CHRISTMAS APPLES

Dear Blog-Friends,

Before this Christmasy post, I just wanted to give you a little update.  BROKEN JAR is in the process of being republished at this time and should be ready for distribution within a few weeks.  It was important for me to do this because I have been unhappy with the many errors I overlooked in its first printing.  Also, it will soon be available on e-books for your Kindle and the like.

Also, I am finally publishing OUT OF THE CHUTE IN AZALEA HEIGHTS!  This is my little novella based on my year as a fifth-grade hoodlum in Center, Texas, back in 1961. Some of you have been waiting a long time for me to take this step.  I am to be the local author guest speaker at a luncheon in February for the Belton Friends of the Library, so I was prompted to quit dragging my feet, get out of the miry clay, and on the stick about this thing. Also, I have a tentative invitation from Martha Rushing to come speak again to the Reading Club in Center on March 15.  I am quite excited about these opportunities.  OUT OF THE CHUTE... will also be available on e-books from Amazon. I hope that those of you who have been encouraging me for so long will not be disappointed with the result.

Merry Christmas to all of you who keep checking to see if this inconsistent, fickle blogger-of-sorts has finally posted something.  She appreciates you greatly!  

Now, for something a little more inspiring...

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“Then they opened their treasures and presented Him with gifts of gold and of incense and of myrrh.”  Matthew 2:11

                I’ve always thought the greatest gift is words. You can quit eating macaroni and cheese four times a week in order to save for an extravagant something for everyone on your list.  I really do believe in extravagant giving, but I know that the things bought with the big dollar often fail to afford the desired heart-result without first having established what we’re trying to say in giving them.

                Proverbs 25:11 says, “A word aptly spoken is like apples of gold in settings of silver.”  If words are the deepest, most definitive messengers, this Proverb provokes some pretty deep thought:  Someone might argue that if words are so foundational, why do writers strive for the perfect metaphor to turn the abstract into the concrete, the words into pictures?  Why do they take a bland statement of fact and embellish it with imagery until it, like a caterpillar to a butterfly, is transformed into a poetic work of art?  Good points, but finish the thought.  When a student of the poem discovers the pictures, the teacher then asks him to communicate his discoveries in words.  When the beloved reads the sonnet, her mind takes the pictures and translates them back into words of her own:  “How thrilling that he loves me this much!”— which was the author’s truest and most basic motivation for writing the sonnet.  He has succeeded in communicating the feelings in his heart via word pictures to his beloved.  He didn’t really want to give her the ocean’s constancy or the rose’s fragrance; they were just the means to an end, a way to communicate the eternal and delightful aspects of his love so that she could get it and say, “How thrilling that he loves me this much!”

                The goods we find inside the festively decorated boxes at Christmas were carefully chosen and paid for at the behest of some sentiment inside the buyer’s heart that took her through the stores searching, finding, touching, inspecting, cocking her head in a visionary way to find out if it would send the right message. What we pull out of the packages and stockings at Christmas are no more and no less than tangible messages, reminders when seen, touched, smelled, worn, driven, or eaten, of someone’s love, esteem, or appreciation for us.  This is why we say, usually a little too casually and more, I fear, as a cliché than a conviction, “It’s the thought that counts.”

                So, okay, even more basic than the words are the thoughts, the feelings.  Yes, they are the real bottom line, but since none of us can read minds, God gave us a means of communicating them to others: words—“words aptly spoken.”

From Broken Jar:365 Days on the Potter's Wheel, Jan Doke

A CORNUCOPIA OF THANKS

Today there is reason for all of us to give thanks.  Some, fully able to identify right now with these traditional blessings, might prefer the first poem,  Others will find yourselves encountering a different kind of Thanksgiving this year, blessed, oh yes, for sure, but with a different feel--one more sober with both feet planted on the ground though your eyes are still cast upward.  Whatever your Thanksgiving is like this year, whatever your feelings are tempting you to accept as truth,  I pray you and all those you love will know the presence of your Father, your Jehovah Jireh, the God who provides. 

“Enter His gates with thanksgiving, and His courts with praise; give thanks to Him and praise His name.   For the Lord is good and His love endures forever; His faithfulness continues through all generations.”  Psalm 100:4-5

“Thank you for the world so sweet.

