Believe God

Apostle Paul tells us in First Corinthians chapter 13 that love is patient and kind, that it does not boast or envy.  He says love is not proud, rude or self-seeking.  Paul says love is not easily angered and keeps no record of wrong-doing.  Paul reminds us that love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.  There are four things Paul says love always does:  protect, trust, hope and persevere.  

A comment Pastor Craig Hofer of Fort Gatlin Alliance Church in Orlando, Florida made to my husband during the early days of his hospital stay was this:  You have to check your dignity at the door when you go into the hospital.  My husband returned home Friday after seven weeks in the hospital.  He was bedfast most of that seven week period and, I must say, the hospital staff did their best to preserve his dignity in situations that no one should have to experience, both in the bathroom and out.  Many sweet-hearted people served him (and me) with the greatest of mercy and protection.  They offered the love that Paul told us about.  We thank God for each of them.

In my husband’s difficult journey through a collapsed lung, treatment, surgery and recovery, I have learned much about nursing.  Many nurses insisted I should be on their payroll and I bristled each time I heard that.  I’ve seen their job and I don’t want it, although my respect for their profession is greater than ever.  As it is in our situation, however, I have provided nursing care for my husband through this very difficult and often embarrassing time.  It is my constant prayer that I serve him while protecting his dignity.  Some of the things we’ve had to do together have certainly given us new levels of appreciation for all that God has given us, in body, finances, helpers, and love.  And we know that the greatest of these is love.

One thing surfaces repeatedly throughout this difficult time:  the more we love God, the more we joyously desire to serve our fellow man, whether in good times or bad, when richer or poorer, and in sickness or in health.  When my love for Him is nurtured and growing, I count it all joy to serve, regardless of the task.  Many times my husband has expressed his great sadness that I have to care for him in some of the ways that I do.  What irony!  I feel the exact opposite.  What a privilege it is to serve my husband, considering the amazing service and sacrifice God gave to me: mercy, grace, and His Son’s life!  Surely my cup runneth over! 

As my husband and I go forward from here, may our lives count for the Kingdom of God.  May His will be done in and through us.  May He grant that we love Him more and more.  May His joy be our delight.  May we serve Him and others with a First Corinthian 13 kind of love.  In His name, Amen.

I had a discussion not long ago with a friend who is single and who is a guest in an older couple’s home.  She intimated that she is realizing that her experience as a life-long single woman has likely kept her from growing in ways that she feels she might have otherwise had she been married.  Our discussion sparked a conversation that gave me a new perspective on not only my own spiritual growth, but also on the spiritual growth of the church in general.

My friend said after living on her own for a long time and then with other people, she has observed that she often fails to view life from other people’s perspectives and to think in terms of others’ needs or desires. Her single life, for example, made no demands on her to let someone know she had left and arrived somewhere safely or to ask whether others needed something or wanted anything.  She also said she often fails to anticipate the need to perform household tasks or for her to subordinate her own thoughts and feelings to someone else’s in order to simply bless them or to see to their well-being.  Marriage does indeed grind off some of the very pointy edges we develop in the jagged corners of our family of origin or in life on this earth in general.  In the nearly twenty-seven years of marriage between my husband and me, I confess readily that both of us have certainly had some heavy grit sandpaper taken to our hides!  I also confess that nothing has changed me more painfully nor more profitably than my marriage relationship.

Left to ourselves, we seem to have a tendency toward tunnel vision.  I look into situations and circumstances only from one perspective: my own, and I often see a mirror image of myself at the end of the tunnel because my interests are the ones I’m primarily interested in.  What I see and how I react to it depends in great part upon what I’ve seen and how I’ve reacted in the past.  Most of these visions and reactions have been learned through experiences.  Not all of them are good experiences but even the good ones stand an even chance of warping my character beyond recognition as compared to its original design.  The bad experiences, left unattended and open-ended, leave me with worn-out strategies that often wreak havoc in my life and others’ lives.  How is all this like the church?  Well, let’s see.

God created the church as Christ’s “bride”, His marriage partner, His help-meet.  When a member of the body of Christ lives and acts alone, he/she becomes separated from the original design as God describes it throughout the New Testament.  We develop tunnel vision and often seek to serve only our own interests, or at the most our loved ones’ interests.  This is absolutely opposed to how God designed the church.  In Matthew 22:36-40, Jesus tells the Pharisees that the greatest commandment is to love God with all their hearts, souls and minds.  But he doesn’t stop there.  He continues, saying the second most important command is like the first, to love their neighbor as themselves.  Then Jesus makes a profound statement:  ”All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”  (NIV)

When I live apart from others and serve no one outside myself or my loved ones, God’s intent for me, His original design for me is perverted.  God is no longer my God.  I am my own god.  Having a god aside from the One and Only True God is idolatry.  When, on the other hand, even as a single person, with intent and committed determination, come together intimately and regularly with others who begin to look deeply into my life and are able to help grind away those pointy edges, yes, it hurts like crazy!  But oh how sublime the smooth, polished stone that lies underneath, waiting to be tucked into a slingshot and launched with precision and force directly to a target somewhere between the eyes of the enemy!  

