By His Grace

One-eighty

As we (hopefully) head out of winter, I have one more blog about the snow. Two years ago, I inherited Randy’s little BMW Z3 convertible. It sounds like a fun car and it is. That is as long as the ground is free of snow and ice. That’s why I got the car. Randy’s trip to work is a minimum of 45 minutes on the highway which is much too dangerous in the snow in a little Z3.

Last year, I was always a mess driving it to and from work – my typical 7 minute commute doubled as I slipped and slided down the road. If it had snowed the night before, I was almost guaranteed to make an unplanned one-eighty, and I was not able to get up the small slope into the church parking lot. Before I’d set off, I’d say a prayer for protection and after the adventure, I’d sit in the car, trying to catch my breath and still my pounding heart.

This year, I got much better at handling it. It’s rear wheel drive, so I learned how to start up a slope and, just before I started to slide back, hit the gas so that the rear of the car would go up the slope first and drag the front end to the top. I also became more sensitive to the feel of the tires, reacting much more quickly when they would start to skid and learning how not to over or under correct the stearing. But I always know that at any moment I could end up facing the other direction.

About a month ago, when we had the big blizzard, I was driving and again spun out. As I righted the car, I realized that although I feel in control, I’m really not at all. And it struck me: that is so much like life. When we first start out, feeling our way into adulthood, we lose control easily, often over or under correcting when we get off course, and we fail to pay attention to the stirrings inside of us. But as we mature, we get better at handling the unexpected and being aware of our feelings and what they mean. Some people never mature in this way and so spend year spinning out of control. For them, health (and safety!) begins with learning to acknowledge what’s going on inside of them (sensing the tires grip of the road) and learning to handle the power we have as people (knowing how the car is made and how it can best be used).

However, even this type of maturity isn’t really the end of the story. No matter how skilled I get, there is always some ice patch in life that I cannot prepare for. Those that have chosen to follow God have at least initially acknowledged that they will never be in control.  But I think it’s a life long journey to be aware of our need for outside protection and guidance as we drive the highways of life.

After that most recent spinout, I continued on my way, thanking God for his promise to provide what I cannot. His word says, “We can make our plans, but the LORD determines our steps.” Or to put it in more modern language, “We can drive down the street, but the LORD determines which way the car is facing.”

Blizzard 2011

Well we've had a lot of snow! Thought you might like to see some pictures.

When it was just getting started on Tuesday afternoon. 

The pile outside the bedroom window.

 

Shoveling the front walk.

 

Snow blowing and shoveling the driveway took almost three hours.

 
The back deck - 4 feet of drift sonw.

 

Ukraine trip

Many of you know that Randy and I just traveled to Ukraine to work with International School Project. While there we participated in two 3-day conferences introducing public school teachers and administrators to an ethics curriculum for 12-14 yr. olds that uses a Christian worldview as its foundation. During the conference, we are able to share our faith and give each teacher a Bible and a copy of the Jesus film for children. Here are some highlights of the trip. 

Because there was a possibility that the airport in L’viv would be closed, we arrived a day earlier than usual. This meant that after we traveled by bus to Lutsk, a city near the Polish border, we had Sunday free. A few of us attended part of a traditional service in an Orthodox church; then we stopped in for the worship of a 2 year old church plant for young people which holds services right in our hotel (we sang Blessed Be Thy Name and How Great is our God in Ukrainian!); and finally we met as a group for devotion and prayer. What struck me was how God was being worshiped in every place by true believers, regardless of the setting (beautiful cathedral or hotel conference room) and regardless of differences in language. I look forward to the day when every tribe and nation is together worshiping before the throne of God. 

The first Monday was orientation for the entire team made up of both Western and Ukrainian leaders. On every overseas trip prior to this, it felt like we Americans had special status and the in-country people served us. This time, however, I truly felt like we were a team and in fact the Americans were providing support to the Ukrainians. It’s wonderful! They taught the conference and we were just small group leaders. 

