Keep On Keeping On

Bungee Jumping and at Rest

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This Sunday brought a weird confluence of thoughts and truths. 

Context: For those that don’t know, I’m adopting a daughter from India. And just now, I am waiting for a match. India releases children to be eligible for adoption every Monday. That means every Monday is the start of a weeklong emotional rollercoaster. Will it be today? My adoption coordinator said it might take a few days to coordinate up-to-date information with the orphanage. It’s Friday – now or never. Not this week. The weekend. It starts again. This process could take from 0-8 months.

Cue Sunday Morning

Sunday started with a text from my mother: ”Sunday School this morning: ‘Be a bungee jumper.’ The lesson was trusting the providence and direction of God.”

Then a visiting pastor preached on Matthew 11:28-30

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

These two ideas seem a little paradoxical. Be a bungee jumper at rest. And I’ve been meditating on the paradox all week. 

I love Matthew 11:28. Who doesn’t love Christ’s call to come to Him and find rest? Rest sounds great! But, because I am a dirty, rotten, sinner, I have some objections that occasionally surface: 

  1. Many days I’m not sure that I want to come. I know the end of the passage: “Take my yoke upon you,” and I don’t really enjoy being told what to do. 
  2. Taking God’s yoke means that the wiser ox (God) works in tandem with the young, stupid ox (me) to teach the younger ox the right way to go. My brain wants to believe that it can figure it out on its own; no help required. And (see number one) I don’t really enjoy being told what to do. 

Clearly, these are untenable positions. I absolutely need someone to lead me in paths of righteousness; I need someone who will tell me “this is the way, walk in it.” I think, I hope, I pray that I am quicker now to abandon these totally foolish ways of thinking and take up God’s yoke and learn of Him, but it’s a daily struggle. And there is another objection. Taking up God’s yoke and plowing straight furrows again, and again, and again doesn’t sound like any fun. It sounds hard. It sounds boring. 

Anyone who has walked with God for any length of time will tell you with conviction that life with God is never boring. I need you to watch sheep for forty years: now go and tell off Pharoah and watch God part the Red Sea. Watch sheep for your dad; now go and fight a giant. Wander in the wilderness for forty years; watch Jericho fall. God’s perfect plan for his children is a heady mixture of plodding and adventure. Biblically speaking, God calls us to faithfulness in daily obedience and to leaps of knowledge-based faith. 

We have to learn to plod. It’s the work of humility and meekness to take up the cross daily and love my rotten neighbors, to be thankful in circumstances I don’t like, to do everything (even the things I am convinced I can do alone) with prayer and supplication, to pray that God’s will be done instead of my own, to hold loosely my own plans knowing that God is the one who will direct my steps (whether I want Him to or not). This is “take my yoke upon you and learn of me” faith. It is hard. It demands consistent sober vigilance, taking every thought into captivity, daily taking up the cross. This plodding does not produce the instant “out” of brain-numbing entertainment or a quick thrill, but it produces with time a long-lasting, well-nurtured, knowledge-based rest born out of a growing understanding of and relationship with God.

We have to learn to jump. To trust God when he says take five stones and fight that giant, march around that wall, take torches, pitchers, and trumpets to battle, sacrifice your son, go back to Jerusalem even though they hate you. This is bungee jumping faith. Bungee jumping faith is awesome; you come through and stand looking back on the Red Sea just crossed, the walls of Jericho toppled, the giant facedown in the dust and praise God for his mighty deeds. You remember these moments to your children so that you can teach them the greatness of God. 

You can bungee jump and plod at the same time, spiritually speaking. Deciding to move forward with adoption has been bungee jumping – the really scary kind where you have no control, the ground is coming up so quickly, and you find yourself screaming (metaphorically, mostly) “God, I hope you’ve got this.” And it’s been plodding. This process started two years ago! There has been reams of paperwork, waiting for the two bedroom apartment to be ready for move-in, lag time as documents were approved, fundraising, praying, planning, hoping . . . 

And in all of this, in plodding and bungee jumping, I am to find rest. To paraphrase Paul, I am to learn “in whatever state I am in – plodding, bungee jumping, walking through the valley of the shadow of death – to be content.“ I am to know my Saviour so well that whether I am in a season that feels interminable because it is heavy, hard, or boring or whether I am in a season that makes me hold onto my hat and pray for a safety restraint, I can rest. He is my Good Shepherd who will supply my needs. He is my closer-than a brother friend, my Creator who remembers my frame that I am just dust, my strong tower where I can run and hide. He is the God who holds me in His hand and nothing can pluck me out. He is the God who delights to rescue me. And as I learn to rest in this knowledge the plodding becomes more like a walk with a friend and the bungee jumping – well, that’s still bungee jumping, there’s just a lot more joy in the jump!

