Robbing God

“But you say, ‘How have we robbed you?’ In your tithes and contributions. You are cursed with a curse, for you are robbing me, the whole nation of you. Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house.” – Malachi 3:8-10

I can think of people in my life—Dave would be among them—who have the gift of generosity. Who just as easily give away money as keep it. But that is something I’ve historically struggled with. It’s ugly to admit, but I tend to feel entitled to what I earn. A while back, I wrote a piece to myself entitled, “Why does God own everything?” and listed four main reasons: because he created it (“The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein,” Psalm 24:1-2). Because he can take it away at any time (“The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away,” Job 1:21). Because we can’t take it with us after we die (“For we brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world,” 1 Timothy 6:7). And because he enables me to earn what I do. It is only by his grace that I was born a woman in the late 1900’s and not the late 1800’s; that I had a supportive family and educational opportunities; and so on. Deuteronomy 8:17-18 says, “Beware lest you say in your heart, ‘My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.’ You shall remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth.” 

 

God owns everything, and this should change how I live. It does not negate the need for financial wisdom and prudence, but it frees me from anxiety and the desire to control money as a primary means of security. It shoots down my pride. It should lead to greater contentment, freedom from the need to compare what I have with others, and an even greater ability to materially enjoy what I do have. And it should lead me to give willingly, because what I have is not mine but God’s. He means it when he says we rob him when we keep for ourselves what should be accounted as his.

 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “Earthly goods are given to be used, not to be collected… the disciple must receive his portion from God every day. If he stores it up as a permanent possession, he spoils not only the gift, but himself as well, for he sets his heart on his accumulated wealth, and makes it a barrier between himself and God. Where our treasure is, there is our heart, our security, our consolation, and our God.” My old pastor put it more succinctly: “Money is like manure: if you spread it around, it helps things grow. If you hoard it all in one big pile, it stinks.” Sometimes it’s good to be reminded of these not-so-self-evident truths.

Binding Wounds

“He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.” – Psalm 147:3

On the inpatient surgical service, wound dressing typically fell to the medical student or intern during morning rounds, whoever was lowest on the totem pole. The team would stride in, the senior resident asking the patient a few questions while the junior resident did “single-point” auscultation (placing the stethoscope at the lower sternum to hit up heart and abdomen at the same time—notoriously sloppy but efficient). One of them would peel back the dressing, examine the site, then orders would be issued and entered while the team strode off to the next room, leaving the student or intern to redress the wound.

 

Those were the quieter moments on rounds, taking out packs of gauze and paper tape from my white coat pocket, fielding residual questions from the patient. If you think about it, the binding of a wound is an intimate and thoughtful act. It says, I see your hurt, your imperfect places, the things you might not show other people, the places you’ve been wounded or where you carry pain. I am reaching out to touch those places so they can be healed.

 

People like to talk about giving yourself compassion, about forgiving and being kind to yourself. But really, I have nothing to give myself. The only way I can bear my brokenness is to turn to a God who binds up my wounds. Who offers grace when I expect judgment, who sees and understands the depths of my struggles as no one else can. To give myself compassion is merely to receive the compassion He gives to me. I must see myself as forgiven because He has forgiven me. I must be gentle with myself because He is gentle with me. I must have the strength to heal and go on because that is the unspoken purpose in bandaging anything at all. 

 

And He is no minion, no minor member of the team. The next verse says, “He determines the number of the stars; he gives to all of them their names.” How jarring: this would be like the attending, the director of the entire surgical service, showing up on morning rounds just to rebandage some patient’s incision. But this is precisely how God uses his power. May we encounter this Healer who “lifts up the humble” (verse 6), who reaches out to touch us in our brokenhearted places. 

Steadfast Love

“The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.” – Psalm 145:8

One thing I feel acutely aware of these days are the limits of my emotional reserves. If I begin each day with a certain amount of emotional capital, then I make withdrawals every time I exercise patience while teaching the kids, buffer an emotional outburst or negative mood, or address an iceberg issue. These things take a forbearance that costs something, and the cost is higher if I am physically tired or meeting simultaneous needs at once. 

My reserves are not unlimited. When there is a good flow of input as well as output, I don’t notice this so much, but make nothing but withdrawals for long enough, and the limits of my patience become clear. Eventually it feels like I have to dig deeper and deeper to find the composure that the moment calls for. I need to replenish those reserves through respite, through receiving emotional care from others and from God, in order to keep going.

