Lent: Wild Beauty

For the beauty of the earth

For the Glory of the skies, 

For the love which from our birth

Over and around us lies: 

Lord of all, to Thee we raise

this our hymn of grateful praise.

One of the most thrilling, most frightening, most rustically beautiful places on earth is the deep woods of Canada.  My head floods with memories of the place four hours north of the border...an island my Opa bought in 1950 for $500 on a remote lake in the Ontario wilderness.  I went there over and over again in the summers of my youth, and I'm sure I'll be able to recall a thousand childhood moments when I'm old and frail and can't remember the way to the store.  

I love the smell of gasoline because Opa would fill the motor tank before the long trek from portage to island, splashing little rainbows into the shallows.  I love cliffs that echo and carpets of pine needles and blueberries off the bush and magnificent storms over the waters.  I love stepping off a slick rock into clear, cold waters.  These are a few of my favorite things, as Maria would sing.  

Yes, this is me looking like a bro.

One year, something in the night scared me.  I brought home recurring nightmares that hung over my sleep for many years...some unseen monster looming in my house.  As I said, it could be a frightening place, like the day I met up with a bear on the beach. We went our separate ways, thankfully.

Another year, burning embers floated on the wind and ignited my favorite tinder-dry pine tree, and within hours, all of it, everything Opa and our family built, was gone.  The vinyl siding on the cabin melted like snakes lying in wait among the smoking remains of our memories.  That was a sad year.  Opa never went back once it was beautiful again, which took about 15 years.  My dad and uncle return yearly, though, and have rebuilt.  

I learned my first lesson about God in that place.  I learned that when a person lays down on a rock under a cathedral of stars far removed from civilization, there is no chance of believing it is all random and meaningless.  God formed this wildly imaginative earth, flung the stars into space, and said, "Jill, this is for you.  Find me in it.  Thank me for it.  Worship me from it."  

It took me another decade to embrace the story of Christ, and now I see Him in the first bud of Spring and in the crushed leaves of fall.  I see Him in the towering cedars that point heavenward and in the tiny seed that seems so lifeless and dry but holds everything within it to accomplish its purpose.  

Today I sing the hymn of Folliot Pierpont, a fellow nature-lover, song-writer, God-worshipper.

For the beauty of each hour

Of the day and of the night, 

Hill and vale and tree and flow'r 

Sun and Moon and stars of light 

Lord of all, to Thee we raise

this our hymn of grateful praise.

Lent: Prone to Wander

Of any line in any hymn, I submit that this one from Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing is as honest and raw as they come...

Prone to wander, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love

Here's my heart, Lord, take and seal it, seal it for Thy courts above

This is one of the grand thoughts we ought to dwell on during this Lenten journey toward the cross, how prone we are to wander from our faith.  Life gets too hard and we consider rejecting it all.  Life gets too easy and we forget to draw near.  This journey is a steady battle to keep our heart soft and our ear inclined to God.  

When Robert Robinson wrote the hymn, Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing in 1758, he understood the depths of wandering.  His father died when he was young and his mother, unable to control him, sent him to London to learn barbering.  Instead he pursued drinking and gang-life, even visiting a fortune-teller at the age of 17.  Something about that experience unsettled him, and the next evening he attended an evangelistic meeting held by George Whitefield, one of the greatest preachers in history, noted to have a voice that was part foghorn and part violin.  I wish I could listen to the sermon he gave that night.

The preacher's words haunted Robinson for 3 years until he gave his heart to Chist and soon entered the ministry.  One day he wrote a hymn for his church for Pentecost Sunday, Come Thou Fount, and it is still beloved by Christians today, and is one of my personal favorites.  

I identify with Robinson's story.  As a teenager, I lived a life devoid of faith and fraught with loose morals and questionable choices that would leave me often unsettled but unsure what needed to change.  One day as an RA in college, I attended a seminar on witchcraft that was part of my "diversity training."  I was outwardly tolerant of the ideas I heard about, but inwardly, I was shaken.  God used that experience to open up conversations with my boyfriend, who is now my husband, on spiritual matters.  Not long after, when God sought me out one day in a courtyard on the campus of Iowa State, I sensed that He was the answer.  Shortly thereafter, I committed my life to Christ and have spent the last 24 years inviting God to have his way in my life.

Jesus sought me as a stranger, wandering from the fold of God;

He, to rescue me from danger, interposed his precious blood.

