PSALM 132 - I've Made A Terrible Mess Of Things!!

Remember, O Lord, in David's favor, all the hardships he endured, how he swore to the Lord and vowed to the Mighty One of Jacob, "I will not enter my house or get into my bed, I will not give sleep to my eyes or slumber to my eyelids, until I find a place for the Lord, a dwelling place for the Mighty One of Jacob."  (Verses 1-5)

It must have been so disappointing to David when God told him he wouldn't be the one to build a temple for his God. "You have shed much blood and waged great wars. You shall not build a house to My name, because you have shed so much blood before Me on the earth. Behold, a son shall be born to you who shall be a man of rest. I will give him rest from all his surrounding enemies. For his name shall be Solomon, and I will give peace and quiet to Israel in his days. He shall build a house for My name. He shall be My son, and I will be His Father (I Chronicles 22)." After all the years of the traveling tabernacle, David wanted the God he loved so much to have an extravagant, world-renowned temple in which to dwell. He just had it in his heart to do this for the mighty God Whose favor rested upon him. But God had other ideas. Counter intuitive and ironic ideas.

From the rooftop across the way from David's expansive castle a woman was bathing herself in the twilight. No doubt David had seen her before. Perhaps it was the reason he walked around the parapet that night. Just a look. Nothing more. She was beautiful. Bathsheba. David knew she was alone. Her husband, Uriah, away fighting a war David chose to sit out in the season of fighting. And so he called for her. No one will know. Just this once. And David took another man's lovely young wife to bed.

He'd probably forgotten about the whole thing by the time Bathsheba sent word to the king that she was pregnant. With his child. And the man after God's own heart brought Uriah home from war in a manipulation worthy of a reality show. But Uriah, it turns out, was the better man. Wouldn't sleep with Bathsheba if the men fighting with him couldn't come home to their wives. We know the story. David had Uriah killed. To cover his own rear end. To save face with the nation of Israel who thought their king could do no wrong. The grieving bride of Uriah became the pregnant wife of a king. David pretended the nation couldn't count to nine as her pregnancy progressed quickly to completion. But Nathan, the prophet, spoke to David, calling the king on his sin...and Bathsheba's baby died in her arms as David lay prostrate before his God pleading for his newborn son's life.

Solomon was the child born to Bathsheba as God's comfort in the aftermath of all her loss. His name means peace. The child of an adulterer and his concubine. And this was the son God chose to build His temple.

It seems like God would want the child of a holy union. Not the son of such sin. The Lord not only forgave the sins of the son who made His eyes dance, but turned the sin into absolute glory! David's repentant heart and God's sacred prescience turned the shame of an adulterous relationship and subsequent murder into a story of redemption and restoration! Who of us would've chosen the son of that hussy, Bathsheba, to take on the task of building a suitable house for our Lord?

David knew his death was near, so he called thousands of workmen together. The king ordered iron, bronze and timber, and had stonecutters prepare massive numbers of dressed stones for the building of God's house. "Solomon, my son, is inexperienced, and the house that is to be built for the Lord must be exceedingly magnificent, of fame and glory throughout all lands. I will therefore make preparations for it." And the Lord let the one always after His heart guide Solomon in the thing David had in his own heart to do.

We all fall short. All the time. And if we think that means we can no longer be used by God...loved by God...we err. Our God was crazy about David. From the time he was a little shepherd boy equally in love with His God. The Lord watched the ruddy little kid play with sheep, anointed his aim to kill a lion and a bear, enlarged the kid's faith to foil an army and slay its giant. God wasn't about to give up on this boy of His. And He's not about to give up on you and me. David accepted the consequences of his sin with Bathsheba, but that didn't change God's mind about who He was going to use to build His sanctuary. Remember, God told David who Solomon would be before the sin with Bathsheba and the death of Uriah. We don't catch God off-guard with our falling short. What He wants is our acknowledgment that we've broken His heart and His laws. "Deliver me from my bloodguiltiness, O God, O God of my salvation, and my tongue will sing aloud of Your rightness. O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare Your praise. For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it. You will not be pleased with burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, You will not despise (Psalm 51)."
What David knew was that God loved him no matter what.

Where is there a God like ours Who can use even our sin for His eventual and eternal glory? Don't run away when you've messed up. Run toward Him. Your God will never turn you away, and you might just be surprised what He can do with the mess you've made of things.

PSALM 131 - Splashing in an Old Tin Tub!

O Lord, my heart is not lifted up. My eyes are not raised too high. I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me. But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me. O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time forth and forevermore.   (Verses 1-3)

I have a picture that I love. It is an actual photograph, but the one I have in my mind is even more precious. It is of my son, Will, when he was nine months old. He is naked, playing in a big tin basin of water in my mother's back yard the summer before she died. It's hot in Texas in August and my boy's little sweaty body relaxed into the tub as he splashed and giggled, his blond hair sparkling in the sunlight, his blue eyes twinkling. Mother and I were sitting close by--I, on the ground beside Will's makeshift swimming pool and Mother on a chair beside me. We were talking about Mother's cancer. It was on her mind that day. How long she'd live. Whether or not to allow the chemotherapy the doctor wanted. Will was content to touch my fingers as they gripped the side of the tin basin. To know I was there was all he needed. There was no way he could conceive of the gravity of my conversation with Mother. Death was too distant a concept. In the moment, all he needed was his mom beside him in order to be happy. My presence.

I'd weaned Will the month before. He no longer needed me in the most personal sense. But the experience of closeness to me for all those months bonded us, like it did with my daughters as well. Mom isn't going very far away, and she takes care of me. That's what they knew. And it wasn't until my three children grew much older that they questioned things too high and marvelous for them. How can a loving God send people to hell? What about the people in the world who've never heard the gospel? Will they be saved? How can there be free will and God's sovereignty? I believe God wants to reveal His secrets to us; in fact, He says He does: "Behold, You delight in truth in the inward being, and You teach me wisdom in the secret heart (Psalm 51)." But God doesn't want us to stress over things we don't understand any more than I would've wanted Will to strain to understand the perplexity and pain of my mother's disease. It wasn't time for that.