The Bible talks over and over about the chesed love of God. This word doesn’t really have an English equivalent—it is translated “steadfast” or “unfailing” love—but it basically marries two ideas, the idea of love, and the idea of commitment. God’s love for us is not based on us. It is a setting of the will to love, regardless of how we respond to him, and regardless of how He feels. It is as if God greets us each day with an unlimited reserve of love. His forbearance, his patience, his longsuffering love towards us is absolutely without limit or qualification.

Something as simple as the sun rising every single morning, without fail, reflects this chesed love of God. Walter Brueggeman reflects on this in his poem “At The Dawn”:

      Our first glimpse of reality this day—every day—is your fidelity.

      We are dazzled by the ways you remain constant among us… 

      Now, at the dawn, our eyes are fixed on you in gladness.

      We ask only that your faithfulness

         permeate every troubled place we are able to name,

         that your mercy

         move against the hurts to make new,

         that your steadfastness

         hold firmly what is too fragile on its own.

Incense

“Let my prayer be counted as incense before you.” – Psalm 141:2

“The four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb, each holding a harp, and golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints.” – Revelation 5:8

One of the neat things about a reading plan that draws from four different parts of the Bible is how it allows you to more easily see concordant themes and imagery. If you were to take your finger and trace the topic of incense throughout the Bible, you might start in Exodus 30, which begins the story with a recipe, with the language of shekels and grams. The combination of myrrh, cinnamon, aromatic cane, cassia, and olive oil for the tabernacle incense is precise, costly, and patented: “you shall make no other like it in composition” (Exodus 30:32). We would trace through the books of the kings how personally God takes it when incense is burned to other gods. We would begin to understand what it all means through David’s plea, then finally see its full meaning in Revelation. Our prayers rise like incense into the very throne room of God in heaven.

How are our prayers like incense? They are intentional, just as the incense was made according to exact specifications. They are regular, just as the incense was burned every morning and evening. They are communal, just as everyone contributed to the resources used to make the incense. They are personal, just as incense was never burned in random but unto another being. They are costly, a privilege bought by Jesus’ blood, just as the incense was made of costly spices. 

But I think the most beautiful thing about incense is the way it spreads. It creates an aroma that fills the space it inhabits, and lingers there. It is impossible for anyone in that space to not smell the aroma—because we must by nature breathe, and because air molecules are not by nature easily separable, we cannot choose to not smell something as easily as we could, say, choose to close our eyes to not see something. Though invisible, aromas are powerful because of their ability to disperse and permeate. And typically, the smell of incense is sweet.

Our prayers are like that: invisible, but powerful, rising up to God. Filling the space with something which all in that throne room could sense, that all would receive as sweet, and powerful, and present. Our prayers allow us, in a way, to join the elders and creatures in worship of God in that place. All that prayers are, in their adoration and thanksgiving and lament and petition, are ultimately worship. Let my prayer be like incense before you, David writes. May it be counted so for us all.

The Dragon, the Woman, and the Child

“And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to give birth, so that when she bore her child he might devour it… but her child was caught up to God and to his throne, and the woman fled…” – Revelation 12:4-6

A homeschooling mom gave me a great tip: pay attention to what your child reads just like you would be aware of what they eat. “Candy” books are fine, but they shouldn’t comprise their entire diet. One thing she does is pick a “stretch” book, one a bit beyond her kids’ reading level. They snuggle together on the couch, and she reads it aloud to them, occasionally having them read a paragraph to her as well. 

The book we picked to read with our older kids is Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring. Revisiting Middle Earth reminds me of how so many of these stories are gripping because they function on two levels: an epic one, and an ordinary one. There is Frodo stealing mushrooms and men battling for thrones on one level, but then the secret quest to destroy the ring on the other. In Star Wars, there are battles against the Empire and Han’s escapades on one level, but then the mission of the Jedi to defeat the dark side on the other. In Ender’s Game, there are battle-school games on one level, but then the confrontation between humanity and the buggers on the other. In the Stormlight Archives, there are politics and wars on one level, but then the rediscovery of magic to fight a looming threat on the other. 

The ordinary stories are what makes the characters human and relatable: but it is the epic storyline that determines whether any of them, or their world, will survive. Reading Revelation is a bit like stepping into one of these stories. On one hand, you have John, an older guy stuck in a cave on a rocky island writing his last letter. On the other hand, you have the visions he records, which are like God pulling back a curtain to reveal epic tableaus that are no less real for being less seen.

This particular vision is of a woman with a crown of twelve stars; she is thought to represent the Israelites (12 tribes, Micah 4:10) or the church (12 apostles). She gives birth to a child holding an iron scepter, thought to represent Jesus (Psalm 2:9). But as the child is about to be born, there waits for him a red dragon, the color of blood and war, with seven heads symbolizing complete evil, bearing seven crowns like a counterfeit king (Revelation 19:12,16). Later we are told the great dragon is “that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan” (Revelation 12:9). Like other epic stories, this plot involves a battle against good and evil—only it is entirely true.