We learned some facts about the success of ISP in Ukraine in less than a decade. 2000 teachers have participated, and recently they were sent a survey asking for feedback. 22% sent it back which is a huge response (average return rate is usually 10%). Of those 440 teachers, 95% have shared the curriculum with another teacher, 75% are using it in their classrooms, and 50% said they learned to study the Bible through the conference. As a result, over 2 million students have been exposed to the curriculum. One of the presenters at the first conference in Lutsk became a Christian a few years back in the small group of one of the men who was on this trip. He is already seeing the 2^nd and 3^rd generation fruit of the seed he planted in her life as she is now reaching Ukrainians herself. 

The first conference went well – 118 participants. Randy and I both had 6 women plus an interpreter in our small groups. In mine, none of the women were Christians, and when we gave them a Bible it was clear that they had never used one before. What an honor to be able to show them how to look up verses and do a basic inductive Bible study! 

Randy had a couple Christians in his group. After he shared his testimony, he showed them a chart with a scale that moved from Atheist to Growing Believer. Zinia who was one of the older teachers said she was Seeking God. Then she took the chart and showed it to the two youngest in the group who had said they believed God exists, but weren’t seeking him. She told them they should make the leap to New Believers. “You are young and should make the decision to have a personal relationship with God. It is more difficult for me because I grew up under an Atheistic society with the Soviet rule. I would like to get there, but I have many deep seated beliefs and teachings to overcome. But you are young and can do it.” How amazing that a non-Christian would try to convince others to follow Christ! Please pray for Zinia and those two girls to “make the leap.” 

Over the weekend, the team traveled to Rivne for the first conference ever in that Oblast (like our states). Rather than being at a school, we were at the Teacher Training Institute which meant about 70 % of the teachers were from surrounding villages. Since most conferences only draw teachers from schools within the city, this was a rare opportunity to impact villages that we would otherwise never be able to reach. 

This time I had a couple Christians in my group. But the differences in opinion between the city teachers and village teachers made leading them a little challenging. They were passionate, which I loved. But having to referee through an interpreter was a new experience for me. However, I think it was a gift from God because by the third and final day of the conference they were very engaged and listening as we shared about personal faith. After watching the Jesus film for children, one of the younger teachers asked me, “I was so shocked to see Jesus angry when he overturned the tables. Why did he do that?” Since we didn’t have time to talk about it during the conference, I promised we’d connect via e-mail. Please pray I can encourage her. She is very open and has lots of questions about Christianity. 

Overall, it was a great trip. We used Life Maps during the first two days of the conference, sharing our life and giving them a chance to share their own. I personally enjoyed the relational evangelism style, getting to know the teachers. It gave a depth of connection which helped when sharing our faith. I’d recommend ISP to just about anyone who was willing to love people.

Too many plants

When we moved to our house last year, we had 12 flower beds filled with over 100 types of plants. Last summer, I was so overwhelmed with trying to care for of it – weeding, watering, debugging, fertilizing, mulching, dead-heading, etc. – that this year I was determined to find a way to ease the gardening load by cutting down on the number of plants. So in May we removed an entire flower bed in the back of the house. Almost all the plants got transplanted, including a six foot pine tree, because I didn’t want to give anything up.

 

Then last weekend we hired two teenage boys to help remove a second bed in the front yard. Because I knew we were getting rid of this bed, I didn’t give it very much attention all summer. No surprise, it was filled with dandelions as tall as me and various other weeds overtaking every inch of space. What a mess. The beautiful plants were fighting for water, nutrients, and sun and simply couldn’t thrive in that state. It’s not that I wanted to ignore those plants. Rather it’s because I had so many to look after, that I just couldn’t give the appropriate amount of time to everything that needed my attention. My yard was too full of plants – good, beautiful, and even exotic plants – but just too many of them. And so in the end we had to throw out many whose roots where intertwined with weeds and were no longer any good (or would have taken even more work to save.)

