by Elizabeth | Mar 2, 2012 | Learning Story
http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/scottysmith/2012/02/28/a-prayer-for-redefined-and-refueled-joy/
I know some who read this blog also read my friend Scotty’s daily prayers. When I saw Tuesday’s prayer, I couldn’t wait to post the link to that with the link to the brilliant (though not always well understood) song, “Joy,” by Page CXVI. In the video I’ve posted, the creator tells her story of how this song was given to her after her father’s death. It is a GREAT story! Also, Page CXVI’s music is great — I have all of their hymn albums, and they soothe and encourage my heart.
by Elizabeth | Feb 27, 2012 | Learning Story
Do you ever have those moments when the words you’re reading in a book seem to suddenly start speaking to you? I had that experience today as I was reading a chapter called Listening to Our Exhaustion in Jan Meyers’ book Listening to Love. (I was actually doing research for the upcoming conference on Living the Gospel in Broken Stories, which is going to be a powerful time to consider what God is doing in hard seasons.)
Jan tells about a sabbatical season, when she discovered that her mood swings were just as bad as they had been when she was dealing with the daily stressors. She was concerned, and she began to listen intently to what God was saying. I found her words so encouraging. I’d love to know what you think. What do you think God might be doing in some seasons of difficulty?
“His reply was not, ‘You need to believe me more fully, and I will deliver you,’ but rather a quiet affirmation of his love: ‘Jan, this is your limp. This is where I’ve been found by you from the beginning. It is in this struggle that you have tasted my love for you. I delight in you regardless of your moods. This is not your identity. But you do have to live carefully. You must give yourself more time and space than most people need. You need more rest than many. Continue to listen carefully to how I view this need, and I will tend to you and keep your heart.’ Can you hear what happens in the face of such Love? I felt as though I had lost ten pounds. God was not asking me to battle for relief. He was asking me to allow him to be present in the very thing that torments.”
“God’s estimation of us is never what we imagine we’ll receive from others or from ourselves…we spend too much time in our Christian lives trying to impress others with the way we have navigated around our suffering and calling that godly. I do think it was right for me to ask, seek, knock – for years – for this dread thing not to be a part of my life. It was good for me to ask, as Paul asked for relief from his thorn in the flesh. But there also came a time when, for the sake of intimacy with Christ, I surrendered to whatever he thought best with regard to my health.” Jan Meyers, Listening to Love
by Elizabeth | Feb 24, 2012 | Learning Story
In Prodigal God, Tim Keller makes the point that our God is really “prodigal,” that is lavishly, extremely generous. I love this part, where he explains where real freedom from our love of power comes. Another good meditation for Lent:
It is only when you see the desire to be your own Savior and Lord -lying beneath both your sins and your moral goodness- that you are on the verge of understanding the gospel and becoming a Christian indeed. When you realize that the antidote to being bad is not just being good, you are on the brink. If you follow through, it will change everything: how you relate to God, self, others, the world, your work, your sins, your virtue. It’s called the new birth because it’s so radical. (p. 78) Jesus Christ, who had all the power in the world, saw us enslaved by the very things we thought would free us. So he emptied himself of his glory and became a servant. He laid aside the infinities and immensities of his being and, at the cost of his life, paid the debt for our sins, purchasing us the only place our hearts can rest, in his Father’s house… Knowing this will transform us from the inside out… Why wouldn’t you want to offer yourself to someone like this? Selfless love destroys the mistrust in our hearts toward God that makes us either younger brothers or elder brothers… We will never stop being younger brothers of elder brothers until we acknowledge our need, rest by faith, and gaze in wonder at the work of our true elder brother, Jesus Christ. (p. 87-89 The Prodigal God)
by Elizabeth | Feb 23, 2012 | Learning Story
Lent is always an interesting season to me, mostly because some Christians celebrate and others don’t, but those who don’t sometimes think those who do are strange or believe that they are special because they do so. I always need to remind myself exactly what this season is about, so of course I went to my favorite place: dictionary.com and looked up the word. What I always rediscover is that this is a season to mourn — our own sin and what Christ sacrificed for us that we might be reconciled to God. It is a season to set aside something satisfying to remember that Jesus is the only one who can truly fill our desperate craving. Not because that makes us “righteous,” but because he made us righteous. Today, I am meditating on sin, so whether you are a Lent observer or not, I invite you to read Cornelius Plantinga’s summary of sin and see if you find yourself there anywhere.
P.S. For bonus points, what is the origin of the word “Lent”?
Lent[lent]
noun
(in the Christian religion) an annual season of fasting andpenitence in preparation for Easter, beginning on AshWednesday and lasting 40 weekdays to Easter, observed byRoman Catholic, Anglican, and certain other churches.
