Broken Lives and Shortbread Cookies

There are these shortbreads I've been baking for 16 years.  They're not ordinary shortbread cookies. They're whipped.  And by whipped, I mean I put butter, flour and a bit of powdered sugar into my faithful Kitchen-Aid, turn her on high and let her roar for ten straight minutes while I go about my business.  Of all the fussy, truffly, ganachy, decadent treats I make every Christmas, these common cookies are by far my favorite.  In fact, I blame them for at least ten of my extra pounds--I mean really, when the recipe calls for equal parts butter and flour, you know the scale is going to taunt you for the rest of your life.  But the key to these cookies isn't in the ingredients.  That's nothing new.  Anybody can make a shortbread.  The key is in the whipping.  A friend was over the other day, and I force fed her one with a bit of Earl Grey tea (because who in their right mind would have one without that specific tea?).  She said, "These are tricky little cookies.  You put them in your mouth, and then they disappear."  Exactly.  There is so much air in those gloriously golden dollops that they melt instantly on your tongue.  Clouds are made of them.  They grow on trees in heaven.  On the day God rested?  He was eating them.  I know this.  I am certain.
But there is one little problem.
They break.
Every year.
When I attempt to place them in a container, inevitably several of them crack the instant they are lifted from the cookie sheet.
It's because they've been whipped.  Hard.
And sometimes life does that to us.  Whips us.
Leaves us feeling like a batter that's been tossed around the planet mercilessly for too many long, lonely minutes.  And those minutes feel like a lifetime of relentless horror.
I know this because I've been watching it all around me.  Lives of those I love have been caught up in some kind of violent cosmic hurricane and the debris and splinters of their world swirl around us.
Children terminally ill.
Family with cancer.
Wedding vows abandoned.
Suicidal children.
Mothers addicted to drugs.
Depression that doesn't lift with talk or pill.
And these aren't just words; these are the stories of souls.  Precious, hurting souls. Souls I've talked with this very week.
They have names; they live, and they breathe, and they break.
Dear God, they break.
And were I to have a hundred hands, still I could not stitch the shards of their lives back together, still I could not wipe away all the tears, still I could not fix the fractures.
Noah saw this same stuff, was witness to great woe.
God placed him on the ark, told him He would send flooding rain.
And Jesus told us In this world you will have trouble. (John 16:33)
God did send rain.  Though Noah expected it, having never seen it, he didn't know how overwhelming a flooding rain would be. And though we know trouble is promised, we are still stunned by its staggering blows.
Noah sat on that boat, goats bleating, crickets chirping, and a family that no doubt freaked as the waters rose.  Did you ever stop to really think of Noah?
Because I thought I knew everything about the whole ark experience.  The two by two animals, the pretty little brown flannel graph boat that floated like a cruise ship on blue felt waves, and the gorgeous rainbow bookended by cottony clouds.  Mr. Thomas taught me all about it at Faith Baptist Church when I was growing up.
He was a good man.  His stories captivated me as he used strips of felt to create a canvas of biblical times. He taught me well, but the truth is, he left a few details out.  The ones that didn't fit neatly on his 2 by 4 foot flannel graph board and easel.
I've thought about those things lately.  A lot.
If I was Noah's wife, I would have been fine for a little while.  I would have let him build his ark.  I would have even helped him, baked him muffins and brought him coffee.  I would have created feeding charts for the animals and packed an overnight bag 'just in case.'  When the rain came, it would have been a confirmation to me that he wasn't crazy.  I would have made tea and sat by a window to watch that strange phenomenon I'd not yet seen as it poured down in sheets of clear liquid like tears.  But friends, did you ever stop to think of the crowds of people desperately crying out and beating their fists against the cypress wood begging to be let in?
God had already shut the door.  And if y'all want things to get really real, we should just discuss God shutting that door.  Because nobody wants to tackle that topic.  Understanding God isn't easy.  He doesn't fit in a theology book or a Dayspring Card.  He can't be tamed, fully fathomed or simplified into words that completely encompass all of who He is.  He can't.  Anyone who pretends otherwise is dead wrong.  But know this, there is not one single description of God in the Bible that is false.  So when we don't understand or God forbid, we don't agree, we stand on what we know to be true.
For the Lord is good; His love endures forever.  (Psalm 100:5)
So when I think of the reality that Noah could give them no relief, I remember that The Lord is still good in that decision to shut the door even if I don't grasp it.  That right there would have been the end of me.  I'd have climbed out a window, slung out a rope, screamed at Noah to let me help them.  Because who among us can ever sit idly by when another is in trouble?
And this is a rather inconvenient truth.  Our God does allow trouble.
No Sunday School teacher on the planet can make that fit neatly on their flannel graph board.  It's ugly and glaring and uncomfortable.
And still, there is more.  It got way worse.
Did you ever think about the bodies?
Because surely when they looked out the windows of that ark they saw bodies.  Floating and lifeless beings that finally surrendered their fight to survive.  The carcasses of animals and cadavers of their friends and neighbors sloshed about by a deluge so strong that none, not one, single soul survived it.
All broken beyond repair.  I know I'd of wept and wailed, and I am not even going to pretend I would have accepted the decision of a sovereign God.
I
would
have
been
ticked.
I'd have yelled.  I'd have pleaded for Him to show Himself.  To explain Himself.  To give me some understanding.  And where is the yelling and hollering and pleading before God for answers in our churches today?  Does that fit neatly on Sunday morning between Bless the Lord  and Oceans in the worship set?  Because what if we all got just a little more honest and spit up just a wee bit of the truth of our souls?  What would church look like then?
But this is what is worst of all.
After the rain stopped its relentless forty days of pounding, there came a deafening silence.
For 11 months heaven held it's tongue.
Our God was silent.
