Out of the mouth of babes...

So yesterday was Caroline's day to be baptized. We were very excited. We had her in her beautiful white dress and new shoes. However, right before we get up on the platform to have her baptized we sing a hymn, accompanied by our very large very loud organ. It was so loud she started crying really hard. I was hoping when the music stopped she would stop crying, but no such luck. 

My little happy cheerful girl who rarely cries, bawled her eyes out non-stop the entire ceremony, which the pastor tried to get through as quickly as possible. At first of course I had the feeling of being horrified that my child was "messing up" the ceremony. And then as I was standing there the verse from Romans 9 popped into my head. "So then it does not depend on the man who wills or the man who runs, but on God who has mercy." It occurred to me that Caroline's freaked out crying was a much truer picture of how we come to God. 

We think we should come in our Sunday best all cleaned up, happy and confident. That's bull. That's not how we come to God. We come scared, confused and overwhelmed. We come bawling our eyes out. We come because we are carried by His grace onto the platform of promise to receive the sign of His Spirit. We are just like Caroline and not a bit different.  And when, Lord willing she is able to understand about God's love and His provision for us, and she confesses the belief He has granted, I will tell her what she taught me on March 18th, 2012. "Out of the mouth of babes...."

God's faithful brown bag

So, Wednesday night I got woken up from a lovely nap with my newborn daughter to some of the worst pain I've ever experienced. After it had escalated from a 5 to a 9 on the pain scale in about 20 minutes we decided it was time for a trip to the ER. So Mom, her sweet friend and neighbor Maj and I were on our way to the ER and all the sudden I felt horribly nauseous and just knew I was going to throw up. And I did.

Ok, back up to the day before. Mom and I were running errands and decided to get a treat for Isaac while we were running around. We were throwing away our trash from the Sonic run and I couldn't find that pesky brown paper bag that all the food had come in and I was so annoyed. Where is that dumb paper bag? I thought to myself, really annoyed that I could never seem to get the car cleaned out to any level of decency. 

Well as I was leaning forward the next day and knowing that I had only seconds before I would have to completely throw up all over my car, there it was. The paper bag. And as hokey and silly as this may sound, in the midst of my pain and the chaos of the moment, the Lord was there, right there in the brown paper bag. All the sudden in the part of my brain that connects to my spirit and my soul--something registered. God is here. In the chaos, going before me in ALL the details, including this paper bag. 

My untidy loose ends are His tidy ones. His sovereign order at work in the midst of my disorder. And He is great enough to pay attention to running the universe and make sure that paper bag was where I needed it when I needed it. And if He can go before me in even this, He can go before me in the much more significant much more substantial details of this trial as well. Praise Him that His goodness condescends to the measly mundane details of our lives to prove over and over the greatness of His power.

Be still my soul, the Lord is on thy side. Bear patiently the cross of grief or pain. Leave to thy God to order and provide, in every change He faithful will remain. Be still, my soul: the waves and winds still know His voice who ruled them while He dwelt below.

Skeptical of Skepticism

Skeptical of Skepticism

A few months ago I sat across the table from a friend of mine who told me that she was losing her faith. It has been a slow decline for her as she has listened now for a few years to the doubts of her husband who has now officially declared himself a skeptic of the faith. It began for him by being the most staunch defender of the faith. He read all the books on apologetics. He had his own apologetic website. But then slowly he began to have doubts. Doubts because he couldn't prove that Adam and Eve were the first people on earth. Doubts that science didn't present facts that couldn't be disproved. And putting the full weight of knowing upon his mind, his faith collapsed under the weight.

And now my friend, his wife, finds herself barraged everyday with questions from him. Evidence that he says evolution presents that is irrefutable. And sitting across the table from me, she asked me, Rachel, how can you know? How are you sure that the Bible is true? How can you trust in a God who allows such evil in the world? How can you look at the evidence the scientific community is presenting and hold onto your faith?

These are weighty questions. But I have come to see something very clearly: Doubt is the flip side of the coin of faith. Doubt means that opportunity remains, because the proof has not revealed itself so fully that decision is irrelevant. And so I pose a few questions back to her. For I feel that really for the human condition it is not always so important that we have the right answers, but that we pose the proper questions. Who is qualified to judge? One can only judge perfectly who has ALL truth gathered from infinite wisdom, not limited by perspective.

Suppose if you will that a man who has lived his entire life deep in heart of an African village is suddenly taken to an operation and asked to watch from the observation room. If he knew nothing of medicine, of the nature of cancer and metastasis; if he knew nothing of the danger of leaving a man in such a condition, would he not think it pure unbridled brutality to watch a surgeon,(not knowing his qualifications or skill to do so) render another helpless on a table, raise a knife, open the victims body and cause a bloody wound, only to remove a part of the helpless victim? Would it not look to him like senseless pain? You see he lacks the context. The sense of greater danger to the patient at leaving him alone. And we suppose in our soft human condition that the greatest danger to us lies in being killed or raped or brutalized in this body. It is not. It is a trifle compared to reckoning before a holy God.

And there is another point of concern. If truth binds itself only to theory, to idea, to perception of the mind, what of the incarnation? Why make Truth flesh himself out? Why walk amongst us? My friend's husband has made a critical error in his judgment. He has decided along with the scientific community that the weight of all truth can be gleaned entirely through the sieve of the mind. It can be reduced to theory, and data and observation, not a being with whom we can be intimate and walk. It has turned its back on all means of discovering truth that fall outside the reach of the scientific method. But therein lies the same problem we have in judging. The observer must rely on that which perceives the data to interpret his data for him.