SIN: “The Bible presents sin by way of major concepts, principally lawlessness and faithlessness, expressed in an array of images: sin is the missing of a target, a wandering from the path, a straying from the fold. Sin is a hard heart and a stiff neck. Sin is blindness and deafness. It is both the overstepping of a line and the failure to reach it – both transgression and shortcoming. Sin is a beast crouching at the door. In sin, people attack or evade or neglect their divine calling. These and other images suggest deviance: even when it is familiar, sin is never normal. Sin is disruption of created harmony and then resistance to divine restoration of that harmony. Above all, sin disrupts and resists the vital human relation to God, and it does all this disrupting and resisting in a number of intertwined ways. Sinful life, as Geoffrey Bromiley observes, is a partly depressing, partly ludicrous caricature of genuine human life.”
Cornelius Plantinga, “Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be”
by Elizabeth | Feb 21, 2012 | Learning Story
Women are invited to register for this retreat even if you don't attend Mitchell Road.
As I continue to prepare for the Mitchell Road women’s retreat on living the gospel in broken stories, I am daily challenged to ask what I want when faced with brokenness? For the pain in my shoulder, most days I just want relief. I want it to go away. But when I’m in my “best desperation,” I want God — “in healing or not-healing” as I once prayed. Yesterday, I read a story Larry Crabb shared in SoulTalk. He draws me to pray that I won’t settle for anything less than God’s heart.
Dear friends called him for counsel regarding their sixteen-year-old daughter. She had just told them that she had had an abortion a month ago. For them, as it would be for many of us, it was the death of a story they had written about their family and for their daughter. As Crabb points out, there are lots of good Christian ways of responding to such a tragedy – praying, having long talks, calling a counselor. The danger, he points out, is missing the crucial question that we should really all be asking all the time. [This is my translation of his point]: What are we trying to do in the midst of this broken story? Are we just trying to find all the pieces in the shredder and glue them back together again? Or – a far more gospel response – are we desperate to know God’s heart more deeply through this event? Are we willing to confess things like, “I’ve wanted my daughter to live the story I scripted for her, and I’m not really interested in what you have in mind, God”? Or, will we dive into the mess with humility, praying something like this, as Crabb writes,
“God, we plead with you to restore our daughter to wholeness in Christ. But if that never happens, we declare today that the deepest longing of our hearts is to know and enjoy and reveal you to others. Free us in our brokenness to celebrate your receiving grace as we approach you, to depend on the Son’s redeeming grace as we face our sin and move forward, and to become sensitive to the Spirit’s rhythmic grace as we enter the battle for our daughter’s soul.”
I’d love to hear from you — what broken stories have you experienced? Where did they take you? What hope does Crabb’s prayer offer you?
by Elizabeth | Feb 16, 2012 | Learning Story
Hope is looking for God's beauty in the encroaching storm.
This is a re-run of a blog I ran almost two years ago, after the floods in Tennessee. Tomorrow I’m leading a workshop on community at First Presbyterian Opelika, and today the Sarah Sisterhood ladies and I will be engaging Mary’s story, so I was looking for the quote and when I found it, I thought I’d share it with you:-).
Though it’s been submerged in the media, the devastation wreaked by the floods in Middle Tennessee last weekend have been the consuming story for many this week. What I hear over and over from my friends there is the glorious story of community joining together to restore broken things. Our individualistic society sometimes overemphasizes discerning our ‘individual’ call, losing the big picture of God’s call to love and redeem this broken world. Here is a favorite quote from N.T. Wright, about our calling to be extraordinary heroes and heroines. For a prayer specifically related to the flood, see Pastor Scotty Smith’s Facebook page.
But we mustn’t imagine that Mary was a heroine, an Annie-get-your-gun type, grasping the promise of God and riding off with it through all the problems to emerge in triumph at the end. As we saw in an earlier chapter, she must lose her dream before she realizes it. She must watch her Son, whom she thought was to be the Messiah, taking up with the shabby crowd down at the pub. She must watch him being fawned over by the girls of the street, not seeming to mind. And she must watch as his Messiahship is conclusively disproved as the occupying forces execute him as a failed Messiah, a would-be national leader who lets the people down. There is the obverse of the dramatic call of God. When God calls a woman, he bids her come and die – die to the hope she cherished, the hope she suckled, the hope born from her own womb and heart. Mary had been called to an ambiguous task – to have people up the street sneer at her, pregnant just a bit too soon, to have her pride and joy going off in quest of a Messiahship totally unlike her idea of Messiahship, to have him executed before her eyes. The call of God is not to become the heroine or hero in God’s new Superman story. It is to share and bear the pain of that world, that the world may be healed.”
N.T. Wright, The Crown and the Fire, The Call of God, 76
