Hope and struggle.

Having finished my paper and my final exam, I now have time to read "fun books"! My first choice was Dan Allender's The Healing Path, which had been highly recommended to me. He covers so much in the book, but I selected a few quotes regarding hope and the struggle for faith in the face of suffering.

“Pain is seldom expected nor embraced when it comes. It is often denied or swept under the spiritual rug of ‘God’s sovereignty’... Few of us enter the tragedy of living in a fallen world and simultaneously struggle with God until our hearts bleed with hope.” p. 5

“Indeed, God loves us and has a wonderful plan for our lives. But that plan may be to labor for forty years with a recalcitrant, hard-hearted youth group that ages and dies in the wilderness, with only a few who make it into the Promised Land. How could God’s best for Moses be to bring the man to the brink of what he’d worked his whole life to achieve, and then bar him from enjoying it before he died? The fact is, God’s perfect plan might include untold suffering that has no clear purpose or meaning in this life.” p. 13.

“How are we to groan inwardly and also wait expectantly? It seems that when we groan most deeply, we most urgently anticipate resolution for our pain. But we cannot hope unless we learn to wait, and we cannot learn to wait if we have put God on our schedule.” p. 39

“The goal of evil is to destroy our future by stealing our hope.” p. 83

“To be truly human--to feel, to doubt, to struggle, to seek, ask, and knock without having to have an immediate answer or much of an answer at all.” p. 146

“My heart will never become any bigger than that in which or in whom I hope. But when my hope is centered on the coming redemption, I begin to take on His glory.” p. 146

“Bold prayer bombards heaven relentlessly with the cries of our soul.” p. 175

...and my new favorite...

“Hope is not an absence of sorrow but a refusal to allow powerlessness to silence our cry or to shake our confidence in God.” p. 151

A difficult question.

“Though the fig tree should not blossom,
nor fruit be on the vines,
the produce of the olive fail
and the fields yield no food,
the flock be cut off from the fold
and there be no herd in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the LORD;
I will take joy in the God of my salvation.
GOD, the Lord, is my strength;
He makes my feet like the deer’s;
He makes me tread on my high places.”
-Habbakkuk 3:17-19

After reading this passage this morning, I am wondering how much I love God for Himself and rejoice in Him for His own sake, or how much I love the gifts and blessings He gives. For I certainly have been blessed.

I can sing "His love endures forever" along with everyone else, but how would I really believe that if I had nothing except His love? Thankfully, He is a gracious God and is patient and gentle with our weakness, our humanity.

Wisdom gleaned while studying for my midterm exam.

If it's not obvious, I love quotations.

“Insofar as the church is conformed to the world, and the two communities appear to the onlooker to be merely two versions of the same thing, the church is contradicting its true identity… God’s historical purpose is to call out a people for Himself; that this people is a ‘holy’ people, set apart from the world to belong to Him and to obey Him.” --John Stott, The Message of the Sermon on the Mount, p. 17

“Men are in their nature ‘evil.’ It is out of their heart that evil things come and out of their heart that their mouth speaks, just as it is the tree which determines its fruit. So there is but one solution: ‘Make the tree good, and its fruit good.’ A new birth is essential. Only a belief in the necessity and possibility of a new birth can keep us from reading the Sermon on the Mount with either foolish optimism or hopeless despair.” --John Stott, The Message of the Sermon on the Mount, p. 29

Requests.

O God,
May I never be a blot or a blank in life,
cause the way of truth to be evil spoken of,
or make my liberty an occasion to the flesh.
May I by love serve others, and please my neighbour
for his good to edification.
May I attend to what is ornamental as well as essential in religion,
pursuing things that are lovely and of good report.
May I render my profession of the gospel
not only impressive, but amiable and inviting.
May I hold forth the way of Jesus with my temper as well as my tongue,
with my life as well as my lips.
May I say to all I meet,
I am journeying towards the Lord's given place,
come with me for your good...

--from The Valley of Vision, p. 274

Boredom.

This very postmodern confession of sin was evidently featured in a chapel service at the seminary last week and also in class tonight.