This is one of my favorite psalms for the picture it gives of how I should be with God, my Father. My God is busy about His work, always accomplishing things in the universe I could not possibly ever understand fully. It isn't my place to strain to get it all figured out. I never will. What it is my place to do is rest in the knowledge that He's much, much wiser than I. And if I spend my time trying to figure out things too marvelous for me so that I forget the One Who is Marvelous to me, I worry and stress. I don't want to strut through life declaring that I know all about what God is doing. Because I don't. Most of the time I simply have a vague idea of where things are going. Even the greatest Christian apologists and theologians only know a fraction of how big our God really is. What we do know is what kind of Father He is. Weaned from the milk of the Word, which has bonded us in His love, ready for solid food, our faith should be such that we stay close to Abba, comforted that all the stuff that confuses or scares us is taken care of because He knows things we don't know. Mysteries revealed in part; ultimately to be shown when He reveals all things to us. But, like Will, I want my heart to be calmed , my soul quiet, as I splash in living water and reach out to touch His fingers, proffered to me as a reminder that my Father is near. Really. That's all His children need.

PSALM 130 - Why Do I Need Salvation, Anyway?

O Israel, hope in the Lord! For with the Lord there is steadfast love and with Him is plentiful redemption. And He will redeem Israel from all his iniquities. (Verses 7-8)

Why do we need to be saved from our sins? Most of us aren't going about in our daily lives doing heinous things to others. In fact, most of us look pretty good on the outside. It's the minority who kill, steal, or seek to destroy. So what's the big deal about needing salvation?

Let's take a little trip back to Eden. Just for the fun of it. Perfection. Peace. Trees filled with fruit. Lions lying down with lambs. Everything man and woman could possibly want, with the added benefit of walking in the cool of the day with the Creator of the Universe. "This garden is yours," God told Adam. "You can eat from any tree, just not that one." And God pointed to the tree of knowledge of good and evil. "If you eat from that tree, you will surely die." One rule. In paradise where the temperature was ideal, no need for clothing, no shame, no self-degradation, no toil. My son, Will, used to say that if he's been Adam he's sure he wouldn't have ruined if for the rest of us. But onto the scene came a serpent, lovely, multi-colored and sly. "Why would God keep something so good as the tree in the center of the garden from you?" God isn't good. The lie both Adam and Eve bought. In spite of all the evidence to the contrary. "You won't surely die." God's rules are arbitrary. The lies we are still buying today. "Eat and you'll be like a god." Pride. Crunch!

We were created by God to have relationship with Him. He had a thought in mind when He envisioned mankind on Earth. It was the heart of the man and woman that was convinced to believe a lie. Once the heart was turned, the actions followed. They only ate a piece of fruit. Not a big thing, really. It was why they yanked it from the tree and munched its sinful goodness. And that is the sin God determined to redeem us from in the moment of their rebellion against Him. Later, when the shame of knowing right from wrong made it necessary for them to hide from God in the bushes of paradise, God asked the man and woman a rhetorical question: "Where are you?"

"Hiding because we are naked."

"Who told you that you were naked? Did you eat from the tree I told you not to eat from?"

"She made me do it." The man. About Eve. Sin on sin. Once the heart is tainted it taints and taints and taints.

For God, it's never been about the rules. But think about it. Cars aren't meant to fly. So if we decide to take our convertible barreling over a cliff like Thelma and Louise, we'll end up like the two friends. Dead at the bottom of the canyon. We were created for fellowship with God, so when we take our lives and veer in the direction of the serpent, we make a chasm between God and us. Dead at the bottom of the canyon, so to speak, we can't be revived unless we are saved from the folly of trying to fly over cliffs. Bought out of the slavery our hearts are chained to. Our pride. Our covetousness. Our greed. Our misguided self-reliance. Now we could judge God a tyrant, making rules He knows we'll break, if not for one thing. Jesus.

John the Baptist, the cousin of Jesus, Elizabeth's boy, standing on the banks of the Jordan, wearing animal skins and looking wholly unkempt, preached loud and long: "Cleanse your hearts and minds! Repent!" This to the religious leaders coming to see the spectacle in the desert as well as to the common folks.

John is arrested shortly after he baptizes Jesus, Whose very dipping into the muddy Jordan cleansed the earth as it foreshadowed His own death and resurrection, and Jesus begins to preach. "Cleanse your hearts and minds! The kingdom of heaven is at hand! (Matthew 4)." The same sermon. All about the heart. Not about all the good things we do...or the bad. But why?

We need to be saved because our hearts are made for God and are given over to other idols.  Anything we love more than we love Him is idolatry and will lead us to shame and a death He never wanted for us. The tree in the garden, the golden calf in the wilderness, the perfect body, the most powerful position, our children, our car, our home...fill in the blank. Our hearts wander and are tainted. We need to be saved from that in order to be free (John 8). Free to love our God. The One Who created us to have intimate relationship with Him. God so loved the world that He gave His Only Begotten Son that whoever believes in Him will be saved (John 3:16). Saved from listening to the serpent's words. Saved from our own pride and willfulness. Saved to life everlasting, eschewing death. God saw the problem in the garden and promised to fix it in the moment. To the serpent, God said: "I will put enmity between you and the woman...He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise His heel."

"And He was wounded for our rebellions; He was bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement of our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed (Isaiah 53)." Before we rage at God for setting up a system whereby we are damned to hell because of our sinfulness, we need to stand in awe of Him because He Himself took on our broken minds and hearts to bring us back to Eden. To the ideal of God walking with us in the cool of the day, hand in hand, toward the garden Eden is only a shadow of, where there is no death, no darkness and where the River of Life pounds for an eternity in a paradise free of serpents and sinfulness. Redemption. Plentiful and pervasive. We need salvation into His love. It's free for the asking. How great is our God Who sees our damaged hearts and minds and provides the thing we need to be made whole. Saved!!




 

PSALM 130 - What Are You Waiting For?

I wait for the Lord. My soul waits, and in His word I hope. My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning. (Verses 5-6)

The path of the righteous is level. You make level the way of the righteous. In the path of Your judgments, O Lord, we wait for You. Your name and remembrance are the desire of our soul. My soul yearns for You in the night. My spirit within me earnestly seeks You.   Isaiah 26

What are you waiting for?