 

It’s not hard to look at my life and see the application. So often I fill up my time with activities and projects that are good. They aren’t weeds of sin or past hurts. They aren’t dead or dying programs that no longer serve their purpose. No. They may be plants that could produce righteousness and flowers of virtue. They may give off a pleasant fragrance and glorify God. Often the calendar is full of valuable, edifying, life giving things. The problem comes because there is only one me and only so many hours of the day to tend the garden of my soul.

 

When we have too many flower beds and too many plants to tend, we start to do a poor job with some or all of them.

·   We might start to miss the weeds that so easily take root because we are distracted by other tasks. And so sin starts to crowd out the virtues that were growing once before.

·   Or we might not take the time to water the entire garden, choosing instead to focus on the plants that look wilted and are obviously in need of attention. And so our prayer becomes focused just on the painful parts of life instead of also being a time where we commune with God.

·   Or we might ignore the parts of the garden that were doing well hoping they will be fine without any attention. And so we fail to love those that are close to us and stop attending to the things that are crucial for our health.

 

It takes courage to remove good flowering plants from the garden of our lives. People might think less of us for not doing as much as they think we should (we even might think less of ourselves!). And the bare, dirt spot is ugly for a while, which tempts us to fill it up again. But we need the space and we need the time to be able to give proper attention to those things that God does want to grow in us. So, I encourage you ask God what needs to go. What “good” things are causing you to do a poor job of tending to your garden and might ultimately damage your relationship with the master gardener.

Gifts

Each quarter, our staff takes a one day individual prayer retreat. I wanted to share about my most recent one.

 

After my last prayer retreat, I learned that I do better with 24 hours than 8 because I seem to need that much time to separate from daily life. So I combined a trip to the next Women’s Retreat location with my prayer day. The retreat center is a seminary made up of beautiful, grand brick and white columned buildings from the early 1900’s, set on a lake surrounded by 800 acres of trees. As I was driving in, a deer was nibbling on the grass along the road, and I immediately felt the tension from the drive up drain away.  After checking in, my first order of business was to take pictures for the retreat marketing next year. I figured I’d get the work stuff out of the way, so I could enjoy the rest of the time.

 

One of my stops was the old gymnasium. The custodian was mopping the floors. So to keep from alarming him, I told him I was taking pictures for a brochure. He said that I had to visit the indoor pool and the underground racquetball courts and pointed to a thin winding staircase at the back of the building. I flipped on the light and started down the wooden stairs. It felt like I was walking into a Sherlock Holmes movie. At the bottom I found a worn wooden bench where you would stop to put on your shoes before going into the ball courts. Here, I sat down to enjoy the cool air and adjust to the light streaming in the small line of windows along the ceiling.

 

I started thinking about all the people who had who sat on this bench. They were Catholic men mostly, called to be priests who gave up everything normal in their lives in order to pursue their passion for Christ and His church. Sometimes, when I move to a new place, the sheer work of getting established can feel overwhelming. I feel like I’ve had to walk away from so much familiar and comfortable. And yet, I really didn’t actually have to give up that much to serve Christ. I was married, something theses men could not do. I get to choose (at least to some extent!) where I live, a decision they gave to the church to be sent wherever they were needed. I have Skype and e-mail and such to stay connected to my family; they had to rely on boats and letters and often didn’t hear for months or years from those they loved. They sometimes risked their lives, I risk what…? It was both sobering and comforting to think of how easy I have it in the my service of our God in this age that I live.

