The Women of Exodus 1-2

Recording the Proper 16 episode of the At Home With the Lectionary podcast, and I am reminded again of how fierce Exodus 1-2 is:

Five women and a baby face off against Pharaoh in a milieu of political intrigue, cruel genocidal plans & the stakes of a nation.

What a pitch with such stellar storytelling in the details!

The story is set within the political and economic tensions of an empire. Beset by enemies on Egypt’s borders, Pharaoh has a problem, and it’s intriguing that his solution isn’t simply to wipe out the Hebrews, but to *keep them from leaving* & exploit them in bondage.

Which leaves the people in desperate straits, after which the text offers one-after-the-other-courageous actions of women, the unlikeliest of candidates to confront the most powerful man in the world.

Shiphrah & Puah, instructed to doula death, instead negotiate a high stakes game to midwife life, without which there would be no Moses.  

Jochebed cleverly finds a way to hide her son: the river is noisy, a place where women can go uninhibited back and forth throughout their daily tasks. Perhaps the shallows where royal women bathed were secluded, off limits to soldiers or others on a murderous hunt.  

I love that a little girl appears in this story: Miriam, the watchful sister.

Why is she waiting to see what would happen to Moses?
Is she protector or strategist?

My novelist’s imagination fills in the blanks.
Did she know that Pharaoh’s daughter Bithia bathed there?

Bithia, who knows the baby is a Hebrew, who knows her father’s decree, who knows that every Egyptian has been ordered to kill.

Instead she rescues.

I think she knew the real plea behind Miriam’s query, because she hands Moses back to his mother with both provision and royal protection. It moves me to tears nearly every time, because the narrator’s choice to leave details sparse underscores something true and recognizable about how women must negotiate a world of power held by others.

Shiphrah and Puah’s careful answers and quiet opposition to evil.
Miriam’s loaded offer to get a nurse.
An imagined glance b/w Bithia & Jochebed.  

Women operating within the subtext of a world that doesn’t write them as main characters.

That doesn’t make them any less heroic.

Some day I’ll finish my epic fantasy novel set here with these characters in this place and shine a spotlight on their faithfulness. Until then, I’ll keep revisiting the text in the lections, reading an account that we know about presumably because Moses listened to the women and heard their side of the story:

To the midwives who could likely recount countless birthing scenes and rescued babies, 

To Bithia who must’ve known the inner workings of Pharaoh’s court,

To Jochebed, who perhaps couldn’t smell bitumen without weeping and remembering the terror.

To Miriam, the first prophet named in Scripture.

Five women who risked their lives to rescue the one who would rescue a nation.

The manifold layered symbolism here and in all of Scripture is inexhaustible:

We could look at the imagery of the floodwaters and impending evil, the parallels between Pharaoh and Herod, both genocidal kings threatened by an infant, or Egypt’s place in Israel’s long history.

Early church writers suggest Moses’ boat was a little “ark,” connecting it and the swirling water with imagery of baptism, a preservation from death & restoration to life.

I suggest the women, too, are a kind of ark, agents whose actions usher in rescue and deliverance.

Their actions have the fragrance of Rahab’s poker face, Abigail’s maneuvering, Esther’s strategy, Jehosheba’s quick thinking – women whose actions quietly secure rescue and preservation,
perhaps foreshadowing the woman from Nazareth who delivers the Deliverer into the world.

We All Will See Him There

Last night we recorded the At Home With the Lectionary Podcast episode for the Easter Day readings, and Matthew 28 took my breath away.

I know the Church hasn’t tiptoed into Holy Week yet, but I’m going to write about the resurrection and the women at the tomb anyway, because the story-telling details here are full of wonder.

Throughout history and across culture, women are often the ones washing dead bodies, keeping watch before burials, feeding the mourning, ministering in the wake of death.

So too Jesus’ women have, in the hours before dawn, prepared age-old recipes of grief-scented spices.

