THE GIVER BEHIND THE GIFT

“…The Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”  Genesis 1:7

“Through Him all things were made…In Him was life, and that life was the light of men.”  John 1:3-4

On one visit a couple of weeks into her stay, Johnnie May told me that she had heard a scripture she liked at the church service she had attended the night before.  She was pretty sure it was Psalm 57.  It didn’t ring any bells for me, so I went home and checked it out.  Yes, immediately I knew that was the one.  The first few verses were custom-written for her at this time.  Since she is not a reader, I decided to memorize it a little at a time and teach it to her so that she could find strength from it every day.

Now, here I need to make a confession:  I was pretty busy at these days, and my mind had lost some of its quickness concerning memorization from disuse, so had the circumstances been different, I am pretty sure I would have just written it down and taken it with me to teach her to memorize! After all, she was the one who said she liked it, and she wasn’t able to read, so memorization was her need right then, not really mine. However, this was a jail visit, so I was not allowed to bring anything in with me except my drivers’ license to identify myself as being on her list of visitors. Thus, I was forced to memorize it in order to “smuggle” it in to her. A veiled blessing for sure!

(It reminded me of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 when at the end, a whole colony of rebellious people finds a way to save the precious words their government is determined to burn: they simply divide up the Bible and memorize vast sections.  A person, thereby, became The Gospel of John, or The Letter to the Romans.  When you wanted to read that section, you went to the corresponding person who had totally digested those words.) But of course, I wasn’t digesting or becoming the whole book of Psalms.  I just needed to transport into the jailhouse a few verses for my friend.

A couple more visits, and we were working on quoting the first verse together:  “Have mercy on me, O God!  Have mercy on me.  For in you my soul takes refuge.  I will take refuge in the shadow of your wings until the disaster has passed.”

 And of course, you know what comes next in my story, don’t you?  Of course you do: the verse became my own.  Lo, it was not just an idea I had to minister to somebody else! The baby bird who hid under the ample feathers of the Big-Winged Mama was no longer just my friend in jail with the huge disaster.  There I found myself, taking shelter, closing my eyes to block out the terrifying world, and quoting those few words during one disaster after another.  And sure enough, each one came to pass and not to stay.

I learned again the thing I thought I had already learned a hundred times before: when we set out to help somebody else, the help’s fallout rains down onto us.  This is, of course, because
the idea was never truly our own.  It is the thing that happens when the putty of the human mind surrenders into the Hands of the Potter, the Higher Giver, who sparks divine light and life into the raw material of mankind.  

THREE THINGS I ASK

Today's post is a little different from the others. It contains no attempt at literary sparkle or  philosophical depth.  It is a simple  prayer I found recently in one of my journals from 2007.  I share it with you at the beginning of this new year.   I send it up once again--my most heartfelt desires for 2013 for me and mine.  Perhaps it will become your prayer too.

Dear Father,

This morning I come to you with a specific request for myself and all those I most love— these you have given to me, these to whom I have also been given.  I ask you for this having just come from a study in Your Word that is always available to us as the sharp instrument to attune our hearts and minds to your will.  I am sorry and ask your forgiveness for all those times I have come away from it unmoved, unchanged, cold-hearted, and thick-skinned.  I ask you also in the Name of Jesus, my Lord, your only begotten Son sent to deliver me and all for whom I pray, sent as a ransom for our sins. Because of Him, we have this lovely hope of Heaven to sustain us every day, every moment, no matter how hard things might become down here.  You inspired Paul to write in his letter to the Philippians, “With prayer and thanksgiving, let your requests be known to God.”  So I come trusting that what he said would follow will indeed follow: “…and the peace of God that transcends all understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.”  I thank you for hearing and taking into your heart’s deep consideration all I am about to ask.

I ask that you grant us tender consciences that are controlled by You; tender, moveable hearts that can feel deeply what and how you want them to; and, sensitivity to the feelings of others, especially those we love and who are closest and thus most vulnerable to us-- sensitivity to their need for our undivided attention, our kindness, our mercy, our touch, our noticing eyes and listening ears. Please keep those hearts that are still like this intact, and restore them to the rest of us who have lost these qualities through time and  familiarity's subtle whetstone or have thrown them away out of bitterness due to the pain they make possible.