The little girl sat on the front porch. Her mother told her she'd be there by eleven o'clock in the morning to take her for the weekend. Emma's hair was neatly combed and her dress particularly chosen the night before so that her mother would think her beautiful. She was only seven years old. Young to be without a mom in the home. But her mother left her for a man who wasn't her daddy, and her new life was taken up with pleasing him. Emma's heart ached to be near her mom as her feet swung and she fidgeted with her hands while she waited nervously on the bench just outside the front door. She hadn't slept much the night before. Too excited. And...there was something else...a thing Emma didn't fully recognize at the time. An uneasy feeling. What if Mom doesn't show up? Waiting with all of her heart, watching like a watchman for dawn, hoping to see her Mom. Sometime in the early afternoon, Emma left her perch, went inside, took off her lovely dress, wiped the tears from her eyes and sucked it up. Again.

Joyce is turning forty. Her birthday party to announce it only days away. Those invited to celebrate the day with her were in various stages of their busy lives. Most, however, seemed happily occupied with a husband and a couple of kids. The thought that that part of life was passing her by always sat on the top of Joyce's stomach. Today she had to look at it. Forty and no man with whom to live her life. Has that passed me by? Doubts about herself. What is wrong with her that she's not married? Waiting, waiting like a watchman for the dawn, Joyce's soul nourished only by the hope she has that he is out there...her man. She must tell her soul that God is good, that He has a plan for her, because without Him there is no hope.

Cancer was the diagnosis three years ago when the young mother of three became plagued with headaches and double vision. Chemo and radiation made the beast which is this disease back off for a few months. But cancer returned with a vengeance. No treatment could cure it or fight it back this time. As the hospice workers tended to her pain, her children and husband hovering around her when their schedules didn't involve the busyness of living without her, the young mother waited. Soul weary but wanting to live. And in the night when the house was quiet, she bore her soul as she waited for her God to take her home. Hopeful like a watchman waiting for the dawn. She is with Him now. The waiting over.

Waiting is soul wrenching. Especially in this day of instant gratification. I have prayed for years for things that still haven't manifested. They are my "middle of the night" yearnings as my soul empties its desperate desire to see God do what only He can do. Much comes against our ability to wait on Him. Like Emma, many of us learned to distrust someone we should've been able to believe in. Time and again, failed and disappointed, only to be hopeful, failed and disappointed again. Hard to trust a God Who says He'll never leave us or forsake us when our experience tells us something else. Then there is the tape recording that plays in our heads when, like Joyce, our past experience hints to us that our future will look much the same. No real hope before us because there seems to be nothing on our horizon that will change things. And then there are times when hope collides with the certainty of death. If death is the end, all was hopeless from the very beginning anyway.

Today the waiting is over for Meriam Ibrahim! Jailed for her faith in Christ along with her infant children, she's been kept chained to the concrete floor upon which she gave birth a few short days ago. The world cried out against her imprisonment. God heard. One minute she's a prisoner, the next minute God speaks it over and it is! He has leveled out her path, opened wide the door to her personal freedom. And it makes the whole wide world rejoice!

Christ says He is our hope. David cried out in Psalm 62: For God alone, O my soul, wait in silence, for my hope is in Him. This world doesn't offer us much comfort. It can't. Its power over us takes us along in a drifting current from which we can't swim free. There is no hope except what we can conjure for ourselves. And, though we wait for a new dawn, this world always gives us a counterfeit. BUT God...takes us to the edge of the Red Sea where we weep and wail that we are destroyed if He doesn't come through. Then a stuttering eighty-year-old man touches the waters with a stick and they part, making a way where there is no way. Hannah cries out so loudly in church that the preacher thinks she's drunk, so soul-weary is she that she can't have a child. And God sees and hears. Declares her waiting over. The prophet Samuel forms in her barren body. For twenty-five years the already elderly Abraham and Sarah wait, impatiently and imperfectly, for the promise of a child. God waited until it was far too late and Sarah, at ninety, gave birth to the nation of Israel. A Messiah, promised a thousand years before, seemed past late in coming. The One described in Isaiah 53. The servant wounded for our transgressions. When He did come, it didn't look like the promised hope. Crucified and buried, the universe waited, soul pierced and anxious, until He rose up out of death, exited the tomb to live forever. Certainly worth waiting for. At just the perfect time, God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.  Galatians 4

God has a time for everything. If our hope is in Him, even death cannot keep us from an eternity of unspeakable joys.  Even life can't rob us of  the good things He's arranged for us in His perfect timing. It's never too late...never too early...for God. For with Him we always wait in hope...fervent hope, sometimes. Waiting and watching, needing so badly for Him to part our Red Seas or impregnate our dreams.

Keep us in hope, precious Father, keep us in hope. We wait and watch for you like the night watchman waits for the dawn. But what our souls really yearn for all along is You. Simply You. For You alone exceed all expectations.

 

PSALM 130 - I Only Want What's Coming To Me!

Out of the depths I cry to You, O Lord! O Lord, hear my voice! Let Your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy! If You, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?  (Verses 1-3)

Mercy. Not getting what you deserve, but instead receiving kindness, benevolence, pity or forebearance from someone you have deeply wronged. It's just not a natural response!

"In twenty years, I've watched tragedy unfold in this courtroom," said Miami Circuit Court Judge Venzer last week. "I could never have imagined a mother embracing her child's killer." But that's just what Ady Guzman-De Jesus did after the court sentence the sixteen-year-old defendant, Jordyn Howe to a year of detention in juvenile court for the accidental shooting death of her daughter, Lourdes. Two years ago, when her daughter was thirteen, Jordyn took out his step-father's shotgun on the school bus where it was showing it to some other kids on the bus. It discharged, killing Lourdes, who was sitting beside her little sister. Two weeks later, Lourdes's father committed suicide. Unable to deal with the horrific loss of his child. In the ensuing months, Ady pressed for a lighter sentence for Jordyn than the court allowed. "It's what Lourdes would have wanted me to do," she said. So on the day of sentencing, Judge Venzer sentenced Jordyn to one year in juvenile detention instead of twenty-two months in prison.

