OUGHTERS AND WANTERS

God's Word reminds us over and over that we should love God, not only with all of our mind and strength, but also with all of our heart. There is a reason for that. When our heart gets behind us in something, we are sure to be victorious.

We do lots of things in a perfunctory way--and granted, for survival's sake, some things pretty much have to be done that way. If we stopped to throw everything we are into brushing our teeth and tying our shoes we would be out of energy before we got to the things that deserved that kind of energy and focus. Yes, we must dress and drive and make appointments and change the sheets, and to do these mindlessly is probably not only permissible but appropriate; hopefully we can multitask at least well enough to do these kinds of things with just a smidgen of our brain and just enough heart to make the task palatable enough to continue to do it on a routine basis. (People who decide not to do these things because they don't enjoy them are the kinds of people most of us would label ''slobs".... So today I am not promoting full-scale heart-throwing after every menial task, and I hope you are not considering throwing scriptures back at me about "doing everything heartily as unto the Lord." Okay, maybe we should find pleasure in doing the menial somehow simply because we are given the blessing of breathing another day to do another menial task, but personally being able to do some tasks mindlessly allows me some much needed time to think more about the things that do really matter.

But what I want to talk about today has more to do with praying to live out our lives' calling with something more than a perfunctory attitude-- praying to love what we are given to do in a way that influences the part of our mind we call "the heart." I know the importance of a heart that knows what it means to be thrilled, a heart-consciousness that realizes right in the middle of doing a thing I need to do that lo! I am having something very closely akin to ...FUN! And rightly so. Having fun is for so much more than having fun. Choosing deliberately to clothe ourselves in all those Christian characteristics that we read about in Colossians is crucial if we are to waylay the gravity of sloth and worldliness. (Sloth because without heart for a job, it soon grows so wearisome that we are tempted to do it halfheartedly and then finally not at all. And worldliness because when our hearts are not engaged in anything holy, they get restless to be engaged in just about anything that will produce a thrill.) There is no denying that we were not put here primarily for fun, or Jesus would not have used the picture of heading off to die when He told us to "take up our crosses and follow Him."

But there are many Christian duties that, even though our sighs might indicate differently, we know good and well don't require anything CLOSE to dying. They are the woof and warp , the everyday staples of productive Christian living. We do them all right, but often we do them as Shakespeare described the young boy: "creeping like snail unwillingly to school." * What if we could somehow learn to think of these tasks as fun? What if we could learn to throw our hearts behind them and not just our wills? What if what we ought to do become the very things we want to do? It can happen. Our "oughters" can be one and the same with our "wanters." For a long time I watched it happen in others, and finally, after much praying about it, I am beginning to see it happening in me. Take Psalm 37:4 as God's literal promise to you.

What I am suggesting today is this: As you go down your prayer list, rather than just praying for their health and safety or wisdom in making decisions, pray that God will give to those you love a heart for the tasks He would have them do. Pray that they will learn to love what God calls them to do rather than tolerate it with a sigh. I'm going to be praying this for all of you. Would you please do the same for me?

"DELIGHT YOURSELF IN THE LORD, AND HE WILL GIVE YOU THE DESIRES OF YOUR HEART." PSALM 37:4

*William Shakespeare, As You Like It (Act II, Scene VII)

THE LOVE OF OUR DREAMS

(I am in Midland this week up to my ears in cute grandkids, so I'm cheating today; I am using today's entry from my devotional book. It's one of my favorites. So for those of you who are being doubly loyal to my writing, you are hereby excused from class. It's a beautiful day, at least in Midland. Go outside to recess. I've got three little delightful faces waiting to be cradled.)

