Trying Hard

Earlier this week our late-October weather was perfect. With blue skies and light breezes, it was the day we’d been waiting for to have an evening beach fire where the children could gobble down s’mores, enjoy a sunset, and get tired out before bedtime.

Beach fireBy 6:00 pm the winds had picked up and Lake Michigan was working up a good chop, but we did as planned and had a great time. Emerald, still battling a bad cold, was wrapped snugly, content to sit in Louisa’s lap sucking on a pacifier. (Mama Birgitta was attending her university classes.)

As the 3 children raced across the sand toward the ice-cold water, Adam’s one caution was short and clear: “Don’t get your feet wet!”

But when the sun started to drop toward the horizon, so did the temperatures. That’s when the little ones began to feel the full effect of romping too close to disobedience as their wet feet stung with the cold.

Difficult to obeyBy the time we got home, toes were bright red and throbbing. Maybe a lesson in obedience was learned, but it’s probable they’ll have to relearn it again and again.

Skylar, Micah, and Autumn aren’t the only ones with a bent toward doing their own thing rather than heeding the warnings of an authority figure. All of us are in that camp. As adults, when we arrive at the painful consequences of our own poor decisions, we usually feel badly about them and accept blame for the cost of our disobedience. But when we end up waging the same battle again and again, we get downright disgusted with ourselves.

“Wouldn’t it be nice,” we say, “if we didn’t have this natural bent toward insisting on our own way? Life would be so much easier if we’d just do things right the first time.”

Happily, that day will come. Our sinful natures will be history, which is good news for those of us in a continual struggle to hold selfish pride at bay. It’s interesting that the more diligence we demonstrate as we work to tame our wills this side of eternity, the greater God’s approval in the here-and-now. And when he approves, he rewards…. with an increased capacity to fight our self-wills more effectively.

Despite that help for today, though, I’m really looking forward to God’s tomorrow when we’ll no longer have to battle ourselves. Our sin nature will have completely disappeared, and obeying our Supreme Authority will be pure pleasure.

Beyond the sunset some dayAt long last we’ll know what we ought to do and will actually delight in doing it. And that goes for Skylar, Micah, Autumn, and their wet feet, too.

“When we died with Christ, we were set free from the power of sin.” (Romans 6:7)

When Chaos Comes

Mickey MouseA week ago while I  answered emails, baby Emerald jabbered happily behind me on the floor, playing with an old Mickey Mouse pop-up toy. All of a sudden there was a noisy crash much like breaking glass, followed by Emerald’s loud wail.

I spun around just in time to see hundreds of marbles scatter all over her and the floor, their glass container lying next to her. Marbles were skittering wall-to-wall and into two adjacent rooms, bouncing off baseboards and heating vents.

Not high enoughGrabbing Emerald to soothe her panic, I figured her reach had grown longer than I’d estimated, and she’d pulled the heavy jar off the shelf where it had been doubling as a bookend.

After putting her safely in her walker, I crawled around on hands and knees, scooping marbles back into the jar, finding some of them 20 feet away. I wanted to get every single one, since 9 month old babies who put everything into their mouths aren’t compatible with marbles.

Even after my diligent search that day, though, I’m still finding strays in distant corners, under bookshelves, behind table legs, and under upholstered chairs. Today I stepped on one (barefooted) in a closet.

ChaosAn explosion of chaos, whether it’s marbles or just a chaotic life event, usually includes a major clean-up effort. And often the ones mopping up aren’t the ones who made the mess. For example, Emerald wasn’t capable of picking up the marbles (of course), so I needed to do it. That minor mishap, though, was nothing compared to some of the turmoil life brings, along with the complicated aftermath.

But sometimes those of us who think we’re innocent in a messy situation, really aren’t. Did we neglect the preventive measures we should have put in place to make a disaster less likely? Could we have been more sensitive to a need behind a deed, helping someone ahead of time?

It takes two to tango and usually takes more than one to cause a catastrophe. If we uncap our halo polish insisting we’re without fault, we probably aren’t. In the case of our flying marbles, I should have been watching Emerald more closely. Turning a back on a busy baby is never smart.

It’s possible God lets chaos happen in order to get our full attention on a certain problem we haven’t been aware of. It might be his effective way to avoid something worse down the road. In other words, minor chaos now in exchange for absolute bedlam later.

Does that mean we ought to thank God when everything’s falling apart? The problematic but accurate answer is yes.

High enoughToday I’m thankful for flying marbles. It let me know Emerald can reach higher, pull harder, and hurt herself more seriously than I thought she could. And now I know. Our marbles have been relocated to the very top shelf.

“O God…. renew a right spirit within me.” (Psalm 51:10)

No Comment

BaldyThis afternoon we celebrated my brother-in-law Bervin’s birthday with a lunchtime party. Between plates of pot roast and birthday cake, Klaus posed an interesting question to Bervin’s grandchildren Ruby (4) and Beck (6). They’d been focusing on Emerald, who is close-to-bald at 9 months, wondering when she would get a decent head of hair.

Klaus said, “Ruby, you were a bald baby like that, too. What’s your favorite memory from that time?”

Ruby looked at him with a blank stare and couldn’t respond. But when Birgitta said, “Probably that you didn’t have to comb your hair every day,” she smiled. “All I did was ride around in a car seat,” she said.

Beck and Ruby

Beck, answering the same question said, “I remember that I didn’t have to do anything.” Of course their answers were fabricated, since neither one of them could remember being a baby.

Most peoples’ earliest memories are from the time they were 2 or 3 years old, but God doesn’t let us remember all the way back to zero. Maybe he doesn’t want us recalling the misery of birth, and every woman who’s ever delivered a baby would call that wisdom.

Baby brain

More likely we can’t recollect babyhood because the memory parts of our brains aren’t fully developed then. Babies don’t have language, either, to describe their experiences. Nevertheless God endowed each one with a complicated brain, all set to go. On most days we take this incredible gift for granted.

What about the brain(s) of the Trinity? Since Jesus was fully human, surely he had a brain much like ours. But what about his divine brain?

Although we forget nearly everything that happens in our first two years and tend to forget even adult memories if we live long enough, God never forgets a thing. Putting him into a memory grid of forgetting and remembering, though, is humanizing the divine. He knows everything about everything, and we believe that. But then what are we to do with the Scripture that says he “forgets our sins” once they’re confessed?

He actually says it 3 times (in both Old and New Testaments). Does this simply mean he voluntarily decides not to remind us or nag us about our past sins after we’ve repented of them?

Maybe it’s something even better than that.

Maybe he literally wills himself to forgetfulness and “remembers our sins no more” (as the Bible says) to make our forgiveness absolutely thorough. And then if Satan should come before him to accuse us, he can honestly say, “No…. I don’t have any memory of Margaret committing that sin. She’s clean on that one” (because of Jesus).

This possibility gives me goose bumps and inspires me to keep short accounts with God. And maybe his forgetting our sins isn’t that much different than Ruby and Beck forgetting what it was like to be babies…

…none of them have any memory of it.

“I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more.” (Hebrews 8:12)