Attacked by the Fearings

The main character in Hannah Hurnard's classic allegory Hinds Feet on High Places is a little cripple named Much Afraid.   She is held captive by her relatives, the Fearings, and engaged to be married to Craven Fear against her will.  I relate to Much Afraid.  On her own, she is weak and vulnerable and always at the mercy of her fears.  Through the course of a long journey with Sorrow and Suffering for companions, she learns to trust the Shepherd.  He leads her away from the Fearings and toward the high places.

I think that those of us who are prone to fear tend to have a certain member of the Fearing family assigned to us.  The theme of my fears is usually the breaking of relationships.  According to Readers Digest I am in good company.  People in many parts of the world fear loneliness more than anything else.  Other people are plagued by different fears.  Some people fear that they are not good enough.  Other people fear poverty.  The Fearing family is very large.

It usually happens like this; I am working away in my own little world, happy and at peace.  Then, some discord happens.  It could be a disagreement with my husband or a feeling of distance between me and one of my children.  Somewhere at the other end of the house Craven Fear has climbed through a window and is creeping up behind me.  Suddenly I feel his icy fingers around my neck, choking me.  I can't breathe.  His gravelly voice growls threateningly in my ear.  "You are alone, and you are mine."

There it is.  That is the lie that gives Fear his power.  The second I choose to believe the lies that I am alone and at the mercy of Fear, I am lost.

But the truth is, I am not alone.  My Shepherd is with me, right beside me. "The Lord is at hand." Philippians 4:5. The truth is, I do not belong to fear. I have been purchased at a very high price by my Shepherd.  I belong to Him.

Sometimes when I first feel the icy breath of Fear on my neck, I close my ears to the lie in time.  I turn to my Shepherd and grab His hand.

Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God, and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.  Philippians 4:6-7
   

What Do You Fear?

People around the world were polled about their greatest fear.  They were asked if they were more afraid of being alone, going broke, losing their looks, or speaking in public. This month's Readers Digest summarized the results.  People in nine out of the sixteen countries polled chose loneliness as their greatest fear.  More people in the U.S. and six other countries chose going broke as their greatest fear. 

Maybe the fact that Americans fear going without money more than we fear going without other humans exposes us.  Six of the seven countries that listed going broke as their greatest fear are "highly industrialized".  Isn't that interesting?  Those of us who have money are most fearful of losing it.  Maybe people who don't have any money anyway are wiser; they know that being penniless isn't the worst thing that could happen.

The poll did not ask people if they ever feel fearful.  It assumed that they do.  I suppose that the experience of fear is universal.  Only the degree of fear or what triggers our fear varies.

I'm curious.  How about you?  What are you afraid of? 

My Happiness Habit: How to Avoid Being an Extreme, Raving, Self-centered Lunatic.

I have been thinking about developing a new habit lately.  Admittedly, most of my habits are accidental bad habits.  But, this time I am trying to grow a new, good habit.  I want to be a person who is deep down, on the inside, content.  I want to be someone whose joy can coexist with pain.

My guide is the apostle Paul.  In Philippians 4:4-8 he is closing his letter from a Roman prison with some quick advice.  The fact that Paul wrote this advice while sitting in a damp, stinky prison with rats for company makes me want to listen.  If Paul could be content there, surely I can be content in the midst of my everyday hassles.  Towards the beginning there is a sentence that seems out of place to me.  In my English Standard Version Bible it says, "Let your reasonableness be known to everyone." It is sandwiched between "Rejoice" and "the Lord is at hand; do not be anxious..."  If I was helping Paul edit his letter I would have suggested moving that phrase somewhere else.  What does reasonableness have to do with either rejoicing or anxiety? There must be some reason that it is stuck in this incongruous place.

What is "reasonableness" anyway? I am no Greek scholar, but I can navigate references so I looked it up.  The same word is translated, gentleness, unselfishness, and moderation.  Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, (in my mind I always think Strong's Exhausting Concordance...) says it means appropriate, and by implication, gentle, moderation and patient.  This is starting to make more sense.  Paul is saying don't be unreasonable, harsh, extreme, and impatient.   

I think another key is in the next phrase, "the Lord is at hand." 

The Message says, "Make it as clear as you can to all you meet that you're on their side, working with them and not against them. Help them see that the Master is about to arrive. He could show up any minute!"