There is an interesting line in verse to that says, "Here I raise my Ebenezer, hither by Thy help I come."  This line was inspired by 1 Samuel 7:12,  where the prophet Samuel raises a stone as a monument and saying, "Hitherto has the Lord helped us."  Samuel names the stone Ebenezer, which translates to Stone of Help.

Enjoy this gorgeous rendition of the song by Chris Rice...

Lent: Swift and Beautiful

Lent calls for a reality check.  We often live two lives...the one that represents our ideals and best Facebook-worthy moments, and the one where we settle into old habits and lost opportunities.    As a songwriter, I write songs that probably make me sound highly spiritually attuned, but pull back my curtain, and I'm often wasting time, skipping Bible study, short with my kids, cold toward my husband, and the list goes on.  Ahem...let's just close that curtain and keep you out of my business.

Frances Havergal wrote the great consecration hymn, Take My Life and Let it Be, in 1874.  She wrote it first and then, throughout her life, chose to live it.  She wrote, "Take my voice and let me sing always, only, for my King," which eventually led her to only sing sacred music and give up singing with the Philharmonic.  She wrote, "Take my silver and my gold/ Not a mite shall I withhold," and one day packed up her massive jewelry collection and donated all but 2 family pieces.

I have always been drawn to the line in her song, "Take my feet and let them be swift and beautiful for Thee."  It represents the kind of servant I want to be, racing to the need and helping someone in a beautiful way.  But, honestly, I hold back, often not willing to dive into anyone's mess.  I am not swift about service most of the time, and there's usually nothing particularly beautiful about it.  I plug away at the mundane chores of life, trying to add little touches of beauty.  I reach occasionally for the higher ideals and am grateful for the blessings that come from them.

Much of life is not a lush, beautiful, orchestral piece, but a plainsong, hummed over the sink.  It's like these words I penned one particularly humbling day...

This is not the song I meant to write

It's lacking insight

And a heavenly melody

It’s just the psalm of a tired mom

An ordinary song

From the kitchen chapel, drinking Snapple

Washing dishes, praying wishes

But there is always a need that I can meet, just as Christ offered his abundance for my deficit, and my feet can learn, eventually, to be swift and beautiful about it.

Lent: Vision

One cloudy June morning, my husband and I climbed into a tiny car and set off nervously.  The roads were incredibly narrow and the speed limit was frighteningly fast.  Dave was getting his bearings driving on the left side of the road, encountering multi-lane roundabouts where drivers were less than patient with confused foreigners, and experiencing great relief when the busy roads of Galway finally spit us out into the traditional Irish countryside.  The beauty enveloped us, like a page from an Irish novel or a classic poem by Yeats, where the grass was green as emeralds and cows stopped traffic as they moseyed across the road.  I think I even saw a leprechaun by a rainbow eating Lucky Charms.

 My mind wandered to the story of Patrick, born in 373 AD, in Scotland, captured by Irish pirates when he was 16, and forced into slavery.  As we passed miles of ancient stone fences lining properties, I wondered if his hand had dug any of those stones from the rocky soil.  When Patrick escaped and returned to his home, his family was overjoyed.  But one night he dreamed that an Irishman was pleading with him to come evangelize Ireland.  That vision changed the course of his life.  At the age of 30, he returned to his captors with the Latin Bible.  He planted 200 churches and baptized 100,000 converts.

Because of God's work through Patrick, we now enjoy a plethora of  hymns, sermons, and worship songs from the likes of Keith and Kristyn Getty and many others.  But my very favorite hymn began as a poem by an anonymous author in the 8th century and was eventually translated and set to a traditional Irish folk song called Slane.

Be Thou my vision, O Lord of my heart

Naught be all else to me save that Thou art

Thou my best thought by day or by night

waking or sleeping, Thy presence my light

This song is beloved by my family.  In fact, my son came home from a homeschool graduation meeting recently, saying he successfuly lobbied for it to be the theme song of the graduation ceremony.  I'll be prepared for tears as all the homeschool families sing it on that momentous day in May.  

It is the perfect song for this Lenten journey, in which my heart's desire is to let my vision of Christ overtake me like the sea wind at the Cliffs of Moher, which was the prize at the end of our perilous drive through Ireland.  

Here is Ginny Owens singing Be Thou My Vision, which is all the sweeter because she is blind.

Lent: A Rugged Cross

Thoughts of Lent always lead me to thoughts of my heritage, which lead me to thoughts of my grandma.  

