When Life Gets Busy...

The school year has fully ramped up, as have my church ministries and I am once again in the "you want me to be out past 8:00 on a schoolnight?" season of life where sleep and coffee are both highly prized commodities.

It's not just me, either. Everyone I know seems to be more busy now than they were even a week ago. --Funny how everyone tends to get overwhelmingly busy at the same time, huh?

So, how do we handle this intense busy-ness? The natural tendency is to madly rush through each day, distracted by all the things that demand your focus, trying to keep it all straight in your mind and sort out what needs to be done first. --In short, we tend to run around like the proverbial chicken with its head cut off.

To cope with the overload of demands on our time, energy, and mental focus, most of us look for ways to pare down the demands, getting rid of that which is not "urgent" or "necessary"

And for many of us, one of the first things to be pared down is time spent with God in prayer. Maybe we don't cut it out all together (although it is very common for the busy Christian to rush out the door, meaning to get their time with God in later on, and then forget altogether in the hustle and bustle of the day, waking up late the next morning only to repeat the cycle.) My temptation when overwhelmed by how much I have to do each day is to minimize or cut short my time with God.  But as I was reminded in Pastor's sermon this morning, the busier we become, the more we need to pray.

Think about it.

When you feel you are taxed beyond your limits with the busyness of life, work, ministry, family, whatever puts pressure on your time, you can go to the omnipotent God who has no limitations, and who offers you His strength for each day.

Isaiah 26:3-4 is an oft-quoted verse, but have you ever stopped to consider the last part of verse 4?

"Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee. Trust ye in the Lord for ever: for in the Lord Jehovah is everlasting strength."

Everlasting strength. strength that never ends, that never fails, that is never exhausted. Through God we have access to this strength. Ephesians 3:16 indicates that God does strengthen believers with His might.

So how do we access this strength?

Look back at Isaiah 26:3

"Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on Thee: because he trusteth in Thee."

The way to access peace in the midst of our busy-ness is to stay our minds on the Lord --to talk with Him in prayer and to read about Him in His word. When we take the time to stay our minds on Him, He helps us trust in Him, and notice why the "perfect peace"-filled individual is trusting God -"for in the Lord Jehovah is everlasting strength". Ephesians 3:14-19 also ties God's act of strengthening to closeness to and knowledge of God on the part of the believer.

So working backwards, to get God's strength, we must trust that it is everlasting- that it is enough (and more!) for our day. And if we trust that God's strength is greater than our own, we will take the time to seek His strength by staying our minds on Him.

In other words, you have to be willing to put aside what you think is urgent and take time for God, trusting Him to enable you to get everything accomplished in your day.

I think it was Martin Luther who remarked to a friend that he had so much to do that day, he had to spend an extra hour in prayer. --That's the mindset we need if we are to live our busy lives empowered by God's limitless strength.

"He who runs from God in the morning will scarcely find Him the rest of the day" 

-John Bunyan

When God's Will Gets Confusing...

It's Thursday night, and I should be asleep.

I was actually excited to be going to bed only a little bit later than I should have been, with a busy Friday of teaching ahead of me, full of exhausted little ones and the need for lots of energy and patience, topped by a busy afternoon and evening. But between being just a little too warm, there being a little more noise than normal in the house, and not being as exhausted as I had thought, (hmm...  and maybe just a little too much caffeine as well...) I just couldn't sleep. That's ok, I thought, At least I'm resting. But then my mind ramped up with ideas for how I could be spending this time that I wasn't spending sleeping... then a text came in from a friend with a burden, and I began praying as well as trying to sleep. All the while, thoughts for this post kept occurring, and I was trying to mentally file them away for later and get the rest that I was sure I needed.

Finally, I gave up trying to sleep, yielded to what I finally admitted was the Holy Spirit's prompting to get up and write this blog post, turned on the light, and got out my laptop.

That was when I saw the spider.

With a heavy sigh, I grabbed a tissue, moved a stool over to where the spider was, and climbed aboard. What am I doing, Lord? I wondered. I'm supposed to be sleeping, getting rest for the busy day of ministry You have called me to, but here I am, standing on tiptoe, precariously trying to kill a spider in the middle of the night, completely wide awake.

(for all you non-teachers out there, 10:30 on a Thursday night is, practically speaking, the middle of the night. Once school starts, my bedtime closely resembles that of my seven-year-old students whenever possible. 4:45 comes ridiculously quickly during the school year.)

I took a breath, and reached for the spider, which promptly performed evasive maneuvers, dropping out of sight behind some furniture. Now I am really awake.