"The Lord your God is with you. He is mighty to save. He will take great delight in you. He will quiet you with His love. He will rejoice over you with singing" (Zephaniah 3:17). Recently while working on a craft project, I watched the old, original version of The Parent Trap. When it got to the part where Maureen O'Hara stood face-to-face with the Hayley Mills she hadn't seen in years, I had to drop everything else I was doing and allow my longing eyes to latch fully onto the scene before me. For that one minute or playacting alone, Mrs. O'Hara deserved an Oscar. Her eyes widened a bit to focus in on and drink in every drop of the face of her child as one dying of thirst might swallow down the last drop of water in a canteen. The camera telescoped in on the mother's inimitable green eyes to show them filling with a kind of light that turned them even greener and radiated out to brighten her entire face. Then ever so tenderly, her hands cradled her daughter's face as though she were touching something rare and fragile that few others might ever get to touch. You knew that this mother was entirely in this place. She was completely undivided in her thoughts, so caught up in the moment that her heart knew no other love but this one that she gazed upon with no words and touched as fine china. She was swept away from any reality but this one B eauty before her by which she was totally enraptured. As I watched, I knew why I was so captured by this scene; it was my deepest longing. It was the epitome of delight. One of the frustrations I have with the English language is its lack of words to describe all the different flavors of love. Whereas Greek has several words to describe various kinds of love, English seems to be stuck with a one-size-fits-all word, and the longer I live and love, the more certain I am that the word "love" is far too general to evoke all the appropriate messages it is called upon to do. Thus, we use it to describe everything from how we feel about this taste of enchiladas to the thrill of riding a roller coaster to our deepest and most sacred familial feelings. Every time I am brought back to this scripture, I realize that there is another word that says what I want it to about some of those very rare and special feelings: delight. This scripture is one of my favorites and thus keeps popping up with regularity at the top of these pages. It's not that God's Word isn't replete with inspirational messages so that I would need to repeat any of them; it's just that this one speaks vociferously to what I cherish most in my memories and dream of most as encores in the future: feeling delight, both in and from another. Delighting is a very specialized kind of loving that means I am not just one-size-fits-all loved," but that someone finds me captivating. There are so many shortcomings that scream that I am unworthy and unlovely that to learn that God could feel this way about me is for sure the best news I could possibly hear. I suppose to want to feel such adoration could be interpreted as vain and idolatrous, but God Himself uses the same word to call us to Him. "Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart" (Psalms 37:4). He knows what can come from pure delight. Fall into His arms today, feel His hands around your face, gaze upon the beauty of Christ, and delight in Him as He delights in you. (From Broken Jar: 365 Days on the Potter's Wheel, Jan Doke, Xulon Press, 2009).

WHAT ARE YOU HIDING?

Allison, 12, and Callie, 6- cousins who cut their teeth on the same scripture songs

I had just finished a good night of sleeping, was awake and in my right mind (well, as right as it ever gets), the terribly hot weather had abated, and the promise of a beautifully refreshing autumn day loomed bountifully all around me, but something was wrong. My insides were disturbed. All the external well-being of the day knocked fruitlessly at the door of my innerds. I was nervous. There was a new unknown about to enter my world whose shadow had me freaked. When I sat still and imagined myself taking on this new necessary challenge--chasing the rabbit wherever it could dare take me so that I could do what I usually do after that exercise, and shrug my shoulders and say, "There! See? No place this rabbit can go is too daunting when I am in the presence of my Deliverer!"-- the outcome surprised me: I was still filled with a thick, foreboding dread. I daresay I was afraid! I thought I had given over this apprehension into the hands of God, but here it was again, stalking me around my secure, well-lit house in the broad daylight. My body was betraying my heart's facade, too: my stomach was queasy, my breathing was shallow, my pulse was elevated, I was sighing audibly.

Then suddenly, there was another one of those announcements I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. Again, it was from the Holy Spirit, and again, it was in the form of a song. Here's what I heard:

"Do not fear, for I am with you.
Do not fear, for I am with you.
Do not fear, for I am with you.
Do not be dismayed, for I am your God.
I will strengthen you and help you.
I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.
I will strengthen you and help you.
I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.
I will strengthen you and help you...
Isaiah 41:10."

It was not what most would call an out-and-out miracle, even though it had every bit as much power upon me at that moment. These are indeed the words of Isaiah 41:10, but neither the scripture nor the melody was any kind of a newsflash to me. You see, I had sung this song probably hundreds of times in the past seven or eight years. The Holy Spirit was doing for me exactly what Jesus promised He would: "I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you... the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you" (John 14:18,24).

It was all I needed to know beyond the shadow of a doubt that He was near me. He was near enough to know intimately this disturbance of my peace. These words had been faithfully hidden in my heart years ago, and just when I needed Him most, God showed up to bring them back to the surface so that I could gain comfort not only from them, but from being assured that He was near. That song had not crossed my mind in weeks, but that didn't hinder God from honoring me with its hidden presence.

Today I want to encourage you to use every method you can find to hide God's Word in your heart. Mnemonic devices, songs, pictures, repetitive recitation... whatever it takes. Hide as much of God's Word in your heart as you can. Most of us who are older know that memorizing doesn't come as easily as it used to; I can still remember hundreds of lines of poems I learned in junior high the night before I had to recite them for a test grade, but it highly taxes my 59-year old brain to remember three scriptures I spent two weeks learning just two months ago...

unless I learned them in a song! I'll bet it's true for most of you, too. Can't you remember way more songs verbatim than you can remember stories or sermons verbatim?