They floated aimless on an ocean of water with no end.  No idea where they were going.  No idea when or if they would hear from God again.  No idea how long their food rations would hold out.  No idea if they would survive.
And if we're being honest, when you've lost that much, would you even want to survive?
They had nothing left.
All I'm saying is we've seen troubles yes, but we're in good company.
God did not speak.  That we know of, Noah heard nothing from God for over a year.
And how does a sometimes silent God work with our pretty paintings of God as a doting Father?  Is this not perhaps the reason people walk away from the faith?
I'm just asking.
Maybe we were sold a Dixie cup of grape Kool-Aid, and after sipping a little while, we discover, there's more.  It's not all grape.  It's not all sweet.  It's not going down easy.  And we feel jilted, deceived, conned.  We feel stupid for falling for it.  We think we're idiots for drinking the Kool-Aid, and we're out.
Because we've tried to live right, you and I.  Haven't we?  Tried to follow the rules, be good little Christians. God said Noah was righteous and scripture says Noah did all that God commanded him.  Indeed he did.
Obedient, God-fearing men and women can do exactly as God instructs and still bear witness to great sorrow.
I'm talking about the kind of sorrow and confusion that follows your child telling you they are gay.
I'm talking about the kind of pain that follows cancer, stage 4.
I'm talking about the knock out punch that happens when you made a bad investment and your family loses their home.
I'm talking about the stuff we don't want to talk about.  I'm saying, let's have this conversation.
In this world you will have trouble.  Jesus said it because He was willing to have this conversation. Not once did he shy away from the truth of who He is or the questions of a people hungry for a Savior.
So Noah and his family are just about in the middle of what seems like nowhere when we read this:
But God remembered Noah.
God--
our God
the God who was silent,
remembered.
See, that little phrase there is a game changer for me.  It's everything I need.
When He remembered, He sent a wind to dry the land, and He closed the floodgates.
Still though He remembered, He remained silent for over half a year longer.
Why God?
Because I know women whose husbands are dead and children whose mothers are dead, and they've lived through the silence of heaven.
But God remembers.
And this is what we need, is it not?  We need to know that God remembers us.  In Hebrew that phrase means He calls to His memory.
If I'm going to drink from the bitter cup, I want a God who calls me to His memory.  I want a God who doesn't forget I exist.  A God who cares enough to choose to call me to His mind.  Because maybe the Kool-Aid doesn't look right after all, but faith isn't what we see.  It's what we don't see.
Around the seventh month, Noah and his family stopped drifting and landed on solid ground.
Faith is believing solid ground will surface and the boat of our lives will land there because our God will not forget us.
Around the tenth month, Noah and his family could see the tops of the mountains again.  Earth was still there.  It did not give way.
Indeed the earth is established, it cannot be moved.  (Psalm 93: 2)
Then, after 370 days Noah and his family set their feet on soil.
Do you hear me when I say it was a year?  An entire year of their lives they drift and float and wait. Lord knows we drift too, don't we?  And finally, their God speaks.
And when He does?  Do you know that He just picks up the conversation right where He left off?  No Hi, how are you?  It's me, God. Missed you.  How you been?  What did you think of the ark?  How'd the elephants do all cooped up?  
Why?  Because He already knew.  There was no catching up needed; He was always there.
Emmanuel--God with us.
And He is here now in the midst of your story and my story.
Right here.  Right now.  In the middle of the debris.
The Lord is near to all who call out to Him, to all who call on him in truth. (Psalm 145:18)
I will never leave you nor forsake you (Hebrews 13:5)
There's the whole rainbow bit too.  Everybody loves that part, but for me, it's just Him talking to them like He never left.
Because
He
didn't
leave.
He
never
does.
And while we're discussing Him.  God isn't afraid of our questions.  He's not phased by our doubts. He's not offended by our disappointment.
In fact, I think when we get real and honest and quit pretending, that's when we start to really see God.
Not the God of fairy tales.
Not the God that's just sugar and no spice.
But the LIVING GOD.
The God who has His own will and plan.  The God who didn't make us so we could enjoy life, but rather who made us so we could have life.
And by the way, that life we get to have?  It's HIM.  He said, I am the way, the truth, and THE LIFE. (John 10:10)
Romans 8:5,6 says this:  For those who live according to the flesh have their outlook shaped  by the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit have their outlook shaped by things of the Spirit.  For the outlook of the flesh is death, but the outlook of the Spirit is life and peace.
Maybe this is the crux of it all.  To survive the flood, we must live according to the Spirit.  And there's only one way to do that.
By faith.
It always comes to this, doesn't it?
Without faith it is impossible to please Him, for the one who approaches God must believe that He exists and the He rewards those who seek Him. (Hebrews 11:6)
That same passage says Noah became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith.
Faith that he exists.
Faith that He rewards those who seek Him.
Faith that if God be for us, who can be against us?  No enemy can stand against the power of His name.
Faith that He will shelter you with his wings, you will find safety under his wings.  His faithfulness is like a shield or a protective wall. (Psalm 91:4)
Faith that our God's love is loyal. (Psalm 92:4)
Faith that though our God is a consuming fire, the Lord is (also) just in all His actions and exhibits love in all He does.  (Psalm 145:7)
Because the outlook of the flesh is death.  And when we're in the midst of a flood, sometimes all we see is the death, but
Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence not seen. (Hebrews 11:1)
Knowing this doesn't remove the angst of life.  It isn't a promise that our spouse will return, that children won't go hungry, that the stroke won't take his speech or that Alzheimers won't steal her memory.  But knowing it changes our outlook to one of life and peace. It reminds us that beneath the raging waters, solid ground remains.
Cookies crumble.
They just do.
And life?  It stings sometimes.
It just does.
But God remembers.
And that is enough.