I am picturing the frightened cry of a small child who has had a bad dream.  The mother dashes in to soothe the child.  She wraps her arms around her.  "Don't worry, Mommy is right here."  Her presence soothes, comforts.  Nothing can frighten the child now.  She can be reasonable instead of afraid because she knows that her Mommy is able to vanquish all the monsters under the bed.

So, like that fearful child I can rejoice.  I can be reasonable and gentle and unselfish.  I can keep from overreacting.  The Lord is at hand.

My Happiness Habit

I want to grow into a person who is characterized by deep contentment, the habit of happiness.

I started last weekend by thinking through the command to "Rejoice ... always"  I decided to focus on the sunny side of things.  About 10 minutes into Friday evening I discovered that rejoicing always was not as easy for me as I thought it would be.  There were little bumps.  It was nothing major.  The kids argued.  My husband and I had slightly different ideas about the best ways to respond to them.  We were all a bit on edge.  I realized that I was not rejoicing.  I hated the turmoil, even though it was minor turmoil.  Ripples in the household put me in turmoil.  I longed to hide for a long time, all weekend even, in a quiet place with a good book and a lot of chocolate.  Clearly, I still have much to learn about contentment.

I have had happiness on my mind for a while now.  I picked up the book The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin.  The author decided that she wanted to be happier.  She studied research on what makes people happy and set herself ambitious goals to achieve happiness.  Each month she focused on a different aspect of happiness.  She rated her success and charted her progress.

I was intrigued, maybe she had discovered the keys to happiness.  Does having a clean closet really make a person happier?  I wouldn't know... A short way into the book I started to feel vaguely uncomfortable with its approach.  I realized that I could never follow Gretchen's lead.  For one thing I hate charts.  Her set-a-goal-and-measure-your-progress way of doing things simply doesn't fit me. Besides, being orderly and disciplined about happiness felt wrong somehow. Shouldn't happiness just bubble up from the inside? I knew there was more to my discomfort than personality differences between Gretchen Rubin and myself, but I wasn't sure what the problem was.  I picked up Walking with God by John Eldredge. Something John said triggered an "aha moment" for me.  I suddenly understood my discomfort with The Happiness Project .

You can't possibly master enough principles and disciplines to ensure that your life works out.  You weren't meant to, and God won't let you.  For he knows that if we succeed without him, we will be infinitely further from him.  We will come to believe terrible things about the universe--things like I can make it on my own and If only I try harder, I can succeed. That whole approach to life--trying to figure it out, beat the odds, get on top of your game--it is ...entirely without God.  He is nowhere in those considerations.  That sort of scrambling smacks more of the infamous folks who raised the tower of Babel than it does of those who walked with God in the garden in the cool of the day.  In the end, I'd much rather have God.

Gretchen tried to figure out how to make life work.  She came up with some useful tidbits. But no checklist, even a thoroughly researched checklist, could make a person content at the core.

However,  I don't want to give up.  I still want to be characterized by deep contentment, the habit of being happy.

I decided to go back to Philippians 4:4-9. 

One reason my "sunny side" approach didn't work was that I mentally deleted the key phrase from the passage.  "Rejoice in the Lord always." The fact that the waters of my life are not always as placid as I would like them to be is a gift.  That way I remember that, at root, I am rejoicing in the Lord, and not merely in the gifts he gives me, not even the tremendous gift of a beautiful family.  Sometimes I get things twisted around and I act like God's job is to make me happy. He wants me to be happy, but more than that He knows that what I really long for is love.  I long to experience God's love for me and love him back.  Nothing less than that will be a stable enough foundation.  Nothing less lasts.   

Peaches and Tea

I am sitting in my kitchen with the door open to the fresh morning air and perfect clear blue sky.  The aroma of freshly baked peach crisp is filling the house.  I am full of anticipation for this afternoon when my sister and niece will join my daughter and me for tea. Not tea as in a mug of Lipton, TEA as in small sandwiches and sweets and pot after pot of darjeeling served in china cups.

Years ago a woman told me that one thing she loved about her husband was that he had the "habit of happiness".  That phrase is etched in my brain forever.  I want to be a habitually happy person. I am going to have to be intentional about this.  Being happy is not always easy. 

Instead of thinking about the good and beautiful things, many times I focus on the difficult things.  Today, I could focus  on ongoing frustrations that soiled the atmosphere in our house for a time last evening.  I could focus the anger I felt after my naughty dog escaped out an open gate, and rebelliously looked me straight in the eye, while she ignored my demand that she come.  Many times there are much more significant heartaches robbing me of joy.