If my grandma was standing at the sink washing dishes, there was a good chance she was whistling her favorite hymn, The Old Rugged Cross.  She had one of those rich whistles that billowed with vibrato and carried through the house so that before you knew it, you were whistling or humming along.  

I wonder if she knew about George Bennard, the composer of the hymn.  He was a traveling evangelist with the Salvation Army in the early 1900s.  After a difficult season of ministry, he realized he needed to develop a better understanding of the cross, so he delved into study of the scriptures.  The cross became more than a symbol to him; it became the heartbeat of his ministry.  John 3:16 virtually leapt off the page in his mind's eye.  For months, he crafted a song that would express his deeper understanding, and when it was complete, he shared it with friends who were so moved they paid the fees to have it printed.  It is, of course, now a hymnal standard. 

On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross

The emblem of suffering and shame

And I love that old cross where the dearest and best

for a world of lost sinners was slain

So I'll cherish the old rugged cross

'til my trophies at last I lay down

and I'll cling to the old rugged cross

and exchange it someday for a crown

I sang this song at Grandma's funeral and thought back over her life.  She was devoted to her study of the scriptures.  I know this, because I have her Bible now, filled with the red-penciled highlights she so carefully drew, always using a ruler.  

Many afternoons she would sit with her Bible by her radio, which was housed in a giant console, and listen to the teachings of J. Vernon McGee.  I also inherited her 5 volume set of his witty, conversational inductive study.

When I was little, I thought she was very religious and a little scary because she didn't coddle and spoil me like my other grandparents.  But as I got older, I realized that she was complicated.  She loved her Lord but did not know how to effectively show affection to her daughters when she was raising them.  She was legalistic without being loving.  She let a bitter root grow in her heart about her marriage and confessed to me one day, when I was an adult sitting on the bed in her guest room, that she had regrets about her life and marriage.  She felt she was mistreated and unloved by her in-laws and regretted ever moving to Iowa from her beloved life in North Carolina.  

I suppose this is why she was drawn to the old, rugged cross, with its rough-hewn surface and splinters and associated suffering.  She did not much enjoy her journey on earth. 

Tucked in her Bible is a page printed with this wisdom:

I think of her reading over this with the sense that it was too late for her, but maybe, someday, her granddaughter would read it and take it to heart as she was raising her own children.  I have.

I know without a doubt that she prayed for me my whole life...me, who grew up without any faith.  I am certain she prayed me right into that defining moment in college where I took the leap to embrace Christ and the Christian life.  I imagine those prayers to be a jewel in her heavenly crown, which she traded one day many years ago for a cross.  

Lent: Blood Fountain

How can the earth have spun so quickly around the sun that Ash Wednesday is here again, like two daughters, grasping hands and turning in mind-blurring circles, collapsing with hard breath?  But after the breath returns and the heart rate slows, there is time to stare at the spinning ceiling and slowly get your bearings.  This is what I am doing: catching my breath and reflecting on Lent, allowing it to come into slow focus.  

The ground is white and frozen hard in Minnesota in February.  It takes a sun gathering up its strength to melt snow and thaw soil and crack ice.  The magic will happen by Easter.  The thaw will have begun.  It's happening.  Now.  In my heart.

During this thawing season of Lent, I intend to meditate on the words of hymns and think about the dear souls who wrote them.  As a songwriter, I am captivated by lyric and the minds that craft them.  Each of my own songs has a story behind its creation.  Perhaps I will reflect on a few of those, too.  This will be my small offering each day of this journey.  

There is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Immanuel's veins

And sinners, plunged beneath that flood, lose all their guilty stains.

-William Cowper, There is a Fountain

William Cowper, who grew up in the 1700s, was so acquainted with loss, the deaths of his mother and multiple siblings, and bullying at boarding school that he eventually threw away his Bible and attempted suicide.  It was in an asylum under the gentle care of Dr. Nathaniel Cotton, that William found regeneration in these words:

Whom God set forth as a propitiation by His BLOOD, through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His forbearance God had PASSED OVER 

the sins that were previously committed.  

Romans 3:25

[propitiation: appeasement of a deity]

Today, I think about the sins I've previously committed...the critical tongue, the selfishness, the withholding of love and grace, and all the excuses I made to justify them.  I get a sickening feeling as I look at it all square and call it what it is and accept that a lot of it genuinely hurt people around me.  