We exist on both levels, the ordinary and the epic, the visible and the invisible, and to miss one is to not fully understand how to live in the other. As the authors of a BSF study wrote, “Satan has waged a cosmic war against God, and our daily lives are nothing less than the battleground. That is the context of our human existence.”

Satan and his forces are not necessarily behind everything that happens to us. But neither should we make the mistake of thinking he is not very much at work in our daily lives. The battles that we fight every day are significant precisely because they occur within the context of a much larger one, and we would do well to remember that.

Grief and Joy

“My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning. O Israel, hope in the Lord!” – Psalm 130:6-7

Today was our first day of school. As with many landmarks during this time, it felt like a mix of grief and joy. It’s fantastic to be have freedom from finding school parking or hauling school gear, to be able to serve fresh snacks and meals. It’s a real gift to be so closely involved now in what my children are learning, to better be able to incorporate home lessons throughout the day. But the whole thing felt sad too. It’s sad to see kids staring into screens for hours a day. Knowing it was coming is one thing; seeing it happen is another. This is not how it’s meant to be.

There is consolation, I think, in how the Bible doesn’t glance over these things. Doesn’t jump to some fix or analysis, but tarries in the places where grief and joy mingle together. My soul waits like the watchmen wait. You don’t set watchmen on the walls unless there is potential for trouble. Their very existence is an acknowledgment that all in the world is not as it is supposed to be. They wait in the dark, through the night. And yet it is in that place that the psalmist speaks of hope and steadfast love. The arrival of the dawn, the end of their shift, is sure, and that is how we wait: we look, and we hope, but never in vain, for there will come the “morning star” (Revelation 2:28).

McKelvey writes, “You are the sovereign of my sorrow.” Sometimes, that is all I can see, the loss and wrongness in how we are living. But sometimes too in that place the joys and gifts pierce through, experiences and perspectives and changes that never would have happened if my life had not been so radically reframed the way this time has forced it to be. “You are the sovereign of my sorrow. You apprehend a wider sweep with wiser eyes than mine. My history bears the fingerprints of grace… you remain at work.” Sadness and grace, grief and joy, and in that place, God remains at work. Hope in the Lord.

A Thousand Years As One Day

“But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness.” – 2 Peter 3:8

One curious thing about infants is that they only have two conceptions of time: now, or never. I remember when our children would sit in their high chairs banging their spoons for food; I would say, “wait a minute,” and they would burst into tears as if I meant “I’m never going to feed you anything ever again.” Waiting five minutes, I suppose, seemed like waiting an eternity; it may as well never happen.

How often I’m like that! God, I want this now. I really can’t wait a day, a week, a year. Asking me to wait years may as well be asking me never to have it at all. I become bitter, resigned, impatient, distracted. Yet to God, a thousand years is like a day. Part of faith is learning to live according to the reality of what will surely come, even if it seems a long way off to us. 

Will Jesus ever really come? That’s what Peter’s readers were asking. We don’t see anything happening. Nothing’s changed since the beginning of creation (slight hyperbole). Peter senses the hurt and resignation behind those questions; his tone is one of tenderness here, like the one of a parent explaining to their infant—wait. Your food is coming. It may feel like forever, but I promise it will happen, and you can trust my promise. 

“Delay,” wrote Charles Ellicott, “is a purely human conception.” To the Lord, “a thousand years… are but as yesterday when it is past” (Psalm 90:4). We are prisoners of our conception of time, but if we know who God is, if we trust Him and His word, the same word that created the world, then we must trust that He will indeed fulfill his promises to us. We must in faith live according to that reality. We must be patient as he is patient with us (verse 9).

Enough Light for the Next Step

“Your word is a lamp unto my feet and a light to my path.” – Psalm 119:105

This verse says, your word is a lamp to my path, not the sun to my world: when we hold a lamp in the dark, it only casts the light so far ahead. The Message translates this, “By your words I can see where I’m going; they throw a beam of light on my dark path.” A beam of light. Just enough to see a few steps forward.

I don’t think I’ve ever been this close to the first day of school with so much still unknown. Normally, we would be in a flurry of back-to-school playdates and teacher meetings and educational nights. We’d be dusting off backpacks and lunch bags and preparing for school run routines. At this point I don’t really know what my kids will actually be doing for school. I don’t know when or for how long they’ll be on screens each day. I’m not sure how our home lessons will fit into that, or how it will look coordinating four different schedules. I’m not even sure which schooling option will end up being the best.