Then my friend texted again, this time having received some very sad news. I knew that was partly why God allowed me to be awake right then, so I could be there for her and pray for her.

*       *       *

Sometimes God's will for us seems confusing. Sometimes we can think we have it all figured out and begin to expect things to go the way we have figured they should go, getting annoyed when God has other plans. (Like being awake at 11:00 writing a blog post on a school night...)

And yet, who are we to be annoyed at anything God plans? He knows and wants the very best for us, and when there are difficulties or God redirects us, they are always for our best good --even when (especially when) those unexpected turns of providence go against our view of what is "good" for us. (Like a good night's sleep before a challenging day.)

Even when you are surrendered to God's will for your life, it can be confusing trying to sort out the details of what God wants you to do. For example, my parents and I were cleaning out the garage last weekend and I suddenly found myself staring down at several boxes of my toys from childhood... you know, the special ones you save to pass along to the next generation.

When I packed those boxes before our move almost ten years ago, my impatient 20-year-old self never would have imagined that I would be opening them again at 30, with the odd task of deciding what to pass along to nieces and what to keep --whether to keep-- any for that "someday", "if I ever have kids".

But there I sat, pulling out toys, each one bringing so many memories to the surface, enjoying seeing them, but determined to be ruthlessly realistic, determined to keep only the ones that were the most special, that I would want to stay in the family regardless, asking God whether or not I should even keep any of it, or if I should try to pass all of it along.

But, despite the confusion of working to stay surrendered to God's present will for me while trying to be open to whatever the future might hold, not knowing what that might be or how to plan, the task of sorting and deciding was much less difficult than I had expected. And in the process, God allowed me to find a specific toy that sparked an idea which grew into a little story that I am now hoping to have my artist sister illustrate for me and turn into a children's picture book. --All because of that confusing process of unboxing, sorting, purging, and re-boxing.

I don't know yet what will come of that story, or of those freshly re-packed boxes full of memories, but I do know that when God's will gets confusing, the best --the only truly helpful thing-- is to take our eyes off our expectations or ideas of what God's will is or should be, and to submit to His good and perfect plan for that moment...and for all the moments after.

--Even at a quarter 'till midnight on a school night.

Getting God's Heart for Difficult People

School began last week, and I had wanted to post this particular blog post before I met my thirteen God-given charges for the schoolyear, but time got away from me and now here I am, one week in, writing about difficult people.

To be clear, I'm not writing because of any specific student. As I contemplated some of the challenges and difficulties I would be facing this year, God brought along a speaker at Family Camp that spoke on exactly what the students I was getting would need. (It never ceases to amaze me how God does that for me!) Because I went into the schoolyear with tools from God's Word and a renewed sense of purpose and the importance of walking in the Spirit every moment, things have gone better than I had thought they would these first weeks.

As I prepared for the schoolyear, though, I began thinking back over past years and past non-school related difficulties with people around me and I realized that the key to dealing with difficult people is to have the same heart God does for them.

When I think about God having to deal with difficult people, I think of the Old Testament example of God's dealings with the nation of Israel. He delivered them in a miraculous way from slavery in Egypt, provided for their needs in the desert, and showed Himself strong on their behalf so many times, and yet they were still selfish, distrusting, disobedient, and unfaithful. But God still loved them, and sent prophets time and time again to turn their hearts back to Himself.  Even though He had to bring judgement upon their sin, He never gave up, and never forsook them.

God's heart cries out for the difficult ones. Jesus wept over Jerusalem, saying,

 "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!"

Nehemiah puts it this way:

"Yet many years didst Thou forbear them, and testifiedst against them by Thy Spirit in Thy prophets: yet would they not give ear: therefore gavest Thou them into the hand of the people of the lands. Nevertheless for Thy great mercies' sake Thou didst not utterly consume them, nor forsake them; for Thou art a gracious and merciful God"  

(Nehemiah 9:30-31)

This passage is preceded by a summary of Israel's cycle from blessing to falling into sin, to judgement, to crying out to God, and then to His blessing again. The final straw, as it were, was the continual rejection of God's warnings, which required God in His perfect justice to bring judgement which removed the people from the land for seventy years. Nehemiah is referring to this, and to the amazing and miraculous way God allowed for their return when their "time out", so to speak, was over.

In reading through the pre-exile prophets, one cannot but be struck with the heart of love behind the warnings of judgement. God could have brought instant judgement, especially since He knew whether or not the people would have repented, but he chose instead to demonstrate His unfailing love over and over again before finally bringing the promised judgement. The focus behind the judgement is that God's people would know that He is God. Then they would be His people, and He would be their God, just as He had planned all along. That is what God desires for the difficult ones: for them to be brought back into relationship with Him as He designed them to be.

