Whatever is Pure, Inspiring Christian Poetry, Devotionals and Testimonies October 2006

Getting On With Life

One definition of a coward is simply, someone who makes a lot of excuses. Most of us have enough excuses to last a lifetime. The sooner we let go of them and get on with living, the better off we are.

Tim Hansel

I said good-bye this weekend to a friend who I wrote about in the I Lift My Eyes Newsletter of October 2004 . To refresh your memory, Mary is Cree and was born in a remote impoverished area of our province to alcoholic parents. At the age of fourteen, she left her tiny hamlet in hopes of escaping horrible abuse and poverty. Having only a grade seven education, her resources were limited and she floundered as she travelled between relatives and friends until accepting Christ at the age of eighteen.

I first met Mary shortly after she accepted Christ. She was attending Adult education part-time in hopes of eventually earning a high school diploma. In the eighteen years since, I have not once heard her use her painful past as an excuse for refusing to go forward in obedience along the path the Lord set before her. When the ' demons' of her past would raise their ugly heads, she did not attempt to cover her pain but chose not to live in that pain forever. She sought out Christian counseling and pastoral helps. She developed strong Christian friendships and the Lord provided wonderful married couples to guide her in her walk, becoming very much her spiritual older brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers.

A course here, a course there, she finally gained her G.E.D and moved on to University and after five years of hard work, she graduated. All the while, she never forgot her family and was an active aunt in the lives of her nephews and nieces, providing a safe harbour as the cycle of abuse continued to spiral down in the lives of many of her siblings. Her heart broke as she despaired to see so many in her family remain in bondage to anger, drugs, alcohol and resentment but she did not allow her brokenness to ever become an obstacle in the course God set for her life. Upon graduation, she found work in a local woman's shelter.

In May of this year, she announced that she had been accepted for the Master's program at a prestigious Christian University. Her friends all rejoiced with her but were immediately saddened to hear that she'd be moving over 3500 miles away. The summer flew by much too quickly and on Friday about 20 of us gathered to pray with her and send her out with our blessings.

Although Mary is thirteen years younger than I, I have looked up to this courageous woman of God as long as I have known her. While transparent and vulnerable and often in deep emotional pain, Mary continues to remain faithful to her Deliverer and Redeemer, forgiving those who have abused her, having chosen obedience to God over remaining in bondage to her past. She truly has moved on to living the life God has given her.

My prayer is that I'll grow up some day to be just like my 'little sister in Christ'.

O God of Love, we come to praise your name!
In spirit and in truth we worship You!
We shout aloud Your glory and Your fame
As You reveal Your nature to our view!
How glorious the kingdom of Your Son!
Majestic is His throne on Zion's hill.
How worthy is the Lamb - the Holy One
Who bled and died to keep the Father's will!
In awe we stand amazed! Amazing grace
That freely paid the price for all our sin
And now we're called to seek Him face to face -
To come to Zion's hill and enter in.
Thanksgiving's gate will bring us to the throne
If we accept His blood which must atone.

I am not darker because you are lighter,I am alright
I am not shorter because you are taller,I am alright
I am not fatter because you are thinner,I am alright

In fact we are both alright,because God created our differences in love.
We are both fearfully and wonderfuly made.
That flat nose you detest,
That odd head you wish was a little bit rounder,
Those thick legs you wish were long and slender
Are all a masterpiece created by an all knowing God.
Today I stand tall and proud
Embracing my flaws
And delighting in my differences.
I stand knowing that
Before God I am neither this nor that...
I am alright.

© L Wandle

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"I stand amazed in the presence
Of Jesus the Nazarene,
And wonder how He could love me,
A sinner, condemned, unclean
.How marvellous! How wonderful!
And my song shall ever be:
O how marvellous! O how wonderful!
Is my Saviour's love for me -
by Charles H. Gabriel

A quiet time, to me, is just an established time to go to my Source, to the Father, and spend time with Him. It doesn't matter what you've done, or who you are, or how you've screwed it up, but you have a Father who likes to spend time with you. To go before God, to know what I've done and thought and to expect that He's going to strike me with a lightning bolt - but to be hugged instead - creates great astonishment. We mature Christians, we get so we're not astonished any more.

This past week, I was reminded how undeserved is the love the Lord lavishes upon me - undeserved, unmerited and utterly unobtainable grace and yet a free gift offered me and paid for through His horrible death and proven in resurrection of Jesus Christ. I ran to the cross today, humble and broken and had a heart to heart with the Lord. I confessed my verbal reaction to a hurt done against me was sinful and the Lord forgave me and in his mercy, he pressed me deeper still, going to the root and asking me to address my inner resentments surrounding the offender. The Lord doesn't only deal with our surface behaviour, he mercifully goes to the root and when I allow him, he'll lay an axe to that root, so I no longer have to ineffectively tug at the 'top' of the weeds that threaten to choke my new growth in Him.