Barefoot and Proclaiming: A 2014 Resolution

Shortbread crumbs huddle in small clusters like chilled people around a fire, pictures are posted, comments are made, the laughter quiets, the garbage cans burst with the refuse of a holiday well had.  Christmas slowly dissolves into clean-up, diet plans, thank you notes and work schedules resumed.  The holiday fades and flits her way into photo albums and fond memories.

And Christ?
The birthday boy?
The reason weary, wisemen wandered?
The reason we all gathered?
The reason we all laughed?
The reason we all baked and ate and wrapped and gave?
He remains.
Ever present.

While the groan of the engine of our homes resume—washing machines grunt and gurgle, dishwashers slosh and whine—His presence is still this miraculous thing that doesn’t end with a baby, some hay, some sheep, a maiden clothed in blue, and a bearded man gazing lovingly into the face of God in human flesh.  His presence fills the flush of our lives.

It does.

And I am blind.
Dear God, I am so blind.

Blind to miracles that extend beyond December. 

Blind to miracles that dance in front of me.
Every.Single.Moment.
Blind.

And I beg God for sight—sight to see the sway of Sassafras limbs in winter wind.  He made them. 

Sight to catch the cardinal’s crimson red wings splash like paint across a whale-grey sky.  When He dyed the cardinal’s wings did He think of the blood His Son would spill on another grey day?

Sight to goodness-gracious-catch-any-tiny-miracle  in the hectic craze that will consume me when I flip the calendar's page and 2013 becomes a history recorded in Christmas letters while 2014 becomes the urgent tyrant that demands my presence, my cooking, my cleaning, my helping, my studying, my mind, my hands, my energy, my life. 

Because I read Ann Voskamp’s One Thousand Gifts and I want to slow and record and catch and praise and revel in the miracles of a God that drips and oozes sacred and holy and good . . .

But I can’t find my camera,

My phone battery’s dead,
And the gratitude journal my family started is buried under fifteen unread copies of Time magazine.
And Ann’s amazing, but I am ordinary.
Ordinary and extraordinarily busy.
Still, His words wiggle and worm their way into my spirit.

Blessed are those who have learned to acclaim you,
who walk in the light of your presence, Lord. (Psalm 89:15, NIV)
 
And can I learn it?
Learn to acclaim Him? 

Even amidst the chaos?  Just learn that one thing this year?

Just one thing?  (Because at resolutions for New Year's, I tend to fail, but maybe this year?)

Blessed are the people who know the joyful sound!
They walk, O Lord, in the light of Your countenance. (Psalm 89:15, NKJV)

I do know it, don’t I—the joyful sound of a people who have lived to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living?

And haven’t I seen it?
His goodness?
When He provided not only what we needed, but a few of our wants too?
When He gave us the theme for a camp we were overwhelmed to consider leading?
When He healed the infection that threatened to claim my life after a botched surgery?
When He healed the marriage that was statistically doomed?
But then, what are statistics to a good, great, giant of a God?

I’ve uttered acclamation to a God who deserves constant praise, but learning to do it all the time?  Isn’t this what sweet Ann was attempting to do with those lists of gifts?

How blessed are the people who worship you! 
O Lord, they experience Your favor. (Psalm 89:15, NET)

The lists are worship.

They are acclamation.
They are shouts of joy.
They are a writer’s way or waving a flag each moment they catch a glimpse of His continual presence in a world that insists on distracting us from every holy moment.

And isn’t it ironic that the people who have learned to acclaim Him are the blessed ones?

This is the thing I keep missing, but it holds the secret of joy in its grip. 

 

The blessed ones aren’t the perfect ones.  They aren’t the talented ones.  They aren’t the ones who have it all together.  They aren’t the ones who write the books or go to college or marry the perfect person or win the lottery. 

 

They are the ones who have learned to acclaim Him, have learned to sing the joyful sound of a soul that stops, a soul that seeks to see, to see the sacred in ordinary life.

 
And they are these souls—the seekers of the Sacred—that experience HIS favor. 
His favor isn’t just bestowed on a few fortunate ones.

Glory to God in the highest heaven and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests. (Luke 2:14) 

And I’ve been duped and fooled into believing the lie that his favor is measured in material things, in people, in ease of life, in comfort, in tangible things I can take into the palm of my hand and count when all along His favor has been as near as my skin.  Nearer, even. 

His favor IS His presence.

His favor IS His countenance.

 
And somehow, isn’t this a game changer?

Isn’t this the thing that whispers hope into desperate heartache?

Isn’t this the thing that promises possibility amidst poverty?

Isn’t this the thing that changes the trajectory of tragedy?

Because sometimes someone is brave enough to be honest with you, and when they are, they’ll admit they’re disappointed with life.  Disappointed with God.  Feel like he doesn’t have their back.

When I think about stories like Elizabeth Smart’s—nine months of torture and rape and devestation indescribable—I can’t even fathom how she could have felt God’s favor was measureable.  Measureable by what?  Starvation and dehydration?  Measureable by the number of days out of nine months that she wasn’t raped?  Are you kidding me?

