How to Make Any Relationship Better

When the Farmer comes in after 11 from the field, he carries it in on his grimy shirt, a few pounds of dirt.

I wonder if he feels it, the weight of the gritty world on his shoulders.

He finds me in a straight back chair at the window in lamp light. There are pages on my lap. He has no words.

Continue reading here....

Cannot Make Yourself

Do not be angry that you cannot make others as you would wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.

-- Thomas à Kempis

Wants To Be

Family ought to see a man less for what he is, and more for what the man wants to be.

-- Brother Smith

Faith & Control

Faith is about, among other things, the release of the need to control life.

In fact, show me someone who has faith, and I will show you someone who has less and less tied up in how things go.  And, in opposite, show me someone who has a high need for control, and you will see someone to whom faith is not much more than an idea.

Control is most often about fear.  But here is the key to fear.

The Key

He will be the sure foundation for your times, a rich store of salvation and wisdom and knowledge; the fear of the LORD is the key to this treasure.

-- Isaiah 33:6

This is the kind of assurance we have, even when it feel like this.

What Lies In Me

I have never met a person I could despair of, or lose all hope for, after discerning what lies in me apart from the grace of God.

-- Oswald Chambers

What Needs Healed

What if your healing comes through tears?

What if it takes tears to turn our hearts to God? What if it is our humility that rolls 'our stone' away?

Humility

The soul of a true Christian, as I then wrote my meditations, appeared like such a little white flower as we see in the spring of the year; low and humble on the ground, opening its bosom to receive the pleasant beams of the sun's glory; rejoicing as it were in a calm rapture; diffusing around a sweet fragrancy; standing peacefully and lovingly, in the midst of other flowers round about; all in like manner opening their bosoms to drink in the light of the sun. There was no part of creature holiness, that I had so great a sense of its loveliness, as humility, brokenness of heart and poverty of spirit; and there was nothing that I so earnestly longed for. My heart panted after this - to lie low before God, as in the dust; that I might be nothing, and that God might be all, that I might become as a little child.

-- Jonathan Edwards

Manna

Your future includes manna. It will come. There is no sense devising future scenarios now because God will do more than you anticipate. When you understand God's plan to give future grace, you have access to what is arguably God's most potent salve against worry and fear.

-- Ed Welch, Running Scared

Lose Your Life

Lose you life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death to your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

-- C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

This still surprises us when we come up against it. We ascent to it, even rather easily, until we are faced with the loss or letting go of something particular...something that makes us feel like we are losing life.

But what does this really mean, if it doesn't mean the areas we spend most of our time preserving, protecting, even building?

Peace & Safety

There is no way to peace along the way of safety. For peace must be dared, it is itself the great venture and can never be safe. Peace is the opposite of security. To demand guarantees is to want to protect oneself. Peace means giving oneself completely to God’s commandment, wanting no security, but in faith and obedience laying the destiny of the nations in the hand of Almighty God, not trying to direct if for selfish purposes. Battles are won, not with weapons, but with God. They are won where the way leads to the cross.

-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Anything You Have

[Anything you have...] It is due to the century and place in which you were born, to your talents and capacities and health, none of which you earned.

In short, all your resources are in the end — the gift of God.

-- Tim Keller

Tami and I were talking recently.  The more I have and the more I am aware of what others don't, the more I struggle to accept the disparity, to not ache for those without. And not just without the physical comforts or benefits in this life, but the deeper and internal stuff that people don't have, don't know about. I have been blessed with so much, not the least of which is awareness of God's goodness.  But, we are all one. And, I can't not feel a ping of inability to completely enjoy something knowing that others are suffering in so many of the dimensions that they are -- some of it by their own choosing, but much of it (perhaps) not.

Oh, to be more like Moses.

Gratitude

An attitude of gratitude creates blessings.

-- Sir John Templeton

Saw this one this morning; seems fitting in light of yesterday's post.

Lack of Time?

The real problem of life is never a lack of time.

The real problem of life is lack of thanksgiving.

Why did Jesus give thanks before He broke the bread and fishes that weren't enough to feed all the people? Did He need to? Did He do it to teach us to do it? Or, was it that He knew something about the relationship between thankfulness and time...and multiplying things. We might accurately report we don't have time to stop and be thankful, we've got thing to do and places to go to make things happen, to keep up...with all that we don't have time for.

...stopping to pray, in this world view, is a waste of...time.

...not according to Jesus. Things, including time, multiply when we allow ourselves to become thankful.

I redeem time from neglect and apathy and inattentiveness when I swell with thanks and weigh the moment down and it's giving thanks to God for this moment that multiplies the moments, time made enough.