 

After a while, my eyes adjusted enough to see a door leading out the back. Upon opening it, I discovered I was a near the water line of the lake. So I wander along the edge for a while before heading back up the hill to explore the other buildings on the campus. The next stop was the library. It was breathtaking with soaring ceilings, ornately carved walls and columns, and shimmering chandeliers. You should know that I love libraries – the quiet, the musty smell of old books, the little nooks to study – but I think this might be the most incredible one I’ve ever entered. I roamed the stacks and fingered the gold embossed bindings. And I started thinking about the fact that I could read. In the history of the world, I am rare; first because I have access to books via the printing press, next because I live where we are rich enough to own books, but also because I am a woman. It made me start to cry. The tears were out of gratitude and amazement at the gifts of God that I do not deserve. Why was I born now? Why do I have all the luxuries my life affords me? Surely I did not do anything to earn it. No, it is God’s choice to set me in this place at this point in history.

 

This theme of recognition continued throughout my stay... as I ate a delicious variety of food that I did not prepare, as I slept on a bed with sheets and mattress springs, as I washed my hair with sweet smelling shampoo in a warm shower, as I scribbled my thoughts into a paper journal. Each of these things is rare. Each something I did not choose for myself. My prayer retreat was not so much about words or well crafted prayers, but about basking in the incredible gifts of God and rejoicing with thanksgiving for his gracious generosity to me.

New blooms

“My life is like a garden - never blooming the same way twice.”

I can’t take credit for this quote, although I have no idea where it came from. But I can say for sure it’s true. Last year all along the front of the flower bed that runs the length of the back yard, there was this profusion of pink petals. Once they started blooming, they just kept coming, eventually spilling over the beams that make up the bed. I would often just look out the window at the many flowers stretching up to the sky, and I always had a clump of them on my kitchen table.

 

So this year I was excited to see the first pink flower open up. And they did bloom in large amounts for about a month. Then they stopped. I have no idea why. I did what my gardening friend suggested which was “deadhead” (for those of you non-gardener types like me it simply means you cut the dead flower heads off the stems so the plant will think it needs to produce more flowers in order to have seeds for next year). I tried giving them more water. Less water. Nothing. Now the bed looks barren and boring and I’m wondering what happened.

 

Since I’m trying to understand life through the garden, I asked God to show me what it all means. He reminded me that the garden of life is not static, but ever changing. Sometimes he wants us to grow new flowers of virtue, ones that may not be as exciting as before or as noticeable to other people, but bring him glory nonetheless. This season, I had more blooms from two other plants that were smaller and not so amazing. They grew right behind the pink ones, and I didn’t really notice them last year. Yet they have their own beauty in just a few blossoms. Maybe I would have liked the pink ones, but there were still flowers in my garden.

 

He also reminded me that I do not control the results. I am to be faithful to tend and water, to pray and give, to serve and love. But what happens from there is not something I can fully take credit for. The virtue in my life is both a result of my faithfulness but even more importantly, God’s faithfulness. I think my favorite verse in the Bible is from Philippians 2:12-13, “…continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose.” I have a part in making the salvation God has given real in every part of my life, yet he is the one who actually does the work that he purposes to do. He brings the flowers of virtue, and so he chooses which ones will bloom each year in the garden. And it never seems to bloom the same way twice.

Our little budding musician

How cute is she!

Look Again

Recently, I was weeding along the back of the property (it’s a never ending activity!) Because of a tree in the way, I was actually kneeling on my neighbor’s yard and facing the back of my house. For most of the time I was face down, busy in the dirt. But eventually I needed to pause and rest. When I did I found myself seeing from an entirely new vantage point. The land itself is a little higher than the rest of the yard which gave me a better view of the roof of my house and the houses beyond mine. I noticed the leaves stuck in the gutter and the crack in the chimney. I also notice that the sky was bright blue with puffy white clouds, the kind you’d find in a painting. And until I looked up, I wasn’t aware of the gentle breeze swaying the many trees and bending the flowers towards the sun.

 

In that moment, it struck me how easy it is to become so familiar with something that you fail to actually see it. Somewhere I read that advertisers keep changing the look of their product because when we see something enough times we stop reading or noticing it. But a change will cause us to look again.