Our school district superintendent wrote recently, “Information shared by the District, including principals, is as good as the day it is issued.” We’ve all had to learn that the hard way, I think: that we can’t really know anything for sure these days. We can’t expect to see too far ahead. And yet this is the way that God’s word works in our lives: it gives just enough light for the next step. There is something about the revelation and movement of the Christian walk that works exactly this way—that doesn’t tell us what the future holds, only what we have to do in the coming hour or day. “The art of living,” Nouwen writes, “is to enjoy what we can see and not complain about what remains in the dark. When we are able to take the next step with the trust that we will have enough light for the step that follows, we can walk through life with joy and be surprised at how far we go. Let’s rejoice in the little light we carry and not ask for the great beam that would take all shadows away.”

Behold

“Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law.” – Psalm 119:18

The first year of ophthalmology residency is probably the most difficult year of training. Here you are, a full-fledged M.D. who has finally gotten the hang of general medicine and life on the wards, and you are plunged into a world you know nothing about. No physician outside of the field knows anything about the eye, so no one has really prepared you for it. The courses you took in medical school are largely useless. And my program followed a “sink or swim” strategy in which we were thrown into the deep end and expected to figure it out. 

One of the most nerve-wracking things we had to do as first-years was present every week at Grand Rounds, where all the faculty would gather to scrutinize us as we reviewed interesting cases we had handled. Most of us kept a list in our white coat pockets of anything remotely interesting we found in desperate hopes that we would have something to present. One of my co-residents always seemed to have a longer list than mine. I finally realized during our morning rounds that we could do the same eye exam, but he would catch all kinds of rare findings that I missed, simply because he read more. “You see what you look for, and you look for what you know,” he shrugged. 

It’s like what Sherlock Holmes says: “You see, but you do not observe.” The issue was not whether the interesting exam findings were there, but whether or not I had the ability to see them. The word for “open” here is galah, “to uncover, to reveal”: the picture is of something that is always there; it’s only a matter of whether or not we can see it. 

And there’s a tone of wonder and intimacy here. Galah is often used when speaking of uncovering nakedness, of showing something that is typically veiled or clothed, and the word for “wondrous” is repeated twice, for emphasis. It’s a word that means “marvelous, surpassing, extraordinary, beyond one’s own ability.”

I remember feeling like that the first time I saw the optic nerve in stereoscopic view. Here was someone who was letting me look through their cornea, past their dilated iris, into their very brain. I was seeing their neural tissue, in all its three-dimensional topography and pulsating color, as no one else could. It was beyond anything anyone could have engineered. It was wondrous.

God’s law is shot through with wonder. With marvelous things quite beyond ourselves. And the more we see, the more we know and suspect that there is more to see, if only we have the eyes to do so. The psalmist’s words may as well be the prayer of our Bible-reading journey: open my eyes that I may behold wondrous things out of your law. 

Trust

“O Israel, trust in the Lord!” – Psalm 115:9

One lovely thing about our kids is that they’re still young enough not to be overly concerned about our itinerary during road trips. They don’t complain about where we’re staying or wonder why we decided to take one route over another. They don’t come with their own agendas. They’re mostly happy to be in the moment, riding along, and from what I can tell, the longer the adventure, the better. 

In his book The Pastor, Eugene Peterson discusses the question Jesus was often asked by his followers: “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” When is this going to happen? How long do we have to wait? Jesus’ response was, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority.” “In other words,” writes Peterson, “it’s none of your business. Your question is irrelevant. That kind of information is of no use to you. It would probably confuse you, might discourage you, and would certainly distract you.”

That reminded me of one time in the car when Elijah asked, “how many more minutes?” When Dave replied, “500,” I’m not sure he knew what to do with that information (he ended up moving on to the more relevant question of whether we could listen to the Frozen II soundtrack again). That’s how I am on the crazy trip that has been this year: God, how long do I have to wait? When will things go back to normal? When are you going to meet my expectations for how things should work?

And what I am slowly starting to wonder is whether I am asking an irrelevant question, one that discourages and distracts me from the very present now God wants me to be in. It’s hard, because this means I have to let go of my own agenda, the way the disciples had to let go of their dreams for the militaristic and political restoration of their people. I feel my agenda is normal and not too much to ask, but then so probably did the disciples. The point is, do I trust God or not? Am I sitting in the car constantly worrying and asking, are we there yet? Or am I willing to trust him each mile of the way? 