Thank you for the food we eat.

Thank you for the birds that sing;

Thank you, God, for everything.”

For budding life—both petal and skin—

And the courage it gives me to hope again;

The oranges and yellows of Your autumnal world,

And the pink in the cheeks of our new baby girl.

For her days ahead full of trouble but grace

That will give her the strong feet to win the long race.

For a husband who lays down his life in your care,

And forgives me unendingly and goes on from there;

For my children whose faces go with me each day,

Growing older and wiser but still loving to play—

Sons and daughters as they’ve always been,

But now brothers and sisters who’ve become my friends.

For hearts who cherish my history,

And whose knees bend in prayer for me stubbornly;

For their eyes that are tender and hearts that are strong;

Tongues that will lovingly tell me I’m wrong.

For arms that enfold me and kiss away tears;

For the blood of your son that shatters my fears;

For brown earth that blossoms beneath yellow sun;

For a spirit that sings and feet that can run;

A mind that remembers and heart that can see

Such visions in detail of all that can be.

For bright hope and warm comfort that always abounds

When I fall disheartened with my face to the ground.

You remind me of all of the times in the past

When the bleakness I feared had won didn’t last.

So for seasons that change, for the thrill of surprise,

For Your Son who came near to reveal Satan’s lies,

For You packed in everything above and below,

What can I say?  How can I show

My thanks for this cornucopia so sweet

Sent down with your blessing and laid at my feet?

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“After this, the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision:

              ‘Do not be afraid, Abram.

              I am your shield,

             Your very great reward.’” Genesis 15:1

Oh, Lord, in this season of fruitless requests

When I’m called just to trust you to do what is best,

With heavier feet I come; still I come—

Not with bountiful faith, but at least with some.

Pale and muted I sit, but at least I just sit

And not rush around madly trying to make pieces fit.

I know you are wishing I’d just leave this alone

In your hands while I count all the blessings I own.

Oh, please see I keep trying, but I’m crippled, it seems—

Haunted by losses and fractured dreams.

Please move me along from this waiting place

To your higher ground of selfless grace

Where my own minor bruises fade from my view,

And I bow in thanksgiving for the Blessing of You.

You said just to “stand” when we’ve done all we know,

So I’ll stand here in your armor until you say “Go,”

Praying that the mind of Christ will move in

So at last I might lose, and you finally might win.

Maybe this Thanksgiving feels different from the other years.  Perhaps the blessing you feel you need most continues and continues and continues some more to hide elusively.  If the blessings you are counting seem still not to overcome the weight of the pain and disappointment, push that list aside and focus fully on the one greatest Blessing—your “shield and your very great reward.”  Remember, Dear One, that when we can manage to stay put before God, when we can manage to remain standing even though we can’t make much forward progress, we are at just the right place to take the rare opportunity to bless God for being the Everlasting Arms when all others fail, the Mighty Shield when every other defense has fallen.  In our dearth we find a different kind of cornucopia; in our penury, a new way to give thanks. 

From Broken Jar: 365 Days on the Potter's Wheel, Jan Doke, 2009

PEACE THAT COMES WITH A SWORD

“Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth.  I did not come to bring peace but a sword… Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.” Matthew 10:34-37

T

he angels in the fields near Bethlehem proclaimed that the birth of Jesus would usher in peace, and yet Jesus as an adult insisted that He came not to bring peace but rather a sword.  How can the “Good News” proclaimed by the angels really be so good if Jesus Himself speaks such bleak words about family members being set against one another?  Jesus elaborates by explaining that those who set out to follow Him will have to choose between making Him Lord or making someone or something else Lord. He has already told us four chapters earlier in His Sermon on the Mount that “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate one and love the other, or hold to one and despise the other” (Matthew 6:24).  

            Jesus’ purpose in telling us these things was not to cause trouble but to prepare us for it.  He wanted us to count the cost of being His true disciple before we set out on this road.  He had already explained that there would be few that would take this narrow road and many more who would take the broad one that leads to destruction ( Matthew 7:13-14). Neither was He advocating violence when He referred to the “sword,” but rather used it metaphorically to describe how the choice we would make would divide—cut in two—some of our prior relationships.

