getting the focus right

Blinding Glory, Truer Sight

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Maddie, blinded by the sunlight from behind me, holding up a dirt clod she found in the shape of a heart.

One morning last week I ran early enough that the sun barely peeked over the horizon. I headed south and felt the warmth rise to my shoulders. Then I turned east. The sun shone through a clump of trees ahead of me. I blinked a little at the sudden light, just at eye level. Then suddenly, unexpectedly, there was a break in the tree branches, and the rays hit me full on. I had to close my eyes against them, but they still pierced through my lids. For a moment I was blinded to everything but the glow.

Later that week I listened to the entire book of Revelation at one sitting (we were driving to Kansas for a wedding) and then today I finally got through the bulk of Job and listened to the final chapters, where God speaks.

The audio version of Revelation was, though word-for-word, read by various actors and accompanied by stirring music. My heart thumped, as if I were listening to Lord of the Rings. My mind pictured the woman and the dragon, the angels and elders round the throne, the Lamb slain, and the Warrior triumphant. For an hour and a half I lost sight of the details of my life and was blinded by the glory of the Magnificent and His story.

And today, as I listened to Job, I found myself silenced, just as he was. When he said, “Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know,” I echoed it. Job saw the smallness of his own complaints and of himself; he saw a bit of the BIG picture, and I caught a glimpse of it, too.

A.W. Tozer says that the most important thing about a person is how he or she sees God. My view of God needs to be expanded to accept His blinding attributes as well as His more, well, comfortable ones. The Lamb that was slain is also the snow-white haired, blazing-faced God-man with a sword in His mouth. Job repented “in dust and ashes” before this God; Isaiah knew his unworthiness so well he said he was “lost”; and John fell at his feet as “though dead.”

This kind of knowledge is not comfortable or easy. But it is good. Job, Isaiah, and John went on to live with a greater knowledge of God, and they anticipated an eternity of being fully aware of and fully satisfied in this blinding Glory.

From Blinding Glory to Truer sight.

“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.”

Pick ’em wisely, then fight them well

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And speaking of fighting/wrestling, here are the two boys doing just that–one of their favorite activities. Once again, it’s at a soccer game!

I may have been standing up with the rest of the congregation, singing along with them, but inside I kicking and fussing. “I can’t believe they left that mess for me to clean up. Don’t they realize…” My hands clenched the back of the seat in front of me. It had been a month of what felt like non-stop service to my kids (the four of my own and our two international students)—without a bit of gratitude in return. I was burnt out.

And I was fighting mad—not enough to take on anyone out loud and in person, but enough to wage the battle inside my own head. I’d carried it into church. On the third song I felt God poking me, harder and harder, till I ceased my inner tirade enough to listen.

“You know, you’re not in the battle right now,” the Holy Spirit reminded me. “I’ve given you this space and time to regroup and rest, to connect with your life source. And you’re throwing punches like your opponent is still in your face.”

Oh, how often I do that. In moments of peace and quiet, I give into the urge to rehash past things I have perceived as wrongs. It makes me feel right and justified. It puffs me up into a martyr (ach, that mommy-martyr syndrome). I allow myself to think that I am building up ammunition so that one of these days—yes, one of these days—I’ll let it loose and air my grievances, and they’ll be really well-delivered because I’ve practiced them so much in my own head.

But this is the wrong battle.

I’m in a battle, all right—or at least I’m supposed to be.

But it’s not the one I choose to fight so much of the time.

It’s like the enemy is right there—throwing in lightning-fast crosses, catching me off guard with his left hook, jabbing me under the ribs with his knee.

And I’m swinging punches at myself, pummeling my own face, kicking my own shins. I weaken myself and become even more vulnerable to the enemy’s attack.

Because there IS an enemy. And he LOVES it when I fight the wrong battle.

Ever since that morning in church, I’ve been asking God to show me the battles I AM supposed to be fighting.

