Author: jc

Have you ever thought about the woman in the Gospels who bled for 12 years, who suffered so greatly and spent all she had, but was never healed? A woman so desperate for relief she fought through a crowd to touch the hem of Jesus’ garment?

How many times did she get her hopes up when she heard of another doctor and another remedy, only to be crushed again and again? How many well-meaning remarks did she have to endure from friends and family? How often in the middle of the night did she get on her knees and beg God for help, throat nearly strangled by tears of grief?

And nothing. Twelve long years of silence from heaven.

What about the man born blind? How often did he and his family endure scoffing and hypocritical questions? How many times was he taunted by neighborhood kids growing up — oooh, your parents must have sinned big for God to curse you this way! How many times did his parents drag him to the temple to make sacrifices for the sin they thought his blindness represented?

Did that little boy cry out to God from his darkness? Was he resigned to his fate or filled with bitterness? How was he treated by the extended family, unwillingly burdened by the shame his blindness brought upon them all?

Twelve years of bleeding and suffering. A lifetime of darkness and shame. And for what?

For you, my friend. And for me.

So that the works of God might be displayed in them. So that we might believe.

~~~

One of the most typical street foods here in Turkey is called the döner. It’s sort of like a burrito, a tortilla that you fill with beef, chicken or lamb, and then a few other ingredients like pickled vegetables or french fries. The seasoned meat is stacked in an inverted cone on a vertical stake which turns slowly next to a heat source that continually cooks the meat as you take thin slices off.

Now I don’t mean to turn you off of trying a döner sometime because they can be quite delicious, but to me, sometimes suffering feels a little like being a döner. One day you’re minding your own business reading a nice book beside a quiet river, when suddenly someone slips up behind you and stabs you with a stake. Then they mount you in front of a blazing fire and instantly you’re in agony. You’re spinning and spinning and burning and burning. There are bits of you being sliced brutally away, and it seems like it’s never going to end.

And what do we do when we’re on the stake? Our tendency is to look down at our flesh melting away, mesmerized by the flames seeking to devour us. When the knife returns again and again we cower and nearly lose our minds in terror.

Look at me, we scream at God. Help me, save me, heal me!

Of course that’s our response — no one loves pain and suffering. And no one in their right mind volunteers to be burned alive!

But can I ask you something? Have you ever considered how many people suffered bringing you to faith? For me the number is high, but I can tell you in particular that I staked my parents through the heart and kept them up there spinning in the flames for years when I was a’prodigaling.

Yes, I was struggling through addiction and pain and grief. Yes, I was broken in a million pieces and fighting for my life. But in the most basic and truthful way, I was rebelling against God. I refused to yield to what I knew to be true because I was so angry with Him I could barely function.

And all that time in rebellion I stood there turning the wheel of my parents’ stake, watching them burn and writhe because of my actions. It wasn’t that I didn’t care, it was that I simply couldn’t take the step that was necessary to get them down.

~~~

A number of years ago I met a man in Senegal who told me how he came to believe in Jesus. He worked for a believing family for 20 years who treated him well and shared the truth with him over and over, but he never believed. Then one day, all but the father were killed in a car accident. Watching the father’s faith hold up through the onslaught of overwhelming grief caused this man to finally believe what they’d told him about Jesus all those years.

It was a great outcome for the Senegalese man, but personally, I always wondered about that father. What would he say to his former employee? Could he say it was worth the loss of his family that this one man might believe? Certainly not! Was there a sliver of good that came out of it? Okay, if you put it that way … but tread carefully, please.

Have you ever considered that the suffering you’re enduring — the weight of pain that feels like it will crush you at any moment — might be part of His plan to save someone else?

We take pride in our Western individualistic culture and pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps — but it is not only not Biblical, it’s damaging in some ways. I don’t think the self-centered lenses we view the world through give us the complete picture of the way God operates. He sees His bride as a whole, a family, members of one body … AND … He will do anything it takes to get to a single lost sheep. I’ve come to believe He might even throw us up on the stake Himself.

So the question is — can we still believe in His goodness when our life is going up in flames? What if we’re in agony, on the spit, being turned and burned on every side, and it never ends this side of heaven? Will we be able to maintain our trust in a good God who loves us more than we will ever understand — and yet — is willing to let us keep burning for reasons He may never explain to us?

If the rock-solid foundational truth we have been able to build our lives on is that God is good, I believe it’s possible our answer could be yes. I can at least say I know personally a good number of people whose answer is yes. To rephrase Paul, let God be good, and my world go up in flames around me.

~~~

I will send out an army to find you
In the middle of the darkest night, it’s true
I will rescue you
I will never stop marching to reach you
In the middle of the hardest fight, it’s true
I will rescue you
Lauren Daigle, Rescue

~~~

Are you grieving? Let us grieve with you. Are you bleeding? Let us bind your wounds. Are you weary? Let us carry your pack for awhile. Have you just lost a dearly beloved? Let us wipe your tears and sit quietly by your side.

But let us never forget that this is not yet, in fact, heaven. Let us never forget that we are the broken and beloved He has chosen to populate His army with, living daily smack-dab in the middle of the territory of an enemy who seeks to devour us whole, but ever marching forward until every last one of our brothers and sisters is rescued from enemy hands. We belong to one another because we belong to Him.

Not all suffering is unexpected, some of it we can choose to walk into — leaving a group of dear Christian friends you love so that you have more time to spend with those who haven’t yet had a chance to hear, making yourself radically uncomfortable to spend time with and get to know a people group grievously opposed to your belief system, mortifying your flesh and your pride and your personality to truly love your enemy with no expectation of reciprocity.