I know, Lord, that you will not force these upon any who are willfully set against them, so I pray also that all in our family and circle of friends will want these things and will perhaps be prompted to ask you to have their sins and deep needs revealed to them.  I know this is a scary thing to ask because we never know how deep your scalpel will need to cut to produce the revelations. Help us all desire to walk in obedience to You and to do that prompted by the right kind of hearts and minds.

Patience, kindness, sensitivity, tenderness, mercy, compassion, Lord. Soft things that take strong people to offer them, especially, and ironically, to those whose closest breath we share.   Please, please, please.

                                                                                                Amen

DEADLY BEAUTY

“Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.” Ephesians 4:29

B

ut the melody of that song to which those lyrics are attached is, at least to me, absolutely beautiful.  It really is no less than haunting.  After hearing it, I walked around for days unconsciously singing it because of its artfully-composed crescendos and decrescendos of questioning and pain, confession and pleading.  And all this was AFTER I had written a blog post and two devotionals about the insanity of its message!

 If your heart is not particularly plucked by music, you might think it’s crazy for me to talk about musical notes and tones depicting such emotional stories, but some of us really do hear narrative in music, complete with rising action, conflict, climax, and resolution.  The minor and major keys denote something almost palpable to some of our ears. I’m a sucker for violins and French horns, and a flute solo can bring me to inexplicable tears.

And herein lies a huge problem.  We can be snared by all of this loveliness.  We can be lured into a den of—well… evil. I hate to sound melodramatic, but truly, no good can come from soft-peddling this kind of danger.  For years I wondered if this was just my secret sin, but others have come clean to me about falling into the same kind of temptation.  Beauty lures us.  It happens in all the best stories: Sleeping Beauty and the shiny, red POISON apple, Edmund and the White Witch’s delectable Turkish Delight, the serpent in Eden and his promise of divine wisdom via a bite of forbidden fruit. 

And I have learned that for me, (and I’m only gently wondering here if maybe also for you?) that one of my most tempting of forbidden fruits hides encased within music.  Although I own probably no less than 500 Christian music c.d.’s, I also really enjoy listening to love songs, especially those from the 60’s-80’s. Sometimes I tune in, but I know that I am treading on thin ice, walking through a minefield, tiptoeing through quicksand, and any other apt metaphor you want to add.  Danger lurks here for me.

For a while the danger was that it pulled me into romantic memories of old loves and thus into the danger of unfaithfulness to my husband.  When all that sort of thing passed (Praise God from whom all blessings flow!), I thought I was out of the woods and could enjoy my music without inhibition.  But then I was blind sighted by another snare.  A hauntingly beautiful melody could hypnotize me out of consciousness to the words I was allowing to come out of my mouth. I had been listening to my secular music on a trip alone in my car and had been singing with the radio (a huge compulsion that probably cost me many second dates in high school).  The song had meandered along for a while when it finally dawned upon me what I was singing, and thus saying:  “Me and Mrs. Jones, we got a thing going on.  We both know that it’s wrong, but it’s just too strong….”  Aaaaggghhhh!  Here I was— a Christian who writes devotional books, no less, fouling the air with blatant garbage. I don’t sympathize with or condone  any of these words that heap adulation upon adultery, of course, but the tune of the thing is mesmerizing and fun to sing and embeds itself up under my skin before I know it.

            Actually, that’s wrong.  It doesn’t embed itself; its gets embedded—blatant evidence that we have an Enemy who is doing just what the scripture says he is: “roaming around like a lion seeking whom he may devour.”  Some don’t believe there is a real devil, a literal Satan, that evil is just evil unpersonified.  But I’m naïve enough to believe our enemy is real, alive, stirring up trouble and torment with his theft, lies, and destruction.  He must be wise enough to realize that some can’t be easily gotten to unless the evil is masked in beauty, sometimes even draped in splendor.  For most of us, straight-out-loud, screaming evil isn’t the problem; it’s the element of mixture that gets us.

            The Bible says we are accountable for every word we utter. I believe this is one of those places where we are to be wise as serpents so as not to be ushered into the darkness through enchanting facades.  If you are a music person, pay attention to what you are allowing to come out of your mouth.  It might surprise you.  And don’t swallow his lie that this kind of music is the only kind that is really lovely.  The truth is that the most of the modern stuff was inspired by the ancient, and most of the ancient was inspired by praise for the Creator.