Jordyn held back tears as he said, "I'm really sorry for your loss." Lourdes had been his friend.

Ady's tears flowed as she watched Jordyn walk her direction, stand in front of her and reach his arms out hesitantly toward her. She was sitting beside her lawyer who stood with her as she embraced the young man who had killed her daughter and caused the suicide of her child's father. The camera angle shows her patting his back, sobbing into the shoulder of his blue polo shirt.

What caught my attention was the look on the lawyer's face. I even played it in slow motion to get the affect. Why? Because it's what everyone in the courtroom was thinking. Who does this? He was at once shocked, disgusted and moved. Mercy catches us completely off-guard.

Gary Ridgeway pleaded guilty to the murders of forty-eight women on December 18, 2003. Angry relatives of many of the women he killed were allowed into the courtroom to address Ridgeway, who seemed to have no real remorse. "They meant nothing to me," he was quoted as saying.

 "Your memory may be gone, Mr. Ridgeway," said one of the mothers of a murdered child, "but our memories are not. She meant everything to us."

Gary Ridgeway sat motionless and stoic. Almost as if he hadn't heard her.

"He is an animal! I wish him to have a long, cruel, suffering death!" cried a near-hysteric relative of one of the women.

Ridgeway was unblinking. Blasé, almost.

Then a man approached the microphone. He was wearing a white dress shirt and suspendered trousers. His hair was long and white, combed behind his ears. A scruffy beard lay against the buttons of his shirt. Robert Rule was his name. He took a deep breath. "Mr. Ridgeway...um..., there are people here who hate you." Mr. Rule, composed himself, trying to control the shaking in his voice. "I'm not one of them." He hesitated slightly then went on. "You've made it difficult to live up to what I believe, and that is what God says to do, and that is to forgive." As Gary Ridgeway looked directly into Mr. Rule's face, the man said, "You are forgiven, sir."

The shock of it made Ridgeway grimace, his face contorted in pain. All in a moment before tears fell and he bowed his head and wiped his face. Who does that? Offers mercy? When there is no reason for anything but hate. It's just not natural. And it's perhaps the only thing that really breaks us.

We know we don't deserve grace. Intrinsically we are aware that we are imperfect. Hopefully not to the degree that a young man who shoots his friend is...certainly not to the extent of a man who killed almost fifty women. But we know we don't deserve unconditional love. Not one that overlooks our sin. That's not what these two people did. They gave a thing we don't possess in our own hearts unless we have received it on occasion for ourselves. Mercy received should foster mercy given. Jesus mirrored the heart of God when, right before He died on the cross, drowning in His own blood, the sacrificial offering for our sin, He said, "Father, forgive them. They don't know what they are doing."

If our sins were stacked up against us...if God kept track of them on a ledger...marked them all down...who could stand? It's remarkable, for sure, for a mother to forgive a murderer or a father to absolve the man who tortured his daughter. Isn't it just as remarkable for us to forgive each other for far less? I've seen people carry grudges for years over nothing, really. Fostering hatred that eats away at their own joy. All the while, it's mercy that pricks the heart. Giving mercy means you deserve to feel hate. But you realize Jesus has forgiven you every heinous thing or small because of His great love and grace. How can we accept that mercy and not give it to others?

For judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment.  James, the half-brother of Jesus
 

PSALM 129 - Weeds in the Driveway

May all who hate Zion be put to shame and turned backward! Let them be like grass on the housetops, which withers before it grows up, with which the reaper does not fill his hand nor the binder of sheaves his arms, nor do those who pass by say, "The blessing of the Lord be upon you! We bless you in the name of the Lord!" (Verses 5-8)

Grass grows between the seams of my driveway where the concrete meets the pavement. It sprouts in little clumps of hopefulness there. From its vantage point the grass can see the green lawn spreading like a carpet around my home. Thinking in its nascent glory that it, too, looks like that. But the clump of grass is wrong about its future. It won't last long. The mower will not even notice it. Too insignificant to warrant its attention, the clump of grass is useless in beauty and in function. It will die between the cracks, turned backward to nothing. Never to grace the neighborhood in emerald splendor.

But what if the little clump of unlikely grass creeps into the lovely lawn, spreading its tendrils into the well-established yard, choking it out? I see it happening more and more in these days. Those who hate Christians rising up to shame us. No longer insignificant clumps of grass that wither and die, those against us grow bigger and stronger. We live in a post-Christian America, but it's not just here. Today I read how the Christians in Mosul are leaving their homes to flee fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant because the families live in constant fear for their lives. Mosul is the most important Christian city in Iraq. Jonah is said to be buried there. Hate has run them from their homes. Sprouted and chased them to the hills to the town of Alqosh where Christians live alongside Kurds. The hotbed that is the Middle East is decidedly anti-Christian. Meriam Ibrahim and Saeed Abedini languish in foreign prisons because of their faith in Jesus. And here at home in the United States?

It is becoming more and more difficult to hold our values in a secular society. From the definition of marriage as a bond between a man and a woman to the Christian stance that abortion kills a human being, our understanding of God's laws puts us outside mainstream morality. Businesses must comply with who the government says they must service. Government insurance must cover procedures we see as murder. Bible studies are shut down in neighborhoods because of neighbor complaints. America is being redefined. And it's not Christian.

British cabinet minister Baroness Warsi recently visited the Vatican and expressed her thoughts about how religion is being marginalized in Europe and Great Britain. She was especially concerned about Christianity, though she is a Muslim. She defined "totalitarian regimes" as those that sprout up when signs of religion cannot be displayed or worn in government buildings; when states won't fund faith schools; and where religion is sidelined, marginalized and downgraded in the public sphere. "You cannot and should not extract these Christian foundations from the evolution of our nations any more than you can or should erase the spires from our landscapes," she said. She was excoriated in the British press for these remarks.

