More to be Desired than Gold

I am guessing that all who love the scriptures have experienced the magnetism of a phrase that is beyond your understanding at the moment, but your spirit senses the sweetness, savors the mystery, and waits for the illumination of understanding in due time.

Like "abide in Me". Or "Christ in you, the hope of glory". Does anyone really get that? But doesn't your spirit quicken to the taste of radiant hope and expansive assent when you read or hear or remember the words?

Some years ago I came across a small book whose title and author I failed to note, and since then I have wished I had not passed over it so quickly. The focus of this book was the hypothesis of a Japanese researcher exploring the power of words. He worked with glass containers of water which he placed separately in a variety of settings, and exposed the water to a range of music and specific spoken words. He then placed drops of water from the containers exposed in these various ways onto freezing slides, so that each drop crystallized.

The book was filled with photos of the variety of resulting crystals. The crystals from water subjected to words like "love", "peace", "happiness", and to light, happy or gentle, soothing music were as one would expect a crystal to look, symmetrical and beautiful. The crystals formed by water droplets surrounded by harsh and hateful words or hard and angry music were irregular, incomplete, or otherwise disfigured.

I have not come across the book again nor heard from any other sources of such a theory, but found myself intrigued by the concept and pondering once again the beauty of the body of literature we know as the Word of God. I have reflected on the potential for illumination that exists in even a portion of one verse of scripture, if it were to wash up on any shore to any person in the world. If that person were able to read those few words and think about them, what questions even a few words could awaken, and what resonance with the human heart.

And then to think of the effect on the human spirit through the generations, the uncounted hundreds of thousands who have gathered weekly and been the listeners as words like "light", "goodness", "love"," joy", "peace", "patience", "kindness", "gentleness", "wisdom", "mercy", "eternal weight of glory", "swallowed up by life", "the God of all comfort", "eternal life", "the hope set before us", "sorrowful yet always rejoicing", "overflowing through many thanksgivings to God", "indescribable gift", "manifold wisdom of God", "the grace of life", "good works", "fitted together", "built together", "riches of His grace", "His kind intention", "forgiveness of our trespasses", "freely bestowed on us in the Beloved", "rich in mercy", "grace abounded all the more", "encourage one another", "love one another", "be kind to one another", "forgive one another", "do not fear", "lift up your heads", "alive to God", "law of the spirit of life", "more than conquerors", "spirit of truth", "full assurance of faith", "be anxious for nothing", "peace of God which surpasses all comprehension", "good things to come", "myriads of angels", "the spirits of righteous men made perfect", "the Father's good pleasure", "blessed and holy", "faithful and true", "the bright morning star", "the glory and honor of the nations", "the Lamb's book of life", "river of the water of life, clear as crystal". . .

This is only the beginning; it goes on and on and on and on and on!

Do we have ANY IDEA how truly blessed we are?! Deeply embedded in the most hidden cells of our bodies and in the smallest backwaters of our psyche are words of life, words of beauty, words of hope, making us supremely rich.

"Summing it all up, friends, I'd say you'll do best by filling your minds and meditating on things true, noble, reputable, authentic, compelling, gracious--the best, not the worst; the beautiful, not the ugly; things to praise, not things to curse. ...Do that, and God, who makes everything work together, will work you into His most excellent harmonies." (Phil. 4:8, The Message Remix)

I have been created for His harmonies.

Oh that these words of illumination and life be our daily portion, and all that is lesser give place to that which beautifies and endures!

Those Silly Foxes

All through the winter of 2010 to 11, there was a large peaceful fox that would sit regally in a patch of sunlight on the hill top, or curl up to sleep on other days, in the same patch of warmth, or bark for the dog down the street, his friend, to come and play fox and hound.

I've discovered that while I was gone he turned into lanky, lean, beautifully bushy tailed teenaged foxES who peek in our windows, tumble and chase up and down the decks, and run the squirrels up the trees.

And carry off shoes. My favorite outdoor slip-ons that I slipped off at the front door have a missing mate somewhere in the hundred acre wood. And they were even too muddy to taste good.

Silly foxes.

Forests and Trees

Brooklyn and Manhattan, Philadelphia and Reading and Lancaster and Nashville and Franklin, Michigan and Halifax and Ethiopia and Tanzania and Ethiopia and Central Park and Shushan....the summer has softly folded into fall all unnoticed, and slowly my soul is catching up to my address.

