A Happy Thanksgiving?

Posted on November 28, 2013 by Margaret

I started Thanksgiving Day by talking to God about you blog readers, with extra time spent on those who are widows. Many of you have contacted me through this site in 2013, and I’ve saved each of your stories in a cyber-file. You’re important to me, especially those of you walking through your first 12 months without your beloved.

In asking the Lord what his desire was for the words in this Thanksgiving post, I could just hear him say, “Comfort those who are grieving. By my Spirit, give them something to be thankful for.”

I wasn’t sure how best to do that, but as is always true with God, he showed me. “Remember the devotional you read yesterday? That message will bring them comfort.”

Though I didn’t remember, when I looked back I saw the reason he wanted me to use it. The topic was sorrow and joy, and I knew each of us could benefit from reading it tonight. Spurgeon began by reminding us of an intensely sad situation in the Bible. After Jesus had been killed, his disciples felt abandoned and were crushed with disappointment. Deep in sorrow, they wondered how they could possibly go on without him.

And then! Their beloved teacher and mentor reappeared, very much alive and back “on duty” as the one they’d become so attached to and loved so dearly. Their joy overflowed!

Spurgeon then moves from that story to sorrowful people today:

“All the sorrows of saints* shall be thus transmuted, even the worst of them, which look as if they must forever remain fountains of bitterness. Then the more sorrow, the more joy. If we have loads of sorrow, then the Lord’s power will turn them into tons of joy. Then the bitterer the trouble, the sweeter the pleasure.

“The swinging of the pendulum far to the left will cause it to go all the farther to the right. The remembrances of grief shall heighten the flavor of the delight. We shall set the one in contrast with the other, and the brilliance of the diamond shall be the more clearly seen because of the black foil behind it.

“Come, my heart, cheer up! In a little while I shall be as glad as I am now gloomy. Jesus tells me that by a heavenly alchemy my sorrow shall be turned into joy. I do not see how it is to be, but I believe it, and I begin to sing by way of anticipation.” **

So whether you’re a widow whose heart is full of sadness or a non-widow dealing with struggles of another kind, these words are a gift of comfort from the Father to you. And in the dark of night, if you haven’t thought of a single thing to be thankful for, now you have one: God’s promise of better days ahead.

Spurgeon may have been talking about our joy-filled life in the hereafter, but from my own grief experience I can tell you it’s a promise God applies in this world, too.

“Your sorrow shall be turned into joy.” (John 16:20)

*Spurgeon refers to all Christians as “saints”. **Cheque Book of the Bank of Faith, p. 331.

Damage Control

Posted on November 26, 2013 by Margaret

Last weekend a bunch of us drove from our home in southwest Michigan to the Chicago area for a wedding. As we approached the city on the Dan Ryan Expressway, a disturbing sign caught my eye:

892 TRAFFIC DEATHS THIS YEAR DRIVE NOW TEXT LATER

Surely all 892 weren’t killed as a result of texting, but some probably were. I know what it feels like to stray from my lane while texting and have done it just enough to say, “No more.” One second too many could exact a terrible price.

The other day Birgitta showed me an iPhone video taken through the front windshield of a squad car. An SUV in front of the policeman began drifting left. As it hit the shoulder, the driver must have looked up, recognized his error, and sharply overcompensated to the right.

He cut across several lanes and hit the side of a truck on the far right, bounced left across those same lanes and into oncoming traffic, and was hit head-on by a fast-moving 18-wheeler. The SUV and anyone inside were disintegrated on impact in an accident that took 5 seconds.

All of us are tempted to say, “I’ll just glance for a second.”

I wonder if similar life-devastation can happen when we look away from the Lord for “just a second.” The problem with texting while driving and also with taking our eyes off God probably isn’t as much about the quick look away as the getting stuck on what we’re looking at. Two seconds. Maybe three or four.

Whatever it is, it grabs our attention ever-so-slightly longer than the one second we promised ourselves. Suddenly we’re “stuck” and catastrophe occurs. It wouldn’t have happened at all except that whatever we were glancing at was, for those seconds, worth it to us.

The most devastating part of the whole thing is that there are no do-overs. If our quick peek turns into a longer one, it’s willful, risky, and a foolish gamble on our part. And if permanent damage gets done, whether while driving and texting, or in other areas of life when we let ourselves dwell on something we shouldn’t, back-peddling isn’t possible.

In hindsight, that just-a-second peek is virtually never worth it, because it doesn’t take much of a look to find us quickly invested in what we’re seeing. And when that happens, it gets more and more difficult to look back at God. As a matter of fact, it might be quite a while before we can pull our attention from what first distracted us to turn back toward him.

So hopefully, if we don’t text and drive, the odds are good we won’t be one of those numbers on Chicago’s expressway sign. Better than that, though, is not to take our eyes off God, not even for a second. If we focus exclusively on him, he’ll save us from many an accident.

“[Lord], turn my eyes from looking at worthless things; and give me life in Your ways.” (Psalm 119:37)

When Nothing Fits Together

Posted on November 12, 2013 by Margaret

This morning in southwest Michigan, we awoke to an ongoing snowstorm and 8 inches of snow. Before the sun was up, my next door neighbors had turned on festive mini-lights above their deck, and the combination of snow and leaves falling together around them was magical. In my 68 years, I don’t ever remember such heavy snow coming so early in November.

As I cautiously made my way to our Tuesday prayer group, I couldn’t resist stopping repeatedly to take pictures of colorful leaves weighed down with snow, an impressive oxymoron. Was it a wintery-fall or a fallish-winter?

It isn’t unusual to encounter life-circumstances that don’t go together, a plus and a minus that are completely incompatible. This is especially true when we’ve asked God to be involved, and no matter how we try, we can never predict what he’s going to do.

Let’s say a poor man asks the Lord to strengthen his dependency on him, and then God answers by giving him great wealth. The man wasn’t asking for riches and is surprised (and delighted), but if ever there is a big-league test for personal dependency on God, that’s it.

Or maybe a wife prays for the Lord to influence her workaholic husband not to spend so much time at the office, and God answers by putting him in a hospital bed where he has plenty of time to think about his priorities.

Or a mother agonizes over her child’s drinking and asks God to take him off that slippery slope, but God allows him to drift into alcoholism. Years later, he finds Jesus Christ through Alcoholics Anonymous, and his life is revolutionized.

It’s important to ask ourselves if we can accept God’s interesting (and sometimes agonizing) answers to our requests. So often we rail against him for allowing things to get worse. And then, months (or years) down the road, he opens our understanding to the magnitude of change he had in mind. We learn his purposes for a life are always greater in scope than anything we prayed for.

But even more significant than accepting the incongruous connections between our prayers and God’s answers is the underlying principle that we must never pray with a mindset of telling God what to do. We can’t “put in an order” and expect him to follow our instructions.

Instead, after we’ve poured out our requests, if oxymoronic things start happening we should excitedly realize, “It’s God!” After all, the biggest oxymoron of all time was when he saved the whole world by crushing his only Son.

So, after we’ve prayed and nothing seems to fit together right, we should stop to recognize God and marvel at his work. In a small way it’s like stopping to take pictures of brightly colored leaves bowed low under the weight of an untimely snow.