Yield - My Chapel message 10/05/17

“I am hurt but not slain

I will lie down and bleed awhile

Then I’ll rise and fight again.” – St. Barton’s Ode

Life is a circle it occurs in cycles, seasons... It holds both death and life, good and bad, and sometimes these themes occur simultaneously, or even overlap. When I see birth, death, transitions…I am always impressed by the weightiness that existence holds. Lately, I have been pondering the smaller cycles that happen in life. Smaller things, like the birth of a new day, the death of a spent one, the birth of hope, the death in discouragement, the birth of a new friendship, the death of an acquaintanceship turned toxic, no one has to actually die in these situations, but there is an inescapable sense of finality to them as well. I once read a quote by Hermann Hess that said “It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home […], for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, […].”   Hermann Hesse, Bäume. Betrachtungen und Gedichte”

Every step is birth, every step is death. 

You just keep going. Keep walking. Keep moving and eventually, you’ll end up somewhere you might not have expected, but that always different from where you came from. It’s kind of like that moment in the Lord of the Rings where Bilbo says “It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

 I feel like in some ways, 2017 has just been a marathon of spiritual and physical cleansing, from toxic people, to toxic situations and it has been very painful. But, you can’t remove most cancers without infiltrating the body, separating things that like to stick together, like organs, or tissue, or ligaments…but it’s necessary to give the rest of the body a chance at an unaffected life.

Louie Giglio in his book “The Comeback: It’s Not Too Late and You’re Never Too far” describes the third plane you can exist on if you’re not bouncing back from a devastation, or entering a devastating experience…the aftermath of experiencing something that has no closure, or no foreseeable ending, or resolution. His concept is God providing “sustaining grace”. The night I read it I was sitting on my couch scaring my cat with how much I was weeping. It was a beautiful experience, and just what I needed in my brokenness.

He says “We will never know all the mysteries of God and how he works within a broken world for his glory. That might sound like an overly simplistic answer, but it’s not. It’s an answer full of trust. It’s an answer full of pain and the realities of a broken world, and it’s an answer full of hope. … Sometimes God in his sovereignty will strip away those earthly things that we cling to hardest to get us back to the epicenter of our existence, that we would seek God, reach for God, find God. The times when life is difficult are the times when we make the most progress and see the most expansion in our personal relationship with God. … That’s the comeback for us when we have no comeback. Jesus supplies us with what we need for the moment, for the day, for the season. And then he provides another grace after that, and another grace after that. Grace isn’t a one-time deposit. It’s a moment by moment relationship with God, where we trust Jesus to be in us and through us and for us. We trust that he will come through in his own time and his own way.”

Sometimes, it takes me a while to get to where I realize I really don’t have anything. I can set up my auto-drafts for my mortgage and make sure my bills are prepared for, but ultimately, Haven could burn down tomorrow, and I could lose everything my heart has prayed for, and I would have to confront Jesus’ presence in a very different but raw way. But thankfully he’s not had to resort to those measures; I’ve become more used to trying to find him when things start going south. 

As an example of what this looks like, in real life, when I was very little, my mother would take me and my brother to different places like Tweetsie and Dollywood, and though I tried, I was not one for crowds or strangers, but I knew that if I could locate her, make eye contact and see her smile, I’d be okay. To this day, my radar for finding her is almost uncanny. 

In the same way, God has become a presence I’ve been able to pick up on, since I started actively looking for him to show up in my problems and devastations. He’s very soft, he doesn’t bust in or berate me or glare at me waiting for me to wise up and make eye contact…he waits, and he hopes, and when I finally drag my eyes up from the brokenness I’m experiencing, looking for help, feeling him dash to where I am and surround me is reminiscent of the lyrics from Philips Craig and Dean:

“Once there was a holy place
Evidence of God's embrace
And I can almost see Mercy's face
Pressed against the veil

Looking down with longing eyes
Mercy must have realized
That once His blood was sacrificed
Freedom would prevail

And as the sky grew dark
And the earth began to shake
With justice no longer in the way

Mercy came running
Like a prisoner set free
Past all my failures
To the point of my need
When the sin that I carried
Was all I could see
And when I could not reach mercy
Mercy came running to me”

