| I am honored and pleased to be writing over at (in)courage today!
Please join me there. If you have never stopped in to visit (in)courage, it is a site that hopes to be a part of the journey of growing in relationship with God and in community with others. This will take the place of my regular Friday post this week. See you next Friday! |
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“Ten more minutes and then it’s time to go home.”
Silence.
“When I say ‘it’s time’, what will you say?”
(shouted in a happy voice) “Yes ma’am!”
“Good girl.”
I’ve learned the hard way that if my eldest girl is expecting to stay at the park and I suddenly pronounce now to be the time to go home, meltdowns and tantrums ensue.
If, however, I give her warning and help her to rehearse what is coming, peace and joy are retained. Mostly.
Expectations.
Just as they color the relationship between my eldest and me, they determine the state of my relationship with God.
As I wrestle with this cancer that is threatening to overtake my sister, my brother’s wife, this 26-year-old mommy of a 15-month old, I am forced to look hard at what I expect from God.
I expect to grow old with my love. I expect to watch my children grow up. I expect to meet my grandchildren, my great-grandchildren. I expect that my parents will dance at their grandchildren’s weddings. I expect good health and more than enough to live.
This is what I dare to say I think I deserve.
When I, or those I love, don’t get what I expect, I am left with anger and resentment.
I am reading One Thousand Gifts: “Expectations kill relationships – especially with God…Is it only when our lives are emptied that we’re surprised by how truly full our lives were? Instead of filling with expectations, the joy-filled expect nothing – and are filled. This breath! This oak tree! This daisy! This work! This sky! These people! This place! This day! Surprise!…Are there times that a sense of entitlement – expectations – is what inflates self, detonates anger, offends God, extinguishes joy? And what do I really deserve? Thankfully, God never gives what is deserved, but instead, God graciously, passionately offers gifts, our bodies, our time, our very lives. “
The idea leaves me whirling. Can I truly live like that? Can I be grateful for every moment that I have with my family, knowing that each moment is a gift, something that I don’t deserve? Can I live grateful for every small gift that God gives?
Can I live without expecting God to give the gifts I think He should give?
I ponder this thought throughout my next days.
Then I see it. I see it in a passage that I have read so many times that I now tend to skim.
Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us. You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. ~Rom. 5.3-6
Yes, I know. Suffering produces hope.
Wait.
A niggling in the back of my brain stirs up the idea of a meaning behind hope. I go to my Strong’s.
The word translated “hope” is from elpis (elpizo or elpo): to expect, to anticipate (usually with pleasure), expectation or confidence.
Suffering produces confidence, expectation, because of God pouring out His love, because of Christ dying for a sinner. For me.
My heart longs for more and so I search.
How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. Everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself, just as he is pure. ~I John 3.1-3
This hope. The same word. Elpis. Expectation.
Expectation of lavish love, of being made children of God. Expectation of knowing, seeing and being made like God. Expectation.
This. This is what I should expect from God.
I weep, ashamed that I demand such small things from God, ashamed that I expect such fleeting gifts when He is promising such riches, such beauty.
Living without expectations.
I will try. I will try to be surprised by every gift that God decides to give, knowing that He has already given me the most beautiful and exciting gift of all.
May we continue the conversation?
If our daily lives are to be centered around Christ, if we are to build physical reminders of Jesus into our daily routines, if all that we are and all that we do is to be made sacred, then how does that idea expand to include the world around us? Is the world around us, the culture in which we live, also to be made sacred?
I read “Resounding Truth” and ponder this:
This book is concerned with…gaining theological discernment about music…It is concerned with how God’s truth might “sound” and “re-sound” in the world of music.
My mind begins to whirl. Should I attempt to view music through a godly perspective? Even purely instrumental music? If in this, than in what other realms should we have a godly worldview?
Literature? Politics? Art? Philosophy? Science? Technology?
Should everything be interpreted through a God-window?
I suppose that there is nothing outside of the lordship of Jesus.
I think through this a little more.
Are we asked to view everything in our world through a godly framework? Are we called by God to actively think through issues in our world, to read and listen, pray and ponder the things in our culture that are relevant in the world?
It would certainly be easier to stay focused only on my home, my daily routine.
Easier, however, is not generally what God calls us to pursue.
Paul says in Colossions 3.17:
And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks for God the Father through Him.
Whatever you do. This certainly reinforces my thoughts about consciously bringing God into my daily life. This doesn’t, however, necessarily translate to God asking us to actively pursue an understanding of and engagement with our culture.
I continue to wonder and seek God in this as I move through my day.
I sit at the computer and see that I have received my Mars Hill Audio Journal in my in-box.
Mars Hill’s stated purpose is to help Christians thoughtfully engage their culture.
They make the argument (rightfully, I believe) that a layer of “Love your neighbor as yourself” is to
pay careful attention to the neighborhood: that is, every sphere of human life where God is either glorified or despised, where neighbors are either edified or undermined. Therefore, living as disciples of Christ pertains not just to prayer, evangelism, and Bible study, but also our enjoyment of literature and music, our use of tools and machines, our eating and drinking, our views on government and economics, and so on.
Considering a godly perspective on technology and economics is a newer idea for me.
Paul certainly engaged the culture when he spent time in the marketplace in Athens, listening to and speaking with the philosophers of the day. (Acts 17)
As artists, my friend Kati and I have discussed this issue from the perspective of making quality art and engaging the artistic community where they are in order that art may be pervaded by Christ.
