To Have And To Hold On To

From today's Facebook post...

Before he became The Hubs, and I, his well-meaning wife, there was this moment...

Thirty-six years ago yesterday - and exhausted for reasons I'll not innumerate today - we stood rehearsing for the celebration of a covenant for which there is no adequate rehearsal. But pushing through while tired and stressed - and totally clueless to what the future held - was probably an accurate foreshadow of the gritty faith it would take to travel the years together.

We knew even then that the marriage out-ranked the wedding day. A single day of pretty does not a life make. 

Instead, the honeymoon leads to each day’s decision to love, to celebrate joys and victories, and to bear with each other’s flaws, sinfulness, and selfishness. To forgive seventy times seven... times seven... times seven. To hold hands no matter what, and to persevere when life grinds at the frayed edges of hope. To pray for one another even when faith falters and the season feels cruel. And, for us, to savor the moments after each child's wedding and the birth of every grandchild - not only in gratitude - but in sober reverence, knowing full well how many times we could have given up on each other and missed sharing these joys together. 

The pledge we made so many years ago - for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, faithful to one another always - remind me of God's promise to those He calls His own, a promise I have clung to time and time again, "Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you." (Hebrews 13:5) He's kept that promise. 

But what of our promises? 

To have endured this long, you may think we've been lucky, perfectly compatible, or amazingly determined, but that is so far from true. We all have a story, and this ours: we know without a doubt that it was, and is, God's unwavering faithfulness to us, His endless grace, and the power of His Spirit in our lives that has enabled us to keep those vows. The only thing we determined was to follow Him, and sometimes that looked anything but pretty. 

So on this, our anniversary, we will celebrate our 36 years. We will reflect, be thankful, grab hands yet again, choose to keep following. And since, for us, a perfect date day always leads to a coffee shop, that's where we'll start. To us! Cheers!

Thank you, Jesus, for thirty-six years!

#tohaveandtoholdfromthisdayforward #happyanniversary #thirtysixyears#Godisfaithful

Good Friday

When your need for Jesus' sacrifice on your behalf 
is so evident that you can hardly get your stiff neck 
to turn to the cross...that's Good Friday. 
That's today. 

Oh mercy... 

Sometimes grace is unbearable... 
"Be gone! Leave me to my death!" 
But it remains...
The weight of offered forgiveness 
pressing upon cold heart,
Pressing, pressing, again and again, 
seventy times seven...it perseveres...
Repentance.

Reviving...

Gasp of breath, flood of life. 
Again I breath,
again give thanks. 

How can I bear up, 
stand stiff, under Your grace,
oh God...
when the weight of cross and blood atonement, 
in the face of my stain, bends 
and woos most stubborn heart? 
How can I? 
Why would I?

Oh God...your mercy.

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Good Friday...

But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. ~Roman's 5:8

Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord ~Acts 3:19


"A thousand times I've failed
Still your mercy remains
Should I stumble again
Still I'm caught in your grace
Everlasting, your light will shine when all else fades
Never ending, your glory goes beyond all fame." 

     ~From The Inside Out, Hillsong United

Perfect Love

Today is Valentine's Day. The day we celebrate love. 

Modern culture often treats love as something cheap and easy...and any one of us has been guilty of doing the same...but it is nothing of the sort. Even on this holiday of love...chocolate, flowers, and romantic cards mean nothing, one day of the year, if the work, and choice, and gift of love is not given everyday. 

On my fun search for "love" quotes today I saw this one and it resonated with my love story: 

"Perfect love sometimes does not come till the first grandchild."  

Welsh Proverb

Even as I ponder it again, I nod and smile. That simplified statement captures a lot for me.

What about you? Is your love perfect? Mine wasn't either. Still has a long way to go. In all things, maturity takes time.

And you may be thinking..."Yeah, my marriage is way less than perfect." 

While I am referring to marriage, what I actually mean here is "my ability to love" was not perfect. Not my spouse's. Mine. Because love, and healing, and forgiveness must start in my heart. 