Lots of trees in this forest; it will take me a while to find words.

Lots of sunbeams too, by the way, and the moonlight is stunning.

Thank You; It was Magnificent

Winter is gradually drawing to a close, and (here I must lower my voice so as not to be overheard by anyone who might doubt my sanity) on the day of the first thaw, I was surprised by the regret I felt that it had passed so quickly. I was not yet ready to part with air so clean and cutting that to take deep breaths of it must surely have added years of health to our lives; nor our weekly routine of bundling up against the piercing cold to throw and stack a week's supply of firewood outside our door, nor the countless treks late at night, returning home after long days in town with snow so deep we had to leave the car up the road and hike with arms full of groceries down our long driveway, through driving snow or under vast starry skies, through softly falling downy flakes or a hushed moonlit wonderland, but always through this deep stillness.

Whether softest powder, glistening ice, cold so dry it caused crispy crunching at every step, piercing micro-sleet, or smoothest drifts of whitest smoothest cream, I have not enough words to describe how deeply I have loved this winter here in beautiful Cape Breton. So much have I loved it and been moved by its unearthly stillness and its majesty and beauty that I am aware that my life on earth has been altered by it.

Every season is a gift, with the Creator's goodness imprinted in ways beyond counting. This year, winter's gift in this far northern wilderness has been a rarity of breathtaking purity so great that David and I have felt sometimes, standing in this profoundest silence of falling snow, or walking like a whisper under a thousand stars, or through the stillness of a corridor of diamonds more magnificent than any dream on earth, that surely we are just a breath this side of heaven, if not already there in one of God's most holy secret places.

"Have you entered the storehouses of the snow?.... And the frost of heaven, who has given it birth?" (Job 38:22,29) As long as we live, our hearts will be marked by the gift this season of beauty beyond imagining has been to us, and for this profound gift we give profoundest thanks.

Tall Like a Tree

"Oh, I get it!" I thought one day several years ago (sometime after fifty) as I surveyed in the bathroom mirror the downward drift of my face--sag under my eyes, drooping along my jaw line, jiggle behind my chin, and generally everything unamusingly dropping just a little. "I get it! It's the earth; it's gravity! It's the dust my body is made from unable to hold out against earth's magnetism; the earth is pulling my body."

For days after that, I thought about how youth is the season of life when the human body is coursing with the vibrant power of life, and cannot help but sing, twirl, skip, hop, leap, run, climb, and believe in flying and all other kinds of miracles. Life's force is anti-gravity, kept from floating off into space by earth's magnetism, but otherwise inspiring every kind of upward movement, from ascending musical scales to a spring in the step, from ballet and trapeze art and hang gliding and gliding birds to flying pole vaulters and skiers and parkour champions, from soaring architecture to even the smallest smile, defying gravity to lift our faces.

I became sharply aware of the very real difference between body and spirit, a difference that in our youth is sometimes hard to discern, but becomes more undeniably apparent with the years, that the body is one thing, the spirit is most definitely another, and our final outcome depends ultimately on which was the stronger during their inseparable bond in the earth-life.

And so my already great appreciation for the keen perceptivity of Paul's words in II Corinthians 4, about the outward, the physical, fading but the spirit within expanding with an increasing wealth, an immeasurable "weight of glory", became exponentially fuller, as I could see so up close and personal the reality of the "dustness" of these bodies.

Listening as my brother-in-law read through a psalm one day recently with my family, a familiar passage suddenly jumped into fresh imagery, "...the path of the upright." UPRIGHT! There again was a reference to the relationship between gravity and our spirit. Good straight posture of heart and soul, embodied in a word that when I checked it out has nearly a hundred references to the character of God or man in the scriptures.

I have always been drawn to trees, and to the woods, filled with their strong vertical trunks by the hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands, with crowns reaching for the light. This perfect straightness repeated countlessly, this light-focus, fascinates and intrigues me and somehow calls to my spirit.

Our God and Creator who is over the heavens has so planned and designed our world that from birth we are surrounded by invitations to look UPward, and thereby more possibly, with adjusted perspective, see ourselves in right relationship with our surroundings and our God. A dear friend asked me recently what really is the difference between the believer and the principled unbeliever. As I pondered the question, I could see that one very great difference is this upward focus, this vertical relationship with the eternally transcendent God.