If one sees a circle filled with tiny dots, what is the meaning of that circle? To the modern Westerner it might be the top of a watering can, or a shower head, or the night sky, seen through a telecope. But to the tribal villager in Nepal, it might be no more than a mound of ants in the dirt. The significance of what is seen, is limited to the experience of the observer.

And so I posed this question to my friend. What if you and your husband walk away from the faith because the scientific community’s current conclusions of the lack of evidence to support the claims of the Bible? What if 50 years after your death, they discover one critical piece of evidence that reinterprets all their conclusions on carbon dating? What then? What if the scientific community for all it can see, lacks the breadth, the entirety of knowledge to interpret the data they have? I asked her to do one thing for me and herself on her journey. Remain skeptical of her skepticism. It that not in fact truest form of it?

I asked her to consider another body of evidence as well. Another voice in the stream of history. The voice of believers, who throughout all the ages have spoken similarly of this God of the Scriptures. What of the witness of their blood? Their dying confessions to knowing a God who is so worthy of their trust that death is a small token of such a Savior?

I discovered a poem this year written by a Christian who lived in the Middle Ages. And in spite of entirely different lives, walks, bodies of knowledge and eras, I knew when I read this expression of his walk with the Lord, exactly what he meant.

O Merry Love, strong, ravishing, burning, willful, stalwart,

Unslakened, that brings all my soul to Thy service,

And suffers it to think of nothing but Thee.

Thou challengest for Thyself all that we live;

All that we savour, All that we are.

Thus therefore let Christ be the Beginning of our Love,

Whom we love for Himself. And so we love whatever

Is to be loved ordinately for Him that is the Well of Love,

And in Whose hands we put all that we love and are loved by”

O Love un-departed! O Love Singular! ”We praise Thee,

We preach Thee, by the which we overcome the world;

By Whom we joy and ascend the Heavenly ladder.

In Thy sweetness glide into me; and I commend me and mine

Unto Thee withouten end. ”Richard Rolle (1290-1349)

The Fire of Love and Meaning of Life

And so considering myself a fool according to the wisdom of the world, I bow my knee before an infinite God, a holy Judge, the only Wise God of unsearchable paths and wisdom, and commend myself unto the day when evidence shall overwhelm mankind as a flood. When the clouds will be rolled back as a scroll, and we shall know fully, just as we are fully known. When our eyes shall behold Him on whose thigh is written the name King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Oh what a horrible day when the truth shall be revealed to those who denied the Truth. Oh let us proclaim if necessary with the voice of our blood, this King of Glory before the world has the evidence it so brashly demands.

Rachel Deffinbaugh, July 30, 2005

Intimacy with yourself

You know, its only been in the past few years that I have discovered what it means to have a relationship with yourself. It sounds on the surface like a bunch of goobledegook or psycho-jargon but its really not.  Its the foundation from which others relate to you. It sounds strange but you set the rules for how others treat you by the way you treat yourself. If you are on time, others know that they must value your time. If you are respectful, they show you respect. If you say no to certain behaviors or things, they understand what you value in yourself. If you allow other's treatment of you to make you angry, they begin to understand the ways that you are controlled.

It is that value you put in yourself that allows others to see what they should also value in you.

Perhaps one of the most important ways I am learning to relate to myself in is showing myself grace. Not excuses. Not I'm never wrong. Not denial. But a true grace that looks honestly in the face of all my short comings, all my flaws and all my fears and nutures and accepts me anyway. As a work in progress. That embraces my mistakes as places-- landmarks from which I can measure my growth.  

Being wrong the right way...

Do you ever have those days where you have an argument with your spouse and you launch into it sure that you are 100% right and you just need them to grow up? It never gets easier to have that moment when I think, hmmm maybe his issue is making my issue(s) show up? I think its a turning point in every marriage when one realizes though that even if we do come out of it finding out we were the one in the wrong, its better to have those conversations anyway. What I mean is that I can spend so much time living in our heads, and analyzing things just to be sure that we are right before we say how we feel, that we are paralyzed by it. Isn't it better just to be authentic and say how we feel (keeping in mind that what is helpful restrains me), knowing that the conversation may mean my humbling and my enlightenment and not theirs? It would probably help how the conversation goes though if I was really cognizant of the fact that I might end up being the one enlightened in the conversation. Why is that so hard? Why does my position seem so right on the front end? I guess that's why Proverbs 18: 17 says, "The first to plead his case seems right until another comes and examines him."

My husband shared with me a few months back that its much easier for him to take my viewpoint when I come at it from the perspective of, "I'm not playing God or the Holy Spirit here, its just how I see it." Its easier for him to listen and its much easier to just be me than try to always carry the burden of rightness. I'm not saying I'm even close to getting this "not being right" thing right either, I'm not. But I think its good to try. To voice things as just me as I see it. Intimacy doesn't mean I always get it right. It means there are two voices in the conversation and they both matter. The twist in marriage is that our spouse's issues reveal our issues more than it ever is some black and white situation where someone is totally in the wrong.

Its hard though to really truly have the integrity to surrender my spouse's issues to the ONLY judge and let Him deal with my issues. Isn't that the irony of dealing with other people's sin? Other's hypocrisy reveals ours in judging them, other's arrogance provokes ours, and being misunderstood provokes my idol of being heard and understood. The issue usually ends up in my lap to deal with vertically. I guess dealing with relationship issues right means that what starts out as our issue with someone else ends up as my issue before God. As it should be.