When all you can do is hold on...

 I've decided to come back to this blog because, even though it's been rather a long time since I've posted on it, it's a bit of an old friend (plus, I just prefer Blogger to Wordpress), and the title is still apt.

Some adventures are filled with sunlight and amazing sights and joys. Some are about a 70/30 mix of brightness and shadow. Some are like walking through a dark valley, where the sun doesn't shine down very often. But I would describe them all as adventures, because they are all particular spans of time that begin and end, during which you are changed by the time you reach your destination.

That's basically what sanctification is: God leading us through meadows, forests, and valleys, so that, by the end of each journey, we will have a closer relationship with Him.

The dark valleys seem to be the journeys when God is removing the deeply rooted things in us that inhibit our deeper trust in and love of Him because they obscure our view of who He really is. When those things are gone, we see Him so much more clearly – the good, loving, compassionate, almighty God.

This is (at least part of, if not the meaning of) what God "work[ing] all things together for good" actually is.

All of that is my intro to say that I've been going through a valley, recently, as I walk with my mom through the treatment of the cancer attacking her. (If you'd like to follow the specifics of that journey, check out her CaringBridge.) And I thought I would use this platform, separately from our journey together, to share my personal experience. 

It seemed as if roadblock after roadblock was coming up to prevent her from getting better, and I had a very hard time finding any light – or even find the time to look at the unquenchable light of God's word! Digging into the His word certainly seemed hard to do, if only because of time, not to mention the mental ability to concentrate.

Yet He is always so ready to pour comfort into you, even with the feeblest ability to open your eyes and look to Him. And that's what He did using Psalm 25 and Lamentations 3.

There have been a couple of mornings in the last week when I would wake up with what feels like a physical weight inside. Those were the days when I woke up pleading in prayer to my Father, and desperately opening up to Psalm 25 and to Lamentations. And grabbing on to the words like a life preserver!

All my mind could manage was to hold on to simple, yet profoundly true truths like these:

On You I wait all the day...

According to Your mercy remember me...

Good and upright is the Lord...

Turn Yourself to me, and have mercy on me,
For I am desolate and afflicted...

His compassions fail not...

Great is Your faithfulness...

He will show compassion according to the multitude of His mercies...    

All I could do was stare at these words – these realities – and trust them.

It wasn't much, but it was so simple that I could remember it – remember these words through the darkness of that day and stand on them.

I hope these things will encourage you all, too! We Christians can get caught up in understanding the {beautiful, profound and powerful} finer points of Biblical truth, and I still say that there should be time for that in our lives, but even the most obvious truths in God's word do deeply change us when we grasp just how real they are – how real He is!

Here are the passages in their contexts (without which no truth should be understood):

Psalm 25

To You, O Lord, I lift up my soul.
² O my God, I trust in You;
Let me not be ashamed;
Let not my enemies triumph over me.
³ Indeed, let no one who waits on You be ashamed;
Let those be ashamed who deal treacherously without cause.

⁴ Show me Your ways, O Lord;
Teach me Your paths.
⁵ Lead me in Your truth and teach me,
For You are the God of my salvation;
On You I wait all the day.

⁶ Remember, O Lord, Your tender mercies and Your lovingkindnesses,
For they are from of old.
⁷ Do not remember the sins of my youth, nor my transgressions;
According to Your mercy remember me,
For Your goodness’ sake, O Lord.

⁸ Good and upright is the Lord;
Therefore He teaches sinners in the way.
⁹ The humble He guides in justice,
And the humble He teaches His way.
¹⁰ All the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth,
To such as keep His covenant and His testimonies.
¹¹ For Your name’s sake, O Lord,
Pardon my iniquity, for it is great.

¹² Who is the man that fears the Lord?
Him shall He teach in the way He chooses.
¹³ He himself shall dwell in prosperity,
And his descendants shall inherit the earth.
¹⁴ The secret of the Lord is with those who fear Him,
And He will show them His covenant.
¹⁵ My eyes are ever toward the Lord,
For He shall pluck my feet out of the net.

¹⁶ Turn Yourself to me, and have mercy on me,
For I am desolate and afflicted.
¹⁷ The troubles of my heart have enlarged;
Bring me out of my distresses!
¹⁸ Look on my affliction and my pain,
And forgive all my sins.
¹⁹ Consider my enemies, for they are many;
And they hate me with cruel hatred.
²⁰ Keep my soul, and deliver me;
Let me not be ashamed, for I put my trust in You.
²¹ Let integrity and uprightness preserve me,
For I wait for You.

²² Redeem Israel, O God,
Out of all their troubles!

Lamentations 3:21-33

²¹ This I recall to my mind,
Therefore I have hope.

²² Through the Lord’s mercies we are not consumed,
Because His compassions fail not.
²³ They are new every morning;
Great is Your faithfulness.
²⁴ “The Lord is my portion,” says my soul,
“Therefore I hope in Him!”

