There are some things that just defy reason.  They just don’t make sense and yet they are as true as can be!  They are the mysteries beyond the spaces…

Think of it…How does it make sense that you can take 29 and add 7 and get 5?  It is absolutely true!  Last Sunday was May 29th and when you add 7 days to it then this coming Sunday is June 5th.  At face value, it is impossible to take 29 + 7 = 5 but it does work in the realm of calendar equations.  It is a simple example of the mysteries of computation!  Oh, the mysteries of math that I’d love to comprehend!

Think of it…What one language could every single person on the planet read exactly the same no matter what hemisphere or land mass they occupy?  Musical notes have no boundaries of age, race, or culture.  Sure what is created through melodies, beat, and style capture unique pieces of our world, but the language of music, beyond the words attached to it, touches the listener from north, south, east, and west.  Oh, the mysteries of an orchestra playing Handel’s Messiah, or the sounds of a daughter’s voice lifted in praise, or the beat of a tambourine of a new African friend!  These sounds race beyond waves that touch your ears and reach inside to touch the melodies of your soul.  They defy the mysteries beyond the spaces of mere humanity!  Oh, the mysteries of music I’d love to comprehend!

Think of it…How can the 3 dimensional world of majestic mountains draped in morning mist, or the first evidence of life emerging from the womb, or the sacred moments of a man and a woman pledging themselves to each other be turned into millions of sequential dots of hues, tones, and colors laid onto a flat sheath of canvas or paper?  The mysterious transformation of the real object into an image that reaches the inner places of your emotions is beyond explanation.  The reflection can be captured in such an artful way that the memory created is more lasting and powerful than the object itself.  It speaks to all the parts of your being beyond the spaces of expression!  Oh, the mysteries of the artistic touch I’d love to comprehend!

Think of it…How could dust be endowed with the characteristics of personality, mind, emotion, spirit, and will?  Bits of the indefinable breathed into a Creation totally reflecting the design of the Master Creator…Life springing from One whose desire is to have an eternal, ongoing relationship…Oh, the mysterious capacity of a mighty King to move beyond His power, might, and authority over an immense universe to desire to dwell within the smallest recesses of a human heart.  It defies reason!  It doesn’t make sense and yet it is as true as can be!  It is THE mystery beyond the spaces!

Think of it…The treasure of a numbered day, the sweet sounds of a melody in the air, the memory of the picture buried in the soul and the Love of a precious and gracious God!  These are the mysteries beyond the spaces that somehow are comprehended in my heart!

My PATRIOT!

September in Washington D.C. was quite an experience as my dad and I participated in what was called the “Values Voter Summit”.  We stayed in a fabulous hotel full of history and the hustle and bustle of people anticipating an active November election 2010 filled the hallways and conference rooms.  Many of the heroes that I’ve admired and looked up to on the political and spiritual scenes were to be found in many of the venues of the weekend.  You could just feel the electricity in the air.  It was a weekend to remember as they say in the movies.  Not only was it an exciting event, it was exciting for me as the oldest of 3 kids getting to go on a trip alone with my dad…a first for me!  Both of my younger siblings had had several opportunities to go on trips with my dad, both as kids and as adults.  Somehow in the pace of life, I just hadn’t had that same opportunity until this event came onto the scene.

You might wonder what would make this event the perfect site for a special trip with my dad?  Well, you see, my dad is one of my most favorite heroes!!  He is son to a hero, my grandfather.  History just comes alive with my dad, and he certainly came by that honestly as my grandfather was such a student of history and shared that love of history and country as he traveled around America giving speeches about this great nation.  Both of these men served in the military, both were pilots, both started their own businesses, and both acted on their convictions.  Both shared a serious love for reading as well.  How else can you access history unless at the starting point of reliable resources?  Bottom line is these men are patriots.  My grandfather has long been deceased but his legacy lives on in my dad.  Yes, getting to be in Washington D.C. with a patriot of my own was just fascinating.

