Thankfulness on Deposit

So….I’m supposed to take a deep breath, count my many blessings, and feel thankful, right?  But what if I don’t?  What if I’ve just lost a loved one or a job or a friend, and my heart aches...or is numb?  What then?  Do I just put on my plastic smile and pretend?

Mary, Joseph and Jesus were celebrating Passover, certainly a kind of Thanksgiving as they remembered their deliverance from their oppressors.  But if they had been feeling thankful, it was quickly lost under the “great distress” of trying to find a twelve-year-old son who had other plans than a trip home.

I marvel at much in this passage: the simultaneous hunger and wisdom of this twelve-year-old Jesus. The amazement of the crowds that must surely have strained to hear the conversation.  But I ache with Mary and Joseph at their exchange over his extraordinary disappearance.  “Your father and I have been searching for you.” “Did you not know I must be in my Father’s house?”

This must surely have been a moment of pain for this son’s mother and step-father.  Oddly, the very deliverance they had anticipated in their Passover celebration is standing in front of them, taking one more clear step on the road to his destiny. Yet I doubt his response invoked immediate feelings of thankfulness on the part of his parents.

But here is what I find most moving. The Scripture tells us that Mary’s response to this distressing moment is precisely the same one she had when the shepherds had come crowding into a stable so many years earlier.  She “treasured up all these things.” 

And here, I submit, is a key from Mary on the Thanksgivings when the right “feelings” are eluding me.  I can place thanksgiving on deposit.  I “treasure up” my questions, my journey-in-progress, my losses along the way, and I hold them close as something precious in the process of a re-creation I cannot fathom in this particular moment…but will understand, likely with gratitude, someday.  For this same son whispers to Mary and to me what he will one day shout: “Behold, I make all things new.”

Doing the Next Thing

I have been watching some new bushes pass through autumn.  They held their leaves longer than the cousins near them, and turned a mellow shade of gold before becoming barren twigs for the winter.  They look right at home in the place marked out for them.

In matters of landscaping, it is good to have a plan.  Colors, size, need for light and water and the proper soil—all of these factors matter, and it has taken time…and a good plan by a competent gardener to develop even a simple garden that thrives. 

But in the midst of the large-scale planning comes the daily activities.  Mow the lawn.  Rake the leaves. Mulch those precious roses by the wall.

I find myself in a season where the landscaping for this plot of my own life appears to be somewhat established for the present.  There’s been plenty of change to get here: “Oh, but Lord, that’s my soul’s favorite bush.  It’s been blooming in the spring and throughout the summer and has really attractive leaves in the fall.”   And it is as though the Lord says, “Yes, I know.  It was lovely for a season, but I have other plans for this particular space in your life at this point.” 

Having been through some tumultuous years, I am beginning to find this season surprisingly restful.  And here is the reason:  I only have to do the next thing.  Teach the class, talk to the friend, write the next little piece.   My prayer has shifted from “Lord, help me understand what you are doing with my life,” to “Lord, what is the next thing I am to do today?”

And I think often of Simplicity’s song.  Of Mary who asks not for an explanation of God’s great plan, but for simple understanding of the next thing: “How shall this be, since I am a virgin?”   And when she is told that the Lord has it well in hand, she responds,  “Let it be to me according to your word,” and then does the next thing.  Mary goes to visit Elizabeth.

And I find myself wondering how much wasted energy I have spent straining to discern the larger plan.  (I’ve never really gotten it right.)  I realize again that the Father is a much better gardener than I ever will be, and that “doing the next thing” may not just be a seasonal activity, but the central steps of obedience, freedom and joy in the kingdom of God.

Father, may your Holy Spirit produce in me a trusting heart that simply does the next thing.  If I need to know something more, I trust you to reveal it in your time.  But grant me the humility and contentment to live in the day I am in, entrusting the months and years to your loving, expert care.  In Jesus’ name, AMEN

Anything But Imaginary

I remember standing in front of a class of Wheaton students over a decade ago and saying, “Having ‘a personal relationship with Jesus’ is easy to talk about, but is often the very reality we struggle to step into.”  And I found myself saying something similar to a class of seminarians just last week.

At this point in my life I would be swift to clarify that statement: Jesus has a relationship with us, a love that “will not let us go.”  Nothing we do or don’t do can initiate what He has already won for us, and now so freely offers those who, by the enabling power of the Holy Spirit, confess him to be Lord.  But this “relationship,” while based in an objectivity so deep that we scarcely can begin to comprehend it,  contains a responsive dimension, as well.  Our hearts are hungry to know our connectedness to Him at the level of our real experience.  We long to know that He is truly present with us.