And yet she tells this story of a night when thirst had parched her throat for days, her body was ravaged by malnutrition, and she fell to sleep a broken, desperate soul.  Yet in the night, she awoke—her captors remained asleep beside her—to find a yellow cup of cold water.  There was no water in their camp.  They’d been out for some time.  There was no human being who would have brought her water.  No one knew of their camp.  No one unzipped the tent that was her prison cell by night to help her.  And yet this cup.

This golden cup of cold water.

She says she drank deeply.  The water, far more than hydrogen and oxygen molecules, gave her hope not because it alleviated her thirst, but because it proved to her the very near presence of her Savior.  And in her book, she will tell you, she acclaimed the Lord.  She knew Her God was present amidst her suffering.

Favor is not measured in the removal of tragedy, it is measured in the presence of God. 

And the people who are blessed?

The people who experience His favor?

They are the ones who worship Him.  Who SEE Him.  Who acclaim Him.  Who say—I see the pain, but I see the God who remains beyond December too. They are the ones who see the God who stays beside the thirsty child in Africa and the sex trafficked woman in Atlanta.  They are the ones who see the God who will go with the foster child removed from a safe place and sent back into a home where his prospects are poor.

Because somehow, though I don’t understand it and can’t explain it, in this life there is horrible suffering, and God is not to blame for that.  He does allow it, though.  And no theological, churchy, Christianese answer will ever satisfy the heart who hurts and hungers.  Because blessed people still weep.  But this I know.  Immanuel? 

That name?

It means God with us.

His presence remains beside us all.

And that IS the miracle of Christmas.

That is the thing to which we must hold until we can understand fully.

That is the only thing worth holding.

That is the thing which I must spend 2014 learning to acclaim—His presence.  Everywhere.

Every.Single.Place in my life and in yours.

In one fell swoop thousands of years ago He saved us from sin, but that isn’t the end.  Every day His presence saves us from a fallen world and ushers us into a holy moment.  A thousand holy moments.  Infinite holy moments.  Because when He died the curtain that separated us from His presence was torn, and we live in the Holy of Holies—In HIS presence every sacred second.  When Moses stood on Holy ground in front of a burning bush, he instinctively removed his shoes. 

 

And shouldn’t we, the ones on whom His favor rests, be a barefoot people?

Our lives are lived out on Holy ground because

He.Is.Here.

Hallelujah.

This song says it too . . . maybe better than I can write it.

 