Any suburbanite who has a lawn will tell you.that snipping off the bright yellow flower and green leaves of a dandelion does nothing to solve the problem although for a day or two, the lawn might look nice and smooth, overnight, the hardy weeds will spread new growth unless drastic measures ar made. The only way to get rid of a weed is to kill it below the surface. The only way to get rid of reoccurring sin in our lives is to go to the root and to humbly accept God's gracious invitation and allow Him to bring to the surface that which we would rather not admit exists.

I praise God that his forgiveness is through and that his forgiveness is instant. How marvellous. How wonderful and how awe-inspiring that Jesus Christ would go to the cross for us, in order to walk us straight into His father's arms, clean and spotless. I pray I will never take that gift for granted.

When I shut my eyes, I can almost see her whisking around pulling her home into order when Jesus and his entourage suddenly drop in for supper, mentally saying a brief prayer of thanks that she'd swept the front room that morning and wondering just how hungry these men are. My mental portrait shows that she's a little round--just enough to make her waddle when she walks--with a broad, honest face, red, chapped hands, and her every move exuding the word "capable." I picture Mary as lithe and slender, gracefully reclining on the floor in a soft blue dress with an expression of perfect rapture on her face as she devours everything Jesus is saying. But Martha--well, the best I can do for her is "capable," which just goes to show how much I still buy into the society stereotype that virtue and beauty are practically synonymous. And of course, "everyone knows" that Mary is the virtuous one who listens to Jesus while Martha is bad, bad, bad and gets her hand figuratively slapped for demanding that the angelic, reclining Mary help prepare the meal for the Master and his followers.

Only problem is that more and more I find myself empathizing with Martha. And the elder brother of the prodigal son, for that matter.

So many times I've had to beat down thoughts like, "Lord, why don't I have as much anointing on my life as they do?" I try so hard to live a life pleasing to Him, and then feel condemned because I'm "trying too hard" and "depending on my good works." And then I counter that faith without works is meaningless, and thus begins one of the many seemingly endless arguments that bounce around in my head at random hours of the day.

It's never seemed fair to me that so many of the "mighty men of God" these days are those with the sordid pasts. Often I hear someone give a particularly moving testimony of how the Lord moved them from the dregs of society into a life of truth and find myself envious. Of course they are quick to clarify, "Now those of you who don't have a testimony like mine, remember, the best kind of testimony is a person who's lived for Jesus every moment of their life." Of course I smile and nod appreciatively. And of course part of me deep down doesn't believe it.

It doesn't help, either, when prophets/evangelists/people who "see" things in the spirit realm come to the church and immediately target everyone around you and pass you by. You find yourself wondering, "what's the point of being here at all? God doesn't see me and if He does, it doesn't look like He gives a rip."

I was in that position not too long ago, and having one of those mental "what's the point of it all" arguments with myself when the tide turned and a single thought came crashing through my defenses: Why are you still so dependent on someone else to explain your relationship with God?

The thought was so strong I was almost surprised at not careening off to the shoulder of the road. There it was again, the ugly truth that even after 22 years of service to Him, I was still so insecure our relationship that I felt the need to hear someone tell me there were angels watching over me. I still felt that compulsion to be somebody else, because I wanted the giftings and callings of that other person more than to try to find my own purpose. I admit, I had to apologize to God right then and give myself a good talking too, and the constriction around my heart popped like the snapping of a rotten rubber-band.

You see, my failing was similar to one of the aforementioned elder son's faults. When he complained to his father that it wasn't fair that his father favoured his prodigal brother, who squandered away his father's money in wild living, with the fattened calf, Jesus used the word "bios" to describe the father's money, which is a primary word for present state of existence or "the means of livelihood." Matthew Henry's commentary states that the older son was trying to put his younger brother into disfavour with his father by magnifying the mistakes made, implicating that the younger son had wasted away everything the father had. By virtue of the fact that the father still had a fattened calf, a robe, and a ring to give to the returning son, we know he was still considerably well-off and that his estate hadn't suffered from the young son's mistakes.

In the same way, when I find my heart sinking at the awareness that God is using someone else and seemingly looking past me, the issue is not that I'm unhappy at seeing someone else blessed, but that I'm afraid He doesn't have enough for me. I am subconsciously limiting God, because I'm allowing myself to believe that if He chooses to pour out from His storehouses onto those around me, it automatically subtracts from the portion He's allotted for me.

If I could pin-point one thing that God is teaching me now, it is that nothing involving anyone else will subtract from what He has in store for me. To think otherwise is merely a lack of faith in His plan for me, and of course, "without faith it is impossible to please God." I love the promise in Romans 3 that our lack of faith will not nullify God's faithfulness. God is God, and His storehouses are vast and infinite.