So what do we do in a post-Christian world? How do we express our faith in a society that has already decided what we think and how we feel? Pre-empted our ability to love the person though we disagree with his or her morality? For me the challenge isn't political. The tsunami engulfing Christian values can't be pushed back with the waving of my little hand toward it. Many Christians have long stuck the Ten Commandments into the faces of the lost and cried, "Sinner!" Washed in our own self-righteousness, the rules were enough for many of us. They aren't any more. It's time for us to be Christ to others under the weight of the pressing hate that says God is dead and has nothing to do with the real world. To silence those who would argue that their God is okay with the new morality. He winks at our sins; thinks of them as peccadilloes. He is love and we all go to heaven. So we get to live as we want as a Holy God slumbers, addicted to the malaise that has medicated us, too.

This is an arduous path that should wake us up. Do we believe God or not? Has He changed us...birthed us anew into a life that is salt and light to a degenerating world? Because if our faith doesn't define us, not by its rigidity but by its power, we will stumble with the world as it "squeezes us into its mold (Romans 12)." Pressing into the heart of God, praying for increased wisdom to navigate our lives through the maze, accessing His love without fear of Him and growing in faith is our only hope against hate. The only way to have the shame turned on us because we believe turned backward on those who hate our Christianity. Shamed not by our derision, but by the very love of God they eschewed. Repentant and longing for more than the vacuum swirling in their own hearts, may our goal be to bring them to Jesus. Mirror our Lord. "Do all things without grumbling or questioning, that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world, holding fast to the word of life. Philippians 2  It is time to make Christ our life! To ditch Him as religion. To shine as the darkness closes in.


 

PSALM 129 - Been Roped Into Doing Anything Lately?

The Lord is righteous. He has cut the ropes of the wicked.  (Verse 4)

"See, My Servant will act wisely. He will be raised and lifted up and greatly exalted. Just as many were appalled at You--His appearance was so disfigured that He did not look like a man and His form did not resemble a human being--so He will sprinkle many nations."  God.
Isaiah 52

Ever felt like the enemy of our souls has you by the hair of the head and is jerking you from one place to another. Actually, I hope not. I have, and it was horrific. To feel that you don't have a choice anymore. That you are a slave to someone or something else and must follow the dictates of your captor's wishes even to the extent that you are thrown into circumstances that are no longer of your making. The ropes of the wicked. Snared by the fowler. Shot through the heart. Trapped in the cords that have caught your feet in a tangled web. What to do. What to do.

I know to the world it matters how we got in our messes in the first place. I mean, did we of our own volition do the first slam of meth? Did we toy with the idea of an affair for so long we plunged headlong into it? How many bars did we frequent before alcohol became the medication of choice? So why should God save us? We made our own choices and we should just have to live with them. That is what I love about my God. He sees my predicament and me struggling in the skeins of the spider's treacherous web. And God waits. Watching the scene. Hovering over me in it. Teary-eyed in the empathy of His great heart. There is a thing God needs to hear before He reaches out to me. Before He cuts the ropes of my entrapment. It is this: "Jesus, help me!"

It might seem cruel that God looks on for so long. But the necessary plea of our hearts comes from a point of great sacrifice. Not ours. His. Our delivery from bondage has been bought and paid for. Our "sprinkling" was with the blood of His Son. He Himself bore our sicknesses, and He carried away our pains. But we in turn regarded Him stricken, struck down by God and afflicted. But He was pierced because of our sins, crushed because of our iniquities. Punishment for our peace was put on Him and by His stripes, we are healed (Isaiah 53).

When I'm caught in the throes of sin, beaten with the ropes of the evil one, tied down in my addictions or cast into hell by the demons wishing to destroy my life, I must remember Whose I am. Only that is my salvation. The wicked can never decimate a life that is free from their control. God waits for the acknowledgment that, yes, I am His. Because? Because in His disfigurement and hellish death, Jesus took my place. Because in His resurrection, Jesus set His Spirit free to live in me. Christ is now the preeminent power everywhere. But if I choose to struggle on my own, it means I choose not to acknowledge Him.

There is the story of trappers who go into the jungle to catch monkeys. What they know about this species is that they love shiny objects. Because the hunters know the weakness of the monkeys, they don't need anything more than a mirror in a cage. They wait for the animal to approach and reach  into the cage to fetch the glistening mirror, curious to hold it. Once the monkey grasps the mirror in its fist, he can't retrieve the prize because his hand is now stuck in the cage, too big to pass back out of it. But the monkey loves the thing he's grasped. Won't drop it! Won't let go! Captured on the outside of the cage.

If we love our sin--the shiny object, if our entrapment has become our identity, if we won't look to the help that has been bought and paid for, we will languish. If the monkey dropped the thing he loved, the thing he stubbornly held onto that led to his capture, he'd run into the jungle and be free. The thing that captivates us to destruction is what God waits for us to surrender. Those who call upon the name of the Lord will be saved (Romans 10).

If we are trapped by disease or affliction that is not of our own making, we can still be free. For the enemy has no power over those whose lives belong to God. In the midst of every storm, every trial and ordeal, if you've experienced the interior freedom Christ brings, there is literally nothing man can do to you. "I assure you: Everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin. A slave doesn't remain in a household forever, but a son does remain forever. Therefore, if the Son sets you free, you will really be free (John 8). That's why we call on Him, the One Who freed us forever, frees us in this temporal world as well. The only name under heaven whereby we are saved--now and forever. The stripes left on our Savior's back from the scourging He received bought us out of slavery. Made peace with God. Set us free! The name, which is above every name, has severed our ties with our slave master! Jesus! Say it! Our Father waits to hear it echo throughout heaven.

PSALM 129 - What Doesn't Kill Me...

"Greatly have they afflicted me from my youth"--let Israel now say--"Greatly have they afflicted me from my youth, yet they have not prevailed against me. The plowers plowed upon my back; they made long furrows."  (Verses 1-2)

We are afflicted in every way but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies.  2 Corinthians 4

I've heard people say all my life, "What doesn't kill me makes me better." Afflictions come in all shapes and sizes. Affliction: a state of pain, distress or grief; misery; a cause of mental or bodily pain, as a sickness, a loss, calamity or persecution.