I dip my toe in this blood-fountain.  Forgive me, Lord.  I scoot closer.  Drop my body in.   For I have sinned.  Plunge down all the way.  Wash me.  Burst up through the surface, cleansed.  O, God, thank you.

Lent: Signs

I admit I feel squeamish looking for signs from God.  It can feel mystical or new age or dare I say, a little desperate.  But Jesus' last days were ripe with them...roosters crowing, veils tearing, miraculous healings, bleeding prayers.  Jerusalem was a hotbed of signs and wonders with hundreds of prophecies violently, joyfully fulfilling in a single God-man and his supreme act of love.  How could the earth NOT quake?!



Witnessing signs is akin to the tearing of the veil in the temple.  Maybe not as dramatic, but still a moment where God allows me to glimpse his glory, to taste a bit of his power this side of heaven.  But I rarely think to ask.  Or look.  Or attribute.  

You see, Jesus  contrasted the ready faith of the Samaritan's with the restricted faith of the Galileans, who demanded signs and wonders to believe.  He said irritably in John 4:48, "Unless you people see signs and wonders, you will never believe."  Paul confirms in 2 Cor 5:7, "We live by faith, not by sight."  So I mostly don't ask.  

Yesterday, I did.  I was wrestling with something that I needed to figure out, embrace, and submit to.  The day was beautiful and I had 20 minutes of spare time waiting for my daughter to finish bell choir practice at Assisi Heights, the glorious Catholic convent imposingly perched on a hill in my town. Thanks to its Roman architecture and castle-like quality, I had my kids convinced for years that it's where the princess of Rochester lives.  

On the hillside of the beautiful grounds is a quiet niche surrounded by sandstone walls crosscut with gnarly oak roots.  At the far end, a shrine of Mary.  I have visited the open sanctuary many times and have always sensed it to be a sacred spot, not because someone ordained it to be sacred, but because it becomes holy ground to me when I enter.  

I went there requesting a sign.  I specifically asked God to lead me to a rock, something I could hold as a reminder that I was living out my calling and was committed to spiritual growth.  I walked slowly along the curving wall, enjoying the playful squirrels, when one of them knocked loose a stone, which rolled to my feet.  I picked it up with a smile and held it in my hand, studying it. Yes, it was the product of nature and gravity and weak sandstone and busy squirrels, but it was, in that veil-tearing moment, a sign which filled me with wonder.  

Lent: Simultaneity

I spent the last 20 hours either sleeping or battling the stomach flu.  Oy!  I missed church and small group, grocery shopping, and weekly planning and now I'm starting the week out with a residual headache and a sense of being behind already.  

But as I sat on the front porch this balmy morning, sipping coffee and chatting with my husband who is in China, I though about the value of being emptied (sorry for the visual.)  Letting go of schedules and duties and commitments is not easy for me, but there is spiritual discipline in both fulfilling and withdrawing from them.  

Jesus, in his final hours, both fulfilled and withdrew.  

But I'm learning we can develop the art of simultaneous fulfilling and withdrawing.  Life can be lived in synchronized work and worship.  In my favorite book on the devotional life, A Testament of Devotion, Thomas Kelly writes 

"At the first practice of inward prayer is a process of alternation of attention between outer things and the Inner Light.  Preoccupation with either brings the loss of the other, yet what is sought is not alternation, but simultaneity, worship undergirding every moment, living prayer, the continuous current and background of all moments of life."  

This, I feel, is my highest calling: to "walk and talk and work and laugh with your friends. But behind the scenes, keep up the life of simple prayer and inward worship." -T. Kelly

Lent: Crumpled

I've pondered words and lessons in the many days since I last posted my "daily" Lenten thoughts, but I've let the urgent edge out the eternal and failed to still my heart and listen.  That is part of my Lenten journey...to face the truth about my weaknesses and feel bathed in Grace.

As I opened the shade on our south window yesterday, the bright March sun burst through with a magnificent blast of light, which hit the round prism on the sill and exploded in a rainbow of shredded color across the room.  That is my picture of grace breaking into a contrite heart.   Thank you, Lord.

I've been on an unusual mission to help save our local youth theater through a variety of efforts: presenting, fundraising, creating a musical.  My time is swallowed up there.  I used to think that a mission like this was secular work, and perhaps competed with my spiritual work, which I equated to serving at church.  I unwisely divided the sacred from the secular.  