Keep On Keeping On

“Many times he delivered them.” – Psalm 106:43

I have concluded that for our kids, entropy is the price of creativity. The more the imaginative play, the greater the resulting level of random disorder in the house. Someone once said that the more kids you have, either the messier or the tidier you become; for us, it’s the latter. Something about keeping our space neat helps me cope with the general chaos. But that means we end up doing a lot of repetitive tidying, cleaning up the same pillows, toys, and craft supplies all day long.

It reminds me of life in general nowadays, which can feel like nothing more glorious than doing again what has been done before. Waking up to days that are all the same versions of each other, with no end in sight. 

But there is something of God in choosing to do again what we’ve done before. That is the story of Psalm 106: “They did not remember… Yet he saved them… But they soon forgot… Many times he delivered them.” Again and again, the people forgot God, and again and again, God saved them. Doing again what he did before. This is what God does, and the daily, repetitive tasks we do live this out in the most granular of ways. 

I like to think about all the repetitive, ordinary tasks done in the Bible: David going through the same routines to tend his sheep, Ruth bending down time and again to glean wheat under the hot sun, Jesus familiar with the same chores in his father’s carpentry shop. God did not work despite these ordinary events, but through them, to achieve his purposes. In some small but important way, they declare the character of a God whose “steadfast love endures forever!” (Psalm 106:1) 

Trees

“The righteous flourish like the palm tree and grow like a cedar in Lebanon. They are planted in the house of the Lord; they flourish in the courts of our God. They still bear fruit in old age; they are ever full of sap and green.” – Psalm 92:12-13

Psalm 92 is titled, “A Song for the Sabbath,” and I can think of nothing better to reflect on during a sabbath than trees. Annie Dillard wrote this:

“Concerning trees and leaves… there's a real power here. It is amazing that trees can turn gravel and bitter salts into these soft-lipped lobes, as if I were to bite down on a granite slab and start to swell, bud and flower. Every year a given tree creates absolutely from scratch ninety-nine percent of its living parts. Water lifting up tree trunks can climb one hundred and fifty feet an hour; in full summer a tree can, and does, heave a ton of water every day. A big elm in a single season might make as many as six million leaves, wholly intricate, without budging an inch; I couldn't make one. A tree stands there, accumulating deadwood, mute and rigid as an obelisk, but secretly it seethes, it splits, sucks and stretches; it heaves up tons and hurls them out in a green, fringed fling. No person taps this free power; the dynamo in the tulip tree pumps out even more tulip tree, and it runs on rain and air.”

Amazing. And we walk by these things all the time. In the ancient near east, palms and cedars meant something special: in a dry and arid climate, they were images of strength, longevity, and beauty. Their leaves were green all year round. The palm here is likely the date palm, which bore fruit that was a dietary staple, and represented the presence of life-giving oases of water (Exodus 15:27, Numbers 33:9). The cedars of Lebanon grew to be immensely large and lived for thousands of years, symbolizing royal power and wealth. They were both literally in the house of the Lord: wood from the cedars of Lebanon were imported by Solomon to build the temple (1 Kings 5). Palms were used in the décor of the temple (1 Kings 6:29), were in Ezekiel’s vision of the new temple (Ezekiel 40:16), and were used to welcome Jesus, God tabernacled on earth, to Jerusalem (John 12:13).

We have four giant redwood trees in our back yard. When I get too caught up in the dramas of daily life, I go outside and look at them. I think, these trees will be here long after we and this house are gone. Here they are, quietly but constantly flourishing, spitting out bud and pine, heaving up tons of water. The wicked are like the grass, here today and gone tomorrow, but the righteous are like a tree in God’s presence. We will last past these times and ever bear fruit. These trees live in an entirely different scale of time and matter, and in our sabbath-rest pauses, it’s good to remember that.

Gratitude

“It is good to give thanks to the Lord.” – Psalm 92:1

Why is it so hard for me to give thanks? I become preoccupied with cares. I grow desensitized to what I have. I fail to notice small graces. I’m too busy complaining about what I don’t have. I’m in too much of a hurry. I’ve fallen out of the habit. I’ve conformed to a consumeristic culture. 

All of those may be true. But I think perhaps John the Baptist said it best. He said, “a person cannot receive even one thing unless it is given him from heaven” (John 3:27). Not even one thing. Every single thing in your life is an act of grace. It is a gift. It is something to be noticed and received with gratitude. Our ability to give thanks will extend as far as we see the grace in our lives, as far as we see this reality. Nouwen writes, “Gratitude… claims the truth that all of life is a pure gift. In the past I always thought of gratitude as a spontaneous response to the awareness of gifts received, but now I realize that gratitude can also be lived as a discipline. The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy.”