Father, we confess that we are satiated and bored;
Creation has bored us.
Work has bored us.
Family has bored us.
Friends have bored us.
Our homes bore us.
Television bores us.
Redemption has bored us.
Truth has bored us.
You have bored us.
No generation in history has ever had so much to entertain it.
We are jaded and cynical.
We think the world is our servant, so we are not thankful when things go well for us, and we are not patient when they do not.
We believe every desire should be satisfied, so we are not delighted when they are, and we are not humbled when they are not.
We laugh, but do not know joy.
We are captivated, but are never really awed.
We celebrate, but we do not worship.
Have mercy on us, and forgive us.
Amaze us with grace – blood stained, incarnate, Messianic grace - the Glory of God in Christ.

--Rev. Michael Kelly, Green Lake Presbyterian Church, Seattle

(This text and other worship elements are at The Liturgy Fellowship.)

Lenten thoughts.

We acknowledge our wickedness, O LORD, and the iniquity of our fathers, for we have sinned against You. Do not spurn us, for your name’s sake, do not dishonor your glorious throne; remember and do not break your covenant with us.
--Jeremiah 14:20-21

O Thou terrible Meek,
Let not pride swell my heart,
My nature is the mire beneath my feet, the dust to which I shall return...
Low as I am as a creature, I am lower as a sinner;
I have trampled thy law times without number;
Sin's deformity is stamped upon me, darkens my brow, touches me with corruption.
How can I flaunt myself proudly?
Lowest abasement is my due place, for I am less than nothing before thee.
Help me to see myself in thy sight, then pride must wither, decay, perish.
Humble my heart before thee, and replenish it with thy choicest gifts...
When I am tempted to think highly of myself, grant me to see the wily power of my spiritual enemy;
Help me to stand with wary eye on the watch-tower of faith, and to cling with determined grasp to my humble Lord;
If I fall let me hide myself in my Redeemer's righteousness, and when I escape, may I ascribe all deliverance to thy grace.
Keep me humble, meek, lowly.
--from The Valley of Vision, "Pride," pp. 160-161

Encouragement from an unexpected source.

For my Christian Ethics class, we were asked to read the first papal encyclical from Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est. Taking exception to parts 40-42 which discuss Mary and the saints, this Presbyterian was greatly encouraged and exhorted by his writing about God's love. Some bits and pieces:

"Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction." (part 1)

"God loves man... with a personal love. His love, moreover, is an elective [!] love; among all the nations he chooses Israel and loves her--but he does so precisely with a view to healing the whole human race." (part 9)

"God's passionate love for his people--for humanity--is at the same time a forgiving love. It is so great that it turns God against himself, his love against his justice. Here... [is]... the mysery of the Cross: so great is God's love for man that by becoming man He follows him even into death, and so reconciles justice and love." (part 10)

"Christ took the lowest place in the world--the Cross--and by this radical humility he redeemed us and constantly comes to our aid. Those who are in a position to help others will realize that in doing so they themselves receive help; ...we are not acting on the basis of any superiority or greater personal efficiency, but because the Lord has graciously enabled us to do so. There are times when the burden of need and our own limitations might tempt us to become discouraged. But precisely then we are helped by the knowledge that, in the end, we are only instruments in the Lord's hands; and this knowledge frees us from the presumption of thinking that we alone are personally responsible for building a better world. In all humility we will do what we can, and in all humility we will entrust the rest to the Lord. It is God who governs the world, not we." (part 35)

"Prayer, as a means of drawing ever new strength from Christ, is concretely and urgently needed. People who pray are not wasting their time, even though the situation appears desperate and seems to call for action alone." (part 36)

"Often we cannot understand why God refrains from intervening. Yet he does not prevent us from crying out, like Jesus on the Cross: 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' (Matthew 27:46) We should continue asking this question in prayerful dialogue before his face: 'Lord, holy and true, how long will it be?' (Revelation 6:10)." (part 38)

And my personal favorite (and new mantra, which I have added to my sidebar above!)... "Hope is practised through the virtue of patience, which continues to do good even in the face of apparent failure, and through the virtue of humility, which accepts God's mystery and trusts him even at times of darkness. Faith tells us that God has given his Son for our sakes and gives us the victorious certainty that it is really true: God is love! It thus transforms our impatience and our doubts into the sure hope that God holds the world in his hands and that... in spite of all darkness he ultimately triumphs in glory." (part 39)

Disconnect.