Today many think a hero is someone that simply is “famous” or makes loads of money.  You and I really know that has nothing to do with being a hero.  How many famous and wealthy people demonstrate true character, worthy actions, or genuine leadership?  My dad has so many qualities that have been lived out in front of us as his family and friends…qualities that have revealed a consistent engagement with life in an honorable way.  First of all, he has loved my mom incessantly since they were college students.  He has loved us as his kids without question.  He has loved the Lord since I can remember and has never hesitated to step out there to do whatever it takes to keep his commitments and vows.  He doesn’t take shortcuts or turn away from doing what’s hard or right.  He taught us values by living them fully.  Even heroes know that they are certainly not perfect or are not without faults or missteps.  My dad has never claimed to be the perfect guy, but endeavors to do his best to live true.  Oh, by the way, he’s also an incredible storyteller mostly from his own experiences throughout life.  He is quite the “adventurer”, and I believe he knows just about everyone!

Most of us when we talk about our heroes could just go on and on with myriads of examples.  I certainly could keep you up most of the night telling you some of the amazing things that my dad has encountered, experienced, and shared but that wouldn’t be as important to you as it would be to me.  What’s really important is to have us think about what are we focusing on that makes a hero to us.  I love history and the truths of the great things about America that I have learned primarily from my dad, the Patriot.  What are the things that I am doing that could encourage someone to stretch their horizons, to believe in the truths of righteousness, to value the great things of faith, family, freedom, to be a leader in the areas God has provided, or to be a shoulder for someone else to climb up on to see what potentials are there for future benefit to themselves or for others?  These are some of the wonderful things I’ve gained from my hero…what about you?  Who is living before you in such a way that causes you to choose the best pathway?

I am thankful to my dad as a model of a hero!  Who is your hero?  Whose hero could you be?

Today is 1-1-11.  After babysitting my grandson, Cruz, on New Year’s Eve, this morning across the breakfast table, I told him that today was special because of the numbers of the date.  He looked at me with his handsome five year old eyes and said, “Nana, I don’t know what that means!”   I responded with, “Of course you don’t…that’s really a grown up thought!”  What would “one…one…one…one” have to do with anything when you think about it?

By this afternoon, while sitting at my laptop with the great new purpose of making an entry on my blog each day, it occurred to me how ridiculous is the idea that because the date is “one…one…one…one” that this day is brand new like none other!  So, logically the question that followed in my thinking was, “Did that mean that because yesterday was, “twelve…thirty one….ten” that it was somehow less unique or that the day would be exactly repeated again because of the numbers of the date?”  Yesterday’s date is just as “unrepeatable” as today’s date!  Maybe my grandson’s wisdom as a 5 year old is much grander than my perceived wisdom as a 58 year old!  Yesterday’s date, yesterday’s events, yesterday’s opportunities were clearly a “once in a lifetime events” just as much as today’s date, today’s events, today’s opportunities are “once in a lifetime”!

God makes everyday a “once in a lifetime”…the sunrise, clouds, sunset, breezes, conversations, relationships, tasks, thoughts…only happen in the unique ways of that particular day.  Can any one day be exactly as one day of the past?  Well, dope slap to me…OF COURSE NOT!  God’s amazing gift is parceled out by a second, a minute, an hour, a day at a time.  How it is used is unique to that day.  EVERY SINGLE DAY is UNIQUE!

God is the “Giver and Creator” of all of life whether you choose to believe it or not!  What YOU get is just as unique to you as what will be unique for ME!  Fascinating in the simplicity of the thinking of this idea.  It may just be that because  this gift is repeated every day that somehow we forget the magnitude of the mystery and wonder of what is being offered to us!

In fact, Renewal isn’t Ridiculous…Renewal is REMARKABLE!  Every second, every minute, every hour, EVERY DAY is a new opportunity for me in the way I think, act, respond, plan, and execute the gift God gives me to CHOOSE!  It is just as unique for me as it is for you no matter the numbers that label the calendar.