A few years ago I stumbled upon a c.d. called "Seeds of Courage" by a producer called SEEDS (www.seedsmusic.com) that was pure scripture. I pounced on it and bought it for our granddaughter who was three or four at the time because she and her mother love singing together, especially in the car. In no time, Allison and her mom had learned all these songs, so I went hunting and found that there were four more in the set, ("Seeds of Purpose," "Seeds of Praise," "Seeds of Faith," and "The Power of Encouragement"), so this time I bought me a set, too. Since that time, Allison and her mom have shared these with her little brother, Bryson, and I have bought a set for our younger grandkids, Callie, Joel, and Eli. It is a fun way learn scripture and the only way I know of to keep up with their bright, flexible minds in this area.

For a while after finding them, I listened to them exclusively every time I got in my car, whether I was going to the grocery store or on a five-hour trip. I loved what happened as a result. Every time I woke up in the middle of the night, from having consumed my normal Volkswagen-sized watermelon or just to lie awake in a caffeine standoff after a guzzling a movie-sized Coke, invariably one of those scripture songs would be running through my mind. Clear as day I could hear the lyrics and the instrumentation just as I had done in my car dozens of time. What a comfort to know that the very words of God were dwelling there just beneath my consciousness ready to meet and greet me when I woke up! It reminded my of one of my favorite parts of Psalm 139: "How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand. When I awake, I am still with you." And another of my favorites, Psalm 63, puts it like this : "On my bed I remember you: I think of you through the watches of the night."

And, oh yes, our minds DO dwell, while we are sleeping, on what we have bombarded it with in our waking hours. Haven't you had the experience of studying for hours and hours, maybe days and days for an exam only to have it run through your dreams in some form or another when you finally gave yourself permission to sleep? A few months after discovering the euphoria of waking in the night to all kinds of new scriptures running through my head, I went to babysit our two-year-old granddaughter, Callie, who was big into Dora the Explorer. She wanted to watch Dora for hours on end there for a while, and since her new baby brother, Joel, needed to have the upstairs quiet while he napped, she and I would stay downstairs most of the afternoons with the t.v. and Dora. After a couple of days there, I noticed that my wee-hour t-t trips were no longer accompanied by such wonderful inspiration as 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18: "Be thankful always. Praaay continually. Give thanks in all circumstances. Give thanks in all circumstances. For this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus. This is God's will for you in Christ Jesus." No. Not at all. Now what I heard instead was a duo of a cute little big-eyed Hispanic girl and her boot-clad monkey crooning the strains of "Dora, Dora, Dora, the explorer... Say 'Back pack, back pack'... We did it, we did it, yeah, you know we did it, yeah we did it!" Needless to say, I had to go back into strict training!

"I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you." -Psalm 119:11

THE HIGHER ROAD

"Father God, just for today
Help me walk the narrow way.
Help me stand when I might fall.
Give me your strength to hear your call.
May my steps be worship;
May my thoughts be praise;
May my words bring honor to your name.
May my steps be worship;
May my thoughts be praise;
May my words bring honor to your name."

You might be tired of looking at these lines, but I'm not quite thorough talking about this song. It does not issue as easily from my lips as it did a few weeks ago. I have been struck between the eyes lately concerning what I must have thought this song meant. I am ashamed to say this, but I think I must confess that I really wanted this song to mean something akin to this:

"Father God, again today,
Help me walk like yesterday;
Help me stand; don't let me fall
Where I can't see ahead at all.
May I keep on stepping
On this path I know;
May I march with eager, cheerful tread
Down this path familiar
With your hand in mine.
Satisfied with marching straight ahead."

First, it occurred to me that my road needed to narrow quite a bit. I was letting myself off too easy. Living in the same old well-behaved, behaviorally disciplined way was really not capturing the spirit of Jesus's words in Matthew 7: "Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate, and narrow is the road that leads to life, and only a few find it." I have been glibly asking to be promoted from a pilot of a VW Jetta to a 747 in one fell swoop (or "one swell poop," as my friend Candy says!) rather than understanding that to seek the promotion means that I must take the training and even the tests that will prepare me for the job.