As always, thanks for listening! 

Ev’ry day the Lord Himself is near me

With a special mercy for each hour;

All my cares He fain would bear, and cheer me,

He whose name is Counselor and Pow’r.

The protection of His child and treasure

Is a charge that on Himself He laid;

“As thy days, thy strength shall be in measure,”

This the pledge to me He made.

Help me then in eve’ry tribulation

So to trust Thy promises, O Lord,

That I lose not faith’s sweet consolation

Offered me within Thy holy Word.

Help me, Lord, when toil and trouble meeting,

E’er to take, as from a father’s hand,

One by one, the days, the moments fleeting,

Till I reach the promised land.

Uncomfortable with Reality?

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None other Lamb, none other Name,
None other hope in Heav’n or earth or sea,
None other hiding place from guilt and shame,
None beside Thee!

My faith burns low, my hope burns low;
Only my heart’s desire cries out in me
By the deep thunder of its want and woe,
Cries out to Thee.

Lord, Thou art Life, though I be dead;
Love’s fire Thou art, however cold I be:
Nor Heav’n have I, nor place to lay my head,
Nor home, but Thee. (Christina Rossetti)

There is a theme running throughout psalms and hymns, authors claiming that they have nothing besides Christ. I think that too often our reaction is to applaud these writers for releasing their hold on earthly things to cling solely to Christ. (Which is a good thing.) We treat the statement as a statement of faith rather than of fact.

It isn’t a statement of faith to claim only Christ; it is the reality in which we live, and move, and have our being. If you are perfect, or, at least, more perfect than I (which isn’t hard) this reality may hold no fears, no nagging uncertainty. Lucky you.

If I have nothing but Christ, then my relationship with and to Him is not just important it is of overmastering importance (to borrow a term from Dorothy Sayers). And I hear you, “No, duh, Sarah.” Hear me out. If all I have is Christ, than any rift in that relationship promises not only to undo my fellowship with Him it also threatens my relationship with reality (everything).

I’ve been pondering a verse brought up in a recent church Bible study. “Open my eyes that I may see wondrous things out of Thy law.” The premise of the verse is that alone I am unable to see what I ought to see in the Bible.

Studying the act of seeing in Scripture is illuminating. (Pun intended.) From almost the beginning man has had trouble seeing aright. Consider our first mother, Eve. She saw the fruit . . . it looked good and it looked like a thing that would unlock for her special knowledge reserved for God Himself. She saw. But she saw wrong. What she saw was not reality.

Or consider the servant of Elisha trapped with Elijah on top of hill surrounded by enemy soldiers. Two men against a host. But, again, what the servant saw was not reality. Elisha prayed and asked God to show his servant reality. And the servant’s eyes were opened to see the hosts of heaven protecting him. He was in no danger from the enemy.

So back to the original premise. “All I have is Christ” is statement of fact. It is not a comfortable fact. God declares His personality, His purpose, His power all over this world in every facet of nature, every event of history, and, of course, in the book He gave us. But in the end, as much as we know about God, we will never be able to know Him fully. Which means my understanding of reality will always be at least a little out of focus, and, to be honest, more often than not, much out of focus.

If you, like me, want a checklist-orderly, understandable world run by a comfortable, understandable God, you and I are out of luck. He is no tame lion. Our most rigorous attempts to bend His ways to our understanding will end in frustration and despair. Always. Why? Reality is Christ, and until I can see perfectly as Christ I have to accept that there is much I will have to take by faith and not by sight. It’s uncomfortable living with the knowledge that your knowledge and understanding will never be sufficient to rightly understand the world.

But be of good cheer. God remembers that we are pretty foolish blobs of dust — he knows us; He made us. And to help us along He gives us many words of wisdom and precious promises to guide our semi-blind wanderings.

I don’t know what pieces of reality, of Christ, are out of focus for you. Me? I’m struggling to trust that God will bring justice into situations in which people who should have known better behaved in decidedly unchristian ways. Or, perhaps, more specifically that God can afflict the righteous without malice — that all his ends will absolutely bring about God’s glory and good, great good, for His saints. I cannot understand why God is patient when I want Him to get busy hurling lightning bolts. (Though I admit to being very thankful He isn’t quick to hurl lightning bolts at me.) How can God stand by and watch his faithful servants be hurt?

I’m not the first to level this accusation at God. (See almost any book of the OT.) But I’ll admit I haven’t found a satisfying, here-and-now answer. All I find is —

The LORD is slow to anger and great in power, and the LORD will by no means clear the guilty. His way is in whirlwind and storm, and the clouds are the dust of his feet. Nahum 1:3

Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the LORD delivers him out of them all. He keeps all his bones; not one of them is broken. Affliction will slay the wicked, and those who hate the righteous will be condemned. The LORD redeems the life of his servants; none of those who take refuge in him will be condemned. Psalm 34:19-22

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. Isaiah 55:8-9

Be still and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth! Psalms 46:10

I find in these and other verses a path for my semi-blind groping for reality. God is not now, nor has He ever been out of control. He is working everything after the counsel of His own will. He is palpably good. He does not change. He does not acquit the wicked. His love is everlasting. And that is enough. That is Christ — even when every fleshly bit of me thinks there ought to be more. Be still and know Christ. Be still and know reality.