Embers--The Lifting of Stooped Shoulders

His lips were reduced to a single slip of pink embroidery thread--a thin line holding back a torrent of tears--when he came. Already, he had thrown the Newton's cradle, a tangled knot of weighted silver balls and fishing line, into the bulging garbage can. In full resignation he announced, "It's broken; we can't fix it this time." Shoulders stooped, his head drooped, and his eyes filled with drips he refused to let flow. Bent over. My boy. And I saw the words, none of them eloquent, all of them embers in the furnace of hope. The Lord...lifts up all who are bent over." (Psalm 145:14) Life bends us over sometimes. It just does. A single slip of hand had sent Cort's hard earned Newton's Cradle soaring through the air where a thousand invisible fingers worked together to tie and tangle the lines so that they were spaghetti, and his heart couldn't bare it all. Holding his rescued wreckage in calloused palms, I thought of my own tangles--the motor in our car that gave up with Christmas around the corner. I thought of the family who saw the soil cover the coffin this week, the neighbor who went from blowing leaves off her deck to immobile in less than a week. I remembered my sister's text telling me a baby where she works died. Another boy overdosed. Life bends, and bends, and bends. My hands held a child's set of knots, but in my heart there grows the knots of a lifetime--a mass of death, divorce, tumors, and billowing bills. Some my own. Some others. All twisting, turning, touching my spirit, whispering, Bend. And that word bend? It means to submit--to bend before a King. And how is it that it is life that causes us to bend when we say we are followers of the King of Kings? How is it that we slump our shoulders and stoop our hearts to the overwhelming flood that gushes when the King of Kings says, "The Lord is near all who cry out to him," (Psalm 145:18) And when did we start crying instead of crying out to the God who is near? Lord, help me to bend to you, that you might lift me up. Show me how to bend to you and not the circumstances. What if we purpose to bend to the King when life demands we bend to it? Daniel danced this waltz--the one where he bends to the one true God. The decree was that no one would pray to any human or God other than King Darius. That was the decree. Bend. Bend to another, not your God. And Daniel bent. He bent to his God offering prayers and thanks. The situation was dire. Surely he knew he risked his body to the shredding of lion's teeth. Yet he bent. He prayed. He thanked. Scripture says, "just as he had been accustomed to do previously."(Daniel 6:11) He was in a familiar pattern where bending to the Sovereign God was his habit. And I think of my own habits. I examine them next to Daniels'. Why, when difficulty bares her jagged teeth do we bend to her when our God remains enthroned? Don't we realize all the raging universe is on a leash? "The Lord has established his throne in heaven; his kingdom extends over everything." Psalm 103:19 Everything. Extends over everything. Extends over the suffocating moment when we know our child is no longer present in their earthly frame. Extends over the moment when husband of twenty years walks out, and we are left murmuring a thousand times, "Don't leave." Extends over the negative bank account, extends over the day when the sun climbs into the sky and you realize you've chased a dollar your entire life and yet have nothing. Extends to the babies in Haiti at the orphanage where they haven't had rice for three days. In His kingdom, His subjects, we are. Even the suffering ones? Even the destitute ones? Yes, even them. And even the bravest of us, the most-determined-to-not-question Him of us all must sometimes admit we want to know. Why? Why then, if we are all His subjects, must we be bent? Why, Oh Great King, do you sit back when children starve? Why do you let young ones die and old ones wither? Why do you allow the wars and the pain? I am just an untangler of human knots, the child-sized spider's webs, not the great universal utterings that together become a theological loftiness beyond the reach of my 67 inches. But still, I hear mankind's murmur--a low mumble at first, and then the fields sway, and the trees flail and I hear them all together--a chorus of questions. "He is the one...who heals all your diseases, who delivers your life from the pit, who crowns you with his loyal love and compassion, who satisfies your life with good things...executes justice for all the oppressed." (Psalm 103:3-6) Now hear me whisper here because I don't mean to tread toes, I only mean to explore our hearts in truth. What if the promise for healing isn't always realized in this parenthesis we call life? What if it comes on an eternal timetable our human minds can't fathom? And what if it isn't our finances He delivers from the pit but our very life--the heart that is freed to make good decisions with the resources we have? What if we still see foreclosure, but our spirit is unchained from the pit of self indulgence and greed, from the sense of entitlement that insisted we needed that mortgage in the first place? What if while our white knuckled hands wring the empty swaddling blanket we sense the Holy Spirit lullaby that soothes our sorrow in His loyal love, in His compassion? What if it still hurts, but He's present? What if justice for the Haitian, the Ecuadorian, the African orphans comes when eternity is revealed? What if pain is sometimes the precursor to joy? What if His ways are higher than ours? What if we bend to the unknown of God's ways? I thought about quitting. That darn Newton's Cradle took me almost an hour to unknot. We waited six weeks on China to ship us that $4.99 desk oddity, and somehow I knew it was more than a proof of Newton's laws. But those embers--The Lord lifting up those who are bent over--they were still burning in my heart. I had to lift the shoulders of my boy because really, when he threw that toy in the garbage and told me it was hopeless, he still had the embers too. He hadn't given up. He'd come to me, hadn't he? He'd hoped. He'd hoped that maybe, just maybe mommy could take the tangles and sort them out, piece by piece. I won't always be able to do that for him. But he'll know, won't he, that I still love him? That day, when the mess is too big, and the circumstances aren't going to be changed by the keyboard clicking pads of mommy's fingertips? On that day, he'll still know he is loved. I'll grieve, and I'll ache, and I'll swallow forkfuls of swollen angst as I watch the day I can't make things better for him. It is somehow the same with God--those who suffer greatest are the most deeply attended by the heart of God. The promise is not that He will fix the Newton's Cradle, not that He will shift the continents of our lives into alignment, but that He supports all who fall, and lifts all who are bent over. Supports ALL. Lifts ALL. Extends over ALL. What, my friends is your ALL? Because there is a decree demanding you bend to that ALL. Can you name it ALL? God gave Adam the chore of naming. We too must name, both the good and the bad. Now can you turn your back on ALL that you have named? Can you turn your eyes upon Jesus? Can you go to Him and bend before His ways, before His goodness, before His mercy, before His compassion, before his purpose? Can you bend to Him? Because if you can, He will lift you up. "Now unto Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all we ask or imagine...." (Eph. 3:20) "And we know that all things work together for good..."(Romans 8:28) Hope burns not because the world is right, but because the God who made the world remains right. And He will never let go. It has been written and sung more beautifully than I can express. Will you click and listen? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kRaF4DI5Sg&feature=share

I Saw You

There dangles from the eaves of my house, like a ruby hourglass, a hummingbird feeder; a lighthouse suspended for those self-propelled ships of the air with beaks almost as long as their thumb-sized bodies. It was March when I hoisted myself onto the railing of my deck, some thirty-six feet in the air and coiled it's attaching wire through the metal on the eaves. There it hung--a signal that a sugar water banquet had been spread. And then I waited. See I have a thing for hummingbirds. Amazing to me are their tiny wings that flutter and flap over sixty times before I can finish saying one Mississippi. Unfathomable. And I want to be with them. I want to see them; to watch them. So the routine begins each year after the feeder has been filled and hung that I take my quiet time outside on one of my red rockers--painted red over black or white as another signal to them that food is nearby--and watch. I know they will come, and so it is only a waiting game. Eventually I hear it--a sound not unlike that of a bumblebee and yet distinctively different, more purposeful, almost like an ant-sized helicopter. And without moving my body at all, I avert my eyes from the passage I am reading to watch his first landing, his first sip of the nectar I've prepared.

To describe how I feel when he comes is probably an exercise in futility but I will try. I plan for them. I think about the reds of blossoms, the nectar giving properties of the flowers I choose, the overall appeal of the plants I place in my gardens and planters all in relation to the hummingbird. And that first motoring sound of his wings, the signal that he has come, is so entirely expected--I knew he'd come because I'd made everything ready for him--and yet so entirely gratifying--the work I'd done yielded the desired results.

Then begins a week or so of just watching, enjoying. Every morning I sit on the rocker propping my Bible against my knees, coffee mug placed precariously on the rocker's arm or more solidly on last year's abandoned toad habitat, and wait. They both come now--male and female--to drink. Every morning. Usually twice. They return too, throughout the day, but it is in the morning that I see them. And eventually I begin to move around them. When they become confident that I won't harm them, I attempt to make their photo which too is an exercise in futility since no image I've ever collected has compared to the real thing. But I try.