I hope all this doesn't sound like works-oriented salvation. Actually this has nothing to do with salvation at all; it has everything to do with what Jesus, in Matthew 7, called "life." (Sure, the first part of his statement did refer to destruction, but that was for those who are traveling a very broad highway and going through a cavernously wide gate. By the grace of God, I do not suffer from the delusion that life consists of seeing how big a swath of pavement I can cover before I fall off the shoulder of the highway and and then into the ditch. I KNOW that the Good Life can only be found within the Master's shadow, and I'll bet, if you're reading this, you do too.) This has to do with continuing to grow rather than resting in our laurels-- continuing education, if you will. Jesus seems to be inviting us to a narrower and narrow way because that is what will lead us to a higher and higher road. That is the only way we can achieve what Paul calls going "from one degree or glory to the next."

Pay close attention to what Jesus talked about most (go back and read the Beatitudes, for instance). It seems to me that the reason very few find that "life" He was talking about in Matthew 7 and in the Beatitudes and all those other places where He talks that crazy talk about down leading up and last being first, is that we have found a few things we do well, and so our goal quietly becomes just to maintain our status quo. Just don't rock the boat for these remaining twenty or thirty years I have left.

But a great new adventure begins when we come upon a narrowing of the road (attitudinal issues like righteous indignation and pride and going blindly, but cheerfully and faithfully, without a map) and decide, even at this late hour of our lives, to commit ourselves to some new training by grabbing firmly onto our Master's hand and walking bravely ahead into uncharted territory.

(Today's photo is Bryson and Larry on a steep section Appalachian Trail in Maine last month.)

THE NARROW WAY

"Father God, just for today,
Help me walk the narrow way.
Help me stand when I might fall.
Give me Your strength to hear your call.

May my steps be worship;
May my thoughts be praise;
May my words bring honor to Your Name.
May my steps be worship;
May my thoughts be praise;
May my words bring honor to Your Name."

I love this song and find such strength and resolve from singing it that I sing it quite often. Many times throughout most of my days when I am not singing it, I catch myself humming its tune. It is a very specific prayer couched in a concise, economical package.

As I have sung the words "the narrow way" all these times, I don't really know what I have, until lately, pictured, but I'm pretty sure "narrow" in my mind was something more ethereal, less down-to-earth than Jesus was getting at when He spoke of the gate and the road in Matthew 7. I believe maybe I thought "the narrow way" meant behaving really well morally-- walking straight down the trail and never veering off it either to the left or to the right. Using this criteria, I was doing pretty well on this part of this song-prayer. I don't drink, do drugs, steal, commit adultery, cuss (very often), or skip church to go fishing (even less often).

But recently I have been given some opportunities to gain a whole new perspective on what "the narrow way" might really mean-- at least to me, right now-- and these opportunities have burdened me with the need to confess that I am lot less comfortable about the status of my check-marks now when I sing that song than I used to be.

Most of these "opportunities" have had to do with feeling taken advantage of or being made to feel obligated to do some unreasonable errand; I might go so far as to say I have even felt bullied because I have been trying to be a nice person and do what it takes to get along. Usually the one bullying me is someone I love and respect, so rather than putting my hands on my hips, putting my foot down, and asserting,"Absolutely NOT! This is RIDICULOUS!," I have gone ahead, huffing and puffing under my hot breath and done the ludicrous thing asked of me.

Once lately as I was driving through the late night hours on one of these errands of mercy, I found myself itching to call somebody and just complain-- just bend some sympathetic ear into helping me rationalize my feeling so needlessly and mercilessly put upon. (That phrase "put upon" had heretofore been pretty much foreign to me, just an archaism past its prime-- a couple of words that once accurately translated something to someone who had never heard of a garage door opener or a microwave but that had long since lost relevance in this postmodern world. But that night, when I wanted to make that pity call, those words came to me unbidden and translated perfectly what I was feeling... put upon. Somebody had just put something upon me without my permission or acceptance, and here I was carrying it down the highway in my car at this ungodly hour like some dumb beast of burden.)

But before I could even realize I had left my cell phone at home, that unmistakable Voice interrupted my seething with an announcement. The Voice was the Holy Spirit of God, and the announcement was in the form of a song: "Father God, just for today, help me walk the narrow way..." UGH! The "narrow way" was somehow connected with THIS? How could such a sweet, holy, reasonable request have anything to do with THIS ridiculous, unwieldy errand that was so obviously unreasonable? When I asked Him to chisel out my ears so that I could hear His message, I was humbled to learn that the narrow way right then was to bear patiently and quietly what my flesh was itching to flail out at with righteous indignation. I wanted justification and a sympathetic ear; God wanted to take me at my word and help me to do just what I had been asking Him to do all those hundreds of times I had so glibly lifted to Him that prayer request.