I wonder if, as they hurried through the quiet, ephemeral beauty of early dawn, anticipation threaded their weeping or if they dragged their steps to make time slow down.

This was it. The final moment. They would get to see His body once last time.

I wonder if in later years the aroma of those same spices that once fragranced their oil infused hands would bring it all back to mind, the way scents can instantly transport us to a poignant memory.

Because this moment was unforgettable. The earth violently shook.

It was a Marvel-esque result of the Angel of the Lord descending and rolling back the stone: appearance like blinding lightning coming so soon after the darkened sun and earthquake days before – no wonder the guards were shaken by fear.

I wonder if they fainted or just played dead

But the women were conscious. Aware. And brave.

© Copyright Silvia10 Wikimedia.

It’s unclear if, when they set out that morning, the women knew the tomb was guarded by Roman soldiers.

But the Marys had been at the cross. They knew the brutality of Rome and the political stakes.

These women didn’t faint.

They listened to the Angel’s message. I wonder if they were in shock, if their world moved in slow motion, hyper-focused on every syllable.

What is it like to have your waves of grief rolled back with such unbelievable incomprehensible news?

But they do believe it. Instantly. No questions asked.

Days earlier, Mary, sister of a man Jesus had raised from death, had anointed His feet for burial. I wonder why. Did she know He was heading toward death?

She *had* spent a lot of time sitting at His feet, listening to His words.

Maybe like her, these women at the tomb, had been paying attention to Jesus’ words. Maybe they had a hint of resurrection hope. They knew Jesus had raised a man stone-cold-4-days-dead.

I wonder if they held their breath as they drew near the tomb, hoping for the impossible. The text doesn’t say.

What Matthew wants us to know is that the women who arrive Easter morning are the same women who were sitting at the tomb after Joseph of Arimathea had first, in his own gentle ministrations, placed Jesus there.

These women kept watch.

And then they RUN to tell the others the news.

Can you imagine? The perfume of forgotten and discarded spices filling the air, the scent of grief displaced with great joy: they sprint. Any woman who has worn layered garments knows what this is like: Hoisted cloth. Awkward pacing. They run.

The scene could’ve ended here. The Angel had delivered the message. Everyone would soon know Jesus was alive. Indeed, Jesus would later appear to many.

But, here, in Matt 28:9-10, Jesus meets them. Unnecessarily. Profligately. Redundantly. I wonder why He does this?

What do you think?

Can it be that He simply wanted to see them?

That He missed them?

That He longed to be reunited with His dear friends and say: You Guys, I did it! It is finished!

That He loved them?

There are ways to explore this by attempting to harmonize the Gospels, but there are still gaps for our imaginations, and I love that. One thing is clear: Jesus often went to extraordinary lengths to have encounters with individuals.

It was no accident that He met them there. I wonder if the brothers ever regretted missing this moment, if they wished they had kept watch with the women or braved that early trek to the soldier-guarded tomb.

Jesus doesn’t forget His brothers. He instructs the women to let them know Jesus will meet them all in Galilee. But first He says to the women: “Don’t be afraid.”

I wonder what they were afraid of in that moment.

Not death, certainly, for any closely held hopes they might have nurtured as they kept watch through the long night had blossomed into reality: death had no power.

Was it an overwhelming somatic response that left them, as Mark says, trembling? Did they fear to let Jesus out of their sight? Or were they afraid of the soldiers? Or of the brothers?

Because the brothers don’t believe them.

Luke tells us that the women’s words “seemed like nonsense” to the other followers of Jesus.

Sometimes people don’t want to listen to women.

A few do. Peter and John race each other to the tomb to see for themselves. (John wants us to know he’s fastest & I love him for it). I don’t know why the women were afraid, but maybe in leaving that unspecified, as is often the case in Scripture, we are invited to consider the life-giving words for ourselves.

