Submission to Future Pain

Recently a pastor’s sermon challenged the congregation to reflect on their lives as they were 5 years ago, and compare it with their lives today to see the progress God has built into their lives.  I was in that congregation, and I have been meditating on that challenge ever since.

My first thought was that yes, I had grown—but not in the ways I wanted to grow!  There are several pet sins in my life that I have begged God to purge for years, yet I see little or no improvement.  If I focused on those evidences, I would certainly despair of my salvation.  But the unavoidable conclusion was that there were differences in my life compared to five years ago, and on the whole, they were evidence of growth:  they just weren’t in the areas that I think must be important to God!

Behold my arrogance:  as if I know what is most important to Him.

Instead of targeting what I DO, the changes targeted what I believe and how I react in attitude to my circumstances.  This was somewhat disappointing:  after all, I want to glorify God by becoming such a great Christian on the outside that people will look at me and notice how well I glorify Him…oh, wait.  That’s not glorifying God.  That’s glorifying me.  Well, then, I want to glorify God by doing awesome, difficult things for Him so that people will be amazed at the things I have accomplished for…oops.  That’s not glorifying God, either.

Well, then, at the very least I just don’t want to hurt anymore.  Recently, though, I’ve realized that not even that will best glorify God.  Instead, God has been enabling me to pray that He would make me able to submit to the pain that is in His plan for my future.

You see, I have been through a lot in the last 12 years of my life.  God took my husband Home instantaneously through a hit-and-run accident when our children were 15, 12, 5, and 15 months.  I was left to raise them on my own, while grieving the loss of my best friend and lover. 

A few years afterward we moved and joined a local church which, at first, felt like “home”.  During this time I developed a serious crush on a single fellow in our congregation:  only to discover that he was secretly a child pornography addict when he was arrested by the FBI.  This hurt so bad, mostly because I had exposed my children to danger through my undisciplined emotions, though I had worked very hard to control them both before the children and in public.

Not long after that it was revealed that the pastor of the church where we were serving was not a pastor at all:  rather he was a manipulative, power hungry tyrant.  Our family had invested heavily in this church both with service and with finances.  As far as I could tell, I was following God as hard as I could when we joined there.  So to discover this and go through the pain of trying to reconcile, being rejected and having all our service rejected, and then having to separate from the congregation without anyone truly understanding why was extremely painful and something I determined to avoid at all costs for both myself and my children’s sake in the future.

We fled to a small, uber-denominational church which my parents attended and which we judged to be at least safe from megalomaniacal leadership due to its governmental structure.  And four years later we left, having discovered that obedience to the scriptures was not considered an imperative for the members of this “church”.

During that time other difficulties arose within our own family which caused deep fear and distress and even depression (in retrospect).  These months were so painful that I literally cried almost every day, often spent days with my stomach in knots, unable to sleep for more than a few hours at a time.  I was trying so hard to follow God, and yet these painful things were happening to me!

I share all this so that you will know, when reading what comes after, that I am not speaking out of a lack of experience of deep emotional and spiritual pain.  Because it’s possible that it may seem crazy for me to pray that God would make me able to submit to the pain He has planned for my future.  I am highly motivated to avoid a repeat of intense pain of any kind!

However, after serious reflection and meditation on these experiences and comparing them to scripture and what I know of the God of the bible, I have come to conclude that there is no way I could have avoided those painful experiences. 

In America especially, but probably in human experience generally, pain and suffering are something we think we should avoid at all costs.  A gospel of pain-avoidance has been preached…from prosperity preachers to the stolid fundamentalist teacher, if-you-would-just-live-this-way-do-this-follow-this-set-of-rules has been proclaimed as the gospel of pain avoidance. “Those terrible things wouldn’t have happened to you if you had only done [fill in the blank]”.

But a serious study of scripture will show this to be no gospel at all.  If we could save ourselves, we would.

Let me be sure to clarify something before continuing:  what I am not saying here is that I am perfect and blameless in each of these circumstances.  What I AM saying is that even if I had been perfect and blameless in each of them, there would still have been pain—I still would have encountered painful situations in my life.  Living blamelessly is no panacea.  Being perfect and sinless doesn’t lead to painlessness. (If you think I'm wrong, just meditate for a moment on our Lord:  sinless, but not painless!)

