deep calls to deep

Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls;
all your waves and breakers have swept over me.

By day the Lord directs his love, at night his song is with me—
a prayer to the God of my life.

                                                                        Psalm 42:7-8

 

Deep calls to deep.

 

The aching agony of a world of brokenness set against the backdrop of a God so whole. This hurts deep. The soul can only take so much. And these needs—this destitute state—serve as the great breaking point. I am being swept over by your anger and sorrow for a world gone wrong.

 

How can I do anything that will pick up broken pieces? How can I do nothing?

 

There is an angst in the everyday when I start to see with eyes you’ve given and love with a heart not my own. I am so helpless myself; so in need of the rescue that gives breath and life. There is an angst; a hurt. An anger and restlessness that cries of how I must reach out—I must reach in and share with souls long lost of a love that has found me.

 

Where are you in the midst of all this heartache and why have I been so comfortable while the nations rage?

 

Deep calls to deep.

 

Deep within a cry is forming; a cry from my depths to the deepness of God. Come and rid me of this comfort for the everyday and the ordinary. Come and bring your wholeness through me to the broken. Come with your gospel truth and resurrection power. Come Jesus, and resurrect my own heart from apathy and the paralysis of so much need and so little me.

 

Come and free me from making it about me. It is you, only you.

 

Deep calls to deep and you are calling me.

 

From somewhere deep within you are whispering gently and shouting violently for those who call themselves yours to live as such. To step up and step out. To reveal wholeness and Jesus and resurrection power that heals souls.

 

I am in turmoil as I see the needs of those who surround me and know my own need too well. It is too much, there is too far to go, to high to hope that I could do anything for others when I need like I do.

 

And yet…by day your love directs me. By night your song is with me. Your  song is my prayer to you. Deep calls to deep to remind me that it has never been me; it has always been you. You working in me you working through me. You and you and only ever you.

 

My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God?           Psalm 42:2

 

You are here and here and always here. And deep within I feel you calling from somewhere deeper still. Calling me to you and calling me to your broken world.

 

 

There is a dissatisfaction even in the writing of these words. The calling, the cry, the angst is deep and words are found lacking. My soul is thirsty and the deep call is reverberating. I simply pray that I can find ears to hear and a heart to receive this song of the Lord’s love. May it be my prayer back to him.

 

keep listening

What do we do when life gets worse instead of better? What happens when we feel and believe that God is about to turn things around and we’re sure he promised he would and then, well, he doesn’t. Things get worse. The pain gets more intolerable. The relationships divide further. The money problems get bigger. What do we do then? What happens when we put all our hope in God doing something—something he said he would do—and then things go further in the wrong direction?

 

Flounder. That’s usually what we do. Struggle. Give up or in our out. We doubt, we hurt, we question. We stop trusting.

 

So Moses told the people of Israel what the Lord had said, but they refused to listen anymore. They had become too discouraged by the brutality of their slavery. Exodus 6:9

 

We are just like the Israelites. Time may have separated us, cultures and mindsets may be completely changed, but we are no different. They refused to listen anymore. They had become too discouraged. For them it was their slavery, admittedly far worse than anything most of us will face in life. But for us it’s usually circumstantial as well. We become to discouraged by our suffering, our mistreatment, our sense of unwanted-ness. Maybe it’s our fear, our repeated failures, our lack of having our own needs met in our relationships. We become discouraged by our questions that go unanswered, our pursuits that go unresolved, our friendships that are broken.

 

The list goes on and on. Things happen and we become discouraged. Nothing wrong with this. Life is sometimes discouraging. But we stop listening to what God is saying; stop trusting that he is working; stop running after the ways that he’s leading.

 

Why? Because things went badly? Because we thought he was coming to rescue and instead it felt like he turned and went the other way?

 

The Israelites just knew God wasn’t coming because the immediate things got harder. And after all, if God is going to do a miracle, won’t it be instantaneous? It took Moses forty years in the desert of Midain just to be ready to come to the Israelites so I’m thinking maybe we are too short-term focused, too oriented to immediate gratification.

 

Whatever you are in, wherever you find your self, how ever discouraging it is, hang in there. Keep listening, God is speaking. Keep looking, God is moving. Keep trusting, God hears your cries for help and he is concerned. He is coming. Maybe not as soon as you’d like, but he is knows where you are and he cares.

