Category Archives: 31 days

thou, my soul’s glory, joy, and crown

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In the early hours I rose, reluctantly, to use the campground’s pit toilet. Upon leaving it to return to “bed,” I looked up and was halted by a breathtaking ivory moon in the dawning sky. Bird songs accompanied it, and I thought that the Spirit surely hovers over the twilight as God finished preparing the day.

The dimness served to still me. To make me anticipate, to consider what He might have set in store for me and us today. I stared hard at the light He made to rule the night, trying to fathom anything. Then I crossed the road and, before re-entering the tent, I gazed across the campsite to the river and the hill beyond. Everything seems so lonesome and holy in these fleeting moments. Just breaths and inklings. God has hidden this here for me, knowing I would come across it – like a trapper’s snare, but for good and glory and life and renewal – here at the edge of the day. To say, “You are Mine. I know you. I’m already here.” To recreate me by His breath for another day in His world.

The Almighty, who spoke into being the universe, has deigned to welcome me to His day. His kindness is unending. Who am I that You are mindful of me? I do not understand; You are too much for me. I feel overwhelmed and startled by Your attention. I wonder not at all that Your glory and presence have been considered dangerous, and terrifying. If You can use Your voice to create the burning sun, what power are we so nonchalantly engaging with our casual invocations, even our cursing? We are out of our depth in our defiance, our ignorance, our apathy. This God leaves room for none of those things.

But:

To be loved by this God?

What joy. What inexpressible honour. God’s glory should make us serious, but His love should make us light.

We’re left in awe, that the holy splendour has drawn near to us – and moved in.

The grace and favour of the Source of Existence is upon me. Everything I have is His. I mean Everything. Not just my house or my money or time. But also, my body, my thoughts, my lungs, my preferences, longings, impulses, all the things I think make me “me.” These belong to Him, because I belong to Him.

He is surely speaking; it is we who decline to listen. He is showing us Himself and the way to Him all the time. We choose ourselves, like true idiots. Most of what we do makes no sense in light of God and all the implications of God. We fill our minds with inane material, and our time with either worries or distractions from those worries. As though God didn’t exist, or isn’t constantly at work making all things new. As though what we do either matters too little (thus we have no accountability to our Creator) or matters too much (thus we bear the weight of the heavy illusion of control).

But we are clay, shaped for many various purposes, and we ought to ask the Potter, “What have You made me to be and to do? What is Your priority for me, and how may I fulfill this in Your service? What have You given me to steward, and what is not mine to carry or perform? And, [of course] how can I ensure others know Your work? How can they know You made me and them? And, [most incredibly] how can I know You and be with You?”

I want to learn to take this different view. That the life of a child of God is first about being, and being with. And as that identity grows deep roots, out of it I want to go into the territory set ahead of me. With a kind of assurance I am only just beginning to glimpse, but which I hope will continually become more and more a part of me, as the warm light dawns slowly on the mountainsides on a clear day.

Turn your eyes upon Jesus,

Look full in His wonderful face,

And the things of earth will grow strangely dim,

In the light of His glory and grace.

– Helen Howarth Lemmel

Fair is the sunshine,

fairer still the moonlight,

and all the twinkling starry host:

Jesus shines brighter,

Jesus shines purer

than all the angels heaven can boast.

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[I wrote this last October, when sleep was scarce and light was low.]

Is there a lesson in everything?

Because some days – maybe most – I find myself trudging, not just my body but my heart too. I’m knee deep in laundry, and diapers. I’m neck deep or deeper in desires unmet, in hopes held down by the immediate. There’s cat litter, dirty dishes, items out of order, a fridge that hasn’t been cleaned in…. let’s move on. Piles of belongings I do not need, expired pantry goods, expired food in the fridge because did I mention I haven’t cleaned it?

There’s a sweet child demanding attention and a cat who really wants it too, and the bathroom sink is soiled too soon after cleaning. But then there are all the changes I want to make, inside and outside of the house, inside and outside of myself.