Following each of these experiences I found myself afflicted with the “what if” syndrome.  The motivation to avoid any future pain of that type and intensity drove me to frantically consider what I could have done to avoid these experiences.  I blamed myself, mostly, and sought to pinpoint the exact moment when I deviated from the “path”, causing so much agony for my children and myself, so much disillusionment.  But eventually I came to realize that I couldn’t have, wouldn’t have done anything different.  The “what if” syndrome extends to the future, also: constantly fearing what might happen, what bad decisions I might make, what evil people might inflict upon us, what mess an incomplete understanding of God’s instructions might lead to.  If I couldn’t have avoided it in the past, then I logically come to the conclusion that neither can I do anything to avoid future pain.

Recently someone expressed to me their belief that the doctrines of Calvinism seemed to them the most hopeless of gospel understandings.  These painful experiences have emphatically taught me differently:  God’s Sovereignty, His ordination of everything that I have been through, is the most hopeful thing I can imagine.  I cannot save myself—not for eternal life, and not in this life.  I cannot even behave in such a way as to avoid pain.  But God has ordained that only that pain which will best benefit me and ultimately best glorify Him, and not a smidgen more or less, will be allowed in my life.

And that is why my prayer for myself now is that I may jettison the “what if” syndrome, cease to try to figure out what I can do to avoid future pain, and instead concentrate on Christ and Him crucified:  To seek His kingdom zealously, to love unreservedly, to be involved generously, to live graciously and joyfully, not in fearful expectation but in glorious hope of the redemption of ALL things.  These scriptures inform my prayers:

who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. 6       In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, 7       so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.  1 Pe 1:5–7

Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead. 10       He delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again. 2 Co 1:9–10

Oswald Chambers has this to say on the subject in the devotional for October 23 (God’s Sovereignty at work again!):

Our Lord never nurses our prejudices, He mortifies them, runs clean athwart them…. It is part of our moral education to have our prejudices run straight across by His providence, and to watch how He does it. God pays no respect to anything we bring to Him; there is only one thing He wants of us, and that is our unconditional surrender….How are we going to get the life that has no lust, no self-interest, no sensitiveness to pokes, the love that is not provoked, that thinketh no evil, that is always kind? The only way is by allowing not a bit of the old life to be left, but only simple perfect trust in God, such trust that we no longer want God’s blessings, but only want Himself. Have we come to the place where God can withdraw His blessings and it does not affect our trust in Him? When once we see God at work, we will never bother our heads about things that happen, because we are actually trusting in our Father in Heaven Whom the world cannot see.

In the devotional Thoughts for the Quiet Hour, the meditation for today is on I Kings 2:38; “As my lord the king hath said, so will thy servant do”:

There is something infinitely better than doing a great thing for God, and the infinitely better thing is to be where God wants us to be, to do what God wants us to do, and to have no will apart from His. • G. Campbell Morgan

And our hope in this was simply and profoundly stated by my daughter in an answering text as we discussed giving in to the realization that we can only learn from what is coming, not avoid it:

"Amen, and no matter what happens, God is in control and there is a time coming when everyone will be completely trustworthy!"

Thinky Things

If you’ve made it to the end of this lengthy post, I thank you for persevering, and by way of thanks this once I will not impose distracting thoughts of my own on your meditation.  The following scripture references may be of assistance: 1 Sam 2:9, Job 23:20, Psalm 66:10, Isa 48:10, Rom 8:18, 2 Cor 4:17, 2 Thess 1:7-12, James 1:2-3, I Pet 4:12-13.  As you ponder, remember to…

HOLD FAST

Art And All That, Part VII

I keep thinking that I will blog on another subject, but then God ordains that something comes up during the week that seems relevant to this topic, and so here we are at Part VII. 

Although we’ll be talking about Art, it’s been the “week of technology” at our house.  My parents have gifted me with a laptop (thanks, Mom and Dad, and thanks God!) which arrived Friday evening sans some of its basic software (boo, Toshiba) but otherwise in working order, making me giddy and keeping me from posting this as usual on Friday night.  Earlier in the week the girls and I were delighted to receive our Christmas Present To Ourselves.  This is a new tradition at our house which began when the nestlings commenced moving out and off and starting their own families.  Those who are still at home all contribute to a larger gift that will benefit everyone instead of purchasing separate gifts for one another.  This year we were blessed to be able to purchase a fairly nice telescope to add to our binoculars from last year.  We ordered it early so that we could catch a few fall night-sky events before it gets too cold for us girls.  As we opened it, we were singing Christmas songs. 