Today is the PRESENT that God gives US!

My brother shared an encounter with God that grew out of a real crisis in his life.  His experience reminded me of my own encounters with God.  Here are some thoughts as to our response to crisis in our lives…

Think of when you’ve grown the most spiritually and had to work through the process of faith.  I am thinking how that might look by using punctuation marks as part of the analogy.  Maybe it could even be called God’s Grammar.

! … A cheating spouse…an inability to get pregnant…a huge split between your family members…a sudden serious illness like a heart attack or cancer…a car wreck in the early morning hours… a threat to the well being of your child…an unexpected move or change of location…the death of a friend, spouse, or family member…financial chaos or disaster…demands beyond your ability to produce…the loss of a job…!

Think of how this surprise event sets you to rocking and reeling emotionally, mentally, physically, and then the impact spiritually.  It is what Henry Blackaby in Experiencing God calls the “crisis of belief”.

When this event happens, you are so stunned and blind-sided that it takes a bit to get your bearings and to begin to process what to do next.  These events are the essence of life; it is what life brings, but not without a cost to our sense of well-being.  A chain reaction of steps ensues. Our faith is challenged!

?   … The next step is the set of questions that arise. Why did this happen?  Why did God allow me this pain and heartache?  What did I do to deserve this event; this tearing away at the core of my being?  I don’t understand why.  All the mental gymnastics that race through our thoughts cannot bring the answers that still our hearts into a peaceful place.  We are in anguish.  Where is God to bring this to a conclusion so that I can cope with the days before me?  How long can I endure this set of circumstances and events?  Often there is almost the sense of physically drowning or being besieged by nightmarish visions or being sucked down into a deep pit or hole.

,  … Then the “pause” begins.  We, as Christians, followers of Jesus Christ, begin to “slow down” along this pathway to stop challenging, stop slapping at the swirling, turbulent waters, and start to seriously settle down to think with not only our minds, but now, importantly to think with our hearts.  The Holy Spirit, God sealed within our soul, brings songs out of the night, Scriptures memorized or planted in our hearts through study, friends, events, circumstances, sermons, radio commentaries, books, and sometimes senses that we cannot even pinpoint to an exact “thing”, that tell our hearts and minds that you are not alone.  You are not going to drown, or be sucked into a dark hole, but you are going to get some air.  You get these soft, sometimes brief, brushes of a breeze that calm your soul.  I think it is God’s hand upon your shoulder that gently pulls you close enough to hear Him breathe.  Then you breathe.  The panic stage seems, at least, temporarily to be over.  You are going to take another step.  It is still filled with “pauses”, but now you are not totally stuck in sheer panic like a moment frozen in time.

; … Next might be the stages where we start to try and put big chunks together.  Organization of how to move forward begins to take shape.  Especially, the Bible believing, Bible studying Christian starts to take their “faith walk” and match pieces or phrases of their circumstances and connect them to similar pieces of God’s peoples’ experiences.  Our faith is evaluated up against our world view and then the “question mark” resurfaces as we find out if the two are in alignment.  Did I really think Jesus was just kidding when He said that we would be persecuted or would experience suffering for His name’s sake?  When Joseph was sold into slavery by his own brothers over jealousy and anger over a dream God had given him, did he deserve the years of separation?  Did God really mean it for good when they had meant it for evil?  Can I believe in God’s timing like Daniel when he was carried away to a foreign, pagan land as just a teenager, never to be re-united with his family again?  Can I believe that I or my loved one can be healed as Jesus healed the leper or gave sight to the blind?  When He said that He would “never leave me nor forsake me”, can that be true or real enough to sustain me when my spouse has left their marriage vows for someone years younger, and I’ve got children to care for all by myself?   Will my belief system, my faith, hold me and sustain me when I fear that I will lose my home, my career, my savings, my future in a corrupt environment or do I believe that the gold coin in the fish’s mouth to pay taxes will show up in my mailbox at just the right time?  These phrases of faith ARE connected to the reality of God’s Word and His presence.  These chunks may not seem to have purpose or even good attached to them, but God tells me differently through His sovereign rule in my life and the life of all around me.