There is an Estonian proverb that says, “Whoever does not thank for little will not thank for much.” Sometimes, I think, it’s okay to start with small steps. At first, thankfulness feels like conscious effort. Slowly, it becomes a little easier, a little freer, a little less self-conscious. Slowly, we find that those small things themselves reveal the reach of God’s grace, like truths worked from outside in. “Acts of gratitude,” writes Nouwen, “make one grateful because, step by step, they reveal that all is grace.”

In and Out of the Cistern

“So they took Jeremiah and cast him into the cistern… letting Jeremiah down by ropes. And there was no water in the cistern, but only mud, and Jeremiah sank in the mud.” – Jeremiah 38:6

I don’t know about you, but it feels painful at times to read about the life of Jeremiah. There’s no greater proof, I suppose, that following God can mean suffering. In this, Jeremiah points to and fleshes out the life of Jesus himself. F. B. Meyer writes, “Jeremiah has always a fascination to Christian hearts because of the close similarity that exists between his life and that of Jesus Christ. Each of them was ‘a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief’; each came to his own, and his own received him not; each passed through hours of rejection, desolation, and forsakenness. And in Jeremiah we may see beaten out into detail, experiences which, in our Lord, are but lightly touched on by the evangelists.”

We see in these chapters the details of Jeremiah’s prophetic word being rejected by his own people. We witness the stratagems of murderers who did not want Jeremiah’s blood directly on their hands. We see the vicissitudes and cowardice of a king who, like Pilate, sat back and let it happen. We see in the life of both Jeremiah and Jesus the words of Stephen: “which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute?” (Acts 7:52). As Jeremiah is lowered into the cistern, we hear words from Psalm 69: “I sink in deep mire, where there is no foothold… Deliver me from sinking in the mire… Let not… the pit close its mouth over me” (69:2, 14-15)

But God rescues his prophet. In Jeremiah’s case, salvation came from a nobody: an Ethiopian foreigner who was a slave and likely emasculated. We may not even know his real name: “Ebed-melech” simply means “servant of the king.” This nobody, despite majority opposition from those with greater power, publicly confronts the king and rescues Jeremiah. Not only that, he cares for his body, finding linens and rags to pad Jeremiah’s armpits as he was lifted up, not unlike Joseph of Arimathea, who cared for Jesus’ body by wrapping it in linens. God too rescued his son, by raising him from the pit of death to life. Because of this, we who also suffer can do so with the hope of new life. We can have courage like Ebed-melech to act against injustice. We can learn to care for our bodies and be kind to others. We can cry out in prayer and eventually come to say, “you who seek God, let your hearts revive. For the Lord hears the needy… Let heaven and earth praise him” (69:32-34).

The Glory of God

“My mouth is filled with your praise, and with your glory all the day.” – Psalm 71:8

What is the glory of God? We bandy the phrase about all the time, but what is it, really? Well, perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s hard to define. My favorite explanation at the moment is that God’s glory is not a single attribute that he has, but the sum of all of his attributes put together, and the excellence of each attribute—not just his wisdom, but the perfection and greatness of that wisdom; not just his beauty, but the perfection and greatness of that beauty. 

I recently came across a piece by Jonathan Edwards called “The End For Which God Created The World,” in which he does a great word study on how “glory” is used throughout the Bible. He expounds more on the idea of what God’s glory means in terms of each of his attributes by saying that God’s glory is the way God inwardly possesses them, the way he outwardly displays them, and then also the way our own knowledge and experience of them results in His praise and honor. He writes:

“The emanation or communication of the divine fullness, consisting in the knowledge of God, love to him, and joy in him, has relation indeed both to God and the creature: but it has relation to God as its fountain, as the thing communicated is something of its internal fullness. The water in the stream is something of the fountain; and the beams of the sun are something of the sun. And again, they have relation to God as their object: for the knowledge communicated is the knowledge of God; and the love communicated, is the love of God; and the happiness communicated, is joy in God. In the creature’s knowing, esteeming, loving, rejoicing in, and praising God, the glory of God is both exhibited and acknowledged, his fullness is received and returned. Here is both an emanation and remanation. The refulgence shines upon and into the creature, and is reflected back to the luminary. The beams of glory come from God, are something of God, and are refunded back again to their original. So that the whole is of God, and in God, and to God; and he is the beginning, and the middle, and the end.”