Today happens to be a good day to start developing the habit.  It is an ordinary day, a muddle of the wonderful, the awful, and lots of stuff that is neither.  A good starting point is reading Philippians 4:4-8.

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice.  Let your reasonableness be known to everyone.  The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.  And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.  Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things, and the God of peace will be with you.

How will I start?  The same way I develop any good habit.  The process is pretty much the same each time.  At first, I try something deliberately, consciously.  It feels strange and awkward and uncomfortable.  If I keep at it, practicing at absolutely every opportunity, feeling ridiculous, the action gradually feels more comfortable.  Eventually, one day, I catch myself doing what used to seem so unnatural without even realizing it.  It has become a habit. 

I'm going to give developing the habit of happiness a shot. To begin, I am going to consciously choose to rejoice.  I'll let you know how it goes.

20-20 Vision

I see what I expect to see.  It happens in my writing all the time.  I try to edit and revise. I read things over a zillion times, and still I completely miss glaring errors right in front of my nose.

Research confirms that the see-what-you-expect-to-see phenomenon occurs in medical labs too.  People examining slides of tissue from biopsies see many more samples of healthy tissue than of diseased tissue.  After a while they tend to see only healthy tissue, even when the slide contains some cancer cells.

The same thing happens in my relationship with God.  

I pray and people I love continue to suffer.  I get tired of waiting for God to act.  Secretly I doubt.  I wonder if He has abandoned us. Sometimes I even wonder if He is there at all. I see only what I expect to see.

This kind of blindness occurs frequently to people in the Bible.  I love the story of bad eyesight found in 2 Kings 6.  Elisha the prophet, seems to enjoy interfering with Syria's plans to to wipe out Israel.  Elisha always knows what Ben-hadad, king of Syria is doing before he does it.  He is in the habit of letting the king of Israel know when and where Ben-hadad is going to launch his next 'surprise' attack.  Repeatedly the Syrian army charges onto a battle field, only to discover that Israel's army has moved on.  Tired of looking stupid, he assembles his officers, and demands to know which of them is a spy.  Fearing for their lives, they plead innocence and redirect the king's anger toward Elisha. 

The scene now changes to Elisha's home in the village of Dothan.  As the sun is just coming up over the horizon in the east, Elisha's servant Gehazi, heads outside and stops dead in his tracks. An entire army surrounds their little hillside village.  
He dashes to Elisha in panic, and pleads, "What are we going to do?" 
I imagine Elisha calmly taking another bite of his bacon and eggs before he answers. 
"Do not be afraid, for those who are with us are more than those who are with them." 
Before Gehazi can respectfully suggest that his master has lost his mind, Elisha asks God to open the servant's eyes.  For Gehazi peeking cautiously out from behind the curtain, the situation now appears to be entirely reversed. Elisha's home is surrounded by a second army.  It is comprised of intimidating chariots of fire facing down the Syrians. They seem far less frightening by contrast.

Elisha calmly takes one last sip of coffee, and prays for his enemies to be struck with blindness.  Then he goes out and informs the commanders of the Syrian army that they are lost.  He offers to take them to "the man you seek", and leads them all the way to Samaria.  The Syrians never dared to raid Israel again.

Wouldn't it be great if we could pray and suddenly be able to see the forces of good fighting for us the way Elisha could?  Maybe we can.  We can pray for 20-20 spiritual vision, and ears to hear, "Do not be afraid, for those who are with us are more than those who are with them."

Kisses from God

A twelfth century monk is an unlikely choice for a tutor on kisses.  This morning I sat down with Bernard of Clairvaux, and he taught me about kisses. 

"Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!"

Is it a quote from a romance novel or a steamy chick flick?  It definitely doesn't seem like what it is, a Bible verse.  

I do love kisses.  My favorite thing in the whole world is for my husband to hold me tight and kiss me tenderly, passionately, intimately.  During my many years as a single mom I wanted so much to be loved, to be kissed by a man, that I ached, literally, physically.

So, when Bernard talks about longing for kisses from God, he definitely has my attention.   I know all about longing for kisses.  But, do I ache for kisses from God?  Maybe part of the problem is that I can't quite imagine God desiring me.  I can imagine "Jesus loves me"  in a Sunday-school-sing-songy kind of way.  But, God wanting to kiss me?  That sounds too intimate.  Can I imagine God himself bending down, filled with love for little Beth, wanting to kiss me?  It feels wrong, like blasphemy somehow.  But if it is in the Bible, and saints from millennia past thought of relationship with God in terms of kisses,  maybe it is OK.  Maybe more than that, maybe I am missing out on something really good.  