Meriam Ibrahim was recently convicted in court in Khartoum on charges of adultery and apostasy. She is a twenty-seven-year-old mother of two. Her second child, a daughter, was born in a Sudanese prison while Meriam was chained to the floor of her concrete cell as her twenty-month-old son looked on. Her crime? She is a Christian. Married to an American engineer. For this crime, she has been sentenced to 100 lashes and death. She lay for two days in the bloody afterbirth of her labor, and wasn't allowed even a shower until a human rights committee visited. It is her brother who brought the charges against her. A devout Muslim, he claims, since their father was Muslim, she is Muslim and her Christianity is apostasy. The father has been absent since they were small, and their mother raised them both as Christians. Meriam refuses to deny her faith in Christ. That is affliction.

Pastor Saeed Abedini has been languishing in Rajai Shahr Prison for helping to build schools in Iran. Abedini converted to Christianity from Islam in 2000. By 2002, Saeed and his new wife, an American citizen, became prominent in the legal house church movement in Iran. Abedini established some one hundred house churches in thirty Iranian cities. By 2005, with the rise of Ahmedinejad to power, the Iranian government cracked down on house churches and the couple fled to the U.S. He  became an American citizen and an ordained minister and settled with his family in Boise, Idaho, where his wife grew up. From 2009 up until his arrest in 2012, Abedini made nine trips back to his family in Iran to help build orphanages in the city of Rasht. On his last trip, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps confiscated his passports and placed the pastor under house arrest. Charged with compromising national security, he was sentenced to eight years in prison. Since November of 2013, Abedini has been in the harshest possible prison where the worst criminals and the most inhumane treatment exist. He has been beaten, starved and isolated. The more specific charges: undermining the Iranian government by creating a network of Christian house churches and attempting to sway Iranian youth away from Islam. Saeed suffers from the effects of multiple life-threatening beatings, is in dire need of medical help and refuses still to renounce Jesus. I cannot imagine.

I have a precious friend with stage four cancer. A young Christian mother of three lies in her home not far from mine, hospice workers tending to her needs as she languishes with brain cancer. Other friends have children very far away from God and from them, homeless, drug addicted or incarcerated. It starts to feel like you've been pushed down in a field as someone plows over your back with a tractor. Ripped to shreds. Not as punishment for a crime you've committed. Not sick as some might say because of sinfulness. The afflicted feel like arbitrary targets of some ill-fated arrows flying their way. The young mother couldn't possibly deserve the death that steals her future from her. So what do we make of affliction?

That it won't win. That's what we who know our God can make of it. It may corner us. It may kill us. But we live forever. In glory unspeakably beautiful and worth the prize. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal (2 Corinthians 4). If it doesn't kill us, we prevail, also. We aren't crushed or driven to despair, struck down or destroyed. Why? Because we know that all things have purpose for us. That the Savior for Whom we might be suffering or the God Who allows it, has birthed us into a kingdom of power and purpose. That in the darkest hours, the most heinous of circumstances, the same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead can empower us to endure to the end. And when we ask Why? we know there really is an answer even if we can't possibly conceive of it this side of heaven. The death of Jesus, cruel and bloody, seemed the end. It was only the beginning. The seed falling to the ground and dying for our eventual fruitfulness. Peter had an answer for this. And he was crucified upside down for the God he refused to deny. Since, therefore, Christ suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves with the same way of thinking, for whoever has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin, so as to live for the rest of the time in the flesh no longer for human passions, but for the will of God. 1 Peter 4.

Affliction burns away everything but Him. Survival in His will. It bonds us to the One Who knows what human suffering is all about. The One Who came to save us out of it and into forever with Him. I've often thought about the psalmists and the great despair they inked onto holy papyrus. Death, lies, hatred, beatings, desertion, sieges, famine, drought, pestilence, betrayal and war. In their moment of anxious pleadings to the God of their psalms, I'm sure it was as horrifying to them as the same circumstances are to us. That in the moment, when no solution is forthcoming, when the loved one is dying or the disease progressing, or the jail cell damp and the beatings deadly, that they were afraid and crying. My thought, though, is that their crucibles seemed to crush them centuries ago. In the scope of all time, their pain wasn't forever. They now see His face and nothing else matters. It ends. Somehow. Sometime. For all of us. It ends. So what we do with what is on our plate today matters for all eternity. Our God prevails in affliction and brings us to His throne room to say, "Well done. Well done" at the same time He says, "Never again. Never again."

So we move on in our perplexity and persecution, not giving in to hopelessness because "hope" lives in our mortal bodies. He is our hope. For God, Who said, "Let light shine out in darkness," has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." 2 Corinthians 4:6  Oh, Jesus, in this hour, for those whose lives are wracked with unspeakable afflictions, be present as only You can be, filling your children with the hope that is You. Amen.



 

PSALM 128 - Children and Children's Children

The Lord bless you from Zion! May you see the prosperity from Jerusalem all the days of your life! May you see your children's children! Peace be upon Israel!  (Verses 5-6)

Grandchildren are the crown of the aged, and the glory of children is their fathers. Proverbs 17

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.  Deuteronomy 6

High school is a difficult microcosm for most kids. I know. Not only was I a high schooler once, I also taught English to high school students for years. Struggling to become adults, trapped in bodies that surge with hormones but with minds that still don't quite understand the full consequences of giving in to their constant urges, teenagers need a guide. A plumb line that informs their behavior and speaks to their hopes and dreams. One of the reasons I love that age so much is that they are starting to think like adults. Wanting to understand good and evil. Reaching for purpose. Trying to cut the emotional umbilical cord with childhood as they are ever nearer to life as an adult in a difficult world.

Vanessa was no exception when it came to the high school experience. I remember being on my face in my closet praying for her life, her choice of friends and a way to communicate with her the things that were on my heart and hear the things pressing in on hers. How do I reach her, Lord? The answer was all about talking with her in the way...we ran together. Up at five in the morning, tying on my jogging shoes, rubbing the sleep from my eyes and stepping out into early morning cool of southern California pre-dawn with my middle child was a challenge. Not because of the three to four miles we ran but because of the questions and doubts that streamed from her heart as our feet pounded the pavement. "How can God be sovereign and we still have free will?" This before sun-up. But God was on her mind. Wanting to discern Him, know Him. Piece together a theology that made sense. So we talked of Him "by the way." My heart wanting her heart to love the Lord of my life.

