Beauty revealing truth

For me an unforgettable experience was the Bach concert that Leonard Bernstein conducted in Munich after the sudden death of Karl Richter. I was sitting next to the Lutheran Bishop Hanselmann. When the last note of one of the great Thomas-Kantor-Cantatas triumphantly faded away, we looked at each other spontaneously and right then we said: "Anyone who has heard this, knows that the faith is true". The music had such an extraordinary force of reality that we realized, no longer by deduction, but by the impact on our hearts, that it could not have originated from nothingness, but could only have come to be through the power of the Truth that became real in the composer's inspiration. ~from an essay by then Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI)

I don't have a lot to say this week other than to note that the sliver of the Christian culture that I live in is very weak on beauty. The essay linked above discusses the Beauty and Truth in Jesus with more detail and delicacy than I can, so I encourage the brave to read it slowly.

But I will make the follow comments. I understand my role and my community to be a missional outpost. This means that we live on the far edge of a boundary, let's call it the edge of the kingdom of God and the kingdom of the World (this may be too high falutin' but it'll work for now). So we call out to and receive the weary and worn, we triage them with the truth of God and send them on in, deeper into the kingdom, further in where they can settle into the kingdom life and kingdom rest.

It's the edge-ness that I want to draw attention to. If we are what we say we are, "evangelical" or "missionaries to our zipcode" or "attractional" or whatever, why aren't we more devoted to beauty? Isn't beauty by definition attractive?

I spent 6 months studying in St. Petersburg, Russia. This is a city that was called the Venice of the north. The Hermitage Museum houses art on par with the Louvre in France. The Russian choirs, ballets, and operas were frequent and magnificent. When I rewind through my memories, I had some of my most intense experiences of beauty there--stumbling into choir practice at the Smolny Cathedral, catching sunset in Tavrichesky Garden, that aria in La Traviata. These left me with the deepest sting of loneliness. I was in St. Petersburg alone, I experienced these on my own. But it felt like such things should be shared.

What is truly beautiful draws us out of ourselves, Ratzinger says that it "reawaken[s] a longing for the Ineffable, readiness for sacrifice, the abandonment of self" and contrasts this with false beauty which "stirs up the desire, the will for power, possession and pleasure."

As it happens, I enjoy and value beauty for the missional outpost, but I don't know how to comes to be. But I daresay it's a question worth wrestling with.

**
Image of Smolny Cathedral

Beauty in tears: Suffering redeemed

I've put off writing this final post on suffering. First of all, somehow all this has been emotionally exhausting. But secondly, we have a tendency to want to jump to the potential good that can be found in suffering. This is for obvious reasons--suffering is uncomfortable--but we miss out on acknowledging that we live in a world that is profoundly broken. But not hopelessly so.

Though suffering is the result of sin, just as Jesus conquered death, He can redeem our suffering.

Lately, I've been thinking that if I could tell people three things I would say:

• You are a beloved child of God.
• You can trust Jesus.
• Say yes to Jesus in big ways and small ways, day after day. 

As I think about finding beauty in our tears, about Jesus being bigger than sin and bigger than the suffering that comes from it, I think these three things redeem our pain powerfully.

You are a beloved child of God. 
Our tendency is to live in every identity but this one. We want to be known for what we have a accomplished, or who we know, or how we look, or how other people think of us. But in our suffering, as we encounter our own powerlessness, we can learn "to release our hold on worldly hopes and put our 'hope in God'."

When we embrace our identity in our belovedness as children of God (Galatians 3:26), then we can live in the tenderness of a Father who is present with us in our pain, who grieves with us, who holds us tenderly. And this Father is so powerful and loving that He can take the ugliness of suffering and use it mature us, to heal us, by "heal[ing] our hearts of self-reliance, misplaced security, fears, and complacence." In this we learn the next truth.