Next year, we’ve promised ourselves new linens throughout the house!
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My precious son-in-law sent me a link to a blog this week that produced plenty of fodder for my own blog.
 
Does anyone else find it interesting to discover the ways God used art in scripture? 

In this case we will be looking at visual arts, drama, and dance. 

Thinky Things (this week they come first as well as last!)

As you attended church today (if you did), did you look at your surroundings?  Were there visual reminders of the gospel other than a cross?  Stained glass windows?  Paintings?

During the service:  was there a drama or skit today or within the last month at your church?
 
Lastly, when was the most recent time you experienced a liturgical dance at church?

You see, music is not the only art God created for worship.  All genres of art find their most glorious heights of artistry when used to point us to the glories of Him Who Created Art.  Yet for long and long the church has shunned certain genres of art and banned them from the worship services of the gathered church.  As a result, many of these genres have been given over entirely to humanists and pagans. 

In looking through scripture, however, we find that God has not shunned any type of art in communicating His message to us!  Visual arts (the heavens declare…) drama (Prophecies of Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Agabus) Dance (Miriam, David).

Consider Ezekiel.  Below is a rather lengthy passage in which God commands Ezekiel to represent by visual and dramatic arts the punishment He is about to inflict upon Israel for their disobedience.  To some phrases I have added highlights to point out the art.

    “And you, son of man, take a brick and lay it before you, and engrave on it a city, even Jerusalem. 2     And put siegeworks against it, and build a siege wall against it, and cast up a mound against it. Set camps also against it, and plant battering rams against it all around. 3     And you, take an iron griddle, and place it as an iron wall between you and the city; and set your face toward it, and let it be in a state of siege, and press the siege against it. This is a sign for the house of Israel.
4     “Then lie on your left side, and place the punishment of the house of Israel upon it. For the number of the days that you lie on it, you shall bear their punishment. 5     For I assign to you a number of days, 390 days, equal to the number of the years of their punishment. So long shall you bear the punishment of the house of Israel. 6     And when you have completed these, you shall lie down a second time, but on your right side, and bear the punishment of the house of Judah. Forty days I assign you, a day for each year. 7     And you shall set your face toward the siege of Jerusalem, with your arm bared, and you shall prophesy against the city. 8     And behold, I will place cords upon you, so that you cannot turn from one side to the other, till you have completed the days of your siege.
9     “And you, take wheat and barley, beans and lentils, millet and emmer, and put them into a single vessel and make your bread from them. During the number of days that you lie on your side, 390 days, you shall eat it. 10     And your food that you eat shall be by weight, twenty shekels a day; from day to day you shall eat it. 11     And water you shall drink by measure, the sixth part of a hin; from day to day you shall drink. 12     And you shall eat it as a barley cake, baking it in their sight on human dung.” 13     And the LORD said, “Thus shall the people of Israel eat their bread unclean, among the nations where I will drive them.” 14     Then I said, “Ah, Lord GOD! Behold, I have never defiled myself. From my youth up till now I have never eaten what died of itself or was torn by beasts, nor has tainted meat come into my mouth.” 15     Then he said to me, “See, I assign to you cow’s dung instead of human dung, on which you may prepare your bread.” 16     Moreover, he said to me, “Son of man, behold, I will break the supply of bread in Jerusalem. They shall eat bread by weight and with anxiety, and they shall drink water by measure and in dismay. 17     I will do this that they may lack bread and water, and look at one another in dismay, and rot away because of their punishment.

5:1     “And you, O son of man, take a sharp sword. Use it as a barber’s razor and pass it over your head and your beard. Then take balances for weighing and divide the hair. 2     A third part you shall burn in the fire in the midst of the city, when the days of the siege are completed. And a third part you shall take and strike with the sword all around the city. And a third part you shall scatter to the wind, and I will unsheathe the sword after them. 3     And you shall take from these a small number and bind them in the skirts of your robe. 4     And of these again you shall take some and cast them into the midst of the fire and burn them in the fire. From there a fire will come out into all the house of Israel.
5     “Thus says the Lord GOD: This is Jerusalem. I have set her in the center of the nations, with countries all around her. 6     And she has rebelled against my rules by doing wickedness more than the nations, and against my statutes more than the countries all around her; for they have rejected my rules and have not walked in my statutes. 7     Therefore thus says the Lord GOD: Because you are more turbulent than the nations that are all around you, and have not walked in my statutes or obeyed my rules, and have not even acted according to the rules of the nations that are all around you, 8     therefore thus says the Lord GOD: Behold, I, even I, am against you. And I will execute judgments in your midst in the sight of the nations. ( Ezekiel 4:1–5:8)

I’ll admit, that is not my favorite story in the Bible!  It is heavy with guilt and the wrath of God:  we all need that reminder more frequently than we get it.  If we heard it more often, perhaps we would remember that from which we have been saved, and be less inclined to take salvation for granted.