Demonstrating how fragmented and isolated American society has become in the 21st century, MSNBC.com reports that

The partially mummified body of a man dead for more than a year has been found in a chair in front of his television, which was still on, authorities said....Neighbors said they had thought Ricardo was in a hospital or nursing home. “We never thought to check on him,” said neighbor Diane Devon.

I assume he had no children or grandchildren; but still, how awful. Anything else I can say about that just seems pitifully trite.

Good, but not tame.

This afternoon I finally finished The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (I can't believe I never read the Narnia books as a child, but I didn't). As always, C.S. Lewis is full of grown-up wisdom:

"Do not look so sad. We shall meet again soon."

"Please, Aslan," said Lucy, "what do you call soon?"

"I call all times soon," said Aslan; and instantly he was vanished away and Lucy was alone with the Magician.

"Gone!" said he, "and you and I quite crestfallen. It's always like that, you can't keep him; it's not as if he were a tame lion."

He always shows up at exactly the right time, but you can't control Him either. Something to remember, every time I want to put God in a box or keep Him on retainer.

The goodness of God.

I can't believe it has been a month since I last updated. (I do remember saying I was going to blog more frequently.) This past month or so has been one of those elusive seasons of contentment and peace that are impossible to attain by striving, but occasionally (refreshingly) sneak up on us. And it has been good.

But especially the last few days, God seems to have kicked the joy in my heart up a notch. I have been feeling more and more acutely His outrageous, unfathomable goodness. He has blessed me with a wonderful family, encouraging friends, education, the freedom to choose and pursue exactly what I wanted to do for a career (and I am doing it), a comfortable home in an interesting city, an over-abundance of nutritious things to eat, good health, coffee :) , fleece blankets, my cat, the technology of digital cameras and email to enable closer connections with far-off people. And He has blessed me with the really big thing: His forgiveness and mercy and love and covenantal relationship. He pours forth blessing, He lavishes love. He paints the big picture and the details.

I recognize that my blessings are the answers to the prayers that have been poured out on my behalf by loved ones. Maybe God has not answered these in the way we expected, but in His wisdom "the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words." (Romans 8:26). So to those who have been praying for me, "thank you" just does not seem enough, but thank you anyway.

But sadly, one of the reasons I am able to appreciate and recognize God's goodness in my life is by witnessing so much brokenness in other's lives. Poverty, violence, despair, sickness, addiction are so close to me and to all of us, no matter how desperately we try to keep them at bay. I feel so limited in what I can do to help, so instead I numb myself to the suffering. How I need to learn to mourn with those who mourn. How I need to learn to be the eyes and ears and lips and hands and feet of Jesus for those who have no hope.

Because we do have hope.

"Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel,
'My way is hidden from the LORD, and my right is disregarded by my God'?
Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary; His understanding is unsearchable.
He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might He increases strength...
But you, Israel, My servant, Jacob, whom I have chosen, the offspring of Abraham, My friend;
You whom I took from the ends of the earth, and called from its farthest corners, saying to you,
'You are My servant, I have chosen you and not cast you off';
Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God;
I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with My righteous right hand...
When the poor and needy seek water, and there is none, and their tongue is parched with thirst,
I the LORD will answer them; I the God of Israel will not forsake them.
I will open rivers on the bare heights, and fountains in the midst of the valleys.
I will make the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry land springs of water...
that they may see and know, may consider and understand together,
that the hand of the LORD has done this, the Holy One of Israel has created it."
--Isaiah 40:27-29, 41:8-10,17-18,20.

Come, Lord Jesus. How we need You.

2006 Reading list.

This isn't all of them, but here is what I could reconstruct for my 2006 reading list.
Future Grace - John Piper
The Valley of Vision - edited by Arthur Bennett
Why I Am Not An Arminian - Robert Peterson and Michael Williams
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader - C.S. Lewis
Creation Regained - Albert Wolters
How Long, O Lord? - D.A. Carson
Far As The Curse Is Found - Michael Williams
The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
Proper Confidence - Leslie Newbigen
My Sister's Keeper - Jodi Picoult
The Plain Truth - Jodi Picoult
Did I Kiss Marriage Goodbye? - Carolyn McCulley
The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
The Magician's Nephew - C.S. Lewis
The Horse and His Boy - C.S. Lewis
Prince Caspian - C.S. Lewis
The Allure of Hope - Jan Meyers