Learning how to love means turning to the Savior, Jesus. The author of all that is good. He tears down and builds up in us so that we can learn to build up and not tear down those around us. 

Learning to love means learning to receive grace and to give grace...and grace changes everything.

Will you wait and hope? Will you persevere, pray, surrender, and trust?

We often read these words and we've heard them so many times that they are just "blah, blah, blah." But they are good words, hard words, true words:

Love is patient, love is kind. 

It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 

It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, 

it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 

Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 

It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails.

1 Corinthians 13:4-8

Perhaps we get stuck on the first phrase and just give up. "Love is patient..." Ugh! But with God all things are possible. His love never fails. It will accomplish in us what is good and perfect...if we will only believe, trust, and rely on Him.

Lean into His perfect love and let Him do what He does best: perfect. 

He makes all things beautiful in their time.

We've had a long road, my man and me. Thirty years and counting. Up hills, through valleys, and many a desolate place. But we've also known still waters, peaceful meadows, and joyful reconciliations. Laughter, silliness, and tender moments. 

And, yes, the wonder of that first grandchild...

...then the second and the third. 

And as each one of those precious babies were born...or even well before that, at each wedding, watching our children enter into the same covenant that we made so many years ago...we've gazed at one another and lifted our hearts to heaven in thankfulness that we did not give up. 

Love never fails. 

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What about you?

It breaks my heart that so many marriages around us have been dropping like flies. And while it looks like they're just suddenly "dropping," the reality is more a slow slide, a heaping of troubles, walls going up...one brick at a time.

I've been a messy puddle on one side of a high, thick wall with my husband...so close and yet so far...on the other side. I understand the desperation, bitterness, loneliness, and hopelessness that takes couples to the point of giving up. I've been there.

But I also know that given enough stubbornness against the "D" word and a desperate willingness to dare...yes, dare...to let God be as big as He says He is...beginning with your own bitter heart, ingrained bad habits, lack of belief...He can restore, instruct, and give deeper faith. 

And as you begin to breathe His life more fully you will find that you are breathing that same life back out...grace...into your marriage and your family, all the while forging a deep intimacy with the Lord that will be your solace come what may. 

You may even find, as I did, that knowing Him that way was the real quest all along, even above a healed marriage. Laying down the idolatry of demanding a perfect earthly relationship because, truly, He is all you need.   

For a deeper look at "not giving up" read For Better Or For Worse.

Know His grace. There is hope.

For Better Or For Worse

Sometimes we forget that our vows before God were “for better or for worse.” We so quickly want to just cave when the going gets tough. And yet what we need to do is to dig in. Not dig in with stubbornness, anger, or exasperation, but to dig in deeper to the Lord - to His truth; to find humility and that God-love that does not seek it's own. We were never promised a life free of pain and suffering. We were called to share in the fellowship of Christ’s suffering, but with great hope in His redeeming power. We need to dig deep into the heart of God and seek not only His promises, but His will for what our life, our hearts, our attitudes should be in Him.

It is so easy to keep that list of wrongs growing ever longer; to rehearse it daily in our minds; to use it as a merciless weapon just because we can. And yet we are called to take on the image of Christ, of our God who keeps no record of wrongs, who demonstrated His love for us in this: that while we were yet sinners, died for us. For the joy set before Him, He endured the cross with all its shame. And His joy? It was that we would one day be reconciled to the Father, and be enabled to have relationship with Him. Do we ask the Lord to give us a vision for our spouse that can be the joy set before us? Do we ask the Spirit to fill us with the ability to be patient…long suffering…to suffer long for the sake of what He can surely do to heal their wounds, to smooth their rough edges, to redeem all things in their lives to Him?  Will we suffer long…claiming the hope that nothing is impossible with God, that He who began a good work IN US BOTH will be faithful to complete it? The only variable to this equation is: Will we be faithful to remain while He does this work?