 

You can be sure that I have heard the groans of the people of Israel, who are now slaves to the Egyptians. And I am well aware of my covenant with them.
  ”Therefore, say to the people of Israel: `I am the Lord. I will free you from your oppression and will rescue you from your slavery in Egypt. I will redeem you with a powerful arm and great acts of judgment. I will claim you as my own people, and I will be your God. Then you will know that I am the Lord your God who has freed you from your oppression in Egypt.       Exodus 6:5-7

 

the wooing God

But those who suffer he delivers in their suffering;
he speaks to them in their affliction.         

He is wooing you from the jaws of distress
to a spacious place free from restriction,
to the comfort of your table laden with choice food.       Job 36:15-16

Sometimes the distress comes on heavy; the anxiety runs deep. Some days feel hopeless and the hurt is so oppressive it’s suffocating. These are days often consumed with words like “why” or straight up accusations regarding fairness and what is perceived as just. But for those who have the courage to listen, God is speaking.

In our affliction, in our pain, in our imprisonment—God is speaking. He is not speaking words of shame. He is not speaking words of judgment. He is not speaking of our mistakes that brought us to the distress we find ourselves in.

He is speaking words that woo. He is drawing us, calling us, inviting and enticing us.

God is wooing us to the place of freedom, to the place of comfort and fulfillment. He is speaking to us. And sometimes we can only hear because we hurt. Sometimes it is only in our affliction that we even give an effort to listen.

God is in love with us. He is recklessly and hopelessly in love with us to the point that he will stop at nothing to draw us to him. And he knows us. He knows that sometimes we hear more clearly when we hurt. Sometimes a little desperation and distress are the only things that will draw us near.

“Does that mean God caused my pain? That we wants me to hurt?”

 

It’s so tempting to put those two together. To assume that if God allowed it—allowed me to suffer or struggle—that somehow he wants me to hurt. But his love goes far deeper. What he wants is for us to know him, to fall into his love with fathomless depths. What he wants is fullness of life for us where we experience the raging torrent of his passion over us.

As I’ve said before, our God has a reckless love for us. He will stop at nothing to woo us to him. If you have the courage to listen, God is speaking. He is speaking words of love, words that woo. He is speaking in your affliction and pain. Because he knows that sometimes that’s the only place we’ll listen.

For the Lord will not cast off forever, but, though he cause grief, he will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love; for he does not willingly afflict or grieve the children of men.            Lamentations 3:31-33 

plundered

 

But this is a people plundered and looted,
all of them trapped in pits
or hidden away in prisons.
They have become plunder,
with no one to rescue them;
they have been made loot,
with no one to say, “Send them back.”

Isaiah 42:22

 

Sometimes I feel like this. I feel plundered and looted. Sometimes it’s hard not to feel like little more than a commodity, a tool to be used by others for their own interests. Some days it’s difficult not to see myself as just a means to an end for others.

It happens some days, in the relationships we choose, with people we love. And it happens in the relationships we didn’t choose; those that are the result of work or other necessities. And there are times when it comes from people we aren’t in relationship with at all.

Some days we just feel more valued for what we can give than who we are. Some days it just feels like we are being taken advantage of or that we are just being taken. And it’s good to know that God sees this, that he knows. What’s not so great in this instance in Isaiah 42 is that God actually admits to being the cause of this reality for the Israelites. 

Why? Why would God plunder his own people? Why give them over to those who would view them as little more than loot to be taken?

Isaiah acknowledges that the reason God hands them over - lets them be plundered - is because of their choices. The life they had chosen for themselves had caused them to accumulate a lot of baggage. Well, that sounds familiar; that sounds like my life. Looking back on the choices I’ve made and the way I have sometimes gone I can see how I’ve accumulated a lot of baggage and am carrying around a great deal of “stuff” as a result of my history.

I don’t like to feel plundered. I don’t want to feel like those around me are using me, and I certainly don’t like feeling that it comes at the hand of God, that somehow he sanctioned it. But what if the stuff others are taking from me are the things he never intended me to have? What if it’s just junk that God knows is weighing me down, sucking life from me, keeping me from being who he created me to be? What if it’s all the baggage that a life lived away from God has accumulated?

To be honest, I’m not sure how I even feel about this while I’m still writing it. Last night I started this and stopped because I just couldn’t make sense of it all. I couldn’t come up with a nice neat explanation about how to know when feeling plundered by others is from God, and when it’s not. I couldn’t tie it all togetherwith a nice little bow that might make us feel better about the idea that God could be okay with us being looted by the world sometimes.

