7 August: Love is a Choice

I grew up in church singing an 80’s version of ‘TheSteadfast love of the Lord never ceases’. Even now it easily comes to mind, the melody locking the words away in memory forever.  It is based on the words in the Old Testament verses,

“The faithful love of the Lord never ends!

    His mercies never cease.

Great is his faithfulness;

    his mercies begin afresh each morning.” (Lamentations 3 v 22 – 23)

What I didn’t really realise before is where those words are found in the Bible.  So when I read the whole chapter, Lamentations 3, recently my head started spinning.  For just before those faithful, hope –filled, trusting words the same author says of God,

“He has made me chew on gravel.

    He has rolled me in the dust.

Peace has been stripped away,

    and I have forgotten what prosperity is.

I cry out, “My splendor is gone!

    Everything I had hoped for from the Lord is lost!”

 The thought of my suffering and homelessness

    is bitter beyond words.

 I will never forget this awful time,

    as I grieve over my loss.” (Lamentations 3 v 16 – 20).

How can the author, who has just witnessed the horrors of the siege and destruction of his home, who feels such pain coming from the hands of God, so readily turn to that same God is praise?  How can he go on a verse later to say “The Lord is good to those who depend on him, to those who search for him” (v 25) when it seems the Lord has been far from good? 

It appears that we can close our fist at God or lift it high and open in praise and that that decision has little to do with what has happened to us.  It is a choice.  A choice to believe that God is always good.  That we are always loved.  It’s a choice I’m ashamed to say I don’t always make.  But if his mercies are new every day then today I want to start afresh to notice them, to praise God for them.  To lock them away in memory for the dark times.  Maybe you could join me?

31 July: Live Today

Sometimes I look back on when my daughter was young, her first six months, and I think how foolish I was to wish it away.  I was always longing for the next stage – when she was first born I couldn’t wait for when she would interact and smile at me.  When she always needed to be held I couldn’t wait for her to sit independently.  I couldn’t live in the moment, the moment always seemed to hold only a lack of sleep and time and energy. Yet when I see a young baby now I realise how much of my present-daughter I missed because of my thirst for my future one.  There was so much to love, which I missed because I was thinking only about what I would love in the future. 

I realised this week though that this is also how I see the relationship I have with my heavenly God as I, his daughter, grow.  I am part of the church, his beloved bride.  And the book of Revelation tells me  “blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb” (Revelation 19 v 9).  But I can get trapped forgetting that I am his beloved now, today, as I wake and start a day.  I am loved now, I am living my eternal life now, in death I’ll enter an extensive of that but Christ has already made me one with God again.  What if I am missing the joys of being a present-daughter because I thirst only for my life as a future one?

What is it to believe that I am fully and always loved by Christ?  What confidence might that give to me today?  How might I live differently if I believed that, today, right down to my core, God was here with me in every moment?

I have grown as a mother and I now try hard (and sometimes succeed!) to live in the moment with Elliot.  To enjoy the long walk home from the park as she examines every flower and takes joy in every step.  I guess I now understand that it will pass.  That the future will come before I know it but that this moment will never happen again.

But now I need to learn this as a daughter, as God’s daughter, that the future will come but that God is found in this day.  And his promises of love are here, now.  I want today for my eyes to be open.  Maybe you can join me today in singing Psalm 118 – “this is the day that the Lord has made, we will rejoice and be glad in it”.

24 July: What's Worth It?

On my bad mothering days I wonder if it is all worth it.  At times it is hard to be gentle and kind and present and available to a whining toddler.   It is hard to stick to the advice to avoid television for under two’s when it is such an instant sedative.  It is hard to do a job that is thankless and earns nothing when my boss used to tell me how great I was, how useful.  People don’t say that much to me anymore. 

Sometimes I find myself saying with King Solomon - 

“What do people gain from all their labours

    at which they toil under the sun?”