I have come to know that whenever relational pain has ripped me apart, God always met me there and filled the grief and despair with His holy presence, with such deep love, and with strength far and above my puny faith. When I was suffocating in fear, He brought me out into a spacious place and gave me His breath. He is a God of immeasurable mercy and grace. So often as He has wooed me and healed me by this very grace, He has persistently whispered, “And what of you daughter? Why are you so unwilling to show this grace to your husband? You want it all for yourself, but you don’t want to see your un-lovingness and your un-loveliness.” “But, Lord, “He did…he said…” If you really gaze upon Jesus and His Father, that perfect picture of oneness, neither stands as the accuser. There is only one accuser and his name is Satan. Jesus Christ did not bear the punishment for our sin so that we could be conformed to the image of Satan, our enemy, the accuser. Jesus is our eternal advocate. He lives forever to intercede for us. His love truly did cover over the multitude of our sins, of our spouse’s sin, our children’s sin…the whole broken world of sin.  

His life in us can give us the ability to do the same. Instead of doing battle with our spouses, we can do battle for them. That battle will be a willingness to look at our own lives and shortcomings, places of need, of hurt, of hardness and to let the Lord come in to do some digging, and pruning, and sowing of good seed. And that battle will also be fighting for the sake of our spouses and their areas of weakness, blindness, wounding. Life is hard. Don’t we all just treasure someone who will fight for us? Fight alongside us? Someone who will persevere and not give up on us? They may not even know yet that we are fighting for them because the chasm has grown so wide that oneness seems only a fairy tale. But fight we must. Fighting in prayer…sometimes radical, pleading prayer, and sometimes just quiet persistent prayer. Fixing our eyes on Jesus continually, so that they will not be on that list of wrongs that the enemy wants us to daily remember, and persistently battling to take captive thoughts of bitterness, selfishness, and despair.

We want happily ever after instead of for better of for worse, but the reality is that anything of strength and beauty in this broken world of ours gains it’s stature through trial, buffeting, and pressure. A strong tree has grown deep roots to be able to stand against the storm by withstanding years of wind and heat, perhaps even parching drought. And an athlete’s strength and ability has come from hours and days and seasons of hard training, sore muscles, even injury at times. This means discipline and self denial and that is hard, but denying self is what we are called to.

And remember that there is so much more at stake than our own personal happily ever after. We are to be witnesses to the world of a mighty and holy God that, according to our verbal testimony, breathed the universe into existence by His very word, and yet we live our daily lives denying His very character and strength when we so easily give up on the people in our lives and the covenants we’ve made. We need to realize that that cry of “Lord, I can’t do this!” is not the sign that we now just walk away. It is the cry of surrender and the realization that we can’t do it in our own strength. We were never meant to. God is so big. We need instead to plead that He be big in our eyes, in our lives, in the lives of those around us. And we need to be willing, by the gifting of the Holy Spirit, to suffer long, to be patient. To be still and know that He is God.

All I can say after decades of learning to surrender, of fighting for God to win and to reign and to truly be my Lord, is that I could never have imagined knowing Him so intimately.  And this has not been in spite of, but because of the many journeys of pain, of suffering long in faith, in obedience, learning to tuck in ever closer to Him. And I never even dared to hope that He could bring healing to my heart, to my husband’s heart, and especially to our marriage. At the end of the day I even had to surrender “happily ever after.” All I wanted was Him; to know Him in sweet unbroken fellowship, and that meant obedience in everything, no matter what. And as a balm of promise, He gave joy in the deepest places of my soul even while I persevered through pain. I am so thankful. And I know without a doubt that He is more than able to keep His promises and that He is ever worthy of trust. He is waiting to pour forth power, strength, mercy, grace, wisdom and love upon the lives and relationships of His children.