Should there be any realm of human endeavor that is not pervaded by Christ?
The host of Mars Hill says it this way:
But it is nonetheless imperative for us to be active in the culture, not because we are saved, but because we are created. Pursuing an understanding of and engagement with our culture is necessary for Christians because we must first bow to God as Creator, to thank him for the goodness that remains in his fallen creation, to live creatively, that is, in keeping with the patterns and norms he has established for creation, even as we eagerly await the advent of a new creation.
Meanwhile, life in this created sphere has meaning and value. God bestows blessings even on the unrighteous. He gives wonderful talents and abilities to those who hate the mention of his name. These blessings are what we mean by common grace: the gratuitous gifts to the just and the unjust that sustain and enrich the life shared by the wheat and the tares.
C.S. Lewis also argues that God asks us to bring Him into all branches of human thought:
If all the world were Christian, it might not matter if all the world were uneducated. But, as it is, a cultural life will exist outside the church whether it exists inside or not. To be ignorant and simple now–not to be able to meet the enemies on their own ground–would be to throw down our weapons, and to betray our uneducated brethren who have, under God, no defense but us against the intellectual attacks of the heathen. Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered. The cool intellect must work not only against cool intellect on the other side, but against the muddy heathen mysticisms which deny intellect altogether.
I must conclude that God does, indeed, ask us to actively pursue an understanding of and engagement with our culture. As I pursue this idea of holistic living, of considering everything to be made sacred, I must go beyond the walls of my home, beyond the walls of my church.
I will keep reading and listening, praying and pondering.
Will you continue the conversation?
If you want a bit of Further Reading on this, here are two essays:
Christianity, Culture and Modern Grace
Christianity and Culture
Her Daddy and I are her sun and moon. Her world revolves around us and she depends on us to keep her life whole.
When one of us is away, she begs to know where we are and what we are doing. She loves routine, this two-year old of mine, needs to know that her Daddy and I are constant and will keep her world whole, will keep it from falling into pieces.
I, on the other hand, seem to delight in fragmenting my world. I want to divide my life into pieces.
A place for household chores and yard work and a place for reading my books.
A place for my husband and a place for my children.
A place for friends and a place for family.
Neat and separated.
For surface organization, perhaps, this brings contentment. Yet daily I willfully ignore my own Sun and Moon Who could knit my life back together into a beautiful whole. I continually forget about inviting Him into certain places of my day.
There is no joy in places of my day that do not include Christ, only weary tasking and resentment over un-acknowledged work.
How can this change? It has become such habit to separate out my day between sacred and secular.
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them upon your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.” (Deut. 6.5-7)
How can I allow God to knit the secular places of my life back into the sacred?
How can the whole of my daily life be made sacred?
I am inspired by Brother Lawrence, the dishwasher:
“The time of business does not differ with me from the time of prayer; and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great a tranquility as if I were upon my knees at the blessed sacrament.”
Yet unlike my Eldest Child, I don’t allow God be constant, keeping my world whole. I speak as though this were my desire. I sing “in my life be lifted high” yet don’t act in physical ways to keep Him present during my chores, while reading my books, in my daily interactions with my family.
I have places. Some are sacred and some are secular.
I long for my world to be whole. For all to be made sacred.
I pray for wisdom. I seek answers and ideas. I have found a few.
The rest of the passage from Deuteronomy:
“Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the door frames of your houses and on your gates.” (Deut 6.8-9)
God desires for our lives to be made wholly sacred.
He knows how forgetful we are. He knows that He created us as physical beings. He knows that we need physical and constant reminders.
Ann Voskamp shares her family’s practice of reading the Word at every meal. They eat the Bread of Life while they break bread together. Perhaps this is another layer of meaning to “do this in remembrance of Me” (Luke 22.19)
After all, Jesus was sharing a meal at the time.
We are just beginning to join in this sharing of Bread at mealtimes.
We try. We fail. We begin again.
We forget. We are ashamed. We begin again.
Liturgy is a foreign and almost forbidden word to us. The idea, however, intrigues me. Set times in your day for going to God. A discipline of regular prayer that keeps us rooted in the sacred at all times, in all of our places. I discovered this version of a book of Common Prayer. We have not tried this yet. Perhaps the little ones are a bit too little still.
Small changes. Little steps. Will you help? Share how God is teaching you to weave your days into a sacred whole?
We yearn and pray for all that we are and all that we do to be made sacred.
Writing is a difficult thing. It requires one to be vulnerable, to trust the world with a piece of oneself while knowing that the world can be a cruel place.
Perhaps this is why I have declined to join the world of blogging until now.
Perhaps, too, it seems as though everyone is a blogger. Everyone has something to say and not many wish to listen. Perhaps no one will wish to listen to me.
Yet I still feel that God is asking me to write. Not to write and hide but also to share.
I have resisted this for quite a while now. Why? Partly due to the work involved.
Even now, I am only agreeing to write once a week.
A large part, however, is that I don’t feel that I have anything new to say. To add to the over-quoting of Solomon, “There is nothing new under the sun”. (Ecc. 1.9) Who am I to think that I could say something new or even to say something old in an improved way?
Perhaps God is simply asking me to restate old things for a single reader.
Perhaps God is even more simply asking me to write so that I can grow to be more like Him as I think through various ideas aloud.
Whatever the reason, here I am. Obeying, even though afraid. I will write. God will listen. I pray He will be pleased.
