Visit me over here. . .

Sorry to those of you who have been missing recent posts. I guess I wasn't clear enough that I was permanently changing domain names. Please come and visit me at www.hearingtheheartbeat.com.

Too old to carry?

Of all the pieces in the Zimsculpt exhibition, this one touched me most deeply. Who among us has not seen someone tell a child, “You’re too heavy for me to carry you. You’ll have to get down and...

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Beating on the chest of God

I felt like a frustrated two year old held by her father, wailing and beating my little fists against his ribs. “Where were you, God? . . .

I'm trying out a new site. Please come and read the rest of my post here for today.

Why we must sing

Into yesterday’s questions, yesterday’s glimpse of poverty and inability to praise, God speaks through a woman who has asked the same questions. 

"I know there is poor and hideous suffering and I’ve seen the hungry and the guns that go to war. But I have lived pain and my life can tell: 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 peonies in June and the song of crickets on summer humid nights and the rivers that run and the stars that rise and the rain that falls and all the good things that a good God gives.

How does it save the world to reject unabashed joy when it is Joy Who saves us? Rejecting joy to stand in solidarity with the suffering doesn’t rescue the suffering. The converse does.

The brave who focus on all things good and all things beauty 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 the all the world.” 

Ann Voscamp ~One Thousand Gifts, A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are

And so today I give thanks. I still feel the pain of yesterday’s sidewalk-dwelling fellow image-bearers. But it doesn’t stop me from praising. It makes it all the more essential that I do.

Today I celebrate the God of the impossible. The God who is able to do more than we ask or imagine. The One who stepped into the pain and felt it himself so he could exchange despair for hope.

This is the Extravagant Giver who does not stop at essentials but pours out blessing upon blessing, a whole sky-full of one lavish canvas after another, the show changing every moment for more than an hour.

And I sing because he is not oblivious to the state of the world. He weeps with the poor. But he knows that evil will not have the last word. Love will. And so he paints beauty and declares hope and shouts his love and I must too.

So I sing to this Lavish Lover who calls us to give and then gives it all back and tells us to use it to host a party with him and the poor at the center.

Be sure to set aside a tenth of all that your fields produce each year. Eat the tithe of your grain, new wine and oil, and the firstborn of your herds and flocks in the presence of the LORD your God at the place he will choose as a dwelling for his Name, so that you may learn to revere the LORD your God always. But if that place is too distant and you have been blessed by the LORD your God and cannot carry your tithe (because the place where the LORD will choose to put his Name is so far away), then exchange your tithe for silver, and take the silver with you and go to the place the LORD your God will choose. Use the silver to buy whatever you like: cattle, sheep, wine or other fermented drink, or anything you wish. Then you and your household shall eat there in the presence of the LORD your God and rejoice. And do not neglect the Levites living in your towns, for they have no allotment or inheritance of their own. (Deuteronomy 14:22-27)

I sing because nothing is too hard for him, and one day all that is wrong will be set right and there will be no more tears or sorrow or homelessness.

More of the endless gifts:

Never ending Love-paintings in the sky

Faithfulness new every morning

Hope in the darkest of places

Hearts that can hurt and heal and beat with His heartbeat

Being called to share his life

The promise that all will be made new.

When your heart breaks for the broken

This morning I planned to write of God’s lavish generosity. Now I cannot. 

I passed too many broken people on the street on my way home. Two slouched against a wall, cardboard signs proclaiming fragments of their stories. An old man sprawled near the crosswalk, useless legs angled awkwardly beneath him. A stooped grandfather paced, weeping, pleading with passersby for just a few cents. Most did not raise their eyes from the pavement, spirits and bodies broken from years of neglect and abuse. 

"He defended the cause of the poor and needy . . . . Is that not what it means to know me?” declares the LORD. (Jeremiah 22:16)

How different, this, from our comfortable ideas of what it means to know God.  I cry out to know God, to hear his heartbeat. Today he shows up not with warm comfort but with a summons into lives and places I fear to go. His heart, which beats rest and peace and generosity, beats for all. It beats justice and love and hope and righteous anger and it beats that this homelessness and hopelessness is not how things were meant to be. Every person should know they are special. Every one should belong.

I cannot hear the heartbeat of God unless I am willing to go where it can be heard. He walks among the desperately needy. When I refuse to follow, fearing the disclosure of my own desperate poverty, his heartbeat fades into the distance. I long to know God, to hear his heartbeat and have mine beat in time with his. . . yet still I freeze when I walk past someone sitting on the scrap of pavement they call home.

Our worlds are so far apart. I don't know how to connect. What does it mean for me - an introvert who struggles with meeting new people no matter who they are, a person with a disability that prevents me standing for more than a few minutes, a resident of a large western city – what does it mean for me to defend the cause of the poor and needy?

I don’t know yet.

I do know that the enormity of the need is overwhelming. Thankfully, I am not asked to care for all. Hope comes through healing relationships, and I cannot befriend everyone.

God does not ask me to befriend everyone. But he does call me to see each person as one who bears his image, however tarnished it might be.  Every image bearer, whether a friend, a checkout clerk, or someone living rough, deserves certain simple courtesies: a smile, a kind response to their words, an acknowledgement of their presence. With time, maybe I can even learn to speak a gentle greeting first. And I can always whisper a prayer to the only One who can restore their health and freedom, to the only One able to heal the fear that keeps me from reaching out.

I can ask God to help me see them as he sees them, to see myself as he sees me. To help me remember how little difference there is between us.