It is the call of Jesus when He taught us to pray as He did, "Our Father WHO ART IN HEAVEN". In these words Jesus led us, in the immediacy and urgent press of our lateral circumstances and need, before all else to turn our eyes Upward, away from our surroundings to HIM.

It is this Upwardly focused living that makes us Upright in heart and life. In a world that pulls our souls toward earth, the upward call keeps us from being spiritually bent, disfigured, bowed down with cares and worries, heedlessness, narcissism, and distorted perspective. Think of the imagery of the psalmist's words, "Why are you cast down, O my soul?..." (with worry and discouragement). And his equally symbolic words to the Lord that "You are my glory, and the LIFTER OF MY HEAD" (Psalm 3). Think of the very physical effects of what the scriptures call the "deeds of the flesh" (the "dust" part of us) versus the "fruit of the Spirit (the upwardly attentive part of us) listed in Galatians 5. Jesus said, "Be on guard, that your hearts may not be weighted down..." The "dust-deeds", the dominance of the "dust" part of us, leave people--both the perpetrators and the victims--bowed down, heavy hearted, vengeance focused, oppressed, and stuck in dead ends and vicious cycles, while "Spirit-fruit" creates health, well-being, buoyancy, balance, and uprightness.

Without this uprightness that naturally occurs by our Light-reaching, our Upward-facing, we develop sicknesses of soul, perversions and twistedness and dysfunction, often without even being aware. The haphazardly straying path of lost sheep who have each gone off to their own way becomes our lot when every man does what is right in his own eyes, without the lifelong benefit of Heaven's GPS, giving us our bearings and a true equilibrium through our proper relatedness to Earth and Heaven, feet on the ground and head uplifted; gravity and Antigravity in a beautiful tension of rootedness and upwardly propelling force of eternal life.

Therein lies the transcendence that truly counterbalances the impact of earth's suffering and sadness, its pull to bitterness and resentment, hopelessness, unbelief, and eternal death, instead pulling us upright, as the sight of a lone bird flying overhead in the Nazi death camps strengthened Betsy ten Boom to remember that the evil surrounding her was not the only or final reality.

The God who is entirely upright in all His ways, calls us and causes us to stand upright, our lives on earth in these dust-bodies filled with grace and glory and upward mobility in the most literal sense of the word, because of the One who is the LIFTER of our heads.

Think of all the ways He speaks to us, calling us from living low, earthbound lives, confined under a ceiling, pointing us upward, lightward, heavenward in spirit! Majestic mountains, plunging waterfalls, soaring birds, towering clouds, geese in formation, starry night skies, the compelling drama of sunrises and sunsets all call us to know our smallness in contrast to what is infinitely higher and more vast than we are; not to diminish our significance but to give us a sense of the GREATNESS in which we are wrapped. Even the waters that cover the majority of earth's surface were created with reflective properties, neverendingly reflecting the sky.

Of these natural testimonies to our God, the psalmist wrote:

"The heavens are telling of the glory of God;

And their expanse is declaring the work of His hands.

Day to day pours forth speech,

And night to night reveals knowledge.

There is no speech, nor are there words;

Their voice is not heard.

[Yet] Their sound has gone out through all the earth,

And their utterances to the end of the world..." (from Psalm 19)

What a tragedy (and a travesty) it is that some would so misperceive God's call to worship to be evidence of an ego gone out of control, with an insatiable lust for flattery. The phrase repeated again and again through much of the Old Testament, "before the Lord", as well as the injunction to "know" that He is King of the earth, straightens our posture, relieves us of the weight of unabated earthiness, and calls us to remember what is glorious and eternally true.

"To Thee, O Lord, I lift up my soul. O my God, in Thee I trust." (Psalm 25:1,2)

"Hear the voice of my supplications when I cry to Thee for help, when I lift up my hands toward Thy holy sanctuary." (Psalm 28:2)

"...to Thee, O Lord, I lift up my soul." (Psalm 86:4)

"And I shall lift up my hands to Thy commandments, which I love..." (Psalm 119:48

"I meditate on all Thy doings; I muse on the work of Thy hands. I stretch out my hands to Thee; my soul longs for Thee..." (Psalm 143:5,6)

"Teach me the way in which I should walk; for to Thee I lift up my soul." (Psalm 143:8)

"TO THEE I LIFT UP MY EYES,

O Thou who art enthroned in the heavens!