You can trust Jesus.
Reynoso writes in her essay that after the tragic death of her daughter, she understood better why people self-medicate with drugs and alcohol. Pain demands an answer. She says it "drives us to run either to God or away from Him." In God's love and power, we can trust Jesus. When we have the power and perspective, we can trust him with our pains in general. When we have fallen and are overwhelmed, we can trust him with our next breath, the one too painful to inhale.

The claim about Jesus is that "all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. (Colossians 1:16-17). Jesus holds everything together, the world we live in, the lives we live, the breaths we take. You can trust Jesus.

So say yes to Jesus in big ways and small ways, day after day.
Saying yes to Jesus is a good idea even if we're not suffering, but it is crucial when we are blinded by our tears. When we choose Jesus' way, we learn "humble submission in pain and sacrifice"--what Jesus chose in going to the cross-- is where God can work most powerfully and gloriously.

Yes to Jesus and no to ourselves is hard. We think we understand ourselves; we know we do not fully understand Jesus. We struggle to trust Him; we struggle to believe that we are His beloved. Fortunately, we don't even have to successfully struggle.

Paul talks about his struggle this way:

I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”  (2 Corinthians 12: 8-9)

We have enough. In Jesus, we have enough, we are given enough to trust, to say yes. We don't have to be strong. It's not about being pretty, successful, or with it. God's grace is sufficient. Our weakness gets in the way of nothing. In fact, it appears to be necessary. "Suffering showcases the work of God in our lives, allowing God to reveal Himself through weakness and great need."

Beloved child of God, hold on to Jesus. As he did for Israel, he does for us. He will "comfort all who mourn...[and give] a crown of beauty instead of ashes."

Quotes from Reynoso, "Formed through suffering" in The Kingdom Life.

Choosing compassion: Suffering with others

Reynoso ("Formed through suffering" in The Kingdom Life) repeatedly talks about how while suffering can be redeemed by God, it is not something we ask for, except for in one instance: we are called to bear one another's burdens (Galatians 6:2).

Now this seems like a choice; I could choose not to enter into another person's suffering, I could look away. But in I Corinthians 12, Paul writes about the community of believers being the many parts of one body. And "If one part suffers, every part suffers with it...(vs 26)." Looking away doesn't mean I escape the effects.

And Jesus did not look away. Mark 6:34 says, "When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd. So he began teaching them many things." He arrived, he saw, he had compassion. The Latin roots of the word compassion mean to suffer with or to suffer together.

Here are some thoughts on having Jesus' compassion:

Presence
Jesus sees the crowd, he is moved by them, and then he walks among them.

Just as knowing that God is near us and not indifferent to us is a consolation to us in our times of suffering, we need to choose to enter the suffering of others with our presence. I think we shirk this role because it seems like not doing anything. It's just being around. It's being around without a chore to complete, without the right words to say, without anything but being there. It'll probably be awkward, but that's ok.

Provision
While he is with the crowd, Jesus teaches them. That's what his compassion moves him to. With our limited abilities, I think we have a limited capacity to provide tangible help in suffering, but we still can try and should respond to opportunities to do so. In fact Paul's encouragement is to "...not become weary in doing good...as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers (Galatians 6:9-10)."

When we are able to push back against the suffering of others, we are participating with God in bringing goodness to the world and extending the reign and rule of God's kingdom.

Sometimes this means a material response, food, shelter, clothing, etc. Sometimes this means using our influence or knowledge. Middle-class Americans have tremendously more influence and knowledge and most people across the globe. Sometimes it's an act of service, picking up medication, volunteering childcare, fixing a broken toilet.

Prayer
Jesus got so into teaching the crowd that they were together through several meal times and in the middle of nowhere (Mark 6:35). They had a spiritual need, and now the crowd had a physical need, they were hungry. This is the five loaves and two fish story. I think we always tend to focus on how this small amount of food miraculously feeds five thousand. We miss the part where Jesus holds on to not enough food, looks up to heaven and gives thanks (vs 41).