I have not really gotten to know what it was like to be pursued by someone who only wanted good things for me. But God has become that, in the strangest and softest ways. I read a quote once by the controversial and progressive activist, speaker and author Ann Lamott, (who is also a Christian) described her saving encounter with Jesus. She writes “I didn’t experience him so much as the hound of heaven, as the old description has it, as the alleycat of heaven who seemed to believe that if it just keeps showing up, mewling outside your door, you’d eventually open up…” as she proceeded through a few other instances of finding Jesus at the door and refusing him, she came to a realization after a service at the church she went to once, that “it was a kind of surrender, but neither she nor we much like the word “surrender”. It feels like somebody on the playground twisting our arm, rubbing our face in the dirt and saying “Give up? Say ‘Give!’ A better word, she says, is “yield” which means, agriculturally speaking “step aside, and let something grow”.

When I take my “Survive at all costs” mentality and push it aside, like a bunch of stubborn bamboo stalks shielding a  horribly neglected, but fertile  piece of secret ground to sit, dig my toes into and say “Hey, Jesus…can you do anything with this? I’m tired and I don’t have anything else to give, except what I’ve never given you before. Please, do something, anything, I can’t.”

I’ve begun to recognize what yield begins to feel like. It’s not grabbing the trowel out of his hand, or criticizing when he bends down to make another seed spot, or pull a weed I’d convinced myself was a flower… it’s more like, kneeling beside him in the dirt and watching him mound up the places where seeds have been sown, feeling him hold me as I’ve wept through my breaking heart, seeing his hot tears falling with mine, we watering this sacred ground that we are both investing in. 

Last year, I spoke in chapel at CMDA about my hope for Shalom as a blessing for my home, but in all honesty, it’s taken learning what Shalom feels like from the God who invented it to really understand what it could look like in my life. H. Stephen Shoemaker,  in his book “Finding Jesus in His Prayers” says “The prayers of the risen Jesus were and are prayers of blessing, prayers of Shalom and peace, and prayers that bestow us with the spirit of life and send us forth to give that life to others.”  

Before I could give peace and belonging and safety to others, I had to first understand what that looked like inside. My English professor used to remind us that we “write what we know”. We don’t have the authority to write about something we haven’t first thought of, internalized or experienced. 

I couldn’t give what I didn’t have. 

I couldn’t give peace when I was jumping at every spark in the dark, I couldn’t give home when I viewed it as my escape, or my asylum from this world’s craziness, I couldn’t give belonging when I didn’t believe I’d ever truly belong anywhere. 

But…I’ve been steadily taking steps to invite My Heavenly father into my fractured messes and asking him to do what I can’t anymore. I have made one of the biggest leaps in my entire faith life, and I now call him “Daddy” when we talk. He has shown himself safe, and good, and golden and very much the Aslan I’d been aching to know and learn of. He has been sustaining my every day. The struggles and all out battles in my head, he applauds my baby steps to turn them over to him, yielding my attempts to block, shield or bury my pain and struggles and he smiles so big when I bump up against something unexpected and immediately try to find his eyes to see what to do next.

I’ve begun a journey that I’d left to stagnate years ago, and as He drains the swamps I’ve allowed to accumulate in my spirit and mind, I’m finding out that the true treasure of walking day by day with him is learning more about his strong, valiant, and gentle spirit. I pray that your walk with him is as beautiful and peaceful as it can be, but that when things go horribly wrong, in your eyes, that you’ll immediately try to find the eyes of the one who sees before and behind you, and knows the outcome of the path you’re following.

I dug up a quote/benediction I’d saved a long time ago from a hero of my growing up faith, missionary Amy Carmichael:

“Let us end on a very simple note: Let us listen to simple words; our Lord speaks simply: “Trust Me, My child,” He says. “Trust Me with a humbler heart and a fuller abandon to My will than ever thou didst before. Trust Me to pour My love through thee, as minute succeeds minute. And if thou shouldst be conscious of anything hindering that flow, do not hurt My love by going away from Me in discouragement, for nothing can hurt so much as that. Draw all the closer to Me; come, flee unto Me to hide thee, even from thyself. Tell Me about the trouble. Trust Me to turn My hand upon thee and thoroughly to remove the boulder that has choked thy river-bed, and take away all the sand that has silted up the channel. I will not leave thee until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of. I will perfect that which concerneth thee. Fear thou not, O child of My love; fear not."