There are many things to fear in this in-between time where we do not yet see Jesus with our own eyes

“Don’t be afraid,” Jesus says to the women and, maybe, to His other followers – to the brothers…and perhaps even to us.

In the waiting of His absence, there is work to be done, tasks entrusted to us, and then, at some future date?

We all will see Him there.

Blessed Holy Week, friends.

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Palm Sunday – Year A (RCL)

Palm Sunday Year A

New Website

I’m updating the prayers to be used with the Revised Common Lectionary (RCL).

Please visit: http://www.prayersofthefaithful.org

Prayers for Lent Year A (RCL)

Please visit the new site for PDFs of prayers for Lent Year A.

http://www.prayersofthefaithful.org/year-a.html

Dear Beginning-Church-Planter’s-Wife Me, by: Marissa Burt

Dear Beginning-Church-Planter’s-Wife Me:

I see you there, with your earnest zeal and your highlighted crinkle-paged Bible and your life verse that reminds you to run hard. I know how you love Jesus and delight in his church, and I’ve watched you sing For All the Saints with gusto every November.

I’ve read that fat stack of books by your bedside, the ones that tell you how to organize your house and make the most of your time, the ones with lists for Scripture memory and Bible study and scheduled exercise and regular sex and balanced meals and the Exhaustive Guide to being an Excellent Wife™ .

I see you packing up boxes for your cross country move — your three-year old tangled up in packing tape on one side, your sixteen month old and his unsupervised Sharpie on the other, and that brand new baby strapped to your front. As your southern friends from the church you’re leaving would say: Bless your heart.

You think you’re familiar with church planting. After all, you’ve been involved in one from the ground up. You’ve experienced the worry of empty chairs, and you’ve sat through meetings where opinions flared and people hashed out mission statements. You’ve raised your hand more than once to meet a need.

Aaron’s ordination to the diaconate – March 2007

 You’ve played piano and taught Sunday school. You’ve set up welcome tables and served snacks. You’ve prayed and laughed and rejoiced and grown. You’ve weathered seminary and youth ministry and stood by your husband while he took his ordination vows. Together you have a handful of years of ministry and some associate pastoring under your belt. You think you know what’s coming.

Bless your Jesus-loving heart.

When your baby is six weeks old, I see you move from South Carolina to Seattle where every trip to the grocery store is full of people marveling at how full your hands are.

You have three children three-and-under, a two-bedroom apartment, and one visionary husband.

You think you can handle it, because you can do all things through Christ who strengthens you. And sleep-deprivation is hard but deny yourself and consider others as more important and you are an unprofitable servant and take thoughts captive, because all the books you’ve read have told you how to be Good.

So the night before every church plant meeting you hunt the internet for children’s craft ideas. After all, three of the five kids are yours, and no one else is offering, and you might as well, because the last sermon you ever fully listened to was the one before your first due date.

And you stock your purse with snacks and books that keep little ones quiet until the singing. They do their best, but you still worry that they are too loud, and then you worry about all the possible negative effects of being a PK, and as much as you loved reading the works of Martin Luther and Jonathan Edwards you’d give it all up for one seminary class on how to solo-parent young children from set up to tear down of the Anglican service.

Because that’s what church has become: service. Serving and teaching and praying and filling in at the piano if they really need it and minding children and making sure you say hello to the new people and checking in with that woman having a hard time and putting on the coffee and wiping the craft glue off the tables and smiling and smiling and smiling. Oh, Honey. Bless your wrung out, well-intentioned, zealous, driven little heart.

You don’t even know how lonely you are. Years of ministry have given you a strange sort of relationship-mode that is the enemy of true intimacy. Keep working at this. People aren’t ministry projects; friendship is worth it, and you need others who can see you for who you are not what you do. And though it’s hard to find, believe me, you’re going to need some solid friends around you for what comes next.

Because, Girl, those things you think you’ve dealt with from your past? Yeah, you haven’t.