In suffering with others, we pray. We pray with what we know is not enough. We trust the Holy Spirit to perfect the prayers we cannot form (Romans 8:26-27).

Perseverance
Suffering people frequently suck. They make choices that hurt themselves or others more. They say awkward things or don't say anything at all. They can be ungrateful. And even if they suffer in a saintly way, sometimes the suffering just keeps on coming and it doesn't end soon, or soon enough.

Welp, as members of one body there's no get-out-of-jail-free card. In fact, in John 17, Jesus says that our oneness, unity, ability to be one body, is evidence to the world of the love of Jesus (see John 17:20-23, The Message).

We must continue to be present for one another, to provide for one another, to pray for one another. We press on even when the miracle healing doesn't come, or the promised "better" doesn't arrive, especially then because our God is a God who perseveres, who does not wait for us to be pretty before he comes to us and loves us.

As we celebrate Easter, we celebrate a risen King, who came to earth as a baby and was here with humanity on earth, experienced the joys and discomforts of our lives while living in perfect unity with God the Father. He died on the cross, was buried, and on the third day beat death and rises again. The perfect, Creator God of the universe fully suffered humanity's death sentence. In doing so, death lost its sting. In Jesus, there is life. We can choose to follow him as our King, a King who knows our every pain, our every heartache, a King who promises us rest.

Alleluia! He is risen!

 

Suffering: Taking up our cross

And [Jesus] said to them all, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me. ~Luke 9:23

We're wrapping up Good Friday when we remember Jesus carrying his cross to Calvary where he was nailed to it and upon which he died though he was innocent in every way. So it is fitting that we consider the sufferings that come from taking up our own cross as we obey and imitate Christ.

For the past several posts, I have not addressed the sufferings that come from our choices. Sometimes, as mentioned here talking about the roots of suffering, we make sinful choices which have consequences. But sometimes we make the right choice, and there's pain. We choose Jesus over our own way and instead of glory there is suffering. That's a really bitter pill to swallow.

I remember at one point in my singleness being super mad at God. "I'm doing my best to live in a way that pleases you, God, and I'm out of my mind lonely." Others in following Jesus suffer small indignities and large. Some are looked down on, seen as foolish, aren't hired, aren't promoted, get reassigned. Others lose friends, lose livelihoods, lose their freedom, lose their life. And it's not fair, and it's no surprise. Such is what we are promised as followers. Love cost Christ his life. We are called to love, and it will require no less of us. And that's frankly scary.

Reynoso ("Formed through suffering" in The Kingdom Life) has this encouragement:

Because we know that obeying God and living by kingdom values will cause us to pay a price, sometimes we choose to avoid suffering and settle for less than God has intended for us. In doing so, we miss out on experiencing the powerful reality of Paul's words, "that I may know Him...and the fellowship of His sufferings" (Philippians 3:10, NASB).

In the garden of Eden, we see a perfect relationship between God and Adam and Eve. One of the main threads of the whole Bible is God's work through history to bring reconciliation between himself and his people, to make the relationship whole. On this side of heaven, while we still live in the fallout of sin, everything that brings us nearer to God has a sweetness to it. So sharing in the suffering of Christ has a promised sweetness in the midst of the pain.

Truths for the Suffering Believer

Paul wrote, "If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation, the old has gone, the new has come."

What does this mean when we are hurting? If the world without Jesus hurts and the body of Christ hurts too, what's new? What is the old that has gone?

For starters, I don't actually know. But here are some ideas from the Bible that we can hold on to.

First, as I concluded in the last post, God is not indifferent to our pain and weeps with us. This doesn't make chemo any more comfortable or solve the grief of a lost loved one, but it is nevertheless light in dark times.