-- Ann Voskamp, One Thousand Gifts

Growth Begins

Growth begins when we begin to accept our own weakness.

-- Jean Vanier

Something Else

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Fear of Man

Fear of man will prove to be a snare, but whoever trusts in the Lord is kept safe.

-- Proverbs 29:25

Authority

A recent review in "Books & Culture" of Victor Austin's book, Up with Authority: Why We Need Authority to Flourish as Human Beings, states that we are:

"essentially social beings all the way to the end". He rejects the idea that authority rides on that beast, coercion. "When coercion becomes necessary, authority is not able to be all that it could be". My father is in his eighties, and I am in my fifties, and I still respect his authority very highly, but not, I hasten to add, because I am afraid of a spanking.

Austin shows that there is a liberated sort of authority that does not exclude freedom but actually depends upon it: "I am persuaded that the freer we become as human beings the more we will need authority".

-- Douglas Wilson, "Books & Culture" review of Up with Authority: Why We Need Authority to Flourish as Human Beings

We are clearly in an age where authority is unfashionable. We have almost come culturally to despise judgment, at the same time when, because of that, we crave it more than ever. Those that we admire are, in fact, those that makes critical, astute, and good judgments. We just don't like it when they're wrong.

But if we abdicate authority completely, what authority have we essentially, and unwittingly, adopted?

Infatuated

We have become infatuated, as a culture, with being liked by our kids in all the ways that we did not like our parents. We have lost the power to say, 'no'.

Grace

If he gives you the grace to make you believe, he will give you the grace to live a holy life afterward.

-- Charles Spurgeon

Safe Sex: No?

Any interesting article, Risky Sex, discusses the notions of safe sex; what is and what isn't safe...about it.

Do It Right

If you don’t have time to do it right,
when will you have time to do it over?

-- John Wooden

The Juvenilization of American Christianity

This seems to coincide rather consistently with a recent article in Christianity Today about The Juvenilization of American Christianity.

It goes without saying, but probably does need to be said, that the two groups (the culture at large and the subsets of the church) are swimming in the same pond and drinking the same water. Which presents both opportunity and challenge to consider what we are all a part of and what needs to be stood against.

Half-Hearted Creatures

If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

-- C.S. Lewis

Prolonged Juvenile Period

“Many parents remarked that it takes more effort to get children to collaborate than to do the tasks themselves.”

Today’s parents are not just “helicopter parents,” a former school principal complains to Marano. “They are a jet-powered turbo attack model.” Other educators gripe about “snowplow parents,” who try to clear every obstacle from their children’s paths.

A rather fascinating assessment in 'The New Yorker' continues here...

Cowboys Must Be Deranged

Dear Mr. Fuller:

I was struck (lightly) the other day by the following wonder: if lawyers become disbarred, and priests unfrocked, how might people in other paths of life be read out of their profession or calling?

It occurred to me then that electricians get delighted and...

Complexity

Complexity is the new opacity.

-- NPR program on the changes data is making on society, 6/30/12

Goodness

Comforts and pleasures are not the larger part of God's goodness, though they certainly are included.

I pray that I will not dis-respect His goodness. So I ask myself about when I tend to do that.

I tend to do that when I forget about His goodness or take it for granted.

And, I tend to forget about His goodness when I become comfortable with comforts and pleasures and seek to hold on to them or when I feel at risk of losing them and start to scramble to keep them.

I can cling to them...rather than to Him.

Sometimes God takes away goodnesses from us, particularly comforts and pleasures, so that we will know of His greater goodnesses to us. I have experienced this. But, now, I am grateful for it (even though I wasn't at the time).

When we come to know of these kinds of goodness, first-hand, we hold less onto the the other versions of goodness, because we know that everything has been given to us. True goodness is not held-onto, it is given away. And, we reflect His goodness when we extend it to others.

All goodness is designed to bring glory to God.

I pray that God would help me remember this and that His goodness far surpasses my small understandings of it.

We Have Listened Long Enough to the Pessimists

In March of 1906, unable to preside over a public meeting of the Association for Promoting the Interests of the Blind, deafblind activist and author Helen Keller instead sent the following stirring letter to her good friend, Mark Twain. On the day of the event, Twain, who was chairing the meeting in Keller's absence, read her stunning letter aloud...

Lists

The greatest poetry comes out of lists.

-- G.K. Chesterton

Riches Stored

I will give you hidden treasures, riches stored in secret places,
so that you may know that I am the LORD, the God of Israel, who summons you by name.

-- Isaiah 45:3