And this perfect storm of children and transitions and job moves and family dynamics and illness and financial stress is about to explode all over the place. You want to please your husband and please your kids and please your parents and please the church and, above all, please God, and all that pleasing has you working so hard to save your Good Christian life that you’re blind to the danger of losing your soul.

I see you default into self-denial when the stressors come, as if legalism and doing the Right Thing and ordering your time wisely and choking out the bad will somehow fill your life with good.

It’s not working out so well for you.

That taking up your cross you think you’re doing? It’s really a form of self-loathing. And all that service? Somewhere along the way you’ve picked up the lie that love means meeting the needs of other people and oh, Honey, you’re in trouble because the world is aching with need, and the church is full of broken people, and there will always be more you could do, and your shoulders were never meant to bear that weight.

© Copyright Jerzy Hulewicz and licensed for reuse at Wikimedia.

Your cracked and dry heart is desperate for someone to see and know and approve, and all the serving and loving and smiling won’t ever fill it. But it will take a few years for you to get there yet. You’ll tread water awhile, because that message you’ve carried around from middle-school youth group has taught you well — Jesus first, Others second, Yourself last — and you don’t yet know any other way to live.

And then you’ve read all those marriage books. The ones that tell you to support his dream and be a strong helper, and of course you’re going to, since you love your husband, and you love the church. And so you lean in even more, because aren’t the two meant to become one? And a wise pastor’s wife once told you that it shouldn’t be a church hiring two for the price of one, but the messages to serve more and do more ring a little bit louder.

So you think of it is as “our” job and “our” calling, and neither of you really know any better, because in a church plant there’s too much to do and too few volunteers, and the scarcity mindset takes over. You get tricked up by your own competency, and you believe the faulty math that says if you can do it and no one else is doing it then you should do it.

Eventually you’ll let go. You know and believe that it’s God who grows his church, and in time this trickles down to melt your perfectionism and drivenness. You’ll see that your volunteering might actually be excluding the person who finds great joy in that ministry, and you’ll discover that it’s acceptable for the nonessentials to fall by the wayside.

The children won’t mind Hot Wheels coloring books for a Sunday, and that one couple will happily set up tables, and what do you know? After a few mornings with no snacks, somebody else begins to bring them. And the Martha in you will come to accept that when there’s no coffee on Sunday, the work of the kingdom will still go on. Even in Seattle.

© Copyright J J Harrison and licensed for reuse at Wikimedia.

And slowly, slowly, you’ll begin to stop. Mostly because you cannot continue at that pace. Your mind and your body and your marriage will all stretch thin until the crippling anxiety irrationally shouts at you that you are in danger.

Because you are.

All your books on Having a Good Christian Marriage won’t prepare you for the moment when both of your coping mechanisms fall short, and you discover his human-ness and can’t escape your own, and the unhealth of the Try-Harder Christian Life slaps you straight in the face until you realize that bending in to another person is never the way to wholeness. It will take you some time to see that becoming one doesn’t equal two people eliminating themselves but requires two wholes bringing all their separateness and individuality to the marriage. So, Girl, get yourself to a family therapist, because that perfect storm? It’s done a number on your marriage.

Photo: ©2001, Todd Buchanan

And eventually that day will come when you and he stop bending in to each other and instead slowly straighten up, letting the crooked spine unfurl and the disjointed things pop back into health until you are standing side by side, hands clasped, looking straight up to Jesus.

That posture brings in the conversations where you can sit and listen and really see your husband without jumping in to fix or problem-solve or analyze a situation. You will find yourself happily ignorant of the politics of the latest vestry meeting, and you will stay home from church when the children are over-tired, and when you do go, you might just sit somewhere quiet rather than jump in with an automatic, “How can I help?” When you recognize that church planting is his job and not yours, you will respect and cheer him on in a new way, and you will find the freedom that comes from setting aside all the need and drivenness and instead consider where you the individual – not the pastor’s wife or the mother – fit into the life of the church.

