Tag Archives: Faith

 Trusting the Script Writer

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This is something I wrote last year before I had a blog to post it to.  With the start of a new school year, it seemed an apt time to share it. 

I didn’t expect to cry.  In fact, I didn’t even entertain the thought.  It just happened as I pulled away from the school and smiled back at the friendly teachers directing car pool.  I rounded the corner and the tears just came, right there for all the oncoming carpool parents to see.   I had no energy to care.  I couldn’t find the off switch if I tried.  Oh my, this was harder than I had imagined.

We had a playful drive to school, my son and I.  He was anxious to arrive early and teased me about being the slowest driver on the road, when actually I was going five over the limit.  A few morning commuters passing us on the country highway only served to prove his point. His eagerness encouraged me.  He seemed more excited than anxious for his first day of school.  I gave him my last bits of wisdom on how to organize his books, to work hard, to take good notes, and for goodness sakes, to please check his spelling.  Mostly, I assured him he would do great, how he’s a strong thinker and engages well in groups through discussion and asking questions.  Such a desire to instill some final words of wisdom and guidance before setting him loose to the structured walls of academia.

My son is no baby.  He’s the stereotypical image of a football player, and has been since birth.  He’s a strapping 14 year-old hulk of a man-child who is regularly mistaken for several years his senior.  Recently, he was asked what his major is!  Nooooo!  He’s my baby boy, the youngest of four, and this growing up thing is happening faster than my mind and heart can handle.  And this very morning proves my angst in letting go and watching my now 9th grader step out and spread his wings into new winds, without me.  Not a bad thing.  It actually feels right.  Just, oh so different.

I suppose this change is harder for me than for him, which is good!  I want it to be filled with smooth transitions and empowerment for him.  But, for me?  Well, these tears and emotions reveal some bearing of inner fragility and loss.  I have home schooled my children for two full decades!  And I’ve loved it!  I wouldn’t trade those moments and years for anything!  But, today marks a change, an end to a twenty-year saga of educating my own.  I have no new agenda or plan, no vision of what to do next.  Today it’s canning salsa and beginning to post online all those twenty years of schoolbooks in an effort to sell some off.  For the rest, I know nothing but to wait on God.

This past Sunday, a guest pastor broke open the Word in our old, historic church.  He spoke of the script we write for our lives, one of personal identity, purpose, and satisfaction.  He affirmed that when we recognize the beauty of knowing Christ, we see everything of earthly importance as useless and rubbish (Philippians 3: 7-8).  When we die to self and are found in Him (:9), He writes a new and improved script for our lives, one where we rise with Him to resurrection life. We no longer live our own lives, but His life is lived in us.  His script shapes our faith and directs us to love the things He loves.  By refraining from personal script-writing, we can function within Jesus’s script for us, to embrace His love and life, and desire to truly know and the power of His resurrection life within us. (:10-11)

I challenged my son to recognize the new script God has written for him, a script to be the light of Jesus as he seeks excellence in His academics, character, and friendships.  That’s not difficult to visualize in his new chapter of life.  Yet, I must believe the same for me, even when that means sitting in a quiet house, tending to book selling and salsa making, for now.  Here too, in the silence, it is Jesus’s life being lived in me.  This is His script for me.  And He will continue to write it as I wait on Him and trust His play-writing perfection.

 

After leaving the school, I head to the grocery store.  (Who knew you could grocery shop at 7:30 am)?  I wipe my tears in mock composure as I enter the store and search for peppers and tomato paste.  With my errand complete, the tears return, a confused mix of feeling loss and lost.  I cry to God on my drive home.  I rejoice in the script change He has written for my son.  And I also rejoice in the script change He is writing for me, even though I do not understand what it is.  But He knows.  I remind myself that He is sovereign and holds all things in His hands; that He is fully trustworthy.  Our lives are not really ours.

This is what it means to know Christ.  Our true value is not about what we are doing, but about what He has done for us and is doing in us. His plans are for our good, and He will not disappoint.  We can trust the ‘author and perfecter of our faith’ (Hebrews 12:2) to write the script of our lives for us….even in making necessary edits and revisions.

