Failing and Falling

Posted on November 18, 2013 by Margaret

In the last 48 hours wild winds and rains whipped through our neighborhood causing umbrellas to flip inside-out and autumn pumpkins to roll off porch steps. Inside the house we could hear Lake Michigan roaring, even though the windows were buttoned up tight.

Stray tree limbs flew everywhere, and in our back yard a tall, pole-like tree went down, though not all the way. It fell into the “arms” of a nearby tree instead.

The visual of this partially-fallen tree reminded me of a popular expression: “If you fall, I’ll be your soft place to land.” In other words, you’ll go down, but you won’t have a crash landing.

That’s what happened to the tree, and for those of us who are Christians, that’s what happens when God offers himself as our soft place to land.

A few months ago I turned around in a dark room and didn’t notice my big black dog Jack lying on the dark-colored carpet. As I stumbled over him, I felt myself going down, unable to catch myself. I hit the floor with such a loud crash that my children came running. It was a hard landing for sure, though no permanent damage was done. If only someone had caught me, even just a few inches above the hard landing, the result would have been quite different.

And that’s what God does for us.

We may be on a fast fall toward disaster and might even be the cause for the whole mess by our own bad decisions, but still he’s willing to catch us. It may not always feel that way as we’re going down, though. During a circumstantial fall, we look for his rescue and wonder where he is. “What’s keeping him?” we say. “Why doesn’t he do something?”

He’s well aware, but often lets us learn the hard way, because that’s when the lessons stick best. As Pastor Erwin Lutzer says, failure is frequently the back door to success. So we feel ourselves falling, failing, dreading the hard landing of horrendous circumstances, and we brace for impact. Then when it doesn’t come, at least not as severely as we thought it would, we wonder what happened.

That is God’s catch.

One of the big reasons he lets us fall/fail is so we’ll recognize our need for him. If we continually succeed at everything we try, we’re much less likely to reach out to a Savior. Recognizing our own need is an important prerequisite for being able to rest in the Lord after he catches us.

When I look out my window and see that partially-fallen tree, I wonder if spring will find it continuing to grow, despite resting on the other tree. After all, it didn’t crash all the way to the ground but found a soft place to land.

“I know, my God, that you test the heart and have pleasure in uprightness.” (1 Chronicles 29:17)

Who do you trust?

Posted on November 4, 2013 by Margaret

Years ago I read the story of a medical doctor who donated his time once a week to trim the toenails of elderly folks, because they couldn’t get the job done themselves. Some had neck or back troubles and couldn’t bend. Others had toenails that were so calcified and thick, they needed professional equipment to cut them.

As I remember the story, his service took place at a local library, and the doctor refused any payment. Surely handling one pair of old feet after another wasn’t pleasant, but week after week he showed up with his clippers, helping just because he wanted to, no strings attached. He was both dependable and trustworthy.

After thinking about this man and his honorable undertaking, I tried to remember the last time I did something quietly righteous like that. I came up empty. I did remember a couple of times when I offered to help strangers but received negative responses: “That’s ok. I can handle it. Thanks anyway.” The general rule of thumb is, strangers can’t be trusted.

It’s interesting that today’s general public is suspect of anyone offering help. Most will walk away as if they didn’t hear the offer, careful not to make eye contact. It reminds me of a vignette from the sixties TV show “Laugh In” when a stranger offered to help Ruth Buzzi (dressed as an old lady). She beat him back with her handbag.

That was funny 45 years ago, mostly because it was the opposite of what people usually did back then. Believe it or not, most accepted help from strangers. These days, rejecting acts of kindness is the norm. For example, if you volunteer to help someone load groceries into her car or even ask if you can take her empty cart back for her, typically she’ll say, “No thanks.”

When I was growing up, a stranger might ask to hold a baby while her mother checked out at the grocery store, and the mother would smile and say, “Oh, thank you so much!” Today that’s unthinkable. Our trust in each other has been eroded by too many experiences of broken trust and its painful consequences.

Maybe that’s why some people find it difficult to trust God. If they’ve never known a trustworthy relationship, then trusting him seems like just one more risk they don’t want to take. If they got to know him, however, they would discover he is trustworthy to the nth degree.

When he offers to help, he means it and will always follow through. Of course we have to give him the chance. If we say, “No thanks. I can handle it myself,” he’ll probably let us. But if we accept his help, we can completely trust him without reason to fear. All the proof we need is in his flawless track record.

To put it in practical terms, we can trust him to help us much like the toenail-cutting doctor helped those oldsters, without asking for payment, and doing it just because he wants to.

“The Lord is trustworthy in all he promises and faithful in all he does.” (Psalm 145:13)

Waiting Patiently?

Posted on November 3, 2013 by Margaret

One of my favorite family photos is this one of Klaus and Hans, our children #4 and #5. We were on a family trip to Florida in 1985 when these two little guys, ages 3 and 4, were demonstrating patience. They were waiting for the perfect wave to lift their mini- surfboards off the sand and take them on a smooth, danger-free ride atop the ocean. They’d done everything they knew to do and were waiting for the water to do what they could not.

It’s a perfect picture of faith. We wait; God acts.

Today is the 4^th anniversary of Nate’s death. Although I don’t know if he’s marking time the way we are, sometimes I get impatient to find out. Whether he’s looking forward to our reunion or not, there are days I long for it with everything in me, just like the boys longed to ride an ocean wave. It’s not that I have a death wish; life holds many good reasons to go on living. I’d just like to be with him again.

My children don’t like it when I talk about joining their father, but my desire isn’t to leave them. It’s that we all leave. In other words, my longing is for Jesus to come and scoop us up for an exit from this world and an entrance into the next. And it’s difficult to be patient.

No matter how hard any of us wishes for that day, however, we can’t hurry it along any more than a gardener can force a seedling to sprout. These things are up to God.

Today a handful of my children and I talked about their father at lunchtime. Their spoken memories of him were like gifts to me, and we shared our feelings about this anniversary day. Talking about how difficult it was to be in Nate’s presence when he died didn’t make us regret being there. It was deeply meaningful to experience those holy moments as a family, expressing love to the one who was dying as well as to each other.

My Spurgeon daily devotional book has a simple note written on this day, November 3^rd. It says, “Nate died today,” a bare-bones statement of fact. Maybe I should have written, “Nate went to heaven today,” or something more positive. But when he died, my heart was so swamped with loss, those were the only words I could come up with.

That November 3^rd devotional happens to be about waiting for God’s timing. Spurgeon wrote, “We are in a hurry, but God’s time is the best time.” The last paragraph is a note to himself: ”Come, my soul, canst thou not wait for thy God? Rest in him, and be still in unutterable peacefulness.”

My little boys waited peacefully at the shoreline, hoping for the best, and since I can’t do anything to hasten my reunion with Nate, I can only do the same.