Here's where it gets practical: God's love is unconditional, and ours ought to be, too. That doesn't mean we should never say things others find unpleasant, but we should say them from a heart of love, and for the purpose of bringing that person back in line with God's Word.

I am writing this as much for me as for you. It is easy for me to be patient first thing in the morning, but when the same person does the same thing for the millionth time (or at least, it seems like the millionth...) it is easy to give in to the flesh, throw up my hands, and give up. Those are usually the moments when God wants to use me to show love to that person in a powerful way that only He can empower me to do, and if I give in to frustration or anger or irritation, that person will not see God's love in me.

God's goal is to restore, to build. As His representative, I must have His heart of restoration, forgiveness, and love towards others, even when they are difficult. When God prompts it, I must say the hard things, take the hard stand, but always with a heart of love and a desire to see God work to bring that person back to where He desires them to be.

So who is the difficult person God wants you to show His love to today? Ask Him to give you His heart for them. He will, and it will make all the difference!

Waiting on God in the "Silent Years"

This morning at church, Pastor made an interesting observation: after Joseph’s lifetime, there was nothing recorded in Israel’s history for about 400 years. He posed the question, “Was God at work during those silent years?” His answer and mine is a resounding “Yes!”, but the fact remains that, historically speaking, while God was at work, He did not see fit to record any of His working during that period, making it easy to see that period as unimportant or insignificant.

Yet, if you know the Lord as I do, you know that He is ever present with His children. Even during those silent times, He would have been at work in millions of ways every day that encouraged the faithful among the Israelites. They may have been living in a “silent” period, waiting, watching, longing for the deliverance God had promised at the end of the 400 years, but God saw, God heard, and God loved them. He was present with them and purposeful in what He allowed, using even the difficulty of the years in slavery to prepare His people for the blessings to come. After all, if Egypt had been a place of freedom and prosperity, they would not have wanted to follow Moses across the wilderness --even for a land flowing with milk and honey.

 God often allows seasons of difficulties to make us willing to accept the blessings He has prepared for us later on. 

And those difficulties are sometimes “silent years” in our lives. They may span days, weeks, months, or years. They are periods of seemingly unimportant slogging along, not sure if we are accomplishing anything meaningful. Those are the times when one can doubt that God is at work. You may feel forgotten or left out as friends move freely down the pathways God has for them, as you stay still, seemingly stuck in a muddy patch on yours. But even in the muddy spots, God is there. Look for Him in the silence. Seek Him in the struggle. 

Let me tell you a story to illustrate. Once there was a young teen-aged girl who just might have been me. She lived out her Junior High years in an imaginary world of her own making, always imagining a different life, with different circumstances and different people.

 In High School, she began to grow up and somehow knew God wanted her to begin living in reality instead of trying to escape the ordinary, every-day life He had given her. As she looked around her, though, she realized that she was lonely. She had family who loved her, and she had friends she saw once in a while, but there was still something missing. 

She began to seek the Lord, beginning again to read through her Bible and, for the first time, praying regularly. She would get up very early and sit by the window of her upstairs bedroom like a princess in a tower, but instead of imagining a prince charming emerging from amongst the apple trees, she now began to revel in the beauty of her moment-by moment reality: the way the light painted the leaves, how lovely the gentle breeze was that blew in from the open window, the joyful sound of robins singing as if to celebrate the new day, the truths she was learning as she sat there reading God’s Word. 

After a while, she began to realize that God was showing His love to her every day in small, sweet, thoughtful ways. Sometimes it was sending a bird to sing to her on a particularly dreary day, another time it was a yard full of her favorite flowers which she had never noticed before, even though she walked past it nearly every day. Another time a whole string of traffic stopped to let her across the street when she wasn’t feeling well but had to walk to piano lessons anyway.

Bit by bit, she began to see God at work and the more she saw His love, the more she looked for Him. And the more she looked for Him, the more she found Him, right there, showing His love for her again and again. And soon her loneliness began to lessen, and she began to find that God is enough, even for the routine of daily life during a seemingly insignificant and unimportant season of life.

I won’t say that the girl was never lonely again, or that she always had that sense of closeness to the Lord every minute of the rest of her life, but I will say that whether or not she saw it at the time, God has always been right there with her, showing His love just the same whether or not she thought to look for it. 

“Draw nigh to God and He will draw nigh to you” James 4:8a

Finding God to be Enough in Times of Grief

Grief is difficult to describe. I have heard it likened to drowning, and the adjective “overwhelming” has been among the most common I have heard used to describe the emotional turmoil of loss. But how can one adequately describe such a powerful feeling? 