Mepkin Abbey, SC

And old wounds will begin to heal – the sting of those early days of seminary when people started asking your husband what he was studying and looked right past you. The hurt that cut deep on that first mission trip where you only wore the label spouse and the aching identity crisis that threw you for a loop when you became defined by motherhood. The wounds of a lifetime that say any self at all is selfish.

When our strange culture breathes the question, “What do you do?” it leaves you defined as a pastor’s wife and a church planter’s wife and a stay-at-home mom, and while all of that is true, what you do does not name who you are. And, oh, I know it hurts, but all of this is part of the process to strip off the old and the false in you, because the seed has to die before it can bear fruit. Just wait. Hold on, because freedom and new life tastes good, and you won’t ever want to go back to the old way of doing things.

But before you get there I see you on the dark days. The ones where you feel trapped and hurt and lonely and afraid. The times when it feels like all either of you are doing is working, and the money is never enough, and his shoulders slump when the critical comments come from the parishioner you thought was on your side, and you want to camp out with Elijah and despairingly say: I have been very zealous for you, Lord.

I see you fantasize about a “normal” job where he can clock out at five, and you try and remember what it felt like to have his arm draped over your shoulders during the sermon and how it was to hoard Christmas week all to yourself. The plain truth is that some of the ins and outs of church planting are just difficult, and you will never recoup the cost.

But it’s time to let go the cultural lie that says being a pastor or church planter (or his wife) is somehow The Hardest.

Because it’s not.

Just like Elijah was not the only one in Israel, you and your family are not the only ones whose jobs squeeze tight or who struggle with the circumstances that beat them down. You need to hear that it’s not just you who’s stretched thin by life, it’s everyone else in the church, every single person who comes on Sundays, and it’s why all of you line up together in that long row for communion, because you all are desperate for the life-giving Bread of the world.

© Copyright Daniel Dauria and licensed for reuse at Wikimedia.

You’re hungry for Someone to see you and know you and approve of you, and oh how happy I am for the day when you sing Jesus Loves Me with the kids for the thousandth time and begin to believe those words for yourself. It’s like the way you’re crazy about your children, but not because they play so excellently or do childhood so well – you love them because you can’t help but do anything else: they’re your kids. He sees you and knows you and loves you, but not for what you do. He loves you because you’re his, so drop that basket and open your arms wide for God to fill them with his goodness.

But all of that’s still ahead of you, and right now you’re in the thick of it. I’m not going to advise you to pray harder or read your Bible more or memorize longer Scripture passages. I’m not going to tell you to look to Jesus or choose your feelings or serve others. In fact, I’m not going to give you any advice at all, because your hard-working, sleep-deprived, driven little heart is going to latch on to the doing, and I know how easy it is for good Christian women to even Martha-ize sitting at his feet.

Instead I’m going to remind you of the truth: you belong to God. He gently leads those who have young. He’s got you. Instead of leaning in more, you can lean back into him.

Because what’s hardest for you to believe is that when Jesus says his yoke is easy and his burden is light, he really means it.

Doing more, self-denying more, giving more or serving more won’t bring you more life, it just sends you endlessly going, rising up early and going to bed late, laboring in vain. And he hasn’t promised you a treadmill – he’s promised you life.

© Copyright Michael Gäbler and licensed for reuse at Wikimedia.

Grace is kind of an all-or-nothing game. Go all in on grace. Rest. Be still. Breathe. Let go. Find joy.

It’s his church. He’s building it. And, in the meantime, he gives to his beloved even while they sleep.

And bless your exhausted little heart, you need some.

***** 

Marissa lives in Seattle. When you ask her what she does, she will answer that

she writes novels for children, reads lots of books, and loves playing board games with her family.

But she’s trying to stop defining herself by what she does, so here are some things she finds delightful: British mysteries, cats curled up on blankets, the smoky smell of autumn, cold rainy walks along the Pacific Ocean, and roasted sweet potatoes.

