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

From Oswald's Mind to My Heart

I won't comment on this little treasure of a paragraph from My Utmost For His Highest, Aug. 3.    I have to go cut my hubby's hair and get on with the day.  Just know that it spoke deeply to me today and will perhaps resonate with you as well.

We have no conception of what God is aiming at, and as we go on it gets more and more vague. 

God's aim looks like missing the mark because we are too short-sighted to see what He is aiming at.

 At the beginning of the Christian life we have our own ideas as to what God's purpose is--"I am meant to go here or there,"  "God has called me to do this special work";  and we go and do the thing, and still the big compelling of God remains.  

The work we do is of no account, it is so much scaffolding compared with the big compelling of God.

whew.

The Great Divide

That is the greatest divide in life:  from the point where we either go toward a more dilatory and useless type of Christian life; or we become more and more ablaze for the glory of God.  

-Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest

Photo by Dave Pearson, Colorado Rockies at sunrise