Consider this testimony:
"Two weeks after my daughter's [fatal] accident, I was lamenting in prayer over how damaged Paula's body was. She had been an attractive young woman at the apex of her beauty, but in the accident she was thrown from the car and crashed against a concrete barrier. When I first saw her body in the casket, I thought we had walked into the wrong chapel. As I relived the horror of her shattered body with God, His quiet voice spoke inaudibly, "I felt that way, too." I was shocked into silence as I remembered that He, too, was a bereaved parent. (Reynoso, "Formed Through Suffereing" in The Kingdom Life)"

At the same time God empathizes with this woman who has tragically lost her daughter, God's heart is for each of us in our own experiences however we think it compares to anyone else's experiences. Pain is pain; God sees and grieves with all of us.

Secondly, we have the Holy Spirit as our comforter. In John 14, Jesus is preparing his friends for what's coming up. He tells them he's leaving soon, but that he's not going to abandon them as orphans (vs 18). With them will be the Holy Spirit described as the parakletos which gets translated as advocate, counselor, helper, comforter. Common ideas within these translations is that the Parakletos comes to the aid of one in need. And Jesus gives the promise that the Parakletos will never leave (vs 16) and will teach and remind (vs 26).

When we are in pain, pretty much we just want it to end or at least lessen. As we understand it, any supernatural power a god could have should be applied to that end. However, we frequently don't get that and certainly not when we want it. But just because we don't get what we want doesn't mean that as believers the Parakletos is not with us, that we do not have supernatural aid in our need. We may not notice until we're at the end of our rope, but God our Parakletos has been with us all the while actively helping us in our need.

Thirdly, as we follow in the way of Jesus, we come to know that death is not the end. Whether our suffering is spiritual, emotional, physical, relational, whatever it is, we have the hope of heaven. This is not a pansy, precious moments angels heaven. This is a stiff, bracing new reality filled with beauty, health, and rightness.

Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,”for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. 4 ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” ~ Revelation 21

We look around at the pain in our lives and the pain in the lives of others and the pain across the globe, across history and we can ask, "Is this as good as it gets?" And the resounding answer is No. All the good that we hope for will be fulfilled perfectly in eternity.

Where is God in suffering?

We envision God as the source of life, light, and goodness as is claimed in the Bible, and when we encounter death, darkness, and despair, our logical conclusion is that God has turned his back on us. This only adds to our misery.

Yet when we go back to scripture, we see time after time God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit moved and bowed in the face of suffering. I do not understand how this works, but this is a pattern in scripture.

God the Father
Nobody reads Ezekiel; it's a weird book tucked in an obscure part of the Old Testament, but it gives the most amazing description of the heart of God.

In chapter 16, God explains his relationship to his special people, the Israelites, with a story about an abandoned newborn he found in a field and saves. She grows up but is still fragile and in need of care and he cleans her, marries her, takes care of her, lavishing her with jewelry, clothes, and fine dining. She becomes famous across the world for her beauty.

But she begins to trust in this beauty, and the love story begins to unravel. She starts sleeping around eventually not taking money for it, but giving money for it. She takes the riches she had been given and uses them to make idols. Then, she sacrifices her children to them. What wickedness, ugliness, and profanity!

Far from abandoning her in her sin, God takes it in the chin like a rejected father and cuckold husband. Then he allows her to reap what she has sown. And there is verse after verse of his howling pain and anger, descriptions of the results of sin. Israel suffers the consequences of her betrayal, and God the Father suffers right there with her.

God the Son
In Jesus, the infinite God squeezed himself into human flesh and lived among us. That's what we celebrate at Christmas.

God physically enters our world and experiences it from first to last breath--experiences sunburns and mosquito bites, making new friends, losing old friends, family members dying, new births, weddings, physical exhaustion, hunger, and longing. Jesus lived in a minority group in a mighty empire, was born as a refugee on the run from a tyrant, was a brilliant adolescent apprenticed to become a blue collar carpenter. But more remarkably, this Friday we remember his ultimate suffering on the cross, a cruel, publically humiliating way to die slowly.