His explanation gets better at the relationship we have with God’s glory. Yes, God’s glory is the sum of all of God’s attributes and the nature and excellence of each—but it is experienced by us. That is by definition part of what it is. In fact, his glory is in every single experience we have, if we look for it, if we receive it. And we cannot receive it without returning it, reflecting it back to God and out to others. This is what it means to live for God’s glory: to see and experience that “the whole is of God, and in God, and to God.” That is how the Psalmist can write, “my mouth is filled… with your glory all the day.” All the day—every single moment, his mouth can speak of the glory of God.

Be Our Arm

“Be our arm every morning.” – Isaiah 33:2

“Your right hand upholds me.” – Psalm 63:8

“The general rule in nature is that live things are soft within and rigid without. We vertebrates are living dangerously, and we vertebrates are positively piteous, like so many peeled trees… I am sitting under a sycamore tree: I am soft-shell and peeled to the least puff of wind or smack of grit.” – Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Some days I wake up with the realization that I’m going to need some strength to get through the day. It used to be I felt like this in the face of predictably challenging events, but nowadays the feeling could happen anytime. It’s like I wake up feeling “soft-shell and peeled,” realizing how fragile indeed I am, how susceptible to my own moods and lack of reserves. How limited I am at being able to actually live into the eternal hope and joy I know myself to possess. Sometimes the chasm between knowing and feeling seems untraversable.

I’ve never had to be led about by the arm, though I’ve seen many patients come into my clinic that way. They have a different kind of gait: usually slower, as if taking it one step at a time in their minds. When you lean on someone’s arm, it starts off like that, going into the day one step at a time. The person who lends you their arm bears your weight and the weight of whatever you carry. They give you a sense of direction, not miles ahead, but far enough so you know where to put your foot down next. And unlike a cane or walking stick, there’s a kind of companionship knowing someone is beside you. It’s like that line near the end of Jane Eyre: “Then he stretched his hand out to be led. I took that dear hand, held it a moment to my lips, and then let it pass round my shoulder: being so much lower of stature than he, I served both for his prop and guide. We entered the wood, and wended homeward.” 

How do you get God’s strength when you don’t feel it, or feel like it? You ask. Like Isaiah, you ask. And you make some kind of decision to trust, to reach out, and not think too hard, and go forward one step at a time.

Quality Time in Quantity Time

“For God alone my soul waits in silence… For God alone, O my soul, wait in silence.” – Psalm 62:1, 5

Some say that when it comes to parenting, quality time only happens with quantity of time. There’s some truth to that: and that is undoubtedly one of the gifts of this time. When have we ever had so much quantity of time with our children? Even as someone who pretty much stayed at home most of the time before the pandemic, I am flabbergasted by the difference. 

Sometimes, though, quantity of time can get in the way of having intentional quality time. It is possible to be around someone so much that you don’t actually end up connecting with them intentionally. For example, even though I’m around my kids constantly, I often don’t end up playing with them very much. They often play around me while I do chores or get my own stuff done, but it takes some intentionality to set aside what I’m doing and actually join in with their play. Even though Dave and I see each other more than we ever have, it takes intentionality to think about the other person for their own sake and not in relation to the functional living of life. The other morning, Dave spoke some words into what he’s seen in my life the past few months, and the time he spent thinking about me to do that was meaningful.

It's this way with God too. He is, after all, omnipresent. But because we always have quantity of time with him, we can become careless about having quality time with Him. We start to see him for what he gets us, or always in relation to how we’re feeling or doing, rather than for his own sake, for who he is entirely apart from how we are. We start to take his availability for granted, giving him the leftover parts of our day.

David says, “For God alone my soul waits… For God alone, O my soul, wait.” This is not someone speaking out of convenience or functionality. Think about who in your life you wait for: you wait for your boss, you wait for your doctor, you wait to pick up your kids. The waiting itself is a statement of how important someone is to you. David’s focus is upon God. He gives him the attention of his soul, his inner being, all of who he is. He does this in silence, without the distraction of the world or even his own words. This is quality time. And he writes it as both a description and an injunction: both a truth and an exhortation. Even as we experience and know how important quality time with God is, we have to remind ourselves to do it. There is a kind of experience of God that comes throughout every day events, but there is another kind of experience that comes only when we wait for Him alone, and that’s good to remember.

Parents As Prophets

“Then the Lord said, ‘As my servant Isaiah has walked naked and barefoot for three years as a sign and a portent against Egypt and Cush…” – Isaiah 20:3

It was hard being a prophet. Apparently the job description included giving up clothing and shoes for three years as an object lesson. The prophets brought the intangible, easy-to-brush-off realities of God to the people around them in an extremely palpable, concrete way, even if it caused them extreme discomfort and embarrassment.