²⁵ The Lord is good to those who wait for Him,
To the soul who seeks Him.
²⁶ It is good that one should hope and wait quietly
For the salvation of the Lord.
²⁷ It is good for a man to bear
The yoke in his youth.

²⁸ Let him sit alone and keep silent,
Because God has laid it on him;
²⁹ Let him put his mouth in the dust—
There may yet be hope.
³⁰ Let him give his cheek to the one who strikes him,
And be full of reproach.

³¹ For the Lord will not cast off forever.
³² Though He causes grief,
Yet He will show compassion
According to the multitude of His mercies.
³³ For He does not afflict willingly,
Nor grieve the children of men.

 

 

 

 

Lessons I learned from Poldark: Whatever Happened to Justice?

This Sunday saw the completion of Poldark's season one saga, wringing tears from those who watched it - those of us who torture ourselves each week as we watch the ups and downs in the life of Ross Poldark. And lately he seems to have experienced many downs. One of the charms of Ross is that he keeps on fighting and struggling to bring justice to all the world against any odds. But every injustice he encounters seems to bring him closer to the despair that his fight will never be totally won. People still die, people are still poor, the powerful still take advantage of the weak, families still fight, businesses are forced to close, and people can still be cruel to their fellow human beings, cheating, killing, gossiping, hating, fighting - and he, at least for a moment, becomes overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of the problem. His fighting spirit droops under the weight of injustice in the world that will just not go away.

I'm afraid I'm going to get a little philosophical on you all in this post... :) But it seems like something worth talking about.

There is a moment about ten minutes before the series ends when you can see it in his face, and Aidan Turner does it masterfully. It is a look mixed with sorrow, disgust, disbelief, anger and heartache. Just looking at him makes me want to weep for him and for humanity!

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He is surveying the wreckage of the Wareleggens' ship while the poor, starving tenants and workers are scavenging the wreckage for passable food, fighting with each other and members of the crew who are washing up on the shore half-drowned. Every person there is tired, hungry and angry, groping in the dark amidst the smoke, the shouting and the human suffering all around them. And there is Ross. He has gone to help any man he can find who needs it, but he seems almost forced to stop by his own realization of the chaos around him - the chaos caused by the acts of self-interest that the instinct for survival drives men to do. Ross hates it, but he is also resigned to the reality that it is natural, that if left without better influence mankind will almost always choose their own interests when their survival is at stake.

He has seen the goodness and sacrifice that mankind can sometimes rise to and that reality makes his realization an even heavier blow. Men work hard in his mine in order to take care of their families, and people like Verity sacrifice their time and personal pleasure to look after their loved ones. Ross loves his wife and daughter, he has true friends in people like Dwight and Verity, and Elizabeth cherishes her son. How, his face seems to say, could people who are capable of love and sacrifice also be capable of such barbarity and selfishness?

This look resonated with me so much because I have thought the same thing, even of myself. It is poignant because it hits close to home, just like any such moment on the screen will do. The human race seems capable of achieving so much beauty, while at the same time achieving new lows of cruelty and self-interest.

From the 1780s until today - indeed, in all of human history - this despairing dilemma has not altered. Sometimes it is tempting to yell, "Why can't people just be good and love to do things that are beautiful - loving, kind, self-sacrificial things? Why is beauty always marred by things that ruin it??" Is there an answer?

Yes.

(And I wish I could tell Ross...)

Humankind was made to be beautiful, to love and show kindness to those around them, to treat those others like people. How can we really know that – especially when people so often act in the opposite way? Because we have an innate sense that cruel, impersonal actions are not right. We all get that look of Ross's on our own faces because we can tell when a person is acting in a way that is less than human.

Why do we think that there is a way to act that is human and how do we know what that should be? How do we know that we should be kind and admire self-sacrifice? The only answer that can explain it and tell us why we so often fail is that God created the human race in His own image – a person who values other people and can love them. The reason we so often don't value and love is because we have decided to choose for ourselves what love is, and that often is biased by self-interest to one degree or another. When we hear the word "sin" we think it is simply breaking a list of rules, but that is a most inadequate definition. What it encompasses is nothing less than a rejection of God – what He says and what He has created us to be and to do.

The actions of those on the beach with Ross can only be called unjust because there is another way of acting that is just. Ross knows it, and he will never give up fighting for people act justly. But all of his work will only be a temporary surface fix. The only solution to end injustice and hatred is a return to the truth: that humankind is less than it should be, and every person desperately needs to be reborn as a new person, which can only happen if they believe with faith in Jesus Christ so God can recreate them.

The world will continue to go on as it is, beautiful and despairingly cruel, while some men are treated with injustice and other men are driven to despair because they cannot save others from such a fate, as long as we insist on trying to solve the problem on our own and without God. Let Ross's look of despair drive us to finding a solution that will fully save the human race.

And thanks for reading to the end!

"As it is written, None is righteous, 

just and truthful and upright and conscientious, 

no, not one."

"...for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,   

being justified freely by His grace through the redemption 

that is in Christ Jesus..."

Romans 3

© 2015 Anna Morton