You can find Marissa online at marissaburt.com.

Waiting for Easter

When I saw the priest swipe the Ash Wednesday cross on my baby’s forehead, I cried. 

“Remember that you are dust and to dust you will return,” the priest said, and I looked at my round-cheeked, bobble-headed, newly-born gift, and I was terrified. He will die one day, I thought, and the simple truth of the human condition quickened inside me. 

I spent one January in the hospital with that child when he was gravely ill, and, for a time, the doctors didn’t know how to diagnose him. If you’ve ever lingered in a children’s hospital, you know it is a hallowed place. 

It rends your heart to see young bodies worn thin with illness and bloated with medication, to watch toddlers toting IV poles, and to find children who should be running and jumping and laughing, instead bedridden. 

There’s an instant respect and gratitude for the nurses and doctors and workers who battle death every day and long through the night.There’s a strange kinship that comes with intuitively recognizing the fear and powerlessness on fellow parents’ faces stretched tight with worry.

My husband and I find etymology fascinating, and this child’s name carries a sense of “belonging to the Lord.” I’ve always believed it, but facing the reality that our son didn’t in fact belong to us, that we couldn’t heal him or sustain him or hold on to him—it was a hard place. 

It’s also a place where dysfunctional coping mechanisms come in handy. The ability to emotionally disconnect, to push past the pain and fear and instead smile at my weak and feverish child was a strange gift that made the days endurable. 

The breath-stealing moments came at night. 

When the room was quiet and my boy slept, I curled in to the hard plastic couch & cried a soundless prayer, the kind where no words come & your body prays for you – the kind I last prayed when we miscarried a baby, the kind that comes from the gut.

©  Renjishino1,  Wikimedia.

One afternoon I was able to slip down to the prayer chapel, where the thick doors shut out the muffled sound of the hospital. It was late December, so the nativity still sat at the front of a room framed by four stained glass images. Next to that was a kneeler facing Mecca. Opposite, a spreading wood-carved tree twined up the wall, & beyond it, a glass cabinet, filled with more religious symbols than I could identify. 

This was a place where no one could escape the truth of mortality, where a parent’s deepest fears confronted them face-to-face — a place where everyone reaches for God. 

I had the chapel to myself, which was good, because emotion is loud and desperation bottles up inside, and all I could think was: NOT MY CHILD. 

The previous four years had wrung us dry as a family. Circumstances had squeezed tight from every possible angle, and relational dysfunction and sin had nearly choked the life out of us, and as the new year dawned I couldn’t face this gauntlet. 

“Please, God,” I begged. “Not that. Not my son.” I refused to bookend this with a rote request for God’s will to be done. I was afraid of God’s will. 

I know well the stories of Job’s wife and her inexplicable loss and Abraham climbing the mountain with his boy and the woman who dared to believe Elisha’s promise of a son only to lose him. I wanted life and health for my child. 

If something else came, well, the thought of it was, and is, intolerable. I confessed this to a friend who gently reminded me that “No, please God, no,” must be a permissible prayer, because there was Another who prayed the cup of suffering be taken from Him. 

And I held tight to that when the diagnosis finally came, when it turned out my child’s rare disease was treatable but had long term consequences. I am deeply thankful for that outcome. I know it could have been much worse and that for many children it is.

© Jerzy Hulewicz, Wikimedia.

Writing medical updates for friends and family reminded me of this. I couldn’t make myself form the expected vocabulary. “Praise God,” seemed like what I ought to say to preface every good report. But it rang false in my mouth, because it felt myopic and premature. I’m unspeakably grateful, yes, but I’d have much rather passed on the whole experience. And what of the other children? The ones who have only bad news to report? 

Easter is far off and while the hope of God’s victory frames all of life, we live in the shadowlands where children’s hospitals are still packed full. I can’t stop thinking about the families who don’t get the “Praise God” report. 