A life verse that God gave me well before I knew just how much I would need it is Proverbs 3:5,6… ”Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him and He will keep your path straight.” I come back to this over and over again…especially the “lean not on your own understanding” part. God is the only one who really knows the depth of our hearts and our situations. Lean on Him for your marriage, seek His promises for yourself and for your spouse. There is a world out there watching to see if God is who we claim He is. If we won’t trust Him ourselves, wait on Him, live a life of long-suffering...ever hopeful, and allow Him to do what only He can do, they will never see from us any reason to put their trust in Him. It is He who is to be glorified by our lives. By His power we can persevere, because - for better of for worse - He will never leave us nor forsake us.  

Give us faith to believe your promises, Lord. Teach us to walk in Your commands, realizing that obedience…even in baby steps…is the only way to see our faith grow and give You room to work Your daily miracles of redemption in all our hearts and marriages. You are more than able. Amen.


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For some additional thoughts on marriage: Perfect Love

Forgiveness: Fact or Feeling

I was struck by this excerpt from Watchman Nee's The Normal Christian Life. So often we can try to value our own sense of forgiveness based on our feelings of being forgiven, of behaving well, of having had a good day or a bad day. We must learn to embrace our forgiveness on the fact that the blood of Christ does, in fact, cover our sin - not our behavior, not our noble thoughts, not our days of victory over sin. In Christ's shed blood alone is our forgiveness. Period. So "Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need." Some say doctrine is dry and boring. Nothing can be further from the truth. Correct doctrine is essential to correct thinking. Correct thinking allows us to reign in our feelings...to bring them into line with the truth. I have come to approach life in this way, "This is how I feel, but what does God's word say." 

Know the truth and be set free to embrace all of the strength and power that His redeeming grace affords you. If you have accepted Christ's shed blood as atonement for your sin, you are forgiven. You can stand before the Holy God of heaven by the merit of His blood, not for anything you have done or not done. "He saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us generously through Jesus Christ our Savior." (Titus 3:5,6)

If you struggle with your "sense" of worthiness to stand before God, read on. 

(From *The Normal Christian Life, by Watchman Nee, Chapter 1)

GOD IS SATISFIED

It is God's holiness, God's righteousness, which demands that a sinless life should be given for man. There is life in the Blood, and that Blood has to be poured out for me, for my sins. God is the One who requires it to be so. God is the One who demands that the Blood be presented, in order to satisfy His own righteousness, and it is He who says: 'When I see the blood, I will pass over you. 'The Blood of Christ wholly satisfies God.

Now I desire to say a word at this point to my younger brethren in the Lord, for it is here that we often get into difficulties. As unbelievers we may have been wholly untroubled by our conscience until the Word of God began to arouse us. Our conscience was dead, and those with dead consciences are certainly of no use to God. But later, when we believed, our awakened conscience may have become acutely sensitive, and this can constitute a real problem to us. The sense of sin and guilt can become so great, so terrible, as almost to cripple us by causing us to lose sight of the true effectiveness of the Blood. It seems to us that our sins are so real, and some particular sin may trouble us so many times, that we come to the point where to us our sins loom larger than the Blood of Christ.

Now the whole trouble with us is that we are trying to sense it ; we are trying to feel its value and to estimate subjectively what the Blood is for us. We cannot do it; it does not work that way. The Blood is first for God to see. We then have to accept God's valuation of it. In doing so we shall find our valuation. If instead we try to come to a valuation by way of our feelings we get nothing; we remain in darkness. No, it is a matter of faith in God's Word. We have to believe that the Blood is precious to God because He says it is so (1 Peter 1. 18,19). If God can accept the Blood as a payment for our sins and as the price of our redemption, then we can rest assured that the debt has been paid. If God is satisfied with the Blood, then the Blood must be acceptable. Our valuation of it is only according to His valuation-neither more nor less. It cannot, of course, be more, but it must not be less.