His living and effective word is a kiss; not a meeting of the lips, which can sometimes be deceptive about the state of the heart but a full infusion of joys, a revelation of secrets, a wonderful and inseparable mingling of the light from above and the mind on which it is shed, which, when it is joined with God, is one spirit with him.   -Bernard of Clairvaux

That is a kiss I want to experience, over and over forever!
During those years when I wanted so much to be loved, I felt bad about it, like there was something wrong with me.  I wondered why I couldn't be content.   Now, I don't think I wanted too much.  Actually, I think I settle for too little.

Listen to what else Bernard told me this morning, "I can scarcely contain my tears, so ashamed am I of the lukewarmness and lethargy of the present times."  I don't know too much about Bernard's times, but I can hardly imagine that they could possibly have been more lukewarm and lethargic than we are in our times. 

So, I feel a free and powerful longing to be kissed by God welling up inside me.    Bernard takes things a step further even, getting almost sexual in his description,

O happy kiss...which is not a mere meeting of lips, but the union of God with man.  The touch of lips signifies the bringing together of souls.  But this conjoining of natures unites the human with the divine and makes peace between earth and heaven. 'For he himself is our peace, who made the two one' (Eph. 2:14)  This was the kiss for which the holy men of old longed, the more so because they foresaw the joy and exultation of finding their treasure in him and discovering all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge in him, and they longed to receive of his fullness.

I want to know God that way, tenderly, intimately, passionately.  I say with the Song of Songs "Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!"    I want my human soul to be united with God; I want to find my treasure in him. I want to receive his fullness.

 

Favorite Funny Signs Part 1

Good to know.  In Juneau the bear always has the right-of-way!

Of Slaves, Mercenaries, and Daughters

There are some who praise God for his power, some who praise him for his goodness to them, and some who praise him simply because he is good.  The first is a slave, fearful on his own account.  The second is a mercenary and desires profit for himself.  The third is a son who honors his father.  Both he who is fearful and he who is greedy act for themselves.  Only he who loves like a son does not seek his own.   -Bernard of Clairvaux 

We modern people assume that we have come far.  We can access the internet on our cell phones.  Isn't that proof enough that we are an advanced civilization?  But Bernard's words centuries ago describe my prayers pretty well.  Sometimes I am self centered.  I act like a fearful slave who loves God for his power, or a mercenary who loves God because of what I want Him to do for me. I don't want to be that way though.  I want to love God like a daughter, just because He is my father.    

I am so glad that He is a gentle father.  Each day he is uses joy and pain and His words and my sisters and brothers and the sunset and the taste of fresh peaches to show me who he is.  And when I see, really see, I can't help but love Him just for Him.  In those times, my prayers are not full of fear and greed.  I forget myself for a moment, curl up close to him, throw my little arms around his neck, and exclaim "Abba!  I love you!"  In those times, I only want to stay there, close to Him. 

Those Who See

As adults, we lose our eyesight.  

I don't mean the kind that can be corrected by a visit to the eye doctor; I am talking about a more important kind of vision.  

One of my favorite authors, Anne Lamott, talks about seeing the world sacramentally, "to see everything as an outward and visible sign of inward, invisible grace. "

Some children are masters at this.  I remember years ago taking a walk with Courtney.  She was in third grade; her parents were divorcing, and I wanted to give her a little moral support.  We were walking along together and she suddenly stopped.  "Look at that flower!"  She forgot everything except the beauty before her.  I looked but couldn't see anything that could possibly have inspired awe.  She had to point to the flower right next to her before I could see it.  It wasn't too small for my eyes.  It was huge.  I couldn't see it, because it was a weed, an enormous thorny thistle in full bloom.  Patiently she taught me to see.  "It is soooo purple!  And soft!  Look, put your finger here.  Doesn't it feel like velvet?" 

Hating the nuisance and thorns of the thistle robbed me of my ability to be present and in awe of the color of the downy purple bloom.   

Seeing was a source of Emily Dickinson's genius too.  In the poem that inspired the name of this blog she says, 

Earth's crammed with Heaven and every common bush afire,

but only those who see take off their shoes...

I want to walk around my whole life with my eyes open and my shoes off, even when I walk among thistles.