There was the late-night conversation I had with Will about Romans 9. God, the Potter; we, the clay. Parsing our sovereign choice. Duking out with God together that we respond to His wooing us, loving us first, instead of our thinking we decide to choose Him without His first loving us. Predestining and foreordaining us, in love, before the foundation of the world for adoption into God's family (Ephesians 1). It went against Will's idea that it was he who chose God. It actually made him mad. Because if we choose God first, we become the powerful one in the relationship. It was two in the morning when we prayed together, his spirit calmed and encouraged by a Father Who would reach down to Will in mercy.

Heather was the earliest to grasp this love for Jesus. We used to have nightly Bible study lessons with her and Vanessa using a flannel board and characters we'd purchased from the local Christian bookstore. Sunday School materials. Each night we'd take a story from the Bible, tell it, and often the girls would wind up acting it out. They were fascinated by the demon possessed man Jesus freed. The story of the encounter Peter and John had with the crippled beggar to whom they spoke: "Silver and gold have we none, but in the name of Jesus, get up and walk!" In their play about this man, Vanessa always was the beggar. "Gimme money! Gimme money!" she'd cry. And Heather would heal her legs. From her earliest diaries, which Heather let me see, her heart pleaded with God to keep her from sin. His Word swirling in her spirit, conscious of how much it would hurt Him for her to transgress His design for her.

And now I have grandsons. Oh, my, don't get me started! But here I am to tell you they are the best of the best! Heather actually has a catechism she teaches them every day. They read together the stories of great Christians. Both have asked Jesus into their hearts. One has been baptized. And that, oh, that, makes my heart sing. I was able to be in Virginia the day Nicholas was baptized. We'd talked about it, he and I, the day before. What it meant. How proud I was of his commitment to Jesus. His desire to tell others (it's even gotten him in trouble). Watching the preacher dip his little head into the water and feeling the surge of the Spirit when he came up out of the baptismal, made my heart quake a little. But then...then...when Nicholas took his seat in the congregation, slipping by his father and mother to embrace me, hold onto me in a unity of experience and joy, well...no words. And Alexander so full of enthusiasm for the Word. Reading it like a pro at the age of seven. Wanting to understand the Bible stories on a deeper level. Both boys really wanting Bibles of their own.

We can pass on our faith. We can't believe in Christ for our children. They will have to make their own way to Him. But we can live before them, talk about Him, be real with them in our own struggles and heartbreaks, in the morning, in the evening, when we sit down to dinner, or walk with them in their way. Give them every advantage to leave the grip of our earthly hand as we gently transfer their clasping hand to His. Ultimately we hope that our children can find the peace and joy we have as a family. Duplicate and surpass it. Blessed and prosperous not only in their physical lives, but also in their spiritual journey. And from their prosperity, their sharing, that the world be blessed. That from Zion God multiplies their joyous unity in Him to the whole, wide world.

PSALM 128 - What Dinner Table?

Your wife shall be like a fruitful vine within your house. Your children will be like olive shoots around your table. Behold, thus shall the man be blessed who fears the Lord. (Verses 3-4)

Husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her...In the same way, husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church.   Ephesians 5

God is into family. It was for the purpose of bringing us into the family of God as brothers and sisters, joint heirs and princesses and princes that Jesus came to Earth to buy us as adopted kids into the kingdom. "See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God. And so we are," writes the apostle John in 1 John 3. Marvel at it. Be in wonder of the prospect that God wants us to be His beloved kids. And that means there is an order to our lives implicit in the structure of family. There is a head: wiser, stronger, more giving, more prescient and more magnificent than the offspring. For this particular family, that is an eternal fact. We will never, ever be more anything than our Father, but we might surpass our earthly parents in many attributes, especially as they age. Our Father, however, is the same yesterday, today and forever. Always bigger and better than anyone else's dad.

That is why God is interested in the families here, on Earth. They mirror heaven where there will be feasts and fruit and family joy (Revelation 19-22). The blessing that our Father enjoys bestowing is the constant comradery of a family meal where the wife brings the joy of new wine, basking in the love of the man who adores and fears his Father. The husband loves because he knows love. He has authority because he is under authority. This man is safe. The wife's face glows because it is a reflection of her man. Because he wants to please God, she wants to please him. And their kids? Little shoots of an olive tree. Chips off the old block. Wanting to be like mom and dad someday. Sitting at dinner speaking of spiritual things, hungering not just for the excellent food Mom has prepared, but for wisdom and companionship.

I know this sounds very Donna Reed and Father Knows Best, but it's what God wants for families. And the man and woman who seek to know God's heart and mind, becoming like Him, will be blessed in their homes. It's a promise. There are lots of messed up situations out there in the world right now that don't look anything like a fruitful, joyful wife and little olive shoots eating and spewing platitudes at the family dinner. Heck...there's no family dinner! What to do? It's never too late to love the Lord with all your heart and soul. To become His kid whether or not we've been successful with our own. God wants so much more for us than we typically want for ourselves, or even know we can ask for. Step one in any transformation of any family begins with our own personal transformation. Men can't expect the lovely wine producing vine of a wife if he doesn't have the love of Christ to shower on her. Mommies can't expect little olive shoots to sing their praises if they're simply hanging on for dear life everyday because Mom's vine is shriveled and stressed. The Father Himself loves you. Look up into His face and soak that in. Our Father wants to bless our families. They are His big idea because family with Him is eternal. And we can experience some of the first fruits of it right here, right now. It only costs us our perceived autonomy. Not too much to ask given the mess our own misguided opinions and decisions have reaped in every society on the globe today. When we have redefined marriage to fit our own morality. Even more important that the home reflect it's head--Our Father, Who is in heaven.

PSALM 128 - "And I Don't Go With Boys Who Do!"