In the life of Jesus, we can be sure that not only does the great God the Father feel the fallout of sin in mysterious, supernatural ways, but God the Son fully understands our human sufferings.

Isaiah prophesied this about Jesus' sufferings (chapter 53):
...He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
    nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by mankind,
    a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
    he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.
Surely he took up our pain
    and bore our suffering,
yet we considered him punished by God,
    stricken by him, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions,
    he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
    and by his wounds we are healed.

In life, Jesus experienced what we humans experience. In death, out of love, he took on the compounded, sin-upon-sin of all people and it "pierced" him, it "crushed" him. Far from abandoning us to the suffering caused by sin, Jesus in his crucifixion faced the ultimate suffering, the collective wages of sin.

God the Holy Spirit
The Holy Spirit, promised to us our comforter and guide also knows pain and grief.

In this next passage, we see the love of Jesus in action, our sin, and a grieved Holy Spirit:

...In all their troubles,
    he was troubled, too.
He didn’t send someone else to help them.
    He did it himself, in person.
Out of his own love and pity
    he redeemed them.
He rescued them and carried them along
    for a long, long time.
But they turned on him;
    they grieved his Holy Spirit.
Isaiah 63 (The Message)

While the Holy Spirit may be generally grieved by sin, we are told he is personally grieved as he accompanies us in our suffering:
In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans.
Romans 8:26

This interceding is a emotional pleading that the Spirit does with us as we pray in our weakness, in our need, in our desperation.

So what?
We expect God to be far from suffering in general, from our suffering in particular. But scripture does not read that way. Instead, we have a God intimately acquainted with suffering in all ways. Whatever we may feel in our pain, God is not indifferent to our suffering, and we are not alone. His back is not turned, his face is upon us and he weeps with us.

The Roots of Suffering

This week is Holy Week, the week leading up to Easter. I'll be posting more often as I process thoughts on suffering.

The story of humanity from the Bible claims that the world was created without sin allowing a perfect, direct relationship with God. But this relationship was not coercive, God did not demand love and affection from his image-bearers. Instead a tree was planted in the middle of this paradise with a prohibition against eating from it. This was the relationship escape valve. The promise was that if they wanted out from the relationship they could have it, and in obtaining their out they would die. But of course, the story goes that they didn't die immediately; they didn't experience a physical death immediately.

Instead the first thing they experienced was shame, shame that caused them to sew leaves to cover themselves with (Genesis 3:7). And when they next encountered God, they were afraid because of their shame (Genesis 3:10).

From their choices, our first parents Adam and Eve introduced sin into the world and all the rest of creation was touched by the stink of death and suffering.

Last week, I reflected on the idea that suffering is less about the (in)justice of God and more about the destructive nature of sin. In this post, I want to present three areas that have been distorted by those first sins that results in our personal and collective suffering.

• Human choice
• Creation
• Powers and Principalities  

(Excerpts are from Reynoso's essay "Formed through suffering" in The Kingdom Life)

Human Choice
When we choose our own way over God's way, we can inflict "intentional and malicious harm...[that] causes a world of grief, pain and injustice."

But we can also make choices out of "ignorance, neglect and indifference" which "passively, but effectively hurt individuals and people groups, sometimes perpetuating unjust systems on entire nations of people."

And we also have to live with the limitations of our humaness. "Sometimes we cannot prevent tragedy simply because our strength and knowledge are not sufficient or we are not in the right place at the right time." It only took a moment of my distracted crazy for my son to fall off his changing table and break his leg.

Creation
I don't know about your influences, but a lot of arguments and advertisements I come across claim something is good because it is/was natural. But in the light of very natural disasters like tsunamis or very natural critters like bed bugs or very natural diseases like malaria or very natural biological processes like cancer and aging, how good is nature?