Behold, as the eyes of servants look to the hand of their master,

As the eyes of a maid to the hand of her mistress;

So our eyes look to the Lord our God." (Psalm 123:1,2)

When come even the darkest of days foretold for the earth, Jesus, in anticipation of those days gave us our life-instruction to "straighten up and LIFT UP YOUR HEADS, because your redemption is drawing near"!! (Luke 21:28)

And so I carry on with great delight in smiling freely, letting the force of life prevail, streeeetching my waking dust-body, lifting high my hands in praise like the uplifted branches of the trees, climbing up into the windowed cupola of this house, turning my thoughts and my spirit to heaven, and day and night lifting up my eyes and my heart to the skies and beyond, to the Eternal One enthroned in the heavens. We and the trees, in the pleasant company of the upright, stand rooted in the earth, ever reaching for the sky! And one great day, gravity will give way to a great and final trumpet blast.

About "the Surrender"

There is a story that accompanies the preceding piece. The surrender referred to was long in coming, and the battle, though only internal, was not an easy one. But I have come to see it was necessary, and the freedom I am experiencing is the sweetest I have ever known.

For I am a settler married to a true pioneer. A pioneer in heart and mind, who does not have a reason to live if not forging ahead. I, on the other hand, move slowly, take more than a bit of time to survey my surroundings and put down my roots, but once my roots are down, they hold firm.

Over time I began to comprehend that our pattern, David’s and mine, was quite literally one in which about the time I had finally been somewhere long enough to put down my roots, make friends, feel like I was getting established, my pioneer beloved was looking at the sky, studying the movement of the clouds, testing the direction of the wind. And I could see it was soon going to be time to pull up our stakes and move on.

I reflected often on the fact that, in the universal magnetism that causes opposites to be attracted to each other, my dedication to the Lord in my youth led me to the ardently questing pioneer I saw in David, keenly aware of my own orientation toward settling and instinctively drawn to this counterweight to my potential complacency of spirit. I also reflected often, especially in recent years, how incredibly much richer I was in life and in personhood because of our journey together, because of his undying quest for the fulfillment of God’s purpose in our lives.

When in 1999 we came upon our “Psalm 23” land, both the settler and the pioneer in us found a most amazing synchronism, and the years following were for me filled with self-discovery, God-discovery, and delight as it appeared we had found the balance of my dream of building a sense of place for our children and grandchildren, and a base from which to make any number of outbound pioneer ventures. We came into a harmonious rhythm of travel and home, California, Israel, even visits to Australia added to our already established family ties in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Indiana. And no matter where we went, there were the dear familiar gardens, paths, woodland streams, fruit trees, and beloved books, paintings, comfy corners and favorite reading chairs to come HOME to.

Then came the Great Shaking, the year 2009 that will go into our personal histories as the year, for David, that “his engine was disconnected from the train” and we embarked quite unwillingly on a season in which our lives were not our own to direct.

Coming out on the other end of that season, it became abundantly apparent to my disbelieving heart that my pioneer husband could not see us resuming our lives as they had been. I loved our life. But once again, the upward call mattered to him more than anything else in the world. Or more accurately, years ago he set himself to follow the One who is Life, and now once again he heard that One calling.

And for the first time in my life, I recognized in myself the very real capacity to say No to the Lord of my life.

I did not at first see the real crux of the choice for what it was. I stood for all the noble and faithful and inspiring principles of our commitment and our calling as it had come to be defined. I argued that the present felt dried up not because God was leading us onward but because we had been so traumatized and disconnected and needed to reengage, reinvest, redefine our purpose. I longed with everything in me, after what felt like the relentless battering of months of stormy winds, to return to the sweet haven of life resumed, normalcy, productivity, and fruitfulness. And home.

With ALMOST everything in me. There was still a place in my heart that the Faithful One knew was tucked down deep, and He was not going to leave it untended.

One evening this summer, 2010, sitting in the presence of the Lord with a few others in a time of quiet “soaking”, my heart was opened, and I understood all at once that I was also being called by the One who calls, and that He had in fact been calling me for many, many months. Loudly, softly, with words, without words, calling and then waiting with unending patience, nudging, then waiting, whispering, then waiting, lining my path with lovely invitations, watching while I ignored them all.