And since that night, I keep having the same kinds of opportunities almost daily to see just how narrow that way is that Jesus wishes I would choose to take. Learning to behave morally was yesterday's very narrow road, but today it's a fairly wide, flat, and easy expressway for me to mosey on down-- and moseying is neither going to accomplish growth in me nor testify to a powerful God of supernatural love in a vastly evil world. I see now that if I am to keep growing from one degree of glory to the next, I am going to have to go through the training. The degrees are not accomplished by just wishing for them. I would never expect, just because I can drive a car, that next week I could fly a 747 just by desiring to do so or even praying to do so. Neither would I expect to be able to perform successful brain surgery just because I had done a good job of pulling my grandson's tooth and now desire to do something greater. To accomplish these tasks, I would expect to go through lots of training. How much training I am willing to go through will be determined by my degree of desire to accomplish the tasks.

Giving up cussing was a pretty narrow road for me to travel on when I was thirteen, but I'm 59, and ... well, you get the picture.

WAYLAID BY GRACE

"It is mine to avenge; I will repay." Deuteronomy 32:35 "You have heard it said, 'Love your neighbor, and hate your enemy.' But I tell you: love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you that you may be sons of your Father in heaven." Matthew 5:43-45

God makes it abundantly clear, and Jesus echoes His Father, that we are to have nothing to do with revenge. And to clear up a possible misconception, when Jesus says, "You have heard it said.... But I tell you...," He wasn't referring to the old ways of the "Old Testament God" as compared to the new ways of the "New Testament God" through Christ. The directive "Hate your enemy" is nowhere found in the Old Testament. He was mining God's Truth ( the only Truth) from the slag that the world had produced from distorting the Law to console our proclivities. Nope, God knew all along, and never changed His mind, about the proper handling of revenge. And for us that proper handling was not at all; hands off-- completely. Not that any of us hooked up to a blog like this are even tempted by such a violent thing as revenge.

Or are we? When we take a close, honest look at the mindset of revenge and why God is so dead-set against it, we have to admit that it covers more territory than just the wild-west, shoot em' up-in-the-streets-of-Tombstone-type. The temptation to get revenge visits the genteel maiden as well as the burly, rough-around-the-edges outlaw. We need to be careful that we don't disqualify ourselves from Jesus' teachings about getting even just because of the clothes we wear, our obvious demeanor, or the outward nature of our personalities. I have known many a pleasant smile to conceal a deadly storm brewing beneath its surface. Someone--maybe more than one-- abused her as a child; her parents neglected, rejected, or abandoned her; her husband of forty years traded her in for a newer model. It's her first waking thought and her last waking memory... in fact, most nights she is tormented by nightmares about it.

What lies at the heart of revenge is payment for damages rendered. This vast debt that plagues her days and nights really needs to be paid if she is to get on with her life. She just doesn't have the energy to focus on moving upward ; all the energy she can muster up is committed to just holding herself together. Of course, she knows the payment should come from the one who owes her, but somewhere in the days and weeks, months and years of her life since then, the onerous carriage of such an unwieldy thing has taken over. Finally, it is no longer a thing she is carrying; it has swallowed her up and is carrying her. It covers her, colors her, coaxes, and constrains her so that her vision is blurred and her judgment clouded. It no longer is compartmentalized so that it stays where it belongs. In fact, she now belongs to it, and everyone is game to its hunger.

Maybe you think this language sounds melodramatic, but the sadistic nature of our Enemy cannot be overstated. No words are graphic enough to paint that picture. He is the thief who comes "only to steal and kill and destroy," and he will use whatever weakness he finds in us to do that. Or maybe you don't want to call some of these familiar feelings "revenge." Maybe that sounds like too harsh a word. Would "bitterness" fit better? Still too strong? What about "projecting," as in casting blame or responsibility away from our ourselves onto another. Maybe we have fallen into some deep ditches because of our burden, and we need someone else to accept the responsibility for our being here in this ditch. If someone victimized me so that I have ended up here, then perhaps it would be all right if I do just a teensy bit of the same to someone else-- maybe even anyone else. Pride can coax me into thinking that this might make me feel a little better about evening up the score; people who are badly hurt, even shamed, are not immune to pride's assaults. We can call vengeance by whatever nicer name we like, but if we are loaded down by a spirit of unforgiveness in our back pocket, it's all the more convenient for our Enemy to use against us.