 

When I think back over my spiritual journey, I see that God often used moving me to another state or introducing me to new people or teaching me a new spiritual discipline to get my attention. My maturity as a Christian is closely aligned with times of change when I suddenly was looking at my life from a new vantage point. I know some people have a similar experience when they get a serious illness, or lose a loved one, or their job, or their marriage. There are lots of ways that God will reveal the truth about our lives. The key is to stop digging at those weeds in our soul and look up. At least once in a while.

 

It’s good to recognize that we have sin in us that needs to be removed and replaced by the flowers of virtue. Just don’t let it mesmerize you so much that you miss some larger needs of your soul (like a patch on my chimney), or the gentle refreshment of the wind of the Holy Spirit, or the light of God’s love shining down.

 

The next time you experience change of any kind – from water damage in the basement that requires remodeling the space, to a child going off to college, or the simple movement from day to night – stop and look up. See the world and your life from a different vantage point and ask God to reveal himself to you.

 

Second Gardening Lesson

Last year, since I didn’t know what had been planted in our yard, I let everything grow in order to see what was there. The definition of a weed is something you don’t want that grows vigorously, and I discovered that the back area along the property line is full of weeds. By the end of the summer, they were above my head and covered in round burrs that hurt when they touched my skin; plus they bent over the rock path making it impossible to walk. The process of removing them was both painful and tedious. And I know I didn’t get them out at the root – only got the visible part and maybe a few inches below the soil.

 

This year, I was determined not to have a repeat performance, so early on I started digging. At first, I only pulled out what I remembered was bad from the last year, but within a month I discovered that the empty space was now filled with other weeds – not as tall or as painful to touch, but still overtaking everything else. So I’m back to digging. Apparently if you leave a patch of ground empty, something will fill it.

 

It reminds me of one of Jesus’ teachings: “When an evil spirit leaves a person, it goes into the desert, searching for rest. But when it finds none, it says, ‘I will return to the person I came from.’ So it returns and finds that its former home is all swept and in order. Then the spirit finds seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they all enter the person and live there. And so that person is worse off than before.”

 

When the Father removes sin from our lives, that space needs to be filled with his grace and peace, the fruits of the Spirit, and (as Teresa of Avila says) the flowers of virtue. Otherwise, we simply make room for more evil in our hearts.

 

So as I am digging out these new weeds and replacing them with flowering plants, I am meditating on the areas of my life that need to be filled by God. And I’m asking him to show me how I can participate in his work so that the weeds of sin can be overrun with the flowers of virtue and the fruits of the Spirit.

 

First gardening lesson - water

Last year we planted two hydrangea plants in my yard. I had come to love the big multicolored blooms when we lived in Ohio where they grow prolifically. But rather than get big, they struggled to get established, and I found out they do not grow as easily in this climate. It took daily watering to keep the leaves from drooping and they never flowered.

This year, they’re doing much better, but still seem to need a lot of water. One hot day about a month ago, I put a hose on one and left it, intending to come back and move it in an hour. Instead, I forgot and the one plant got about 4 hours of water, the other none at all. The heat literally burned the leaves of the water-deprived one leaving them brown and shriveled. A month later the watered plant is green and growing well. The other still has some brown leaves and is not as big and full.

Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) describes the life of prayer as the experience of watering the garden. When we first start to pray we must learn the discipline of going to the well to draw the water. If we do not learn the importance of prayer, the flowers of virtue will never grow in our lives. We need the water of prayer, not as an end unto itself, but at a vital part of our spiritual growth.

My two hydrangeas are a physical example of this principle. The damage done to the one plant will probably take the entire season to overcome. When I fail to pray, not only do I miss the refreshment of God in the moment, I also stunt my growth over the long term. Even when life is hard, in fact most importantly when life is hard and my soul dry, I need the water of prayer to sustain me. It takes discipline to pray, just as remembering to put the hose on the plants requires my effort. But the water does something that I, myself, cannot accomplish. Prayer opens me to the work of God’s Spirit so that I might grow and produce the fragrant flowers of virtue that will glorify him.