These battles are not WITHIN but are actually AGAINST my own mind. “(W)e take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” That’s the second half of 2 Corinthians 10:5. The first part of that verse is also applicable. Though it is often used to refer to false philosophies and doctrines, it certainly applies to the false things I tell myself and the wrong perceptions I hold. “We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God…”

“For we are not fighting against flesh-and-blood enemies, but against evil rulers and authorities of the unseen world, against mighty powers in this dark world, and against evil spirits in the heavenly places.” Ephesians 6:12 NLT

The enemy is never really my children or my students, my boss or my colleagues, my husband or my friends. The enemy is wholeheartedly focused on one goal: to keep my eyes and my mind OFF of Christ, away from true knowledge of Him and the Father. And this enemy will use whatever weapons work best to accomplish this.

So I DO have a battle to fight. But the one I often get drawn into is a false battle, a decoy, and being in that false battle is a sure sign that I’ve stopped fighting in the real one.

I have to listen closely to my Commander-in-Chief. “Jen, did you really take a look at that thought that just passed through your mind? It was full of self-pity and self-promotion. Don’t give into that thought. Fight it! Wrestle it down. Catch it NOW before it lures you in. Ask Me for help. Cry out to me and keep your eyes fixed on me. I will rescue you.”

I need to pick my battles wisely.

And then, I need to fight them well.

And here’s how it ends (usually)–collapsed in laughter! (There must have been a time-out between the earlier pic and this one, since PJ now has a hat on. Maybe the grass was tickling his head?)

Getting beyond age 7

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I'm not sure what he was pretending to do, but that's Em's hat PJ is wearing.

I take Chai, our dog, for a “bike run” (I bike, she RUNS) nearly every day that it’s nice. Sometimes the kids join me. When they do, I have three rules for them: 1. Stay on the sidewalk; 2. Don’t panic; and 3. I WILL come back for you. Trust me.

They do really well with rule number one, but they break 2 and 3 nearly every time. Jake lags far behind, and Maddie panics: “Jake, we’re losing you!” Then someone, unable to keep up with me at first because Chai is running off her steam, yells, “Mom, don’t leave us.”

That’s when I circle back around, gather them together and remind them—again—of the rules. I usually end with, “Have I EVER left you?” They shake their heads. “Don’t I know exactly where you are?” They nod.

The other day the Holy Spirit nudged me during my “rule” review. “Oh,” I thought. “I do the same thing to God.”

And as I’ve listened to some of the conversations I’ve had lately with my younger three children, I’ve discovered that MANY of the things I say to them are the very things I know God tells me. I’m a lot like a 7-year-old in the ways I relate to Him. Not only does He have to say the same things I do, but He also has to say them over and over.

So I’ve been trying to take a spiritual lesson from what so often feels mundane and repetitive.

When Maddie asks, “Mom, are you getting me a sandwich(or whatever)?”—for the fourth time—and I answer, “Honey, I’ve told you I will put a sandwich in your lunch for tomorrow, but right now I’m fixing our dinner. I WILL get to it. Can you please stop worrying about it and trust me?”

Hmm.

Today PJ ate lunch with his dad while I met with a student. Dave texted me on our way into school to tell me he was not in his classroom. When PJ headed that direction, I told him, “No, buddy, Daddy’s somewhere else. You’re going to eat in a different place today. Just follow me.”

But that wasn’t good enough. “Where are we going?” he asked.

“The Maroon Room.”

“What’s that?”

My explanation didn’t make sense to him, so he asked it again.

“Buddy, you’ll see it when you get there. I can’t explain it to you in a way you’ll understand.”

So he changed tactic. “WHY are we going there? Why aren’t we eating in Daddy’s room?”

Once again I “saw” myself, questioning God’s plan, wondering why it’s different than what I think is best, frustrated when I can’t understand the answers He gives (and thinking that that’s HIS fault, not mine) and then asking “Why?” rather than simply trusting.

I could give lots more examples. This happens just about every day.