Paul Tripp likes to say that the one word that describes parents the most is “ambassador.” Children don’t belong to us. They are God’s possession (Psalm 127:3) for his purpose; we are God’s agents in their lives. “The word that the Bible uses for this intermediary position,” Tripp writes, “is ‘ambassador’… The only thing an ambassador does, if he’s interested in keeping his job, is to faithfully represent the message, methods and character of the leader who has sent him.”

As an ambassador, you find your sense of identity as a parent from Jesus, not from your children. Your work as a parent is not to turn your kids into something, but to represent God and realize you have no power to change them. Your work is motivated not by what you want them to be, but by the potential of what grace could cause them to be. As an ambassador, success is not about working towards a specific catalog of horizontal outcomes, but about being faithful; it’s not about what you’ve produced but what you have done. As an ambassador, you care about your children breaking God’s law, not about the hassle or embarrassment they’ve brought you.

It’s not unlike being an Isaiah, personifying intangible spiritual truths so that they can be seen, heard, touched by the people God has put in your care. It involves an abandonment of your own agendas and preferences at some level. It involves having your own encounters with God. At heart, it involves hearing “whom shall I send?” and responding as Isaiah did: “Here I am! Send me” (6:8).

The Small and Hidden Life

“O my Strength, I will watch for you.” – Psalm 59:9

I was rereading some parts of Discernment by Henri Nouwen the other day. He writes, “Discernment reveals new priorities, directions and gifts from God. We come to realize that what previously seemed so important for our lives, loses its power over us. To our surprise, we even may experience a strange inner freedom to follow a new call or direction as previous concerns move into the background of our consciousness. We begin to see the beauty of the small and hidden life that Jesus lived in Nazareth. Most rewarding of all is the discovery that as we pray more each day, God’s will—that is, God’s concrete ways of loving us and our world—gradually is made known to us.”

In the first chapter of John, everyone is watching for Jesus: John the Baptist, who keeps insisting there is a greater one coming. Andrew, who left John to follow Jesus instead. Simon, who was brought by his brother. Philip, who answered a simple call to follow. Then there is Nathaniel, who said, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Yes, apparently. Yes, and more: Jesus tells him, “you will see greater things than these.”

Life feels small and hidden these days. Life is a dish washed, an assignment uploaded, a floor vacuumed, a book read, a dispute arbitrated, another snack or meal prepared. Life is a series of unquantifiable moments—hard ones, like when the kids have successive emotional issues. Good ones, like when we sat around watching our pet snails or when Emmy kept asking us serious questions like, “which do you like better: oil or tea? A cup or a tissue? Ice or water?” God’s will involves when to speak and when to hold my tongue; when to go do something I don’t feel like doing; how to approach one of the kids when they’re having a tough moment.

We who follow Jesus will see greater things that these, but sometimes it starts in being open to the unremarkable, watching for God in the small and hidden life.

The Unnamed Burden

“You have kept count of my tossings; put my tears in your bottle. Are they not in your book?” – Psalm 56:8

David Brooks writes, “We have entered the endurance phase of this pandemic.” When people ask now how we’re doing, I find myself rather at a loss. Nothing has changed, logistically. Yet there are constant ups and downs. In his book A Grief Observed, C. S. Lewis writes, “One never meets just Cancer, or War, or Unhappiness (or Happiness). One only meets each hour or moment that comes. All manner of ups and downs. Many bad spots in our best times, many good ones in our worst. One never gets the total impact of what we call ‘the thing itself.’ But we call it wrongly. The thing itself is simply all these ups and downs: the rest is a name or an idea.”

We are not meeting a Pandemic. We are meeting each hour or moment that comes as we press on in a world of monotony and future uncertainty, and I’ve found many of those hours and moments unpredictable. Some days are good, some days are bad, and I’m at a loss to explain exactly why, since all days are circumstantially identical. I sometimes feel more depleted by the end of the day than I used to feel. Is it that my work is harder? Perhaps. But it’s also the weight of simply doing what we’re doing, enduring.

Lewis writes in the same book: “I once read the sentence ‘I lay awake all night with toothache, thinking about toothache and about lying awake.’ That’s true to life. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.”

That’s the unnamed burden of this time: not just the unknown, but thinking about the unknown. Not just the monotony, but our awareness of the monotony. Not just the ups and downs, but wondering about the ups and downs. This burden runs like an invisible undercurrent through our day; it eats into our emotions, messes with our attention spans, can cause subconscious anxiety or dread. But this is a burden we don’t have to suppress, or deaden ourselves to, or drug ourselves from—this too is a burden we can cast upon God. We have a God who counts our tossings at night, who sees and keeps and remembers not only every sorrow, but every thought about the sorrow.