The mind set on revenge is dangerous-- even deadly-- regardless of the source of its inferno or the weapon it wields. When our hearts are set on avenging wrongs done to us, we eventually follow our heart's desire and venture into territory fraught with land mines. The grave danger of getting revenge is that on our way to making sure the world pays us back what it owes us, we can gyp-- even abuse-- a lot of people who are as innocent as we were when we were gypped or abused.

God knows that we are not strong enough to bear the load of vengeance responsibly. We will fall down upon it and cut ourselves to shreds, or it will burrow itself into our flesh and take over. We will become the very monster we flail against. Jesus knew we weren't smart enough to know where to draw the line or how to distinguish between innocence and guilt, so in His living and in His dying He warned us against even trying. He told us to trust the Father with the weight and wisdom of avenging and to focus our own minds on the lifestyle of loving and praying for our enemies. He said that by doing this we will be exactly the person our heart desires to be and just the person the world so desperately needs us to be. We will be"sons [and daughters] of our Father in Heaven."

EVEN BETTER THAN A BOXCAR?

One of my dearest friends in the world is named Andy Lee. She's the one who encouraged me to do this blogging thing and taught me how, not only by example, but yea, even by taking me by my little ignorant and stubborn hand and guiding me step by step through the process. Andy has been through a soul-shaking (but not soul-shattering!) experience lately. She has just recently lost her big sister, her only sister, to cancer. My friend, Andy, left her family in North Carolina for a solid month and went to Oklahoma to work tirelessly as Christy's devoted nurse and cheerleader. She is a woman of great faith in her Father God, and so she, and all she could enlist to accompany her, boldly entered the throne room requesting from the King that the life of her sister be spared yet again from the cancer that she was delivered from a few years ago. For a while it looked like those prayers would be answered according to our wishes, but on July 13, Christy's fight with cancer ended forever. She was delivered from her disease into her Father's safe keeping, never to do battle again with cancer or any other frailty of the flesh. I invite you-- no, I implore you-- to go her blog and follow her heart's journey for the past month [hernamewasmary.blogspot.com].

Andy's blog for today is especially compelling; in fact, I was so shot in the head with it that I was tempted just to cut and paste it into this space and call it mine! Instead, let me just step up beside this soul mate of mine, say "Amen, Sister," and add another testimony of my own.

It's all about the best kind of happiness being something different from what most people might normally think of as happiness. She has decided that happiness to her is peacefulness. Although the word "peace" doesn't conjure up mental images of of the high thrills and deep ecstasies of skydiving or whitewater rafting, isn't it really the truth? Isn't the fleeting nature of such "happy" experiences as these always haunting our consciousness? And doesn't the very widespread accessibility of such "happy" experiences throw them into the ironic category of "cheap thrills?" (Ironic because they are available to anyone who has the guts and the money!)
True peace, however, is not cheap at all. At least it hasn't been for me. I have been given some opportunities recently to be put in the hot seat and discover the mettle of my inner peace, and let me tell you, no one has been more surprised than I to watch a holy calmness fall down and cover and smother what used to be inner turmoil and outer agitation. It's been like an out-of-body experience to stand aside and look upon a self I hardly recognize. Then it hits me that this is what God has been promising all along, ever since I drew near to Him to be Lord over Jan. You see, He has had to take me down some pretty rough roads, to teach me to turn lose of my own machinations and resources and take Him at His Word. There has been nothing easy or cheap about learning how to rest increasingly in the peace of God "that passes all understanding." I have spent most of my Christian life wondering if I would ever make it around the first bend of this race. This is why I feel like an alien onlooker lately when I find myself making some progress.

Even though in your whole lifetime you might not personally know even a handful of high-thrill seekers who spend all their time getting on and off bucking broncs or swimming with sharks, I'll bet you know even fewer (outside of those seriously stoned on drugs or who have had a lobotomy) who abide in overwhelming, awe-inspiring peace. This peace is as rare as hen's teeth-- so rare that when we find ourselves possessed of it when we know a year ago we would not have been, oh yes, indeed, it is a happy, happy day! We know that now we're really getting somewhere, not just coming to the end of the ride (or the free fall or back up to the boat where sharks can't breathe.) Peace doesn't just last for a few thrilling minutes. With practice-- soaking in God's presence-- it gets better and stronger and more reliable. It doesn't quit being available when our hair turns blue or our teeth fall out or we can't see or hear anymore, either, like most of those other "happy" things. That's good news for me and for everyone else like me who keeps having birthdays.

(P.S. This does not mean that I have given up my desire to jump a freight train.)