It all boils down to their lack of trust,

As it all boils down to MY lack of trust.

And it’s more than a lack of trust in His leading or His wisdom. Ultimately, it’s a lack of trust in God Himself, that He is who He says He is, that He loves me with an everlasting love.

“This is what the Sovereign LORD, the Holy One of Israel, says:

‘In repentance and rest is your salvation,
in quietness and trust is your strength,’”

Isaiah 30:15a

Embracing service–really?

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NOTE: In this entry, I’m using motherhood to show how I’m learning to serve; however, I’m not claiming it’s harder than other kinds of servant hood. Whenever I’m tempted to think that my call to serve is more difficult than others, God sets me straight by letting me encounter someone who’s REALLY learning it! Blessings to all of you who have been given extraordinarily difficult servanthood roles.

Here are five out of the six: only Nina missing.

Is it possible to embrace a life of servanthood? Really embrace it?

I think I would have said yes before I became a mom. I never knew what a selfish person I was until Em came along—and then three others. Before that I had my areas of service—to students, players, youth group kids—but all of them had end points. The school day was over at 3; track/volleyball/play practices by 5:30; even ferrying youth group kids home didn’t take past 10, and I returned to a quiet, peaceful home with only myself and a very capable husband to care for. And even when the stress really built, I knew summer was coming—eventually.

But motherhood is 24-7, 365-days-a-year, with no sick days.

And I don’t think I’m particularly gifted for it. I still resent (I generally hide it well) getting up in the middle of the night for sickness or fear of the monster under the bed. Some mealtimes come, and I think, “Again? I just fed them! When are they going to start doing this for themselves?” The other day I told Dave, “Next year I will not be a MOP (mother of a preschooler) for the first time in 12 years!” and I said it like I’d earned a badge—till I realized it’s not exactly an accomplishment; it’s pretty normal.

But how do I embrace the nitty-gritty of servanthood, the stuff I do that nobody ever notices or thanks me for?

Thinking of it as service to others doesn’t help me much, even though Romans 13:8 says for us to think of ourselves as being in debt to others, continually paying it out in love.

I pervert that idea way too easily.

I begin to think—“Really, it’s them who owe something to me! Look at all I’m doing for them—and getting nothing in return! The least they could do it act grateful.” I get grumpy and bitter.

I’ve also tried the no-emotion approach. “I’ll just do it and try not to think about it, simply think of it as a job that has to be done, laundry as something to be checked off the list.”

But that doesn’t work either. Because it still turns to a bad attitude, and because I’m called to do everything “heartily!” Like I’m doing it for the Lord. With joy! With a sense of purpose!

The only solution I can think of is the one that Paul and Peter and Mary used. They called themselves “servants of God.” I’ve often thought of that in the context of BIG tasks (like Mary’s: she was about to bear the Son of God, and Paul’s: evangelism to an empire and martyrdom—pretty big deals!) But what if I think of all my “little” tasks as direct acts of service to God? What if I could do them FOR Him and WITH Him, enjoying communion with Him in the simplest acts of washing the dishes or turning socks right side out.

Would that transform my attitude toward them? If I could say, “Yes, I am wiping down my little-boys-have-been-using-it toilet and I am doing this because it pleases God.”

That sounds a little hokey, but it sure beats the alternatives.

There’s still a problem.

I can see this is the best way. I WANT to be a servant of God and see all things, even the small ones, as acts of service for Him. I DESIRE to do it all heartily.

But I can’t.

I can’t force myself into it or cheerlead my emotions into getting excited about housework or another trip to the grocery. All I can dois acknowledge that I can’t and say, “But that’s what I want, God!”

And THAT place of need is where God comes through. He already helped me to see more correctly than I was; He gave me the desire to serve Him; now He will also provide the energy and the joy.

I can do ALL things THROUGH Him who strengthens me.

Even the small things.