Many days I find myself back in the hospital chapel, panicked in the face of suffering children, and shouting: NO, PLEASE GOD, NO. Because disease and death? I hate them. 

In the front of the chapel, there was a large book filled with written prayers. Pleading prayers and resigned prayers and prayers for strength and messages of love to dead children. Because children die. Parents sit in that room and plead and cry and God doesn’t take the cup from their boy’s lips. 

They are left bereft and empty-armed, and I can hardly breathe when I think of that played out. I can make no sense of the “why?” questions, and while my head does fine with accepting the sound theological parsing of suffering, my heart can’t swallow it. 

On this side of mortality, there is no answer to the reality of that kind of suffering.

There is only Jesus. 

A wounded Savior, I’m desperate for him. It’s moments like those where I need the crucifix. I need to see God himself coming to enter into suffering and death. I need to see him draw near to us in the face of our doubt and grief and show us the wounds in his hands and his side.

© Michael Saludo, Wikimedia.

When friends’ stories of loss brush close: the woman whose five-year-old was suddenly given a few months to live, the dying mother who stores up letters for her children to read after she’s gone, the missionary who came home on furlough to find a terminal cancer diagnosis, the dear suddenly-widowed friend and her bereft children, the Code Blues ringing through the hospital halls —it is too much for me. 

Death, our great enemy, steals in, and how can we endure it? 

I don’t know. There are no theological answers that make the pain bearable. Death is part of our world — a strange, holy, and terrible thing about being human. 

Lent gives me space to receive this, it brings me into the wilderness with Christ, who took on a body destined for dust. The ashes on all of our foreheads become a quiet chorus that whispers: death comes to us all. 

Though we must accept death, there is no way to normalize it. I think of this as I wonder how one bears the unbearable, how one carries the suffering and untimely death of a child up a mountain of grief. Or of anyone, because can death ever be timely when we were made for life? 

I’m having trouble ending this post, wrapping it up with some sort of tidy conclusion, but I think that’s perhaps appropriate. 

There is no conclusion for the Lenten moments – no tidy answer for my empty-armed friends, for the mothers still pacing emergency room floors, for the hollowed-eyed fathers in the hospital coffee line, for all of us who cry wordless prayers of pain. 

Together, we wait with the suffering, gasping, beautiful world, believing hard that Easter is coming. 

 

Democracy of the Dead – CS Lewis

G.K. Chesterton once said that “Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead…Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father.”  

To honor that sentiment and to stave off an easy chronological snobbery, today’s post comes straight from the mouths (or pens) of men and women who have died in the faith.

From CS Lewis‘ THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH

[Mark] left the Bristol feeling, as he would have said, a different man.  Indeed he was a different man.  From now onwards till the moment of final decision should meet him, the different men in him appeared with startling rapidity and each seemed very complete while it lasted.  Thus, skidding violently from one side to the other, his youth approached the moment at which he would begin to be a person…

There were no moral considerations at this moment in Marks’ mind.  He looked back on his life not with shame, but with a kind of disgust at its dreariness.  He saw himself as a little boy in short trousers, hidden in the shrubbery beside the paling, to overhear Myrtle’s conversation with Pamela, and trying to ignore the fact that it was not at all interesting when overheard.  He saw himself making believe that he enjoyed those Sunday afternoons with the athletic heroes of Grip while all the time (as he now saw) he was almost homesick for one of the old walks with Pearson – Pearson whom he had taken such pains to leave behind.  He saw himself in his teens laboriously reading rubbishy grown-up novels and drinking beer when he really enjoyed John Buchan and stone ginger.  The hours that he had spent learning the very slang of each new circle that attracted him, the perpetual assumption of interest in things he found dull and of knowledge he did not possess, the almost heroic sacrifice of nearly every person and thing he actually enjoyed, the miserable attempt to pretend that one could enjoy Grip, or the Progressive Element, or the N.I.C.E. – all this came over him with a kind of heart-break.  When had he ever done what he wanted?  mixed with the people whom he liked?  Or even eaten and drunk what took his fancy?  The concentrated insipidity of it all filled him with self-pity.