Zoe is a dancer who is reading through the Bible and blogging her thoughts as she goes through each passage.  Here’s a sample of what she has to say concerning this passage:

  “The neat thing about this is that God is using something besides just preaching to get a message across.  He's using visual representation and physically acting out the prophecy in a symbolic way.  Hey, that sounds an awful lot like drama!  Ezekiel has become, in a very weird sense, a performing artist prophet.”

She admits that:

This probably isn't the number one thing you're supposed to get out of reading Ezekiel 1-12, but for me, as a performing artist, it really stuck out.  

Performing Artist Prophet.  Now that’s a different—and interesting-- perspective.  It makes me think all kinds of things, like…I wonder if his friends (did he have any friends?  He had a wife…) thought “oh, that’s just Ezekiel trying to get attention.  Honestly, I wish he’d quit that sort of thing.  It takes attention way from God.”  Or, “That’s pretty cool…look at all the attention Ezekiel is getting! I can draw, too…I’m going to draw some stuff on clay.  My heart is right, so it will be God speaking just like Ezekiel.”  Or maybe when Ezekiel heard all this he wished there was a way to resign from being a prophet:  just like sometimes I’d like to resign from being a teacher/performer.  In fact, as it turns out, Jeremiah did feel that way, but found his call and message stronger than his desire to stop prophesying:

    If I say, “I will not mention him,
or speak any more in his name,”
there is in my heart as it were a burning fire
shut up in my bones,
and I am weary with holding it in,
and I cannot. 

As a performer, I understand this tension:  So many times I am judged for the very gifts that God has given me to use to proclaim His message; at the same time, I know that I must proclaim it somehow, using the gifts He gave me (and not other gifts that He has NOT given me) and I must do so in a very humble yet excellent manner.  This makes me glad God promises to accomplish these things in me, because trying to balance all of that for myself is impossible in my own wisdom and strength.

My particular gifting is in the area of music, which is currently and historically an accepted art in the church, even when it is restricted only to the singing of the human voice.  But a dancer’s perspective is quite different:

Dancing, though, is probably the most iffy art there is for Christians.  For so many centuries it was denounced by the Church or important leaders within the Church, although there were always some who objected to demonizing the art as a whole.  A few years ago I read an article that's actually fairly recent arguing that dance, while not inherently evil, probably always leads to bad things - the author claimed that it was the Israelites' dancing that angered Moses and caused him to break the original 10 Commandments, and even blamed Michal's anger at David's behavior on David!  As a dancer, I found this incredibly disturbing.  Fortunately, I think that with the rise of dance ministries (more than even the rise of Christian dance companies), people in the church are beginning to see dance as simply a visual, physical way of expressing an idea or emotion, and that expression can be worship.

I certainly hope she is right about dance becoming a more accepted art form in the church.  I have personally witnessed a few rare instances of liturgical dance that made me catch my breath at the glimpse it gave me into the heart of scripture.  It could be a powerful way of communicating the gospel.

Zoe continues:

Anyway, so back to Ezekiel.  It's just comforting to see that the things we're just now figuring out, Ezekiel was commanded by God to do.  He was using art, as it were, to tell a story or to present a message.  That is the purpose of art - not to be worshiped or even to draw attention to itself, but to tell you something about real life.  Art has a way of breaking down barriers.  A lot of people will not listen to a sermon, or if they hear something that starts to sound like one, they'll just close their ears.  The arts have the ability to reach beyond our defenses and speak straight to our hearts, sometimes without us even knowing it at first.  That's why they're so powerful, and maybe that's why God had Ezekiel do this.

Or, you know, maybe He was saying it's okay to let your kids play in the dirt.

Well…perhaps letting your kids play in the dirt was a secondary interpretation!  Still valid you know, but not the main point *extracts tongue from cheek*.