I do believe that He will use some connecting words instead of punctuation marks…

But…in my “crisis of belief”, He may be showing me that there is need for my attention.  Maybe, I’ve been placing my trust in the wrong things.  In fact, maybe it has been in “things” instead of in Him.  Maybe, it has been in someone else or even self-reliance or pride in my own ability apart from Him.  God does have conditions.  His love never fails, but He does allow the outcome of our choices to have its results.  God promised Moses that He would bring His people out of slavery in Egypt, but their hearts were continually challenging God’s goodness, patience, and provision.  It took 40 years, broken tablets, a melted golden calf, men and their families swallowed up by an opening in the earth beneath their feet, and a generation dying in the wilderness before they could enter the promise land because of the stiff-necked condition of their hearts.  God doesn’t fail, but I do.  These failings may need to be confessed as outright sin that I have ignored or hidden in the back recesses of my heart.  The word “but” seems to remind me of conditions around my situation that I am to take responsibility for in the challenge of my faith walk.

Or… it may mean that new choices need to be considered or addressed.  Peter was clearly on the inner circle of Jesus’ disciples.  He was passionate about what he was doing even to the point of Jesus having to publicly call him down for his misguided view of what Jesus would endure by telling him to “get thee behind me, Satan”.  Peter wanted to do what was right, even when he failed to do it.  After Jesus had left and Peter would be given the chief responsibility to “feed My sheep” and would be the “Rock” (Petra) of the new Church, God gave him a choice to make.  Was he going to follow Him or go back to his prior profession of being in the fishing business?  Would he lean on his own abilities or in the power of the living Savior?  Would he believe strictly in his Jewish heritage and traditions or would he be used to set the stage for the world’s most influential force for eternity?  Would he stay in the box of Judaism with its traditions and laws or be a part of establishing the Church that would include all nations?  He was delivered a vision of a net being brought down from Heaven with all kinds of animals, both clean and unclean, to show him he had to make a choice of rethinking who could be included in this new God family.  Do I depend on the tried and true of my traditions, or could God be giving me a vision of something new that my crisis provides the setting?  Peter was jarred to the core of his belief system.  He was challenged to face what seemed to be a huge obstacle, but was really being given a huge opportunity that was far larger than he could have envisioned.  He needed the time to consider a different way of viewing God’s plan than what he saw for himself.

And…Please be patient with me, God is not finished with me yet.  That is from the days of Bill Gothard.  Do you remember that?  God is like a diamond with many facets.  His character is continually demonstrated in the myriads of Names that are given to Him throughout Scripture.  He works in our behalf to embed His character into us as we are taught through faith to die to self and to live unto Him.  He wants to “add” to us Himself, but it can only be done as we willingly release the space we’ve so cherished for ourselves and invite Him to take over.  In our own minds, we tend to believe we have sacrificed through loss, but His thoughts are so different from ours, that in truth we now have given Him room to multiply His beauty in us.  He is a God of addition.  He tells us that “whosoever will lose his life will gain it”.  As the crisis in our lives is contemplated, sometimes after quite some time has elapsed, we begin to see light reflected in ways that we have never seen before and a new view opens up to give us strength and the ability to reflect Him to people we would never before have been able to relate to or pass along the truths of God’s character.  God wastes nothing.  He adds to us in every sense.  Jesus called it the abundant life.

