.

There are memories from my teaching days.

The trips to Dallas didn’t happen quite so often after I moved back to Illinois, but I was very happy to discover a direct flight from Champaign to Dallas.

Which is the way it should be.

I’m not as good at it as she was, but I learned at her feet how to show Jesus love to those around me.

I am so grateful for the years we had with Gram living here in Springfield.

I’ll admit that I am greedy for more time. More time to just BE with Gram, more time to listen to her and soak up all of her knowledge and wisdom, more time to learn how to love like she loved, more time for my girls to know her, for my youngest to be able to remember her.

Yet I know that I have a choice in all of this. I can choose to be angry with God, letting my anger and grief drive me away from Him, or I can choose to be obedient and thank Him, clinging to Him and letting Him be all that I need.

So at least for today, I will choose this:

Thank You, Father, for the gift of my Papa and my Gram.

Thank You for giving me so many years with them, years of such close relationship and of so many beautiful times with them.Thank You for giving them so many talents and abilities and for giving them the desire to teach and share those skills with me and my family.

Thank You for their wisdom, for all that I have learned from them, for all of the wisdom that I now have stored in my own heart, wisdom that I can now pass on to their great-grandchildren. To the next generation.

Thank You most of all for making their hearts like Yours. Thank You for allowing me to see You in them, to see in their lives how You want me to live. Thank You for showing me through them how to live faithfully as a child of Yours, as a spouse and as a parent.

Thank You for the beauty that is their lives.

Thank You, God, for Your grace.

Gone From My Sight Henry Van Dyke

I am standing upon the seashore. A ship, at my side,

spreads her white sails to the moving breeze and starts

for the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength.

I stand and watch her until, at length, she hangs like a speck

of white cloud just where the sea and sky come to mingle with each other.

Then, someone at my side says, “There, she is gone.”

Gone where?

Gone from my sight. That is all. She is just as large in mast,

hull and spar as she was when she left my side.

And, she is just as able to bear her load of living freight to her destined port.

Her diminished size is in me — not in her.

And, just at the moment when someone says, “There, she is gone,”

there are other eyes watching her coming, and other voices

ready to take up the glad shout, “Here she comes!”

And that is dying…

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Death

We all will experience it.

Does it matter?

Does it matter how we die?

Death is something we all must think about, especially as physician assisted suicide becomes more and more accepted in our world.

If, as I argued last week, there is a created order to all things and therefore the way we think about and live out all things matters, then it matters how we think about death and dying.

If we do not, our culture will.

And we may not like our culture’s decisions.

As life becomes more individualistic, so does death.

Most of us, when asked our preferred manner of dying, would say that we would rather slip away peacefully in our sleep without any warning.

For most of Christian history, the answer would have been different.

A common prayer was A subitanea morte, liber nos, Domine – From a sudden death, deliver us, O Lord.

Why? Christians understood that they existed in community. They understood that they were interwoven with the people around them and they wanted the chance to say their goodbyes, to make right any lingering feuds.

We seem to have become more frightened of death.

There are two extremes in our culture, neither of which seem to fall within the confines of our Christian faith.

The first is to preserve life at all costs.

The quality of that life receives no consideration; doctors are asked to keep people alive regardless of the misery in which they may be existing.

It is a fear of death that keeps people clinging to a pale semblance of life.

The second is to end life prematurely.

It is autonomy run amok, autonomy that says I have the right to do whatever I wish with my life, including the right to end it, autonomy that rejects our creatureliness, our dependence on God.

It is a fear of a life that is “less than” that sends people seeking the oblivion of death.

We, as Christians, can accept death. We can recognize that God holds all times in His hands, that there is a time to live and a time to die, and when it is our time to die we are held close in those hands.

I have watched one I love recognize this and choose quality of his last days over the miserable clinging to a side-effect filled life that might have gained him a few months in the span of a full life well lived.

We, as Christians, can resist death. We can use the power of medicine to heal and see it as a gift of God for gaining more time to love those around us and to do His work, to bring His kingdom rule here on earth.

I have watched many I love fight for life while there was still hope and accept whatever was given to them by the hands of God.

What we, as Christians, cannot do is to accept either extreme of avoiding death at all costs or aiming at death with all purpose.

Death

We must all consider it.

Does the manner of our death matter?

Culture is making its decisions.

Will we make ours?

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Lent is a time of self-denial, a time of sacrifice.

Lent is a time of giving up, a time of letting go.

Lent is a time of death.

Perhaps it seems strange that a God Who claims to be Love would ask for His beloved to practice such harsh disciplines.

The difficulty often lies in our idea of love.

We see love as sweet and soft, as gift giving and hugs, as making someone happy.

God’s love, however, is a fiery love.

God’s love is a love that cares so fiercely about His beloved’s joy that He refuses to leave anything in His beloved that might diminish that joy.

God Who is love asks us to die to ourselves because He knows that you cannot have glory without suffering.

He knows from experience that you cannot have resurrection without death.

Lent has already begun, but it is not too late to begin practicing how to die to yourself.

Fast for a meal or two; give up television for an evening. Use that time to read God’s words and pray.

Set aside thirty minutes to practice solitude and silence. Go somewhere you can be completely alone and try to still your mind and listen to God.

These habits take practice, so start small.

Let God’s Spirit teach you how to deny yourself, to give up, to sacrifice.

Gone From My Sight
Henry Van Dyke