Let us remember that He is holy and He is righteous, and that a holy and righteous God has the right to say that the Blood is acceptable in His eyes and has fully satisfied, Him the Lord Jesus. I approach God through His merit alone, and never on the basis of my attainment; never, for example, on the ground that I have been extra kind or patient to- day, or that I have done something for the Lord this morning. I have to come by way of the Blood every time. The temptation to so many of us when we try to approach God is to think that because God has been dealing with us-because He has been taking steps to bring us into something more of Himself and has been teaching us deeper lessons of the Cross-He has thereby set before us new standards, and that only by attaining to these can we have a clear conscience before Him. No! A clear conscience is never based upon our attainment; it can only be based on the work of the Lord Jesus in the shedding of His Blood.

I may be mistaken, but I feel very strongly that some of us are thinking in terms such as these: 'Today I have been a little more careful ; to-day I have been doing a little better; this morning I have been reading the Word of God in a warmer way, so to-day I can pray better!' Or again, 'To-day I have had a little difficulty with the family ; I began the day feeling very gloomy and moody; I am not feeling too bright now; it seems that there must be something wrong; therefore I cannot approach God.'

What, after all, is your basis of approach to God? Do you come to Him on the uncertain ground of your feeling, the feeling that you may have achieved something for God today? Or is your approach based on something far more secure, namely, the fact that the Blood has been shed, and that God looks on that Blood and is satisfied? Of course, were it conceivably possible for the Blood to suffer any change, the basis of your approach to God might be less trustworthy. But the Blood has never changed and never will. Your approach to God is therefore always in boldness; and that boldness is yours through the Blood and never through your personal attainment. Whatever be your measure of attainment to-day or yesterday or the day before, as soon as you make a conscious move into the Most Holy Place, immediately you have to take your stand upon the safe and only ground of the shed Blood. Whether you have had a good day or a bad day, whether you have consciously sinned or not, your basis of approach is always the same-the Blood of Christ. That is the ground upon which you may enter, and there is no other.

*This book and others can be found on 

http://www.worldinvisible.com/library/bookcat.htm

While contemplating a pile of shoes...

Ever trip over shoes and stuff left strewn about? So frustrating! Falling and hollering and “sharing the love.” That happens in relationships too. Things left unsaid, or unwisely said. Pain inflicted or absorbed. Things left all undone and messy that continue to trip us up, and trip others as well. 

When things are put away as they should be…not stuffed into random corners out of the way, or crammed under the couch…but truly put where they belong, order and peace are restored.

How I love the word restored! Something put back into its former condition. Made new again. Made whole. No more tripping. A work of the Spirit, but a work we must come to with hands and hearts willing to be made willing. The very same power that brought Jesus to life again alive in us, able to do more than we can ever ask or imagine. And grace in abundance to continue to live with one another’s raw places in compassion, in holy response, with love that will cover over a multitude of sins while He completes the work He has begun.

What need there is for confession! Forgiveness! A willingness to consider another as higher than ourselves, to overlook the slight and pray for the other. What inner battles are they fighting? What were they fighting those many years ago when flaming arrow hit the mark? Did they even see the battle? 

We must lay down the pain. "Oh Jesus, how this aches! I am dying inside! Will you take this from me?" Can I rest in my security in Christ and surrender this pain? Be fully comforted? Have hurt put away? My mind set aright? Yes I can. Yes we can. 

His grace is sufficient.

I don’t like tripping, but I used to be defined by it. He has healed. He gives nimble feet that do not stumble so readily. 

“The Sovereign LORD is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer, he enables me to go on the heights.” (Habbakuk 3:19) 

He renews my mind so that I can take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ, to put it where it belongs. He is my strength and I need him every day, every hour. 

Are there things strewn about in the pathways of your heart? Don’t let them define you. Let Him restore every thought, every relationship, every hurt. But it may take time. A long time. 

Will you wait? He will hold you while you wait. Will you press on? He will renew your strength. Will you grieve? Very likely, but He is close to the brokenhearted. He can make sweet wine from the crushing. 

It is so good to throw off everything that hinders and run the race marked out. No tripping. I know that in our homes there may not always be perfect order, but in our hearts there can be perfect peace. 

Ask. Trust. Be held. Be healed.