Our true identity is in Christ.  He has divine purpose in His plans for our lives, that they may be lived for His glory and for our good.  We can know and trust this is in the script.

O my Strength, Come Quickly

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Lately, I’ve been feeling rather undone.  There has been far too much brokenness and pain for a human brain to rightly process and make sense of.  The moral compass of the world is tenuous; the political compass of America is destructive.   Add in my own wrestlings of life and God to the equation, and I start an internal crumble.

Though the sun is shining from a vibrant blue sky, a murky cloud seems to hang over life.  It prevents me from seeing beauty or hearing birds sing or recognizing good around me.  It takes some serious effort to list things to be grateful for.

It’s in times like these that my soul feels rattled and I search hard to see evidences of God to encourage me forward.  Scriptures clearly remind me who God is, and worship buoys my heart in praise to Him.  But I cannot stay in this glorious place all day.  Closing the Word, letting the music fade into quiet, and stepping back into life’s fragments of loss and brokenness, challenges the reality of my faith.

What refreshment to my soul to find several verses in Psalms that refer to God as “my Strength.”  Yes, the psalmist had the wisdom to recognize the strength of God not only as a quality of his character, but something that defines who He is.  It becomes a defining title, a name with a capital S.

How beautiful is it that Almighty God is known not just by the title of “Strength,” but as “my Strength?”  The title of Strength that defines the living God is given to His children for their ownership.  That is a treasure worth clinging to when we are so blatantly aware of our own weakness and woundedness.

Psalm 22 is a mournful psalm of feeling forsaken and distanced by God.  It includes the famous words that Jesus quoted when he cried out to His Father from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  The psalm continues, “Why are you so far from saving me, so far from the words of my groaning.  O my God, I cry out…but you do not answer.”   (:1-2)

These are deep soul cries of faith from a heart that knows and loves its Lord and Savior, yet feels terribly alone in a place of deep suffering and pain.  It comes from a place of inner yearning to hear God’s voice and be assured of His presence.  I know!  I’ve been there on more occasions than I care to recount.  It is a time of painful spiritual wrestling with God that ultimately does result in growth of faith.  But oh, the process can be hard.

David, the psalm writer, was beautifully referred to by God as “a man after God’s own heart.”  He was a complex character: a giant slayer, a singing shepherd turned king, a strong warrior, an adulterer and murderer, a penitent sinner.  As a songwriter, he had a great ability to bare his emotions and faith before his God.

Following his initial lament in Psalm 22, he quickly looks to God’s holiness for comfort and declares his trust in Him.  In true honesty, he reveals the weariness of his soul as he strives for faith in his struggle.  “My strength is dried up like a potsherd….I am laid in the dust of death.” (:15)  A potsherd is a pottery fragment dug from an archaeological site.  Broken, jagged, dried up, frail. A well portrayed image of inner fragility.

After a tumultuous season of tragedy, a dear friend said she felt like a vase smashed into a million pieces.  Without realizing it, she was echoing David’s feelings.  She, too, did not have strength within herself to rise from her place of brokenness and pain.

David then does a remarkable thing.  From his place of dried up strength, he turns to the Lord and cries out for divine help.  He refers to the Lord as “my Strength.”  In desperate faith he cries out to the One he knows is able to renew his strength.  “But you, O LORD, be not far off; O my Strength, come quickly to help me.” (:19) Yes, he calls the Lord by name: “Strength;” a title of well-placed faith.

“My Strength” is also our strength. God desires to reveal Himself as “Strength” to us in our places of emotional weakness and soul weariness; to pour His strength into our dry and frail places of need and prove His great sufficiency to us.

It is here where the soul finds some stability and the inner crumble lightens.  It is here where faith is raw and God becomes real, where His Spirit meets ours in an ebbing process of renewal.  It is a place of hope, where we place our trust in who God says that He is.  He is Strength, “my Strength,” the one who restores our souls.  (Psalm 23:3)