- Ecclesiastes 1 v   3

But then today I saw my daughter sitting in a chair with a doll soothing and cuddling it and gentle patting it on the back.  My daughter has been teething lately and there has been lots of giving up my goals or plans for the day and instead sitting soothing her for what feels like hours.  Is it worthwhile?  It is when I see her modelling it like that – when I realise that it’s more then just a drain on my time, it’s a lesson for her in loving kindness, gentle care and responsiveness.  It’s a way to teach her how to love.

I often hear 1 Corinthians 13 read at weddings, but it occurred to me today that we are called to love everyone, even our enemies.  And what is love in these verses? 

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.  It does not dishonour others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.  It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”

- 1 Corinthians 13 v 4 – 7

There are times we all struggle to love like this.  But it is worth it, it is always worth it.  Whether it’s because we get to see it reflected back to us or just knowing that God sees our effort.  After all, if God is love then any time we choose to love deeply and well we are choosing to be like Christ.  To be truly Christian.

17 July: Loving Extravagantly

Before I had my daughter I wasn’t sure if I would be a very good mother.  I just didn’t have much patience or affection for other people’s kids.  But then Elliot come along and I found I had this depth of love and devotion and patience and tolerance for her.  But I’m still not very good with other people’s children!  In fact, I was explaining a child the other day as being moody, a bad listener, naughty, pushing boundaries, ungrateful and a little bit dumb.  Wow, replied my husband!  That’s an over the top reaction to a typical child isn’t it?!  Especially when my daughter at times can do all the same things and yet get a much more patience, kind and generous response.

Thinking about this made me remember some words of Jesus in one of his famous sermons, the Sermon on the Mount.  He says –

“If you love only those who love you, what reward is there for that? Even corrupt tax collectors do that much. If you are kind only to your friends, how are you different from anyone else? Even pagans do that.”

- Matthew 5 v 46 – 47

Ouch!  What a failure I am in this!  Jesus is saying that God’s love (the kind of love we are meant to copy) is extravagant, without bounds or limits.  It is not to be reserved only for those who are – through relationship or personality – easy to love.  Indeed, when God chose to love me I was still his enemy.  I was still a sinner. 

I pray every day that God will help me be a godly mother, loving and kind and patient with my daughter.  But today I want to pray that He will help me see all the people I come in contact with as worthy of the best, most extravagant, limitless loving kindness.  And that His Holy Spirit will help me to express this loving kindness.  For me this will probably be tested when interacting with irrational preschoolers, but for you it might be workmates or in-laws or grouchy neighbours.  Whoever it is, I encourage you to try, with me, to love those who are hard to love.  Because that is what God did for us.

10 July: Cares and Worship

I’ve been feeling burdened down this last week, full of uncertainty for the future.  The future for me, my family, my church community and my friendships.  So I came to my devotional time today full of requests.  Ready to quickly read the set text and then rush into asking God to sort out my life.  God however had other plans.

I opened the Bible to Psalm 8, a psalm of worship to God, or wonder at his creation and the wonderful, undeserved love he has for us.  It reads:

“Lord, our Lord,

    how majestic is your name in all the earth!

You have set your glory

    in the heavens.

Through the praise of children and infants

    you have established a stronghold against your enemies,

    to silence the foe and the avenger.

When I consider your heavens,

    the work of your fingers,

the moon and the stars,

    which you have set in place,

 what is mankind that you are mindful of them,

    human beings that you care for them?

You have made them a little lower than the angels

    and crowned them with glory and honor.

You made them rulers over the works of your hands;

    you put everything under their feet:

all flocks and herds,

    and the animals of the wild,

the birds in the sky,

    and the fish in the sea,

    all that swim the paths of the seas.

Lord, our Lord,

    how majestic is your name in all the earth!”

Wow.  I was stopped in my ask-ask-ask take-take-take prayers to God and suddenly caught up in praise that He has set in motion time itself.  That He has given me life.  I raised my arms in worship until they were sore.