It's about 8 square inches, I'd say. The space occupied by feeder and bird can't be much more than that in size. I have to zoom right in with my camera to bring that small section of life into focus. Atop the hill from my neighbor's vantage, you'd never know they were there. Just eight tiny inches of a world filled with statues of liberty, Mount Everests and Grand Canyons--so insignificant really. But I see those eight square inches every single day. I observe them with joy, with care, with determination, with dedication. I am unstoppingly compelled to enjoy them because it was I who made a place for them; it was I who planned for them. And they came--to my eight square inches.

I read from John the first morning I waited for the birds to join me. Jesus had been in Bethany and decided to travel north to Galilee. Nothing Jesus ever did was coincidence. He did, after all, have the knowledge of God miraculously available to his human form. So when he found Philip and spoke, "Follow me" I believe though Philip may have been floored, Jesus was probably expecting him. And upon being told to follow, Philip did exactly what I would have done. He ran off to Nathanael and told him, "We have found the one Moses wrote about in the law, and the prophets also wrote about--Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph."

A little history for those who may not already know. The Jews were living under Roman rule. They had been without a word from God or prophet for around 400 years. 400 years of oppression, of battles, of existence without any tangible hope or proof that their God still cared. 400 hundred years of silence. Have you ever felt that heaven remained silent while you called and called under your throat was dry and your voice no longer made a sound? Amongst a melting pot of cultures, beliefs, peoples from all manner of nations--Greek Roman, German, Egyptian, African--and multiple gods to go with each nation, the Jews had been left to wonder if any of it had ever even been real. How was their God any different from the pagan gods of other nations? And yet they had the law of Moses. They had the words of the prophets promising that someday a Messiah would come. And their understanding of this promise was much more literal than is ours today. They understood it to mean that when their Messiah came it would mean redemption from Roman rule, and the oppressive rule of other kings and emperors that He would bring. He would be King, but not of their hearts, of their literal world. They saw their countrymen brutally crucified on jagged spikes, they lost their husbands and their children to Roman whims, they gave their last coins to the Roman tax and lived in towns where Roman soldiers could drop their heavy packs before them and insist they carry the load of Rome for a mile. Though their lives were not all bad; they did live in fear. And I would venture to say that many if not all had doubts and there had to have been those who were cynical at best and more than likely hopeless. Nathanael, a Galilean himself knew the basin in which Nazareth lay and transparently replied to Philip, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" In him there would not be found political correctness, nor any desire to pretend that he believed the prophecy of a Messiah could be fulfilled by a carpenter from Nazareth.

Philip simply told him "Come and see." Come and see for himself--which on a side note is perhaps the most wonderful evangelistic phrase ever spoken. We spend so much time trying to learn the best evangelistic teachings, approaches and methods when all Philip said was, "Come and see." An invitation to come and discover Christ from a trusted person may be the most compelling way to share the path of Jesus ever used. (Exit tangent.)

As soon as Jesus sees Nathanael he says, "Look a true Israelite in whom there is no deceit!" In other words, "Here's the real deal. Here's a man who is authentic and in whom I find no falsehood." And Nathanael says to him, "How do you know me?" How? How can you know who I am? I'm just a Galilean--one of thousands. Tell me how you--a carpenter from Nazareth--can presume to know my heart?

And without hesitation Jesus says, "Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you." I saw you, Nathanael before Philip ever even told you to come and see, I saw you. No one will ever know what it was Nathanael was doing or thinking under the fig tree, but Jesus looked into that man's eyes and told him where he was located before Philip came to get him. Nathanael had to have felt the same hopelessness as other Jewish men and women and he had to have wondered at some time, "Does this God even care?" And Jesus said to him, "I saw you."

Nathanael is like the hummingbird. God had a plan for him just as I had a plan for that hummingbird. The plan involved a relationship. God didn't intend just to redeem Israel but to bring all mankind as individuals to Himself. Just as I set out a feeder to bring the hummingbirds to my home and waited patiently for their arrival, Jesus had to have anticipated the moment when he could look into Nathanael's eyes and say, "I know you exist and I care." That tiny little portion of earth under the fig tree may have only been a few square inches, but Jesus saw it.

You'll remember the story of Hagar when she was cast out of Abraham and Sarah's home with her son Ishmael and God introduced himself as Jehovah El Roi--The God who Sees. Is that not a beautiful name for the God we worship? He is the God who sees you. And no matter how small, how insignificant and unimportant your few square inches of earth may be, it does not go unnoticed. It does not go unplanned for. It does not go uncared for. It does not go untended. It does not go unwatched. And mark my words, it DOES NOT GO UNLOVED.

He sees the miner's wife as she weeps into her pillow at night over her husband's death. He sees the young girl in the inner city whose mother lives on welfare and doesn't know who her father is. He sees the swollen belly of the baby in Angola and the boy in the mountains of Afghanistan taught to shoot long before he understands the value of life. He sees the barren woman and the unemployed man. He sees. He sees the overwhelmed student and the stroke victim. He sees the greedy man and the hungry man, the raging woman and the abused. There is no square inch space on this entire planet that Jehovah El Roi does not see.

As I sit each morning and watch that crimson feeder for the arrival of the hummingbird I can't help but consider my antics. It seems silly that I should care so much for such a little thing, but I do. And that in that moment I'm overwhelmed by the reality that the obsession I nurture is entirely and utterly minuscule in comparison to the obsession of God on my behalf. As I focus on that feeder, it is I who am watched. It is I who am tended. And it is I who am seen. By the God of the universe. And you too, are seen.

Nathanael responded to Jesus by saying, "...You are the son of God; you are the king of Israel!" He responded with belief. I don't know where you are in life, but He knows. He cares He sees you. Do you believe?