There’s a garden of dreams and books to read and books within me to write. There’s an aging body whose pains could maybe be lessened with better food and specific activities and oh, sleep. There are [every] mornings when I can’t believe I have to be the one responsible for my daughter and I secretly (until now) wish I was living in my life of years ago. I’m supposed to keep both of us well-fed? And bathed? And socialized? And rested? Well darn me if I’ll ever reach any of those goals.

And even in all this, I’m supposed to believe there’s more? That when I look up at the October-blue heavens, I will feel differently about everything? Am I supposed to feel better? Even though friends and their parents face diagnoses of concern and others grind their way through tunnels of depression, and I don’t feel I can speak my mind safely in this knee-jerk world knee-deep in cynicism and self-righteousness?

What am I supposed to learn? All the pieces of my life and my days seem disjointed, random, at odds. Glimmers of joy, bouts of laughter fade pretty quickly as the present concerns retake their ground in my mind and thus my body.

There are [most] mornings, evenings, and wee hours when I forget the point. All that is within me just aches for sleep. For inner rest too, and freedom from this world’s dying air. The only thing I get when I raise my eyes to the sky is that I am small.

Which reminds me that God is, and is big.

And that it is sunny here but storming in the Gulf. Which means I only see a small part of the sky. These storms have a cause and an end, and this clear view does too. Nothing is random except to my infant perception.

I don’t know why these limits are mine and those struggles are yours and those successes are theirs and these realities are ours. Funny though – everyone’s is the sky. Our minutiae all through to our circumstances may be unique, may needlessly isolate us one from the other, but always the sky is ours.

I don’t know why anything is — except that God says it’s for His glory, His story. I am a character asking the Author what’s going on. But the Author’s world is bigger than mine can ever be, and I am known only by the words He uses, whereas He is fully Real. He imagined me, and I became. So forgive me if I grasp very little of what He’s doing.

Lord, forgive me when I can’t see beyond my paragraph. I don’t even know how many chapters are in this thing. If there’s a lesson, a big ultimate one, I won’t know it until after the end.

So for now, for all the nows, I think my character’s best move is to look up – at the sky, yes, but more to gaze at You. And my best motive is to be with You. I thank You that these two things are always possible for me, no matter how deep my knees or neck are in duties and struggles.

The sky is ours, and we are the sky’s, being always under it and subject to it. Such is our relationship.

And You are ours, and we are Yours. And I will henceforth be head-deep in Your abiding love.

Prayer

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A magnetic gaze at the wind and the clouds and trees,

knowing You are so much beyond me.

The cling to my tiny girl, hair against my cheek, smelling her skin as long as she’ll briefly let me, feeling something is just out of my grasp, and Your plan and creation is unfathomable.

A conscious, intended breath or several, and the surrounding pause as I re-ground and You are with me.

The trembling, quickening, urgent feasting on sunsets, impossible as they are to understand, realizing this is a little bit like You: terrifying, deep, gigantic, glorious, transformative. Holy.

Finding words to illumine what is – and they’re jolly good ones.

Receiving sun warmth, in no hurry.

When Your children are in my home, assembled like a gladsome fighting force, willing to work and battle by way of food and praise and love and prayer,

sharing with the others what each is given. I look around and am stilled, lifted, comforted in the presence of the joy warriors, the persistent gatherers, who know their need and He who meets it.

Silence.

Pain.

Grandeur of infinite mountaintop perspectives, windowless in the ideal way,

as though it was really true that nothing mattered more than You.

When I, mid-song, choke and weep without warning, Your Spirit clearly, mysteriously about Your business.

Speeding heartbeats after a narrow escape of accident or calamity; Your providence bids me live on unscathed.

Opening of lips to receive Your welcome in bread and wine, assenting to what I only barely grasp, but which grasps me entirely and makes me whole.

[This wee post was inspired by Malcolm Guite’s Word in the Wilderness; in one essay he encourages his readers to make a listing poem of images of the emblems of prayer in our lives. These are some of mine.]