I don’t know what you are struggling with. All you have is Christ — literally. For you and me the only answer is Christ.

Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me,
Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ on my right, Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down . . . (St. Patrick)

A Jumble about Waiting and Plodding On

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No one wants to be —

Moses watching sheep for forty years in the wilderness

Jacob working 14+ years for his uncle

Abraham in all the years not recorded in Scripture (and there were quite a few!)

Paul in the desert

BUT —

Moses at the burning bush, parting the Red Sea, on the mountain with God — Absolutely.

Jacob dreaming angels — Okay.

Abraham seeing God’s promises fulfilled time and time again — We would rejoice.

Paul preaching with the power of the Holy Spirit and seeing multitudes saved — Yes!

——————

There is something soul-searing about Moses, an intelligent and cultured man, “wasting” forty years of his life watching stupid, smelly sheep in the forsaken wilderness. Forty years! It’s a long time. And it staggers the imagination to conceive the number of days and years Abraham spent wandering (at God’s command, but still wandering).

These are the decidedly un-cool, without glamour, not-worth-writing-about moments (weeks, months, years . . .).  It’s easy to assume that because the Bible tucks these moments away into a few incidental verses that they are unimportant, but to do so is to ignore the that fact that these times often represent a substantial chunk of lifetime.  (For Moses, his time in the wilderness was a third of his entire time on earth.)

We read our Bibles looking for glamour (not on purpose, it’s just more interesting narrative material):  Peter at Pentecost, Paul on Mar’s Hill (or almost anywhere else), Elijah at Mount Carmel, Samson (a jerk, but . . .) pulling down the temple, David slaying Goliath, etc.  We miss the myriad “little people” and “quiet moments.” The many, many women without whom the work of the apostles would have been impossible.  The Aquilas and Priscillas.  The apostles who “disappear” from view, but who were doubtless working as hard as any Peter, Paul, or John. David’s time (and there was lots) spent in caves or in wildernesses waiting for the next attack.  Elijah’s time at the brook and with the widow waiting for God to determine it was time for the drought to end. So many people who never had “spotlight” ministries or “showcase” moments of super-power. So much time spent away from the “limelight.” And these “little people” in these “quiet moments” had nothing to do but plod along in obedience and faith waiting for God to act. And let’s face it: Obedience is HARD.  Faith is HARD.  Neither is glamorous. Add a little conflict (which the Bible promises will be our constant companion) and life can look downright dismal.

The issue seems to be that in narrative waiting is generally compressed into a very few words. In the Psalms we have some narratives of waiting (and probably in the prophets, especially the Minor Prophets, but who reads those?  Just kidding.  Sort of . . .).  But sometimes we miss the waiting in the Psalms. We spend too much time trying to force the Psalms to be happy-happy praise and comfort and often overlook the fact that many Psalms are anything but comfortable.  They are full of anguish and longing — of waiting for God.

I believe that I shall look upon the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living! Wait for the LORD; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the LORD! Psa. 27:13-14

Commit your way to the LORD; trust in him, and he will act. He will bring forth your righteousness as the light, and your justice as the noonday. Be still before the LORD and wait patiently for him; fret not yourself over the one who prospers in his way, over the man who carries out evil devices! Psa. 37:5-7

I am weary with my crying out; my throat is parched. My eyes grow dim with waiting for my God. Psa. 69:3

(This from a simple word search for “wait” ignoring other terms like longing, hope, and know.)  So many commands and encouragements for the soul to “wait” make it seem like maybe waiting is both challenging and important. The simple fact is that much of our Christian lives will be spent in faith

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Heb. 11:1

and obedience (the active, cheerful kind — at least on good days)

By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome. 1John 5:2-3

waiting for God to work in our lives and in the lives of those around us.

Be still, and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth! Psa. 46:10

It isn’t glamorous.  It certainly isn’t fun.  But God teaches things in the wilderness that he cannot teach (or maybe, more accurately, we cannot learn) on the mountaintops. To all my waiting friends, and to my own soul, maybe we can encourage each other to be still in the waiting, to wait in hope, to be confident in God’s ability to work all things after the council of His own will in his own time.  And when the waiting is over maybe we will all be ready for our own burning bush (and another forty years of wandering with griping, faithless Israelites — on second thought, maybe the waiting isn’t so bad).