And here’s the thing – the rest, all those things I had lined up to demand from God – they were gone.  In those moments of worship they no longer mattered, they were already known to the God who fills the skies and the oceans; the fields and the wild mountain passes.  I was known to Him.  My cares, my worries, my burdens.  And from that came great joy. 

I walked away from time with God today with a light yoke.  If you are feeling burdened down this morning, maybe you too can turn to God in worship, not request, and through the awesomeness of God find He has taken your cares on to himself.  For He cares for you.

26 June - Start with Me

My eighteen month old daughter has started walking and over night she seems to have become a toddler, not just literally toddling around but also in her behaviour.   Sometimes I’ll hear her saying ‘no, no, NO!’ and rush over to see that she is just sitting there practicing how to say this newfound favourite word.

I feel like this has crept up on me and, being geeky, the first thing I did was go to the library to get a bunch of books on parenting toddlers.  The best one was by Elizabeth Pantley and it was full of helpful ways to gain coorperation and help toddlers with their newfound freedom of emotion.  One thing which really stood out to me this week though was her words on modelling.  If you want your child to use their manners then make sure you are using yours when talking to them.  If you don’t want your children to whinge check to be sure that you aren’t whinging at them to comply with you all the time.

It seems simple, doesn’t it, that getting the best out of your child starts with making sure that the best is coming out of you.  But I keep thinking this week about all the things I want – from my daughter, my family, the Christians I lead in home group, my church community – and how I need to be asking God to ‘start with me.’  Do I want my home group to be more passionate in prayer?  Then I need to start by examining the way I pray.  Do I think Christian’s need to challenge our consumerist culture?  Then I need to start by looking at the way I live.  Start with me, Lord, start with me, I should be praying.

Jesus understood this so well.  Famously he knelt down and washed the feet of his disciples, the men who had sat at his feet learning from him for three years.  After this he told them;

 ““You call me ‘Teacher’ and ‘Lord,’ and rightly so, for that is what I am.  Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet.  I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you. Very truly I tell you, no servant is greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him.  Now that you know these things, you will be blessed if you do them.”

-John 13 v 13 – 17

If something was important to God, Jesus would demonstrate it first, tell people to do it second.  He was saying, ‘I will start with me.  I will show how important humility is to God by first being humble.’  I want so much from people, from this world.  But today I’m going to remember that I need to make sure that change starts with me.

June 19 - Who God Uses

I’ve been wondering this week why it’s so easy for me to think that I know the mind of God?  God!  Beyond, above, immense – I’ve sung from such a young age that I have an awesome God, a great God.  So why is it I think I can know the depths of his plans, actions and consequences?  I was reading a Christian website the other day which quoted Gandhi and my first response was to think, ‘as if a Christian can learn anything from a non-Christian, no matter who they are.’ How proud I am!  How arrogant.  As if my status as a Christian has given me a superiority.  What a fool I am! 

That very same day I read about Gandhi, I read Ezra chapter 1.  God firmly put me back in my place.  Here’s what I read –

“In the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, in order to fulfil the word of the Lord spoken by Jeremiah, the Lord moved the heart of Cyrus king of Persia to make a proclamation throughout his realm and also to put it in writing:

“This is what Cyrus king of Persia says:

“‘The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth and he has appointed me to build a temple for him at Jerusalem in Judah. Any of his people among you may go up to Jerusalem in Judah and build the temple of the Lord, the God of Israel, the God who is in Jerusalem, and may their God be with them.”” 

- Ezra 1 v 1 – 3

God uses who ever he chooses and that can at times be a surprising choice.  The Lord moved the heart of Cyrus, a pagan King.  This king of godless Persia is recorded forever as being a man who God used for his will.  And not in an unwilling way, as if possessed, rather as any of us respond who have had their hearts stirred by the Holy Spirit.

I need forgiveness.  Grace.  A willingness to be humble among others, no matter who they are or what their outward life might say to me – because I can not know the mind of God.  The songs from my childhood are right – he is a great and awesome God.  I pray that I will walk more humbly among his creation today.