The fact is, this doesn’t package up nicely no matter how you look at it. We are never going to like this feeling that the world around us is taking advantage of us. And the truth is that usually (I believe) it’s not God at all. The world is a wicked place and it seeks to use us up at any and every turn. But sometimes God can be behind it. Loving us so ruthlessly that he pushes us into places we would never go on our own. Because ultimately he knows it’s for our good. I’m thinking that what I really need to decide, is not whether or not I can discern when it’s God-sanctioned plundering and when it’s not, but will I trust him either way?

Will I trust God to know what stuff in my life is just baggage I don’t need anyway? Will I trust him to control what I can’t and protect me from losing the really significant and important parts of who I am to a world that loves to plunder? Will I trust him to understand what I really can’t – namely, that sometimes it’s in our best interest to go through things we would never choose? Will I trust him with all of that?

Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding;    Proverbs 3:5

make a different choice

Sometimes I am tempted to be distressed, to succumb to the overwhelming weight of life. You know, times when I think about my financial needs vs. available resources, or the devastation in Haiti, or the difficulty of raising kids, or the pain in my own life, or the pain I cause others, or…well, you get the idea. There are a lot of options everyday for being totally distressed and overwhelmed.

 But here are some words from God that I came across today. They have encouraged me to not give in.

Distressed and hungry, they will roam through the land; when they are famished, they will become enraged and,looking upward, will curse their king and their God. Then they will look toward the earth and see only distress and darkness and fearful gloom, and they will be thrust into utter darkness.         Isaiah 8:21-22

 Well, that sounds way too familiar for me. Distressed, feeling like I am roaming…yep that makes me angry. You might even say enraged. That makes me want to curse God – or at least blame him and complain about the unfairness of it all! And I never seem to have trouble cursing the king as well (or any authority figures over me).

I hate feeling like I’m walking in darkness and to be honest, I feel like that often. I know God wants me to do something, but what? but when? But where? But how? I feel like I’ve been given a map (The Bible and the Spirit) and I’ve been sent on my way, but it’s dark so the map feels useless. But Isaiah goes on and that’s good news for me.

 Nevertheless, there will be no more gloom for those who were in distress. In the past he humbled the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, but in the future he will honor Galilee of the nations, by the Way of the Sea, beyond the Jordan—The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned. You have enlarged the nation and increased their joy; they rejoice before you as people rejoice at the harvest, as soldiers rejoice when dividing the plunder. Isaiah 9:1-3

I would like to rejoice. I would like to “see the light” as they do. (makes me think of that great Charlie Peacock song: “I Wanna Be in The Light”) And what this says is that I can. He has given me the light. Verse six just drives the point home:

For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Isaiah 9:6

  I know, I know. February is an odd time to be pulling out the Christmas verses. But it fits, it’s truth, it’s for today, I think. God gave us Jesus. And according to this he has very large shoulders for holding up very large burdens. Mine aren’t made for that. Why do I always try to leave it all on my own shoulders when his are obviously far better suited?

 I know He has disappointed me sometimes: not making life as easy for I as we would have liked; not giving some things to me that it feels like he could have easily given. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t love me, isn’t in control, isn’t working for me everyday. I just don’t get it. I don’t see what he’s doing.

 I don’t want to live in distress. I want to live in joy. I guess it’s like I’ve always heard and said about love before: Love is a choice. You have to choose to love, you can’t rely on always “feeling” it. I think joy is the same way. We have to choose it.

 I remember a new parent I knew some time ago who always used to say the same thing to his son when his son was behaving badly. He would say, “Make a different choice.” The sentiment was brilliant. He was empowering the child to choose a new way of acting or engaging. He was inviting the child to be proactive in his own correction. The only problem was, the child was two years old. At two years old, “make a different choice” might as well have been a flat out “NO!” The two year old could not appreciate the power he was being given, couldn’t recognize that while he was being told, “No, you can’t do that.” he was also being invited into the process of what he could choose instead. It wasn’t being assigned to him.

I wonder how often God is saying to us, “Make a different choice.” But all we hear is “NO! You can’t do that!” Or maybe he is saying, “I’m working on that” or “You aren’t ready for that.” Or “Trust me, I have something better.” But all we hear is “No, NO, NOOOO!” And what we miss in all of it is that regardless of whether we feel like we’re walking in darkness or not, he has given us a great light. The Light. And he has very big, very strong shoulders.

 What was it that Jesus said?

 “Come to me all who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest.”

 But just like rejoicing, just like the light, we have to choose it. We have to decide that we won’t rollover and submit to distress. That there is something better. Someone better.

Am I in distress? Am I choosing joy? Am I choosing rest?