Well, it could be worse

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This is the downstairs bathroom in our new house, and, yes, that is a cold-water-only pump for the sink and a toilet disguised as an outhouse bench. And, yes, we will move right at the end of soccer season and the school year. More adventure awaits!

When Maddie was three years old, she climbed onto the top bunk of her and her sister’s bed; crawled across the five-foot-high wardrobe next to it; grabbed the bottle of cough medicine that we’d accidentally left there after a middle-of-the-night dosing; unscrewed the “childproof” cap; and drank enough to make her loopy drunk. We took her to the emergency room, where she spent the night for observation.

After we got over our fear (“Too much cough medicine can cause heart-stopping seizures?!”), it was actually humorous. The doctor asked her to jump on both feet (the toddler version of walking the straight line, I guess). When she flopped over instead, she looked confused. “I’m all twisted up.” When the nurses inserted an IV into her little wrist, she was so high it took a good five minutes for her to notice it. “Daddy!” she said, looking at it with her face scrunched up. “This hurts. What happened?”

Before the hospital would release Maddie the next morning, I had to speak with a social worker. She opened her binder and, pen in hand, asked, “Why was the bottle out in the open? How did she get ahold of it? Where are medicines generally kept in your house?”

Then, “Does Madeleine have any siblings?”

“Yes. Emily is seven, and Maddie has a twin brother, Jake.”

Her pen paused. She capped it, closed the binder, and got to her feet. “She’s a twin, Mrs. Underwood?”

I was confused. “Ye-es.”

She smiled at me. “I hate to tell you this, but I doubt this will be your last trip to the emergency room, Mrs. Underwood. Twins have a way of… well, they…”

She wasn’t sure how to say it, but I knew exactly what she meant. From the time Jake and Maddie were able to crawl, they began collaborating on schemes Emily would never have thought of. They snuck in the fridge so often we put a childproof lock on it, but Maddie figured out how to rip it off. A few days later the two of them walked down the hallway carrying egg cartons, dropping an egg every few steps. Splat. Splat.

Another time I’d run downstairs to grab a load of clean laundry. I carried the basket up the steps of our split-level ranch and stifled a scream when my eyes were floor-level with the kitchen. Somehow they’d opened the dishwasher, and Jake had used it to climb onto the kitchen counter. He’d pulled several apples from the fruit basket, taken a bite out of each, and dropped them on the floor. Maddie had grabbed a sharp knife from the dishwasher. Plopped on the floor, chubby legs spread wide and an apple between them, she was stabbing the fruit with her knife.

I did NOT scream—only because I was afraid Maddie would jump and stab herself.

So I knew what the social worker meant about twins.

Even after they were old enough that I wasn’t so much concerned about them accidentally killing themselves, they could make amazing messes in no-time flat.  I taught myself to pause before I entered a room where they’d been “playing.” I would close my eyes and imagine how bad it could possibly be. Then I would walk in. Generally my imagination had created the worse picture (hallelujah for a vivid imagination), and I would say, out loud, as if reassuring myself, “Well, it could be worse.”

I didn’t realize how much I said it until I sent Emily to check on them one day and she came back and said—in a perfect mimic of my tone—“Well, Mommy, it could be worse.”

I’ve gotten out of that habit of dealing with the “mess-ups” in my life, and I’ve decided I should get back into it. I read an essay by G.K. Chesterton a few days ago titled “On Running After One’s Hat” (http://www.catholic-forum.com/saints/gkc16004.htm). He wrote about how silly it is to be frustrated and seriously miffed by mere inconveniences. He suggested the opposite: taking joy and even humor in the moments when things go wrong. He wrote, “An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.”

I imagine that in heaven toilets won’t clog, and sheets won’t get tangled into knots in the dryer, and long trains won’t cross the tracks just when we have six minutes to make it to a meeting on the other side. But here, those things WILL happen. They have to in a world that’s broken in its core and cracked all the way to its surface. But this is STILL the day God has made for me, and He is not surprised by any “inconveniences” I encounter. In fact, believing as I do that His sovereignty is a truth, there’s an awfully big chance He may have planned them.