And…He often will command us to do something out of the crisis of dying to ourselves.  It will never fail to match God’s Kingdom agenda.  He is always going to “enlarge the territory” of drawing people to Himself.  He knows exactly who will come into His presence ultimately.  See, He is adding!  Throughout Scripture there have been many times when God called His people to be soldiers.  They were going to be called to do some serious fighting.  We, of course, always start at the physical location, but God reminds us that the battle grounds are not always what we physically see.   Ephesians is one of my favorite books and in the sixth chapter He lays out a strategy for Kingdom warfare.  He has to remind us that we will be involved in ways that are unknown to us now, because in reality, what we are experiencing on the earth is just a very small arena in comparison to the real battle which is in the spiritual world.  Our struggle is not against “flesh and blood” which is exactly where we think we are fighting.  Our crisis is to provide us with a view from the top where our great God and King dwells to catch a glimpse of what He is doing…which is adding.  He is always fighting out of a love that would stop at nothing.  He would even call His Son into the fray of the battle in order to add to His ultimate purpose of being worshiped, adored, and glorified.  His Kingdom family cannot be established without holiness.  My crisis will not only afford me with the chance to be groomed for holiness, it will accomplish the purpose of exposing God’s character through a broken vessel, which will be used to influence, encourage, and win others to Christ Himself.  A Kingdom circle…  Our sorrow, heartache, and failures will be taken and used for completion of God’s plan.  Only the One, True, Living God could take the disaster of my life events and create “beauty out of the ashes”.

And…He will comfort and confirm His presence in our lives and circumstances.  Can you imagine what it must have been like for Jesus’ disciples to have spent a three year sabbatical from their lives with Jesus and then have Him torn from their very lives through His horrible death on the unsavory cross of ridicule, shame, and humiliation?  Talk about a crisis!  None of us will experience the sense of despair and separation and probably even abandonment that these men must have endured.  At the time, it must have felt as if their whole world and truth, as they had come to believe, had been a big joke or a gigantic disaster of misplaced faith.  Now, what would they do?  Could they have been so stupid to have actually believed He was the Son of God?  If He had really been who He said He was, then surely He would not really have to do this thing.  Their faith had not really been put to the test yet.  Actually, it wasn’t really faith at that point, because Jesus was a physical reality to them.  It didn’t demand what Hebrews says faith is, “ the assurance of things hoped for; the conviction of things not seen”.  The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the whole truth, the completed truth for all of our sorrows.  It is because of the wretched misery and suffering of the cross that the glory of the resurrection is showcased.  Upon the foundation that God is truly all He claimed to be and still is, the resurrection shows that if He could do that, THEN we can have faith in Him for any situation we encounter.  When He tells us that He will love us, provide for us, protect us, give us eternal life, join us in the endeavor of everyday living with purpose, indwell us, sustain and fulfill us with a real, living relationship,  we can be sure He is able to do it.  The days after He arose from the dead, He appeared to many different people.  He did this in ways that truly matched the needs of those that needed to know of His reality.  He came to the tomb, he appeared in the upper room, He walked along the way to Emmaeus, and He came to Thomas in a special encounter.  Often, I’ve thought that this situation was showing the deficit of Thomas, but I wonder now as I’ve been thinking about how we deal with our crisis situations if it wasn’t way more about how good God is in the midst of our hurting.  He isn’t shaming us because we doubt or are confused by the trauma, He is showing us that He meets us where we are to comfort us personally…to confirm to us personally that He isn’t just universally God the Savior; He is MY Savior.  He is there for me when I am torn to a million pieces and don’t know how it is going to turn out for the good.  Thomas experienced the crisis along with the others, and he could not get a grip on what had happened until Jesus let him touch His hands and side.  He knows us and He is personal in the way he comes alongside of us.   He is present to comfort AND to confirm His reality.

. …Yes that is a PERIOD.  The end of the statement.  The end of the idea.  The closure.  Jesus said on the cross, “It is finished.”  Crisis has a conclusion.  Heartache has an ending.  Sorrow is over, but it isn’t finality!  Payment for our sins was deposited to our accounts when personal belief was installed.  Jesus didn’t finish and come to an end.  He is and always will be eternal.  The suffering was to instigate the most powerful of beginnings…ETERNITY for us, those who believe.  My sorrows are but for a season.  They come to an end.  They have an eternal purpose beyond myself; to know Him and to make Him known.  God is my everything in everything.  He provides the grammar of my faith!