I attended a memorial service for a beloved uncle last week, and I must admit, I couldn’t think of a better way of describing grief than the definition the pastor used: that grief is a hole in one’s heart that is carried with us for the rest of our lives. 

I cried at my uncle’s service, as I have cried over the loss of other relatives: not because of any sadness for them, (they are enjoying the glories of heaven!) but because a part of my heart is empty. 

I have found that grief is not the all-consuming pit of despair I had expected it to be when viewing it through the eyes of childhood. It is more like a flash flood. It comes powerfully, in waves. 

When my Gramma died (my first “real” experience with grief), I cried a great deal in the first few days, but even during that first intense period of grief, the waves would come and go. It was not a steady stream of sorrow; and even now there are times when I see a picture of her, or hear someone say something she often said, or smell the scent of the hairspray she used, and all at once I feel that emptiness acutely and the flood of grief washes over me anew. 

For me, these floods are usually caused by or at least strengthened or prolonged by “nevermore” thoughts. For example, the day my uncle was put on hospice, Mommy asked me to bake a small apple pie for my uncle. I was happy to do so, but as I prepared to bake, I found myself overwhelmed with grief as the same idea raced again and again through my mind:

His last pie. 

 The last pie I will ever make him.

The last pie he will ever get to eat.

As it turned out, he actually never got to eat the pie I made; he went to heaven the next morning before the pie could be delivered.  But I think God intended the making of the pie to benefit me more than my uncle anyway. It made me come to terms with the reality of the coming loss before it was upon me.

When my Gramma died, the “nevermore” thought that was on auto repeat through my head as I drove home from the hospital (and many times after that) was that she never got to see me in a wedding dress. Oh, how she would have loved to! She delighted to see her grandkids all dressed up, and I used to stop by to see her whenever there was an occasion to dress up for. Several times in the first year after she went to heaven, I had the thought as I got ready for some special occasion, “I should stop by to see Gramma afterwards” and was struck with the thought that I never could do that again.

But despite these oh-so-poignant “nevermores”, I have found that God is enough, even in grief. In every area of loss, whether it be loss of our dearest people or dreams or health or plans of how our lives “should” be, God’s character never changes, and Romans 8:28 still applies.

In my few sorrows, I have learned that dealing with grief and loss is just like dealing with any other area of aching emptiness: the answer is surrender.

Now, before you tune me out for being unfeeling, know that I do acknowledge that grief is real, raw, and powerful. To say that the answer is surrender in no way diminishes the reality of grief. But God is as His Word says, “a very present help in trouble”. In fact, Psalm 46, the first verse of which contains that wonderful truth of God’s presence and support in trouble, goes on to describe earthquakes and mountains melting into the ocean and angry waves shaking even the mountains. Yet, the very next thought is “There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacles of the most High.” (v.4) There is comfort to be found, yes and even gladness in the midst of such turmoil. The way to such peace and joy is found in verse 10: “Be still, and know that I am God”

The problem with my “nevermore” thoughts is that they presume to pass judgement on how things “should have been”, instead of accepting how God has allowed them to be.

It has well been said that “Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, ‘It might have been.’”[i] But God is the Master of our reality. In times of grief, when the billows of sorrow and floods of “nevermores” overwhelm us, the choice to trust in God’s character and wisdom is crucial.

Think of Job. He suffered loss most of us will never come near to experiencing, but even in those first moments of grief and agony, he responded in a way God describes as being without sin.

Here is Job’s response: 

“Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21)

These words have been quoted and held up as an example to suffering people ever since Job’s story was first told, but I want you to notice God’s view of them. The very next verse clearly states why it was that Job’s response was right:

“In all this, Job sinned not, nor charged God foolishly.” (Job 1:22)

Here’s where it hits me the hardest: Those “nevermores” I so readily wallow in are nothing more than thinly veiled complaints about what God has allowed. In other words, I am foolishly charging God with incompetence or negligence at best, and malice at worse. After all it is God’s “good and perfect” will we are arguing with. (Romans 12:2)

Godly grief acknowledges sorrow and the feelings of loss, but chooses gratitude over complaint, humble trust over bitterness, and hope over despair.

God has designed us to feel those empty places. But the reason He wants us to notice them is so that He can fill them. When my heart feels hollow, I must choose to cry out to God, for Scripture promises: “draw nigh to God and He will draw nigh to you.” (James 4:8) When I yield my sorrow and hurt to Him, I never cease to find that He is enough.

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[i] John Greenleaf Whittier, “Maud Muller”