So last week, I invited my students into a simple, ancient exercise. I asked the Holy Spirit to reveal Jesus to us, and then invited us to become the blind man healed by Jesus in John 9.  We took a few moments to imagine being this beggared, sightless man.  They shut their eyes as I slowly read the story to them, simply changing it from third to first person.  Within a few moments none of us were “outside” that story. We were in.  We were the blind man. We heard the new voice of a man who refused to answer the tiresome question of whose fault it was that we were blind in the same life-sapping ways. We felt (and smelled) the mud  He put on our eyes, and the tender, firm fingers that placed it there.  We went and washed in the pool. We felt the frustration of not knowing what Jesus looked like so that we could find him.  We were pressed into a corner by the religious leaders until we, too, were convinced of whom Jesus was. For when his eyes were opened, the scales came off ours again, too. And by the end, we, like our friend on the page, worshipped the Jesus who came, a second time, to find him.

One of my students, who, six weeks ago was the vocal skeptic as to the “relevance” of classic spiritual practices, said, “OK, I see.  I’ve never realized that I’m always an outsider to the Gospels.  Jesus touches someone else, but I never thought it could be me.  I’ve always stood on the margins when I am being invited in.”

Years ago I read a couple of lines from Oswald Chamber’s My Utmost for His Highest that changed my life in this regard. He writes, “Is your imagination stayed on God or is it starved?...If you have never used your imagination to put yourself before God, begin to do it now.” (Feb. 11)  That insight, combined with the truth that the Scriptures contain the LIVING word that does something while we are listening, has been used by the Spirit of God to draw me into life-changing relationship with the living Lord—over and over again.

This is how I wrote the chapter on Confidence.  For when we come to terms with how vulnerable we really are, only the hands on protection and comfort of a flesh and blood Jesus reaching out to us through the pages of Scripture will suffice. 

So while we are tempted to think of our imagination as the capacity to see the unreal, when the Holy Spirit harnesses this aspect of our humanity it becomes the capacity to see the unseen.  Like Mary Poppins and the children on a “jolly holiday” we pop into the chalk picture—at the Spirit’s bidding--only to find that the view from the inside is anything but imaginary.

Grassroots Gifts

The story of writing and publishing “Songs of Assent” tells a bit like a mystery.  The development of each of the chapters (and their illustrations) mirrors the actual “song” they sing.  The “weightless fullness” of Simplicity was written last and once.  The picture of Simplicity that also adorns the cover was drawn in an afternoon—long before I had any idea of what to do with her. When the chapter with finished, the picture was already there.

Buoyancy, that “moment-by-moment adjustment of a fragile vessel renewed and propelled by God’s abounding grace,” was a voyage on the high seas.  I couldn’t find the “word” to describe Mary’s response to Jesus at the wedding in Cana. For a couple of months I struggled to find the way forward. Humility?  No, she was a handmaiden of wisdom.  Hospitality?  It wasn’t deep enough for the themes resting right under my consciousness. 

But when I finally found “buoyancy” (or, perhaps more truthfully, it found me) I was at last enabled to embark on that leg of the journey.  I wrote the chapter from my laptop propped up in bed, for I was ill most of last fall, with nautical books of all kinds strewn around the room. 

Buoyancy’s illustration was just as much of an adventure. “Pam, I want the perspective from the deck of the ship, with rising waves and a storm in the distance.  And I’d like another boat within sight.” Ah, Carla, you don’t want much.  And upon seeing her hard work, I instantly said, “Oh, no, I guess the other boat really doesn’t fit.”  At that moment I was grateful that my illustrator lived in Minneapolis and I was safely sheltered in Chicago.  I am grateful to report that we (and our collaboration) survived.

Yet the sustained challenge in this venture has been to move forward in publishing in a manner that is as organic as the chapter on Receptivity proclaims the real work of the Kingdom to be.  Seeds are planted in the soil of our souls and take root far under the ground. In time they bear fruit that can be shared with others.  Nothing forced, nothing manufactured. Just seeds planted in their time.  There’s an actual phrase for approaching the dissemination of a book in this manner: it’s called “grassroots.”

So here we are, coming up to the first Christmas after releasing this book.  This is the season where many Christians turn a brief eye toward Mary.  Yet her “habitual availability” to God not only collaborated with the Holy Spirit to give us Jesus, but her responses to the Lord’s ongoing bidding in her life renders rich lessons for own responses as we carry the Spirit of her Son in our hearts and into our communities. 

And so we at WaterManuscripts—that would be Wyatt and me—want to extend a gift to you: personalized ease in offering this book to others this Advent and Christmas season.  If you have found these meditations on the implications of Mary’s life helpful, we would delight in facilitating the grassroots extension of that gift to others by offering free shipping on autographed copies wherever you would like us to send them within the United States.

This organic offer comes with this prayer: Lord Jesus, may your Holy Spirit wing this book to the hands of those who need to hold it, the hearts of those ready to see.  And would that same Spirit prepare our hearts to receive you anew, oh wondrous gift of God.