More Thinky Things

What forms of True Art do you personally prefer?  Are there forms of art which are not useful to the Body of Christ and therefore useless for worship or proclamation when the Body gathers (if you argue for this, you MUST provide scriptural support.  Ha.  For that matter, if you argue the opposite you must also use scriptural support.)  The “Worship Wars” continue to be fought in church after church.  Why?  What’s the big deal about worship that we need to fight over?  What’s the big deal about Art And All That for the Body of Christ?  And what is the result of the church’s abandonment of certain genres of art over the centuries?

Well…that’s a lot to think about.  You can read Zoe's entire post here . Ponder, post and, until next time:

Hold Fast

Art and All That, Part VI

Here in Central Texas we are having a beautiful fall, one that was sneaking silently and stealthily, like a cat slinking through the brush at the edge of the yard: a few whiffs of fall-ish air late at night or early in the morning were the only hints that autumn was stalking.  One day summer seemed still in full force, while fall settled down behind a screen of shrubbery, tail twitching, the victim unaware of its impending demise, making us all think summer would continue forever.  And then, as cats will do…

POUNCE!

The next morning the temperature had dropped, the heat-hazy air cleared, the light suddenly came from a different direction, the leaves on the trees which had been a deep late-summer green the day before had an orange tint to them, and the fragrance of fall accosted our summer-stale nostrils into fresh, enervated fascination.  Summer expired quickly and painlessly, as hoodies made their long-awaited but hurried exit from mothball-scented closets.

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Thanks for reading that.  I’ve been just itching to write it down ever since it occurred to me.  A few of you may have encountered bits of it in things I’ve written here or there, but this is the full version.  So…how’d I do? (No, really.  Feel free to teach me better writing:  in a constructive and gentle manner, of course.)

Now to turn to the subject of True Art as quickly as our summer turned to fall.  It was of great encouragement to me to read an article by Rachel Starr Thomson over on the Speculative Faith blog. Here’s someone who gets “True Art”, and has the concept down well enough to apply it to her vocation of writing.

As a reminder, here is the working definition of True Art being employed in this series of posts:

True Art magnifies the greatness of God in Jesus Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit illustrating God’s Word through the artistic medium thereby motivating the gathered Church to proclaim the Gospel, to cherish God’s presence, and to live for God’s glory.

Rachel writes:

As a writer, I grapple with the idea of loving my readers. I don’t write merely for myself. I don’t even write for God alone. He has placed me here, in this world, so I write for readers–to love them in obedience to God.

That paragraph packs quite a punch for me, and may therefore qualify as True Art in its own right:  it makes me wonder if I am loving those who partake of my art, or if my focus is too narrow—is my art only there to gratify myself, or even only for God alone, in disobedience to His command that we love? Since this motivates me to proclaim the Gospel, cherish God’s presence, and live for God’s glory, it meets the criteria of True Art in and of itself.

Rachel continues:

Excellence has to be a part of that. Love and excellence go hand in hand. Where we don’t love, we can’t be bothered. When we care passionately, on the other hand, our best hardly seems good enough. If we love our readers, we’ll work at the story, at the sentences, at the themes. If we love our readers, we’ll revise. If we love our readers, we’ll apply ourselves with dogged commitment.

How I wish that a very long list of people (a list that would include me) could acquire this concept.  My music students.  Any number of unskilled, untrained, unprepared church members who claim their hearts are right and therefore they have the right to sing or play a solo before the congregation.  Writers of poorly written “Christian” poetry.  Makers of B (or even C!) “Christian” movies.  Posters on blogs who do not think that spelling matters...

God have mercy on us all.  Give us real love for You, Lord, that pours out in a passion that makes our best seem hardly good enough.

Then she comments:

We write with love, too, when we let our imaginations go and burst forth and make places and characters that inspire, that enervate. Lord of the Rings is a work of imagination, through and through, but it’s imparted real courage to me. Thank you, Master Tolkien, for your love.

Yes, thank you, Master Tolkein.  And Master Lewis.  And Paul the Apostle.  And Ludwig von Beethoven.  And Michelangelo. And Rachel Starr Thompson.

Thinky Things

You can read Rachel’s entire article here.

Are there places in your life where your lack of love is obvious?  Where your art isn’t True Art?  Who are some famous artists you know have loved you because they cared passionately about excellence?  How about unsung artists who showed love to you through their excellent art?  Why not give them a plug in the comment section ?

HOLD FAST (to what is good and excellent!)…