I can refuse to shut out the pain. I can continue to listen for God’s heartbeat, allowing the longing for justice and hope to grow.  I can choose to follow the sound of his heartbeat, though I do not know where it will lead.

Today, that is all that He asks.

How to receive the gift of your life

Recently a statement in a secular magazine caught my eye.  It spoke of the importance of practicing acceptance and gratitude in living well with limitations. 

It made me think.  How does one practice gratitude if one does not believe that God gives all good gifts? Whom does one thank? And what does it look like to practice acceptance as a follower of Jesus Christ? 

I have intentionally practiced gratitude much more than acceptance.  I am a fighter. I do not give up easily. Acceptance can feel too much like resignation, an acknowledgement of defeat.  Or like fatalism – “this is the way it is and there’s nothing I can do about it so why try?”  How can I live in eager expectation of God's intervention while accepting the reality of what is? It's that word, “reality,” that helps me see. In the moments when I long to practice obstetrics again, it’s hard to keep reality in view. My mind wanders in its own little world, “Maybe if I just worked a couple of half days a week. . . maybe if there was a position that didn’t require night call or surgery. . . maybe. . .”

But the reality is that God is Truth. He works within and through the truth. He always starts from where we actually are, not from where we wish we were. Healthy, God-centered acceptance faces the facts – both the human limitations of our situation and the power of God’s grace to work all things together for good in ways we can't imagine.

Mere resignation to my illness would mean giving up hope. Acceptance, a stronger, truer act, is not passive, not merely giving up or giving in, but actively embracing reality in the hope of what God will do in the midst of it. Acceptance lives within my limits, not fighting them. It delights in the gift of space to listen to God’s heartbeat rather than resenting my inability to listen to babies’ heartbeats. Instead of feeling inadequate because I need help, acceptance frees me to receive and enjoy the community God provides. 

Acceptance is not merely “coming to terms with something” but is the “act of willingly taking a gift” or the “agreement to an invitation or offer.” (MS Word dictionary)  I have a choice. I can cling to dreams of an unreal life and miss the gift of the present. Or I can embrace the life held out to me, receiving with it the God of Truth who delights in working through weakness and bringing beauty out of brokenness.

If I spend all my energy hating the fence and wishing to return to the time when it did not surround me, I'll fail to see it as the perfect place to plant sunflowers.

“Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. 

See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?

I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland.” (Isaiah 43:18-19)

  

Acceptance is gratitude's sister. Being grateful for daily grace-gifts helps me see the beauty in the life offered to me now. It's hard to fight something when you see Love's fingerprints all over it. 

Care to join me in embracing whatever shape of life-gift God is holding out to you today?

“See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. . .  Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the Lord is your life.” 

(Deuteronomy 30:15, 19-20)

When you wonder if God is holding out on you

He hugs me tight, holding me close a second longer as though he wants to send his gentle strength with me. Before he speaks goodbye to me he speaks over me, speaks about me to Another, words of blessing, of love, of hope and trust. He has given me so much, this precious father of mine. But this is the greatest of all, this blessing in which he places me into the arms of another Father, this moment when earth and heaven merge and I hear the blessing that since creation has been spoken over humankind now spoken over me, spoken this time through the familiar voice of my father. Two fathers, both blessing, the one through the other.

Among the first words spoken when this world was new were words of blessing. The startling statement comes right after the repeated “Let there be”s, and before the commissions and command.

“God blessed them.” (Gen 1:28)

It is among the first things we learn about this Other. He is a blessing God, one who delights to give, to love, to embrace, to cherish.  How is it that I still fear complete surrender to these arms which long only to bless?  Why do I still hold back when he reminds me that he holds nothing back from me?

“He who did not withhold his own son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else?” (Romans 8:32)

Have I been so awed by the power of the One whose words birthed us that I have failed to hear the gentle heartbeat of love that conceived us? Or perhaps I have focused on the commands and failed to see that they are an overflow of the blessing, an invitation to be so drawn into the center of the blessing that we become part of the blessing.

Or perhaps, along with the first humans (and every one since?) I have fallen for the lie that God is holding out on us, keeping back the best, holding us down instead of lifting us up. Of course, few of us would state it so bluntly. But is it not that subconscious fear that causes us to ask “why?” when we lose our health or career or someone we love? Is that not the reason behind our anxiety when life feels unpredictable and out of control? Why should I need to be in control if I am confident that I am safe in the arms of a Father who longs to bless?

How can I learn to live in the truth that God is a God who blesses, rather than continuing to live in the lie so ingrained in us since the fall? I can start by listening to the longing in the voice of the One who calls in a myriad of ways. Yesterday it was through a waiting elevator when I was running late, through a golden clouded love note written in the sky. Today He calls through Brian Doerksen’s “Song for the Bride”:

RETURN TO ME - SONG FOR THE BRIDE

(Isaiah 30:15) 

From the ancient days until today I have inspired prophets and poets And at the heart of every message Are these three words Return to me I am your Creator – Return to me I am your Redeemer; Your Father – return to me I am your husband – return to me

I have longed to hold you in my arms

And take all of your fear away

I will take your filthy rags and make them clean

If you receive my love, if you will receive my love

Return to Me            and hear my Spirit say

In repentance and rest            is            your            salvation

In quietness and trust            is            your            strength

Today may we each take our place with the rest of creation listening to the heartbeat of the One who waits and calls and pours out blessing upon blessing, longing for us to notice.