"All creation suffers hurt, damage, erosion, death and decay (see Romans 8:20-22) because God linked nature to the consequences of Adam and Eve's sin...God allowed sin to distort His creation and cause suffering...Meanwhile until its liberation the natural world suffers pain and humans suffer with it through the wildness of nature..."

Turns out nature is bent by sin too. It's not that there is nothing good in nature--it is product of a good God's creativity--but like humans, it has been warped by sin and is capable of inflicting great suffering.*

So while "God may use nature to carry out His plans...he is not the source of damage and death in this world." Natural disasters are so beyond our control we call them "acts of God", and in doing so we fail to grasp how thoroughly sin has warped even nature.

Powers and Principalities
These words carry a lot of Christian "voodoo" in them, but Paul seems to be describing "human and spiritual structures" which includes both the sense of evil spiritual forces as well as human institutions found in our culture, economics, and politics.

The latter "come under the influence of damaged and corrupt world systems, insatiable desires of the flesh (i.e., greed), and Satan, who desires to enslave the hearts and souls of men and women. The result is suffering beyond measure. Powers in the form of war, ethnic cleansing, slavery, systemic prejudice, and unjust dominance of the strong over the weak...break spirits and bodies by the weight of suffering they impose."

On Palm Sunday, we celebrated the triumphant entry of Jesus into Jerusalem even while on the back of a common donkey. On Easter Sunday, we celebrate the risen Jesus having defeated death. But in these days in between, we travel with Jesus in the consequences of sin. Before resurrection there is the cross, and Jesus hung on the cross as the definitive act of bringing restoration to a broken world. His death was costly in that it paid off an enormous debt, righting countless wrongs. To understand the glory of a risen King, we have to be willing to stare into the darkness. To live in grace, we must understand how wholly broken we are individually, corporately, and in the world at large.

---
*This is why comparing the love of God to a hurricane may be inapt.

What suffering reveals

In the last week of reading Calm My Anxious Heart, we're covering our If Onlys and Whys. I think we come to these questions when we are dissatisfied with our current lives. It can be a mild dissatisfaction that gnaws away at our contentment or a deep festering pain--physical, mental, social or all of the above. So I'd actually like to use this last post reflecting on Calm My Anxious Heart to kick off a new series reading through an essay on suffering ("Formed through suffering" by Peggy Reynoso in The Kingdom Life).

I tend to not like to think about God and suffering because I end up questioning the justice and power of God. Like many people, I wonder how could a good, powerful God be loving and not end suffering?

Now a very common response from Christians is that God can bring good out of suffering (Romans 8:28). Reynoso starts her essay confronting this by saying, "...the misfortunes, illnesses, deprivation, and cruelty that cause our pain are still intrinsically bad, despite how God may use them for good." We must start there. The death, destruction, and despair that can feel too near are bad, it's ok to hate that stuff, to stop in the darkness and say it's dark.

Our church small group has been making its way through the New City Catechism and we've been stuck in a long series of questions about God's law, sin and the effects of sin. Frankly, it's depressing. Week after week, we're confronted with our limitations, our sinfulness, and the consequence of sin--death. I want to throw up may hands and say, "I GET IT! We suck, we suck, we suck and we earn suckitude (Romans 5:8)."

But do I get it? I want beauty and sunshine, I'd rather gloss over sin. It can't be that bad.

But Reynoso writes, "We err when we look to suffering to reveal whether God is just or unjust because what it best exposes is the destructive nature of sin." 

In my first encounter with depression, I lived in a lot of If Onlys and Whys. I played those tapes over and over in my mind. I would curl on the floor of my room in storms of inner pain while I clung to ugly conclusions based on lies. And I remember at some point feeling like God was saying, "You have an opportunity here. You can keep doing things your way or you can try my way. Your way is leaving you on the floor in darkness and pain." Well, I couldn't deny that. In the end, part of the way out was medication, but a bigger part was choosing God's truth over my lies. Sin is wildly destructive.