There had been my father’s often-repeated words quoting his father’s: “I never lived in a place I didn’t enjoy, and I never lived in a place I could not leave.” There was February in Florida, sitting with David’s parents watching the winter Olympics, David switched channels for just a moment and fell into the Diary of Anne Frank, a scene with the unhappy couple hidden with them in the attic, the husband mourning his wife’s stubbornness, having long before that refused to flee while there was opportunity: “You could not leave your dishes and your things…”

There was the unwelcome but persistent memory of that poem I had written fifteen years previous, awakened by one of those midnight revelations in which I saw our journey of the past twenty years so marked with the constant nearness of the Lord that I saw HE was my home more than any address we had ever had; it had been a realization so forceful that I got up and with random pen and paper squeezed into the laundry room of our apartment in Antioch, Tennessee, and wrote of God being my home here on earth, with a peace wrapped then in awe and wonder. The revelation of heaven’s nearness no matter where we were over the years had illuminated my understanding like a beacon. But that was then, I felt, and this was now; I had completed that “phase” of my life.

But now I saw, in opening up my hands to receive the gift of a home and land from my Father, had my fingers closed around the gift? Had it gone from being His to Ours to Mine? In fact, if He was calling us onward, or even if my beloved thought He was calling us onward, and I could not lay down what I considered a gift from my Father, then had not the gift become more important to me than the Giver? If that were true, then the gift had become an idol.

The words my father loved called to me: “I have fought the good fight; I have FINISHED the race”; and I knew a good start was important, but meant little unless the race was completed. I thought of Solomon, Rehoboam, Asa, Hezekiah, who started out strong but faltered and dropped out in the end. “Be faithful UNTO DEATH, and I will give you the crown of life.” “For our citizenship is in heaven…” “For here we have no continuing city…” “You are not your own; you have been bought with a price…” “These are those…who did not love their life to the death.”

But most of all, I saw the body of Christ torn and bleeding, the “veil” through which I passed at my second birth. It cost Him His life, it cost Him His own will to become my salvation, and how could I then think I could hold onto my will? The very greatest mark distinguishing the believer from the unbeliever is this laying down of one’s right to self-determination, to yield to the will of One greater. To belong to this One and call Him Lord has always meant no longer being a sheep turning to my own way. My own way was only an option if I was no longer following my Shepherd.

And then I remembered the words of Jesus, that the one born of the spirit is like the wind, blown here and blown there. I remembered His invitation to come to Him and be filled with His living Spirit that would flow from the innermost being. Flowing, blowing, living, breathing I saw all in a rush were linked entirely to yieldedness, surrender, the opposite of the rigid stiffness that comes with atrophy of body or stubbornness of soul.

Outside the quiet room where we sat, surrounded by worship and candlelight, was the music of a forest stream, and I saw clearly that eternal life is a yielded life, a life that remains supple, that can be directed like the wind or like a flowing stream.

And with that realization, as this poem says, I surrendered.

It is hard to describe the immediate lightness of my spirit, so exhilarating I felt nearly that I could fly, like I had been cut free from a tether, and the joy and the freedom were nearly intoxicating. I felt like Pilgrim at the cross, whose heavy load carried on his back for the entirety of his long journey broke away and went tumbling down the long mountain and he was free! Free from the fight for my future, my responsibility, my material possessions, my this and my that, my-my-my and me, and free to just say Yes! and enter in with my whole being to the invitation being extended to a future defined by Someone bigger than myself, who loves me with a patience beyond comprehending.

The part that brings me to tears is that this season defined by Him is filled to the brim with gifts and opportunities and surprises that I could not have dreamed of, that are sweeter than anything I even knew to imagine, gifts that are refreshing long-dormant places in my heart, in our relationship, in both of our walks with God.

I am getting to see what I would have missed had I continued to hold out for what I understood. More than ever before, I am in awe of His kindness, His patience, and the depth of His love that only seeks our greatest good. With everything in me, I want never again to drift from this place in which I have been set free to move, to be led, to follow, to flow, to yield, to trust, to surrender to such a One; I want only to come even more fully into this yieldedness for the rest of my life.

Because once again, I have decided to follow Jesus, no turning back.