What are you willing to endure so that your prodigal brother can finally come home? What are you willing to suffer so that your daughter will finally comprehend how much He loves her? What would you do for the guy at the office whose comments make your blood boil if you knew he would one day be your brother? Would you willingly place yourself where it’s possible they could drown you while climbing over you to get into the lifeboat? Because they’re drowning. They’re flailing. They’re dying. Right now.

The bleeding woman and the man born blind have been in heaven for approximately 2,000 years. How much time do you think they spend remembering their suffering? Or do you think they can say, like Paul, that it was light and momentary? Personally, I think the weight of glory has utterly obliterated those desperate years for them. And just think, their party is only beginning.

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“I prayed for this child, and the Lord has granted me what I asked of Him.” 1 Samuel 1:27

Yesterday I celebrated my first Mother’s Day from the side of being a mother. We went to church and I was holding my daughter while we began singing and my heart was swelling with thankfulness to the Lord —

How did this happen, this beautiful gift in my arms? How can I ever thank You enough?

— and reader beware, don’t read any further if you’re looking for a happy story this morning!

And then the familiar intro of a song that has the power to strike fear in my heart within the first few notes — Majesty — the song we played at my baby brother’s funeral. The song I will always connect, no matter how much I’ve learned to enjoy singing it, with being shattered upon the immovable will of God in a broken world, as for His own purposes, He acts in ways that we would never choose.

I’ll tell you what it felt like: it felt like a slap in the face, a punch in the gut, and like the kind of grand foreshadowing I’d write into one of my novels to see if the reader was paying attention.

It felt like God was letting me know that He was about to take my daughter. It felt like death.

My husband knows how I feel about that song and he looked down at me and teared up himself when he saw the tears in my eyes and the difficulty I was having breathing. He reached for my hand and I clung to it, trying to get control of myself.

I employed the tactics I’ve learned over these past seven months of fear-attacks since my daughter arrived. I rebuked the fear in the name of Jesus. I confessed to giving into that fear and asked for forgiveness. I asked for help from the Holy Spirit in taking my thoughts captive. I refused to listen to the voices and the temptation to worry about tomorrow. I focused on breathing in and out and loving my daughter today, which is the command I’ve heard over and over since her birth.

But I couldn’t get past that little niggling doubt about foreshadowing. What if this is the kindness of my Father helping me begin to prepare?

I’d like to say that all my strategies worked, but in actual fact, after begging Jesus to save me from the waves threatening to drown me where I sat, I had heart palpitations. It was like another slap, a glass of cold water in my face. Suddenly I realized it could be me who was going to die and leave her behind.

It was enough to shake me free from the attack, and for that I thank Jesus for His creativity in getting me out of the smoke at times when I can’t help myself.

My daughter needed to be fed so I took her back to the cry room during the sermon and half-listened, slowly coming back to normal. Outside the flood of emotion and terror of the waves, I focused on His face and what is true: I will love her today, You’re in charge of tomorrow.

Our pastor’s wife spoke on Hannah. I didn’t hear much until my daughter fell asleep, but then I tuned in right as she read the above lovely verse, which I’ve heard time and time again. It’s even quilted onto one of my favorite quilts a dear friend made for my daughter.

But do you remember what the next verse says? I went to look it up and lost my breath all over again.

“So now I give him to the Lord. For his whole life he will be given over to the Lord.” 1 Samuel 1:28

I realized as I never had before how Hannah must have felt. She knew from the beginning that she had promised Samuel to the Lord. She knew she would only have him for a couple of years, and then she would lose him forever. She would go home alone and live a life of missing him. Of thinking of his sweet little hand in hers, of his eyes staring up at her, of his head leaning on her shoulder and the little puffs of breath he breathed into her neck.

A lifetime un-lived. A growing up un-watched. An unbreakable bond with one end flapping in the wind.

And she knew.

My God.

How could she do it? How could she love him in that moment and not let her heart turn sour with longing and her soul crust over with bitterness, watching the days fly off the calendar and knowing they were completely and desperately finite?

We all love quoting Psalm 23 to ourselves, but I think I’ve always pictured those when-I-walk-through-the-valley-of-the-shadow-of-death moments as somewhat temporary. Horrible and desperate and agonizing, of course, but I’ve lived through a few of them so I know you eventually crawl forward into the light again.

But now I realize this awful truth of motherhood — we are always living in the shadow of death.

Our children live with us here in this broken world where a sovereign God demonstrates every day that His thoughts are not our thoughts. He chose to close Hannah’s womb to show His glory. He chose to give her Samuel and then take him away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.

Our children grow up in a world where, every day, God makes beauty out of ashes. And unfortunately, there are new ashes made every day by the endless and innumerable fires burning everywhere we look. He chose to give us free will, and because of that free will being exercised, He is every day out here among us, putting out fires and pulling off miraculous recoveries. He’s also in the fire, kneeling beside those who are burning alive. Blessed be the name of the Lord.

We will watch our children be wounded and threatened and devastated and, for some of us, we will watch God take them or allow them to be taken. A God who is so holy that you can’t even look at Him without going blind. A God who has done so many wonderful deeds among men that His goodness can’t be catalogued. A God who gave what was required, Whose love for us is immeasurable. Blessed be the name of the Lord.

This is the God we serve and this is the world we live in, and motherhood might be the worst juxtaposition of the two I’ve yet lived through.