The Ballad of Peachtree Street

Peachtree Street with her tall trees skirted in emerald ivy, strings itself through Atlanta's downtown as if she were a secret kept only for those parched and weary of concrete and glass buildings. I walked her way last week and knew I was amidst the sacred, the preserved part of a city whose towers no longer remember their roots. And as I ambled past cafes and patios polka dotted with black bistro sets I marveled in the culture, the variety, the vastness, the couture of God's creation. Then I saw them--spaced apart like park benches--they lay here and there, unnoticed. A part of the landscape to the buzzing administrative assistants, the graphic designers and marketing researches, they went unnoticed and unregarded. Homeless. Without a place to go, without money to get there, without purpose, they dozed at noon while others hurried past to grab a bite to eat before returning to the business hub. Broken lives wasted--this is the ballad of the homeless man on Peachtree Street. When Jesus had fed the masses--a miracle to all who witnessed this act--he made a statement that always penetrates my spirit. "Gather up the broken pieces that are left over, so that nothing is wasted." (John 6:12) Of course he's talking about bread and fish here, but to me it says so much more. When I think of those men and women, hair long, faces brown with weather and lives void of purpose, I can't help but think when were they broken? Once they were whole and somewhere along the way things happened and they were left discarded as useless, no longer worth picking up and taking home. And then I consider the lives of those who I know and love. I think of the broken pieces of a life torn by abortion, the remnants of a life torn by death. I recall the shreds remaining when marriages end and children and wives are left to sift through the rubble. I'm nauseous at the reality of alcoholism and drug addictions that leave in their wake only debris, debris and more debris. Broken pieces. And there are moments when I want to shake my fist and swear and ask, why? Why? WHY? I want to shout out, "This isn't fair." And Jesus says, "Gather up the broken pieces...so that nothing is wasted." Nothing is wasted. I have not lived out the greatest heartaches. I'm certain there are those that measure far deeper than my own, but of those that I have seen there is one thing I am certain: God does not waste our pain. He does not discard our grief. He does not cast off our hurt or our confusion or our sorrow. He gathers with hands that are skilled and gentle healers. He binds. He knits together. He multiplies. He soothes. He redeems. He renews. He brings a light into the darkest recesses of our pain and causes life to emerge from the places that have suffocated our spirits and left us for dead. Our God never leaves those places. He does not. I know when His Spirit passes the path of Peachtree Street He calls out to those sunken frames that huddle on sidewalk and corner, "You are mine and you have purpose. You have value and you have My Love." And when His Spirit passes the deep places of our own hearts He sings the song of restoration, "I heal the brokenhearted and bandage their wounds." (Psalm 147:3) Pray with Me: Father, You are the binder of the broken and the healer of the hurting. You are the restorer. Will you take the pieces, Lord, that I see before me and restore life to them. Return to them your original purpose that they would again have use in a world where hope seems an intangible theory. You are the God of hope. You are hope, Lord. I believe you will restore and I ask that you would grant me faith and patience as I wait to see your plan unfold. Amen. Read with me: Isaiah 61 Psalm 147