In his normal condition, explanations that laid on impersonal forces outside himself the responsibility for all this life of dust and broken bottles would have occurred at once to his mind and been at once accepted.  It would have been “the system” or “an inferiority complex” due to his parents, or the peculiarities of the age.  None of these things occurred to him now.  His “scientific” outlook had never been a real philosophy believed with blood and heart.  It had lived only in his brain, and was a part of that public self which was now falling off him.  He was aware, without even having to think of it, that it was he himself – nothing else in the whole universe – that had chosen the dust and broken bottles, the heap of old tin cans, the dry and choking places.  

 

Self-preservation, or…?

“Christianity is a battle, not a dream.”  – Wendell Phillips

I’ve written before about my ongoing struggle with fear.  I hold tight to the promises of peace, trusting in the nearness of God to be my good.  I memorize verses that tell me that He is my refuge.  I pray loud that God is my only security, that only in Him can I be safe.  Which is why I came up short the other day to find I was wrong.

© Copyright Jerry Segraves and licensed for reuse at Wikimedia.

Nowhere am I promised to be safe.  Oh, He will be my refuge.  His nearness is, in fact, my good.  He will become my security, but my insatiable need to feel safe will never be met this side of heaven.  I stumbled across one of those charts that you’ve probably seen before.  The ones that contrast “fleshly thinking” with “spirit-filled thinking.”

And this one sets the desire for peace against the acknowledgment that we are in a battle:

“Is self-complacent; craves the peace of mind that relieves him of unwelcome responsibilities.”

vs. 

“Knows that warfare between good and evil will not allow undisturbed peace.[1]”

I’d heard before that peace doesn’t necessarily mean everything goes perfectly.  You only have to look at the cross to recognize that Jesus didn’t mean “trouble free” when he said “My peace I give to you.”

I’d heard how He doesn’t promise to take the storm away, but that He gives you peace in the midst of the storm.

But what if it’s not just a promise to help us endure the storm?  What if it’s a call to get out there and stir one up? 

I spend so many hours hoping that tragedy doesn’t strike that I’m not even truly living.  I remember watching my six-year-old waver on the edges of the dodgeball game during kindergarten recess.  The thought of getting hit with the ball was just too much for him.  I can relate.

But here’s the truth, the one I need to sink down into the depths of my soul: The ball might hit you, and it might hurt, but staying on the sidelines means you never get to play the game.

Lisa Bevere states it this way:

© Copyright Michael Gäbler and licensed for reuse at Wikimedia.

“Becoming who God created you to be is both your best offense and your best defense against the enemy’s strategies.  He obviously didn’t stop you from drawing breath. It is now time to keep him from stifling the spiritual seed God planted inside you.  When the enemy oppresses, it is always because he fears what we might become.”

I think that’s true. The next best thing to making sure you were never born or killing you outright, is sentencing you to a living death where you do absolutely nothing.  Self-preservation is the opposite of the gospel, so how is that I’ve been telling myself God will help me with my pet project of self-security?

Preserving your life doesn’t save it.  It just keeps it.  And what good is a well-kept life? 

I want a well-spent one.  Whole-heartedly, frivolously, even recklessly poured out, because we’ve joined His game, and it’s a wild one.

 

 

“Ours should not be the love that asks, ‘How little?’ but ‘how much?’;

the love that pours out its all and revels in the joy of having anything to pour on the feet of its Beloved.

The question ‘what is the harm?’ falls from us and is forgotten when we Calvary, the Crucified, and the risen-again Rabboni of our Souls.”

–Amy Carmichael

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[1] Beyond Ourselves, pg. 192