Most of us have been deeply hurt by someone if we’ve lived long enough to learn our ABC’s and our multiplication tables.  If we’ve lived longer than that, we’ve likely been traumatized in one way or another so we pull our heads into our shells and crawl along on bowed legs, hoping and praying that no one will come in and pry us out of our dark, seemingly comfortable hole.  So we die slowly, achingly, longing to have our lives count for something, for anything good; to know that anything that we are or have could possibly touch another’s life in some meaningful way.  We long to know that the original design for our souls is in tact and actively blessing the heart of our Designer.  So what must we do?  Don’t run away.  

When painful relationships bear down upon you and tear at your heart, let your Designer brace your heart and set your face like flint in the direction of finding out why it hurts so much and how to live through it, not go around it or run.  For God’s desire is not that we run, but that we change!  We are not doormats or punching bags for others, but we are lovers of God and lovers of others.  It is not in the church house or even in the Bible that we mature spiritually.  We can spend a lifetime in both and never grow!  It is in the presence of others, in committed, courageous relationship that we mature!  

What relationships in your life are grinding down your pointy edges?  Do they need to change?  Or do you need to change so that the relationship changes?  Don’t run away!  How do you get help?  Ask your Designer!  He will guide you and give you wisdom and discernment.  If you need the help of elders or professionals, ask your Designer to provide you divine connections.  He has designed a plan for you.  He’s just waiting for you to ask!  Then be willing and determined!  He is faithful.  Believe God!

I have a friend who says, “People are like toothpaste tubes.  When you squeeze them, whatever is in them will come out.”  When we consider ourselves and the people we know, is this a frightening thought?  Or does someone come to mind who, when squeezed, might emit the fragrant aroma of God, a person full of grace, mercy, love, and faith?  A person who is full of courage and resilience and whose trademark is a life lived for Christ?  When I grow up, I want to be the latter.

My husband has been hospitalized for nearly five weeks now and part of his lung was removed to repair a hole in it.  His recovery has been nothing short of miraculous.  As doctors’ fears surfaced, so did the power of Christ.  When surgeons were saying he may not come off a ventilator, less than 17 hours after surgery they removed the tube and he’s been breathing on his own since.  As days pass, so do some of the concerns we all had prior to the operation.  But before the surgery, when we were being squeezed, well, that was different.

Where I grew up there were no streetlights because there were no streets.  We lived several miles up a dirt road where the only night light was whatever illumination heaven provided.  On nights of clear skies a full moon and millions of stars made midnight nearly as light as dusk.  On cloudy nights though, I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face.  The darkness became a thick and heavy blanket covering the earth.  It was as if I couldn’t breathe in it, even though I knew that wasn’t the case.  Utterly blinded, my senses of touch, smell and sound became my navigation tools.  Sometimes my imagination exploded as a sudden noise jumped out at me, or I brushed against something unfamiliar.  My mind conjured up all sorts of enemies or ambushes and fear gripped me.  I would push through, not from courage but from terror, from both fright and flight.  My ultimate motive was to escape the darkness, and everything that lurked within it, waiting to get me.

Before Chuck’s surgery, we had four weeks to sit (and try to sleep) in a hospital room and think.  We tried to anticipate what might be out in the darkness ahead of us, sometimes in order to make decisions about his treatment and other times, well, we just did it.  We would allow our minds to venture over and over again into the future, where the darkness blanketed our understanding and our stability, paralyzing us.  At times it seemed my mind would just go out there on its own, perhaps to escape the present moment of suffering or fear, as if something better or more promising or even comforting lay beyond the present moment and I could just reach into the next day or week and pull it back to now.  But fear would creep in and attack me on those journeys and the darkness there was the stage for my imagination to once again run amok.  I would see terrifying possibilities and the comfort I reached for often morphed into nightmares lurking in the dense, sinister unknown.  When I was squeezed, fear came out.  And then… the Word of the Lord that I had hidden in my heart returned to my mind, again and again.

I am the head and not the tail.  In Christ I’m more than a conquerer.  What good work He began in me, He will finish.  I am called according to His purpose and therefore all things, all things, are working together for my good.  If He is for me, who can be against me?  Christ died for me, even while I was a sinner.  God loves me.  He provides for me, protects me and profits me.  Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil for He is with me.  His rod and His staff comfort me.  He is my Father in heaven and is name is sacred, may His kingdom come and His will be done on earth as it is in heaven.  I will rejoice in all things.  I have the joy of my salvation.  I have the joy of my husband’s salvation.  I have peace that passes understanding for it comes from God alone through Christ.  Regardless of what my circumstances look like, when brought out of darkness into the Son Light, it becomes clear and illuminated.  I shall not fall but mount up on wings of eagles.  I shall not faint.  I shall overcome.  There is a heavenly purpose for suffering and sorrow.  I will serve the Lord my God forever.  

The darkness is changed forever by the light.  Nothing in the darkness looks the same in the light.  Whatever your circumstance, return to the Light of the Word and see what God says about it.  What is the Truth about suffering?  What does God say about sorrow?  Turn to the One who is the Deliverer.  He is able to do abundantly above and beyond anything we could ever hope or dream of.  Regardless of circumstances, the Light illuminates the darkness.  When you are squeezed, what comes out?  Is it light or darkness?  May it be light.