The Call of God: Sharing and Bearing Pain

by | 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

A Valentine’s Message:Crumpled Carnations

by | Feb 13, 2012 | Learning Story

This little heart showed up on my pants as I was driving to a doctor's appointment last week. It's shriveled lettuce that fell out of the fast food sandwich I was eating:).

For some not-so-strange reason, my early thoughts today went to the awkward high school Valentine’s years of anxiously, eagerly, achingly anticipating the delivery of a slightly-crumpled colored carnation. And that led me to the ache for broken hearts who are cringing now or gritting teeth to endure the next 48-96 hours when most Valentine’s festivities and stories will have subsided.

Even though I don’t have time to blog today, I am writing to any and all, myself included, who have looked for love in all the wrong places and failed to find it, when all along LOVE has not only looked for, but found us, and written the message of love in the stars, in strangers’ faces, in 66 books and too many stories and letters to be counted. I want us to gush over the Love of the One who is right now writing Love into our hearts by redeeming stories in ways that could possibly look more like hate than love but nonetheless bear the undeniable handwriting of a God who lovingly created us, refused to leave us when we refused to trust him, and pursued our broken and wayward hearts with a love that will not let us go.

I found this love message written in the sky during a long road trip.

Tomorrow I’ll write more about how this love compels us to love. But meanwhile, stop. Look for His love. In what surprising places do you or have you seen it? Will you share your story with someone who desperately needs to hear it? (Hint: this is a good place to share!)

“See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called the children of God, and so we are.” 1 John 3:1

Hope for Bitter Hearts

by | Feb 10, 2012 | Learning Story

Our Sarah Sisterhood Bible study again yesterday had a powerful discussion about God’s grace working in hearts of Bible women. One point that struck me hard was how God does not edit out lament, even wrongful accusation lament from the Bible. Read the verses, what a commentator has to say, and then a few thoughts. The gospel gives hope for our hearts even when they are not soft!

Ruth 1:20–21 (NIV)
20 “Don’t call me Naomi,” she told them. “Call me Mara, because the Almighty  has made my life very bitter. 21 I went away full, but the LORD has brought me back empty. Why call me Naomi? The LORD has afflicted me; the Almighty has brought misfortune upon me.”

“God sometimes takes away the things that have become precious to us because they are supporting us in our life of sin and hardness of heart toward him. Alternatively, he sometimes takes away things that were good in themselves because he wants to use our lives as a powerful testimony of the sufficiency of his relentless grace in the midst of our weakness and loss. Invariably, though, he has not brought these trials and losses into our lives because he hates us or is seeking to afflict us, or to get even with us for our sin. On the contrary, if we are his children, he loves us and through this loss wants us to receive something far more precious than all of the trinkets to which we become so desperately attached. He wants us to give us more of himself.” Iaian Duguid

This is all true. But notice the biblical narrator leaves Naomi’s statement in. He doesn’t edit it out, nor does he insert this commentary. Can we leave it? Can we recognize that the Author of our lives and the Author of Scripture knows and loves our hearts enough to see the bitterness and hear the accusations and still send his Son to die for these same hard hearts? This is what the Book of Ruth, and indeed the entire Bible is about — the God who changes our hearts from bitter to soft; who allows us to be empty that he may fully fill us.

True Community and Radical Forgiveness

by | Feb 6, 2012 | Learning Story

In eleven days, I’ll be at First Presbyterian Opelika leading an interactive workshop on community. I’m way done with preparation, but I keep finding more and more excellent teaching on community. Found this article by Tim Keller today as I was studying Matthew 18.

“But one could argue that the biblical teaching on forgiveness and reconciliation is so radical that there are no cultures or societies that are in accord with it. It may be here most of all that we see the truth of Bonhoeffer’s statement, “Our community with one another [in Christ] consists solely in what Christ has done to both of us.Christian brotherhood is a spiritual and not a human reality. In this it differs from all other communities.”

1In its most basic and simple form, this teaching is that Christians in community are to never give up on one
another, never give up on a relationship, and never write off another believer. We must never tire of forgiving (and
repenting!) and seeking to repair our relationships. Matthew 5:23–26 tells us we should go to someone if we
know they have something against us. Matthew 18:15–20 says we should approach someone if we have
something against them. In short, if any relationship has cooled off or has weakened in any way, it is always your
move. It doesn’t matter “who started it:” God always holds you responsible to reach out to repair a tattered
relationship. A Christian is responsible to begin the process of reconciliation, regardless of how the distance or
the alienation began.” Tim Keller, “Serving Each Other through Forgiveness and Reconciliation”

The Gift of Getting Caught

by | Feb 3, 2012 | Learning Story

When my children were young, I remember a mom telling me that she always prayed that if her teenagers got in trouble, they would be “caught.” I hadn’t ever really thought of it before, but her point was an excellent one — if they were caught, they could experience discipline and consequences, forgiveness and redemption. On a rather interesting side note, one night when my husband was coming home from a late night on call, he ‘caught’ her son with several others rolling a neighbor’s tree in grand style. When he called her, she was completely gracious and grateful to him for telling her:).
I love this quote from Sharon Hersh on being caught…
“This book considers the gift of getting caught, because this is when we have the chance to experience being known, loved, and still wanted….we will examine the gift of humiliation that leads to the gift of surrender…we will look at the unlikely gift of woundedness, because wounds, no matter how painful or unsightly, are where Love gets in with the healing gifts of mercy and forgiveness.” Sharon Hersh, “The Last Addiction”