STEAK AND BARE BONES

“Love is patient, love is kind.  It does not envy, it does not boast.  It is not rude, it is not self-seeking.  It is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.”  I Corinthians 13: 4-5

I

’m going to make a confession.  Sometimes I am assaulted by a streak of rebellion.  Everybody who knows me well knows that as a “little boy” growing up in East Texas, I was a dyed-in-the-wool rebel, but I am here to confess to you that vestiges of that rebellious nature still occasionally rise up in me and have their way. They often rise up, specifically, in the area of well-established, commonly-accepted aphorisms. 

            Yesterday I heard an old song on the radio that I’ve been hearing and singing along to for as long as I can remember, and I’ll lay you nine-to-five odds that you have too.  Here are some of its lyrics: “You always hurt the one you love, the one you shouldn’t hurt at all.  You always take the sweetest rose and crush it till its petals fall. You always break the kindest heart with a hasty word you can’t recall…” So far, I have no huge problem with what I assume to be the lyricist’s logic:  Vulnerability is indeed the thoroughfare on which pain most effectively travels, and thusly, many live the remainder of their lives after serious heartbreak stony hearted and heavily fortified against a repeated offense. I don’t think he was saying any of this in a bragging way but likelier as a confession of falling prey to the terrible temptation to take advantage of those who are easiest – the ones we know we have already “caught” and won’t likely run off too easily with our cruelty borne of familiarity and laxity of self-control. But then comes the final, climactic line of this would-be (but sharply failing to be) romantic ballad.  Are you ready?  “So if I broke your heart last night, it’s because I love you most of all.” 

Wait a minute—WHAAAAT???  Even my very sketchy research reveals that at least fourteen artists have made this sad and sadistic melody a hit.  I am astounded that I have easily and naturally sung these words for years without any recrimination from my conscience or even from my common sense, for Heaven’s sake!  (Yes, I do remember that the goal of my writing today is to come up with a worthwhile devotional meditation; truly, Your Honor, I am about to get to that very thing!  Can you tell I’ve been watching “Matlock”?)

            The lyricist here seems to be doing the devil’s work for him quite effectively, subtly gaining the agreement of thousands, maybe tens or hundreds of thousands that we always go around picking on the ones we love, bruising and battering the sweetest and kindest of hearts. He makes it sound as though this is normal— that this is just the nature of true love.  It ranks right up there with the much-repeated, grossly unbiblical, line from the 60’s movie “Love Story”: “Love means you never have to say you’re sorry.”  Both are attempts to give us permission to ravage tenderness, to despise kind vulnerability, to treat with scorn those whose love will surely easily turn the other cheek. That’s way more than enough commentary of these ridiculous notions for the likes of you, the choir.  I’m done singing to you about those first few lines. You can easily fill in the rest of the blanks.

            But about the song’s climax, I have a little more to say.  “So if I broke your heart last night, it’s because I love you most of all.”  Really? Is the indicator of some people’s depth of love for others how poorly they treat them?  Well, it does go right along with the song’s theme, so here, I suppose such a sad conclusion is to be expected. That’s written as a representation of the pagans, right? 

Our reflex answer is yes, but in fact, no.  I’m afraid the truth is that even with us who love Jesus and claim to want to follow Him, the confession of this emotionally worldly song bears out some sinister reality.  Many of us give ourselves silent, subtle license to maim those closest to us with our sharp tongues (or, just as often or moreso, our silent tongues!) and with our offhand treatment of them which shouts our testimony that they have become invisible?  I watch with mounting concern so many who act this way toward their spouses. This is no better than luring a dog into a cage with a t-bone steak and then tossing him only bare bones for the remainder of its life.

The truth, from God’s point of view, is that if we broke their heart last night, there might be several reasons, many of them understandable and even forgivable, but among them is not that we love them most of all.  It might be that they love us most of all, and that is why they were standing close enough to get burned.  It could be that we love the fact that they keep staying and giving us someone on whom we can explode when an explosion feels necessary for us to get back on an even keel.  It might be that we love their loyalty and faithfulness and ability to keep turning that cheek time and time again. But let’s not deceive ourselves into thinking that we mistreat them because we love them. The closest that can come to being true is that we mistreat them in spite of the fact that we love them. 

Ever since I caught myself singing those words the other day, these thoughts have taunted me.  I plan to go back and study in depth God’s definition of love and ask Him to help me be brave enough and humble enough to measure my treatment of my “loved” ones against His standards for us, His children.  He has given us lots of words about how He wants it done.  Will you join me?