If you're fixing water damage in your house, you need to know how far the problem goes. It doesn't do any good to slap a new coat of paint over the rot because the rot's still there. Before we apply the grace of Jesus to sin, we've got to know how far the rot's gone. So we read the news, talk to a friend, visit a family member in the hospital. Suffering reveals the rot of sin to be pervasive, unavoidable, undeniable despite out best attempts. Stew on that a bit.

Boring can be better

So we've settled into a breakfast routine. My husband has been eating the same breakfast all the years I've known him. But getting myself and the kids on a routine has taken a bit longer.

The kids have baked oatmeal with a bit of milk poured over it and microwaved. Sometimes one asks for an egg.

I'm settled into 1/2 cup of oatmeal (pour 1 c. boiled water over it, stick a plate over it and let it sit for 5 min) + 1 scoop protein powder. Then 2 fried eggs.

Eating the same thing every morning makes mornings a bit easier. When I run out of baked oatmeal, I'm always at a bit of a loss for what to do. Sometimes we have dry cereal on hand. But that never fills them up the way the oatmeal does. This may be boring, and the alternative is more interesting, but at this point way to much work to be worth it. No one is complaining about the same ole everyday, so we're just going to roll with it for now.

The baked oatmeal I'm making these days looks like:

6 c. old fashioned oats
pinch salt
1/3 c sugar
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 c. raisins

3 eggs
1/4 oil
3 c. milk

preheat oven to 300 F
beat eggs, mix wet ingredients
line 9 x 13 pan with foil
mix dry ingredients in the pan
pour over wet ingredeints
mix together
bake for 35 min
when cool cut into 1/16ths
store in fridge for up to a week or freeze

Holding onto treasure

This week in Calm my Anxious Heart, we're reading about letting go of What ifs and entrusting our future to God. This is a powerful vision: What if I could let go of my What ifs and let God take care of the future? I mean, I think for most people, that would be a life changing gift to be able to let go of anxiety about what might happen. So how do we get there?

Scripture memory is a discipline that helps us trust God, but everyone (including me) wants to skip it because its corny or hard. This is unfortunate. When I think about pivotal times of deep emotional stress, it helped to have a truth from scripture to hold up to the lies I wanted to believe. It's not that I didn't wander off into dark places, but when I got there, I had light.

I believe that we should treat God's word like treasure. When it comes to treasure, people have given their lives hunting for treasure, searching for gold, searching for oil. But followers of Jesus are told that:

[The decrees of the Lord] are more precious than gold,
than much pure gold;
they are sweeter than honey,
than honey from the honeycomb.
~Psalm 19:10

This is a guarantee. The word of God is freely available to us in the Bible, and its value is beyond measure. The question is not, "Is the Bible worth hanging onto?" The question is, "How to I keep this?"

The Navigators have an illustration, which I've replicated at the top of this post, that describes five ways of holding onto the Bible: hearing, reading, studying, memorizing, and meditating. Notice that the two fingers most important for gripping, the index finger and thumb, are memorizing and meditating.

You can get a long way to hanging onto your treasure by memorizing and meditating on God's word. Worry is simply mediating on an undesired outcome. Holy meditation is "worrying" on God's goodness and promises. Having scripture already memorized helps. I mean, nobody sits there and writes out their worry list for the day. The worries are already there. So if we're going to "worry" on scripture, it helps if it's already in our minds.

Here are a few verses that have been helpful for me, (and were part of the Topical Memory System that I learned in 1998.)

Isaiah 41:10 – “ So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous hand.”

Isaiah 26:3 – “ You will keep in perfect peace him whose mind is steadfast, because he trusts in you.”

Luke 9:23 – “Then he said to them all,” If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up the cross daily and follow me.”

Mark 10:45 – “ For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as ransom for many.”

John 13:34-35 – “ A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love on another.”

Galatians 6:9-10 – “ Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who
belong to the family of believers.”

Hang on to your treasure. "Worry" on the word of God.