Power

I don't know about you, but I don't want to come to the end of myself. The idea flies in the face of all conventional wisdom, and against every fiber of my self-protecting and loved-one-protecting nature. Yet, as David Platt puts it: "This is how God works. He puts his people in positions where they are desperate for his power, and then he shows his provision in says that display his greatness." He used God's defeat of Jericho through Joshua as a reference, and he didn't even mention the top-notch military training program God used a preparation: circumcision. Yeah, that sounds like great preparation for an attack on the enemy. God's ways are certainly not our ways - his power loves those who hate and dies to live.

Which leads me to question: Do I really want more of God's power in my life?

Or do I just want God to give me more power?

Grandma Psalm

A phone call can change everything...

Tears jump to my eyes as I hear a dear one share news that my last living grandmother suffered a major stroke this morning during her Bible Study group.

I don't even know why I'm upset; I've never lived with her, never shared more than occasional visits with her. My parents moved away before I was born and my life is separate from hers. And Yet...

She is part of me. She is one of the reasons I am here at all.
She was faithful to her Father God when most of her loved ones turned away. She persevered.
She pressed on, passed on her faith. Her daughter continued on that journey with her. And Then...

Her daughter birthed a daughter, far away from the house she grew up in, far away from the heat and the familiarity of Home...and made a New Home with the same center: Jesus.

I know the gift of this Faith Legacy. I know how important it is to watch others work out their salvation; it builds a strong foundation unawares until it's rocked by unexpected storms and holds fast.

I know this Life is fleeting. I know she is drawing nearer to her Father each day. And it still hits hard...

I know she will soon be Free, but waves of shock and sadness wash over because she was not made to go through this Death. She was made to soar - and she will soon enough.

Again, I see the threads of God's handiwork. Before I knew this news, I read Psalm 90 this morning.

 ¹ Lord, you have been our dwelling place
   throughout all generations.
² Before the mountains were born
   or you brought forth the whole world,
   from everlasting to everlasting you are God.

 ³ You turn people back to dust,
   saying, “Return to dust, you mortals.”
⁴ A thousand years in your sight
   are like a day that has just gone by,
   or like a watch in the night.
⁵ Yet you sweep people away in the sleep of death—
   they are like the new grass of the morning:
⁶ In the morning it springs up new,
   but by evening it is dry and withered. ...

⁹ All our days pass away under your wrath;
   we finish our years with a moan.
¹⁰ Our days may come to seventy years,
   or eighty, if our strength endures;
yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow,
   for they quickly pass, and we fly away. ...

¹² Teach us to number our days,
   that we may gain a heart of wisdom. ...

¹⁴ Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love,
   that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days. ...

I haven't taken the time to say, Thank You, Grandma; but, I am so grateful for You.

Untether her, Lord, from bondage to a broken, deteriorating body. Fly away, Beloved Dorothy.
I look toward the day when I will sing praises to Our Lord with you.

Quote of the Week: Capon

I've seen some bloggers share thoughtful quotes; here's one I read today.
Spot on and thought-provoking. Also, it sheds new light on my baggage with music...

From Between Noon and Three by Robert Farrar Capon:
(Capon is speaking of the outrageousness of God's grace. Here he is responding to a reader's concern that he is not serious enough about morality. The Latin phrase, loco parentis, means 'in the parental role.')

If we are ever to enter fully into the glorious liberty of the children of God, we are going to have to spend more time thinking about freedom than we do. The church, by and large, has had a poor record of encouraging freedom. It has spent so much time inculcating in us the fear of making mistakes that it has made us like ill-taught piano students: we play our pieces, but we never really hear them because our main concern is not to make music, but to avoid some flub that will get us in Dutch. The church, having put itself in loco parentis, has been so afraid we will lose sight of the laws of our nature that it has made us care more about how we look than about who we are - made us act more like the subjects of a police state than fellow citizens of the saints....[we need] the ability to take our freedom seriously and act on it, to live not in fear of mistakes but in the knowledge that no mistake can hold a candle to the love that draws us home. My repentance, accordingly, is not so much for my failings but for the two-bit attitude toward them by which I made them more sovereign than grace. Grace - the imperative to hear the music, not just listen for errors - makes all infirmities occasions of glory.

Loving Freedom

 
"In the Sermon on the Mount and in other places Jesus is asking his followers to see that the way to more abundant life is the way of love. We are to love one another, and this love is to be more comprehensive than our love for family and friends and tribe and nation. We are to love our neighbors though they may be strangers to us. We are to love our enemies. And this is to be a practical love; it is to be practiced, here and now. Love evidently is not just a feeling but is indistinguishable from the willingness to help, to be useful to one another. The way of love is indistinguishable, moreover, from the way of freedom. We don't need much imagination to imagine that to be free of hatred, of enmity, of the endless and hopeless effort to oppose violence with violence, would be to have life more abundantly. To be free of indifference would be to have life more abundantly. To be free of the insane rationalizations for our desire to kill one another - that surely would be to have life more abundantly" (Wendell Berry, The Burden of the Gospels, pg. 62-3).

It is for Freedom that Christ set us free; it is because of His Great Love that He gives us the Freedom to choose. I want to grow in this unconditional Love.