 Indeed He did come to bring us peace—the very best kind, the only lasting kind—and He continued to proclaim it right up to the eve of His death:  “Peace I leave with you; My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give it to you.  Let not your heart be troubled, nor let it be fearful” (John 14:27).  There could be no more perfect picture of peace than Jesus spelled out for His disciples, but He made it perfectly clear that it was His peace, not the peace that the world offers and not the stereotypical definition of peace that many earthlings embrace.  Think, for instance, of the Hippies of the sixties who in the name of peace burned their draft cards, or many who every day, in the name of a “peaceful” life, choose to end their babies’ lives before they see their faces or hold them in their arms. 

To be at peace with Christ is to be at war with Satan and to be at odds with the world, but it is the only peace worth having.  It is the only peace that follows us through all of life’s conflicts, diseases, disappointments, and death.  This is a peace of mind and security of soul that can be possible only by means of a Savior— and not just a pseudo-savior that brings a temporary, fading  relief that leaves us worse off than before— but a true Savior who serves as a Peace Treaty between ourselves and  Almighty God who will judge the entire universe.

            The sword of Christ is a weapon of destruction but not the kind we need fear or dread.  Living the Christian life arms us with the sword of the Spirit—the Word of God— which is vital if we are to cut through the lies and discover the truth.

NEW SEASON, OLD LEAVES

NEAR SEDONA, ARIZONA

“They are autumn trees, without fruit and uprooted—twice dead.”  Jude 12

I like the hush of autumn; its quietness is so huge.

It falls like cotton around me, swallowing me whole with its cushiony throat.

First my ears go down its gullet, and then my tongue is stilled.

The rest of me falls motionless in a comforting paralysis.

I think it is a most holy season when the din of fans can die,

And finally we can listen unhindered to the whisperings of God.

Autumn is so lovely.  Even its name—autumn—falls eloquently from the tongue and is beautiful to look at with its silent “n” just hanging out there so unobtrusively beside sister “m” who gets all the press. It seems to be just an in-between season hanging on to the leftovers of summer, when everyone came out to play hard, while serving as a harbinger of winter, when we all will go back in to recover so we can do it all again next summer. But it isn’t just a memory of one time or a preview of another.  Autumn is a glorious season by its own merits.  It is a quiet glory, though, bidding us be still and listen to gentle rustlings.  It can be a time when we slow down after summer’s rush to listen to how God might want to be preparing us for the seasons ahead.  It can be a time when we let old foliage fall away to make room for the fruit he is forming inside.

Some of the most beautiful imagery in the entire Bible is in the little book of Jude, just one chapter long, tucked between John’s three epistles and Revelation.  Jude’s imagery here is a little confusing at first:  autumn is not the time for fruit, so why should the tree be uprooted?  And what does “twice dead” mean? 

 Jude, probably the half brother of our Lord, wrote this letter to warn his readers to be on guard against false teachers who were perverting the meaning of grace so as to give license to sin so that grace “could abound,” to use the words of Paul. It occurs to me that many times I am my own worst false teacher of this doctrine. Sometimes I want to allow myself great liberties; I want to hold on to the thrills of a bygone season of my life when God wants me to shed those and enter into His deeper thrills.  Because He has been gentle with me— bestowed such grace upon me— I fear the heartaches of letting go of what I know to reach out to what I don’t know more than I fear God and the consequences He might allow if I do not obey Him. And so in this season when He desires to strengthen my roots in preparation for fruit to come in a future season, I refuse to shed the rapturously-colored leaves I glory in.  Thus, I am “twice dead”—first, dead to the faith work I need to consent to right now, and secondly, dead to the possibility of the future fruit God envisions for me.  Without his grace, I would already be uprooted.

On the brink of this new season, purpose to allow old foliage to fall away.  Dare to embrace the naked starkness of the outside to enable every bit of the nourishment to go to the roots.  Let us get silent before God and ask Him what must go in order for His way-down-deep growth to best be accomplished in us.  Autumn to the branches can be springtime to the core.

“Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.”  2 Corinthians 4:16

THE PRICE OF AUTHENTICITY

“For unto us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders.  And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end.”  Isaiah 9:6-7

I

magine yourself as a Jew whose family has for generations awaited the Messiah promised by God through the voices of Abraham and the prophets.  Your people, having been under the rule of such pagan nations as Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Media Persia, Greece, and now Rome, know little of true peace.  But you and your family have been hanging on—sometimes only by a thread —to this promise from Isaiah, so you faithfully observe all the festivals, pray, watch, and wait…and wait, and wait for this Prince of Peace to arrive in His glory and take upon His shoulders this government, shattering the yoke of Rome.

            And then one day it happens.  The messengers are angels, and the first audience is a clump of lowly shepherds:  “And suddenly, there appeared with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace…’ ” (Luke 2:13-14).  Now it can begin.  At last this elusive peace that has seemed like only a fairy tale for so long will be yours.

            But we who live more than two thousand years removed from that first angelic carol of hope know that the peace that the Jews waited for so long took on a much different form from their expectations.  The baby in the manger was indeed the Messiah, the Prince of Peace that the prophets foretold, but the kind of peace He ushered in left many Jews scratching their heads and squinting their eyes.

And if truth be told, the Jews of two thousand years ago were not the only ones confused—even disappointed and disillusioned—by lives burdened down with frustrated dreams, thwarted plans, and irreconcilable conflicts. In our twenty-first century free nation of America, the city sidewalks and country lanes are filled to overflowing with lives every bit as devoid of peace as those Jews beset by alien nations.  If Jesus came to deliver peace, why aren’t we enjoying it?

            Matthew 10:34 records these words from Jesus:  “Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.  For I came to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother…and a man’s enemies will be the members of his household.”

 Upon first glance, this seems contradictory to Isaiah 9, but a closer look at the angel’s message brings clarification. Maybe we were so carried away with the wonderful news of our long-awaited Messiah that we quit paying attention before we got to the end of the message:  “…and on earth peace among men with whom He is pleased” (Luke 2:14).

            Yes, true peace is conditional, but anything easier would be counterfeit.

DUCKS’ BACKS OR SPONGES

 “Do not hate your brother in your heart.  Rebuke your neighbor frankly so you will not share in his guilt.”  Leviticus 19:17

 “Whoever of you loves life and desires to see many good days, keep your tongue from evil…seek peace, and pursue it.”  Psalm 34:12-14

Choosing the right path to true peace—discerning between peacemaking and peacefaking— is not always easy.  Just knowing that sometimes we must confront, even though it is uncomfortable, doesn’t solve all the problems that go along with trying to be wise. 

 If we move too quickly in one direction— speak our minds as a sort of knee-jerk reaction— we might be plagued with regret for the rest of our days for spouting off things we didn’t really mean after a while. 

If we convince ourselves to wait it out and see if our resentment or hurt indeed will roll away like water off a duck’s back, sometimes, even if it doesn’t roll away, we listen to the Evil One as he uses one or more of several tactics to convince us not to go back and revisit this Thing with our sister or brother.  (Many of us err in the first way because we are the type who know from past experience that if we convince ourselves to wait it out and see if our resentment or hurt indeed will roll away like water off a duck’s back, we might once again end up despising ourselves for our fearful or slothful paralysis.) 

How do we grow a heart of wisdom in this matter so that we will neither react “knee-jerkfully” nor allow the devil to falsely placate us into a deadly malaise that will surface in some bizarre way down the road?  My friend Candy calls this bizarre kind of surfacing “coming out sideways.” That paints a pretty graphic picture, doesn’t it?

Something that has worked for me is the Jericho solution.  When some hurt lingers until the next day and I am tempted to “speak my piece” as a means of finding my peace, I begin praying specifically and purposefully about it for seven days.  After this weeklong prayer vigil, I will notice that I am either greatly prompted to have the discussion or else the thing has faded from bright red to pale pink, and the sharp edges have been whittled down to a smoothness that no longer has pricking power.  

 

Whether we can be a duck’s back about an offense or for some reason can’t help being a sponge about it is important for us to learn and admit to ourselves. Somewhere in our anger and hurt, we might have missed the possibility that we have likewise been part of the offense. 

If we don’t deal honestly with ourselves and our brothers and sisters, we might miss the possibility that we, too, have offended, and according to the spirit of Matthew 5:23-24, our gifts to our Father will not be accepted.  What a terrible plight!  We must be diligent to pray to be delivered from such costly deception.