And The Leaves Have Fallen

The fencepost trunk of a maple whose limbs only days ago were roosters crowing scarlet red across a bluebird sky now stands bare--all of it's glory scattered and blown by autumn's wind. I have admired this particular maple from my window for over a week now and I'm sorry to see it's leaves flitter and fall. Soon they will be nothing more than the very soil out of which they first grew. How quickly--only a matter of seasons, less than a year--that tree went from being adorned by hundreds of peridot and then garnet leaves to nakedness. Aren't our lives so similar? On Monday a woman is surrounded by her husband and children and on Friday her husband has left for another. In Summer business was booming and in winter the driveway stands empty of the truck he could no longer pay for because business was dead. The sun shone high, retirement in sight and the stock market fell like bricks from the open bed of a truck. Now he is seventy and will take a part time job as a grocery bagger to pay for his living expenses. Yesterday they were married and today she buries him--only a few seasons of love and family spanned the distance between their bands of gold and the shovels of soil on his coffin. How in the midst of lives where people and possessions shift transiently through like crimson leaves do we continue to stand as the trunk of that maple outside my kitchen window? Tell me how we continue to love when God allows loss? Tell me how we continue to hope when God allows terminal diseases to wrestle the life out of a sweet child's body? Tell me how we have faith when we find ourselves standing alone with hands whose only contents are the flesh that glove them? When everything we thought was ours is now a pile of leaves in which others play and we are left staring at God alone, then tell me is that enough? Naomi met the autumn and winter seasons of the soul early in life. A desperate famine and the inevitable urge to provide for his family drove her husband to take Ruth and her sons to a land far from her family. I too have lived many miles from the family where I grew up. I know the ache she felt for her sisters and her parents--intense at first like a hammering on her chest cavity and then as the years passed only a dull weight woven into the strands of her heart within where others couldn't see. Only days ago I hugged the neck of a dear friend who would lock the doors of her own home and drive hundreds of miles south with her family to a place where work was more plentiful. Naomi's family may have moved because the wheat and barely no longer grew in her region but our families move too--because the work has ceased to exist. Famine. We know that name, don't we? We call it a declining economy; unemployment. We know what it's like to leave people and places we love. The Bible tells us that some time later her husband died leaving she and her two sons alone. Alone. We lose those we love in this life. It is the nature of life that death befalls and inevitably someone is left to mourn the soul who has shifted to the wind of eternity. Within ten years Naomi laid soil on the carcasses of her only two sons. God, please forbid the day that I would ever bury my own two sons. No mother should have to bury her children. That's not the order of things, is it? Yet that is exactly where I found Naomi this morning when I was studying one of the names of God--El Shaddai. The name, first introduced in Genesis 17:1 means all sufficient one or the God who is enough. Often, especially in the King James version it is translated God Almighty. It's meaning is probably more accurate when it includes the sufficient nature of God in its translation. When Naomi uses this name for God I can't help but wonder if there is sarcasm, a deep sense of irony in her words or if she has simply learned that though she has lost everything God remains enough. Whatever the case, upon return to her native home Naomi is greeted with excitement by her village. She says to them, "Don't call me Naomi! (pleasant) Call me Mara (bitter) because The Sovereign One (The All Sufficient El-Shaddai) has treated me very harshly. I left here full, but the Lord has caused me to return empty-handed. Why do you call me Naomi seeing that the Lord has opposed me and the Sovereign One (All Sufficient God) has caused me to suffer?" (Ruth 1:20,21) Can you see her standing at the center of her village--feet brown with dust and hands empty? "Don't call me by the name you once knew me. I am no longer that woman. The Great Sufficient God has made my life very bitter. I left here with heart and arms full and I return an empty woman. I have been humbled by the very God who is All Sufficient and I now know and call him by that name." Do you know what it is like to feel that the God you sing praises to has treated you harshly? Can you relate to Naomi when she says that this God who she worships has humbled her to the point of emptiness? I am captivated by her use of this name--El Shaddai--for a God who allowed such incredible tragedy in her life. The Hebrew word carries with it the tone of a mother who nurses her babe at her breast--that perfect sufficiency of a mother's milk superior to any other form of sustenance. Would I, in God alone find perfect sufficiency? Would I, in Him find all I want or need or thirst for? If material things were taken from me I am certain I'd feel humbled, but I think I'd still cling to God and call Him good. But if my husband and children were taken? Then still, would I call Him good? When God promises in His Word that He will supply all of our needs according to His riches, when He insists that He came to give us life to the fullest, when He declares I am with you always I am tempted, I believe, to confuse my own perspective with His. When He says He'll supply my needs can I conclude that means He will always feed my empty stomach? Ask the child in a remote village in Africa if God has failed to meet his hunger-swollen belly's needs. And when He says He came to give us life am I to assume that means that somehow that life embodies some form of ease throughout our earthly sojourn? Ask the families members of those who saw the waters of hurricane Katrina or the Tsunami about abundant life. What then do I believe about these promises? Do I come to believe that God's word isn't true or is in some way conditional? I have often quoted that verse about God supplying all our needs. I believe that God is who He says He is when He calls Himself Jehovah-Jireh, but I don't think we always understand the reality that only God knows what we need according to His plan and will. I only need sustenance in physical form if I am to remain on earth for a time longer. My greatest need has been met some time ago when Christ died and rose again--salvation. If the time appointed by God for me to return to Himself has arrived, then it could be possible that my physical needs would no longer be met because in fact, they would no longer be needs. The soul does not need sustenance for it's time in eternity. I must learn to measure my needs not through the filter of my human perspective but rather through the filter of God's divine plan. I hope you can hear my heart--I'd never say God would choose to neglect children who are starving. Never. His original plan included a perfect garden where we would never want for any physical thing, but we messed that up. What has happened since is a result of the reality of sin in our world. His first intention was NEVER for the pain or suffering of those He created. But it is reality now. And in that reality God has promised to meet our needs. That said, I believe it is necessary to take a long hard critical look at what we believe about our lives here on earth. If I believe that my every need as I see it is to be met then if it is not I will face a crisis of belief and a great disillusionment with a God who disappointed me. If however I can see the world through a lens not my own--that vantage point that is divine and therefore given me only in occasional glimpses--then perhaps when tragedy and loss in this life occurs I will accept it differently. Naomi could never have seen what God saw--she needed to leave her family and travel with her husband to the land of Moab because it is there that one of her sons married Ruth. Ruth, you will remember, is in the very lineage of our Savior, Jesus Christ. She needed to lose her husband and sons so that she would return to her village and there find Boaz for Ruth to marry thus continuing the lineage leading to Jesus. Like a scarlet thread the weaving of Christ's lineage began centuries before and not one of those families knew how the ordering of their lives would someday result in the salvation of mankind. Their tragedies, pains and losses were not explained but they still believed in a God who somehow remained sufficient. Hebrews says it well, "Therefore since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, we must get rid of every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and run with endurance the race set out for us, keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith." (Hebrews 12:1,2a) It is true that we cannot always see the sufficiency of God with our human eyes. "But faith is being sure of what we hope for, being convinced of what we do not see." (Hebrews 11:1) I cannot always see how God alone would be enough were I to lose everything and everyone I loved. But His word I know to be true and if God calls Himself The All Sufficient One then may I root myself in that name no matter what the winds of life may take from my branches. I can't help but consider again the naked tree outside my window. Christ too knew about the leafless body of a tree. It became His death cross, but it bridged the gap to The Life for all humanity. While on this earthly parenthesis in the eternity of my soul I pray that my eyes would be fixed on the person of Jesus Christ who found His Father sufficient even as he hung on a cross bleeding, naked and alone. It is in Jesus that I know I find the abundant life promised me. After all He claimed without hesitation, "I am the way, the truth and THE LIFE." (John 14:6) May we discover that the very life for which we hunger exists not in any earthly person or thing but in the eternal and divine person of Jesus Christ whom we possess always because He possesses us. Amen. Listen with me: Give Me Jesus--Fernando Ortega