And so I can rejoice—because they MUST have purpose; because He knows what those purposes are even when I don’t; because there probably is a funny side to it that I can find if I only look for it;

Because, really, isn’t it true that, almost always, “it could be worse.”

Gray or Glory?

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Em and cousin Grace enjoying each other's company last week in Philly

“There’s one! See the purple!”

I followed Em’s pointng finger. Flowers sprouted straight from winter-dark branches, like they’d split the bark and sprung out full-blossomed. The tree literally erupted with spring.

It was yet another drive to-from school, and we needed some magic. “Let’s look for beauty,” I’d told Em, and spotting brilliant yellows, pinks, and lavenders transformed the trip.

Yesterday morning, as I drove home from work, I didn’t have beauty on the mind. I was weighed down with decisions, the busyness of the day ahead, and struggles I knew others were experiencing. Suddenly purple caught my eye.

Here I am.

Holy Spirit whisper.

I resisted, focused on the gray of the leafless trees, the asphalt, the cloud-scudded sky.

But more, more, more, one spot of color after another.

How long will you resist me? And why? What good will your focus on the gray accomplish? Look at ME.

“Your Father in heaven gives good gifts to those who ask him.” Matt. 7:11

I wasn’t asking for any gifts (how ungrateful, since it’s ALL, honestly, gifts)—and I was trying to stay in my funk, in my “gray,” despite His offers and gifts of beauty, of delight—of Himself!

As I looked at a spring-budding world, a world being transformed from gray to color, wakened magically to new life, I realized how strange, silly even, it was to assume that the God creative and powerful enough to do THAT would be unable to fix me! To fix all the problems I saw.

The focal point of my gaze was magnifying the gray, overwhelming all the God-color.

Today PJ and I walked at the dog park.

Though most owners do pretty well at cleaning up after their pets, it’s still a poop minefield. Above was a blue sky and fluffy clouds, pines standing straight like guards, flowering trees spreading branches wide like they were trying to hold hands.

Lots and lots of beauty. But me…well, I was too busy looking down, watching out for poop, to notice it much.

In Isaiah 6:3 the seraphim above the throne of God say, over and over, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.”

The WHOLE earth is full of His glory.

So the problem, again, isn’t His absence, it’s my focus.

Am I going to focus on the gray? The poop?

Or am I going to walk ahead with confidence, trusting that God will “lead me in the path of righteousness,” that He will “make all paths straight,” not just mine.

In her book One Thousand Gifts, Ann Voskamp writes, “…I only deepen the wound of the world when I neglect to give thanks for early light dappled through leaves and the heavy perfume of wild roses in early June… The brave who focus on all things good and all things beautiful and all things true, even in the small, who give thanks for it and discover joy even in the here and now, they are the change agents who bring fullest Light to all the world.”

Two years ago, on a trip to Kenya, we had the amazing opportunity to go INTO the Kibera slum, the second largest slum in the world. A giant man who grew up in it and who still lives and ministers there, took us in, leading the way through the maze of shacks. I watched out for more than poop as I placed each foot, but at one corner my eyes were drawn up to a barred window that had a bright, cheerful curtain. A small jar of wildflowers sat on its sill. Tears came to my eyes and I thought, “You’re here, Lord, even here!”

If I focus on the gray, the poop, I will be overwhelmed, but if I focus on His beauty, the glory of God pinpointing its way through the gray, I have hope: I can pull the gray TO the glory. It’s there; it’s available.

George Washington Carver, who certainly had plenty of gray in his against-the-odds life, said, “I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in.”

If we will only tune in.

Look for the Glory!

Extra quote (just ’cause I love it): “God writes the gospel not in the Bible alone, but on trees and flowers and clouds and stars.” Martin Luther

Maddie, thoroughly enjoying some of the glory in Philly last week