But I am learning the beautiful truth of this verse:

Everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer. 1 Timothy 4:4–5

I have made this mission holy by praying for it.  And by praying for it and seeing it as sacred work, I see God everywhere in it, and I uncover constant opportunities to be His message in both word and deed.  

Oswald Chambers, in this insightful devotional, said:

The natural heart will do any amount of serving, but it takes the heart broken by conviction of sin, and baptized by the Holy Ghost, and crumpled into the purpose of God before the life becomes the sacrament of its message.

Jesus, walking the road to Golgotha, was crumpled for the purposes of God.  But his light was about to break forth.  May I walk each moment in that divine paradox of crumpled glory.

Then your light shall break forth like the morning,

Your healing shall spring forth speedily,

And your righteousness shall go before you;

The glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard.

Isaiah 58:8

Lent: Stumble

I'm stumbling over stones on this dusty Lenten road to Golgotha. Jesus is trudging slowly up the road, dragging his cross, which leaves a deep groove in the dirt behind him, and I am stumbling awkwardly beside him, tripping every third step. It would have been easier to give up sweets for 40 days.

The stone in my path last night was the documentary Dropbox, which I saw with friends and my daughter in a local theater.  Pastor Lee of Seoul, South Korea, shared his heart and ministry for orphans, abandoned babies, and children with severe and profound disabilities.   Most of his 15 children are all three, and many times a week, the little bell on his baby dropbox rings, revealing an unwanted bundled newborn.  He loves the least of the least of the least.  

It's an inspiring movie, beautifully filmed with sweet moments of levity, tragedy, hope.   The young American director who set out to find a cool story and win a Sundance prize was so moved by his six months in the orphanage, sleeping on the floor with the children, that he surrendered his life to Christ.  

It's a stumbling stone because it is asking me what I am doing for the least of them.  I am possibly more informed than the average person on global orphan needs and child trafficking, I help out my adoptive family friends when I can, and I give to causes that serve these groups.  So why do I stumble?  

I think Christ does not want us to shrug helplessly ever.  He would rather have us faceplant.  He appoints each of us times, kairos times, to step/stumble into a space where our ability meets someone's need.  We can spin on our heal and walk the other way, of course, or we can crack open and spill out.  

I close with these difficult verses on confession of my/our rebellion, which drives back justice and incites oppression.  I'm sorry, Jesus.  Show me a better way.

For our offenses are many in your sight,

    and our sins testify against us.

Our offenses are ever with us,

    and we acknowledge our iniquities:

13 

rebellion and treachery against the Lord,

    turning our backs on our God,

inciting revolt and oppression,

    uttering lies our hearts have conceived.

14 

So justice is driven back,

    and righteousness stands at a distance;

truth has stumbled in the streets,

    honesty cannot enter.

15 

Truth is nowhere to be found,

    and whoever shuns evil becomes a prey.

Isaiah 59;12-15

Lent: Kairos

  

My pastor on Sunday shared an interesting contrast in words.  The Greeks were bright enough to have two words for the concept of time.  Chronos refers to hours, minutes, seconds; the time I watch click by on the big, round clock across from me. The Greek god Chronos was represented with an hourglass and a scythe.  Symbolically appropriate, I'd say.  I've often felt the sting of the scythe of chronos.

Kairos, in contrast, is the word for "an appointed time," a "supreme moment."  It is the winged god holding the balance of time that has reached its tipping point.  It is the "ripeness" of time spoken of here:

“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted…” and so on.

In the first Greek translations of the Bible, each use of the word ‘time’ in the above passage is rendered as kairos, not chronos.

Mark says, “The KAIROS has come, the kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!” Mark 1:15

I FEEL chronos.  I feel it in the shoulder that won't fully heal because of the sophomoric trick I did while snow tubing in January. I SEE it in the eyes and minds and bodies of my children.  

But I HEAR kairos.  The Holy Spirit speaks to me in the language of kairos.  Throughout the day it says, "Move now.  Speak now.  Listen now.  Give now.  Do now. Rest now."  

It told Esther:  "Now is your moment.  Speak."  It told Gideon, "You, unlikely man; you, man of valor.  This time is for you.  Move now!"  It told Jesus, "The time has come for the cross."

The Bible is drenched with kairos.  So is my life.  As  I listen carefully during this Lenten journey, I hear two sounds:  the unrelenting ticking of chronos and the unmistakable voice of kairos.