Blessed is everyone who fears (reveres) the Lord, who walks in His ways! You shall eat the fruit of the labor of your hands. You shall be blessed and it will be well with you.  (Verses1-2)

And if you faithfully obey the voice of the Lord, your God, being careful to do all His commandments I command you today, the Lord will set you high above all the nations of the earth. All these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you, if you obey the voice of the Lord your God. Blessed shall you be in the city, and blessed shall you be in the field. Blessed shall be the fruit of your womb and the fruit of your ground and the fruit of your cattle, the increase of your herds and the young of your flock. Blessed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl. Blessed shall you be when you come in and when you go out.
Deuteronomy 28:1-6

I used to think God had to bless me. Why? Because I was such a good little girl. I'm not genetically willful. As the middle child, I'm more inclined to try and make peace. I also crave closure. Open-ended anything makes me a little crazy. That's why I always did long-term school assignments as soon as I received them. Whew! I don't have to think about that anymore! That mentality. It followed then, that as a Christian, if I played by the rules, did the Ten Commandments (which, by the way, is impossible to do without the Holy Spirit), and "didn't smoke, didn't chew and didn't go with boys who do," I'd please God and He'd give me everything I wanted. I was pretty proud of my humility. The way I got it right with God most of the time. I know you see where I'm going with this. Downhill.

Before we live a righteous life, we must be in a love relationship. The fruit of faith comes from knowing our Father, not from knowing His rules. In Matthew 5 Jesus breaks down the rules making them even more difficult than we thought. Adultery, He cautioned, isn't just sleeping with a married woman, it's looking at a woman with lustful eyes! Murder, according to Jesus, is an outcropping of an angry heart. It starts there and there it must be fixed. "Do not think I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets. I haven't come to abolish them, but to fulfill them...For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." Jesus knew our hearts. Unfit and incapable, even the most religious of us, of keeping the law--of gaining righteousness that way. As if it weren't bad enough that we were burdened with keeping holy rules, Jesus went on to make them an impossible matter of our hearts.

That is what the cross was all about. Making me, a frail human made of dust, right enough to live eternally with a holy God. And not only that, empowered to live a life pleasing to Him. When Jesus called the Pharisees "white-washed tombs who look good on the outside but are filled with dead men's bones (Matthew 23)," it was their inner life He judged. Their "hypocrisy and lawlessness." How could those who spent their lives obeying the rules be lawless? Because they were without the Spirit of the Law. Doing the rules for self-righteous gain is to God like kissing His ring when you don't love Him. We wind up being "holy" for ourselves alone. For show. To feel above others. To sleep at night knowing we are just so very good.

Jesus, God's Son, however, knew that being good isn't about creating a false humility so we could walk around with our heads up. The disciples heard the conversation Jesus had with the young rich man (Matthew 19) who wanted to know how he could be saved. He was a really, really, really good young man. Had kept the law since he was young. But there was one more thing he needed to do. Isn't that the way with the law. That loophole. The thing that keeps us from being truly perfect. "Sell everything you have, give it to the poor and come follow Me." Everything. The Pearl of Great Price, God Himself, wants only one thing. Me. All of me. If there is something more valuable in my life than He, it is an idol, even if it's being good. The followers of Jesus had a great question after the young man walked away sorrowful: "If this man can't be saved, who in the world can?" "It's not possible for you to save yourselves. But God can." And with those words, Jesus shifted the paradigm of centuries of frustrated self-righteousness. A few days later, hanging from the cross that bought us out of hell, Jesus declared, "It's finished!" Yes. All that "trying" is over.  Then Jesus sent the same Spirit Who raised Him from the dead to live in us. To give us the link between our hearts and His. Binding us to the Father in love. A brand new motive for doing right instead of wrong. I don't want to break the Father's heart nor live as though Christ died in vain. I love my Father God.

Blessings flow out of that relationship. Father to child. Now, the Father Himself loves me (John 16). The rich young ruler couldn't buy that even with his great wealth. That's why Jesus told him to give it away! I'm family. With the Father's seal on my life. My salvation through Jesus bought and paid for. Peter asked Jesus this question when the man walked away: "Look at us! We have left everything and followed you! What will we get?" The answer, of course, was "eternal life" plus a hundred times more blessings than before! Jesus promised them that whatever they gave up to follow Him would be multiplied in this life and in the next because we know and love Him--the actual Giver of life! The more I know and love Jesus, the more I look like Him instead of the white-washed tomb I used to be. No more dead woman's bones for me! I'm allowing my Father to dig that stuff up and throw it away. Not to make me a perfect Christian specimen to be gazed at in wonder, but to make me genuine and godly from within. So the inside of the tomb looks more beautiful in every way than what you might see on the outside. I'm a work in progress, but I'm His work. Praise God from Whom all blessings flow!

 

PSALM 127 - My Children...Behold Them!

Behold, children are a gift from the Lord. The fruit of the womb is a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior, so are the children of one's youth. How blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. They will not be ashamed when they speak with their enemies at the gate.
(Verses 3-5)

It's hard to think back about who I was before I knew my children. I remember when Bill and I were first married wondering about who they would be, what they would look like--knowing they'd all need braces on their teeth (they did). But unaware how sharply they would define us. How our kids would stretch us and make us better, more interesting, more patient, more loving and kinder. Oh, how I love the quiver full God gave us.

Heather. From the beginning loving Jesus. She stopped me in the kitchen one day when she was three-and-a-half years old to say, "I really miss Jesus. It's been about four years since I've seen Him." Conscious even today of His continued presence in her life, teaching her own sons how to trust in the God they now belong to through Christ. She's level-headed, not prone to immediate reaction. More like her Dad that way. Heather was the first to teach me that I could love someone so deeply I'd die for her. I'd say persistence and loyalty are her strengths. She can argue without raising her voice. That's why she was good on television debating conservative Christian views against the likes of Patricia Ireland. I was, on the other hand, screaming at the TV set in her stead. I don't know of a better mother than Heather is to her boys. Known by our God from before the world came into existence, I watch in amazement as Heather walks daily into her calling.

Vanessa. Iron sharpens iron. This little arrow has challenged me from the beginning. Where would I be without her wisdom and prescience in my life? Opinionated and often headstrong, she's still the little girl who didn't want to move to Dallas because there was only one two-story house there...and it was pink. Don Jose's Mexican restaurant was off limits to her because she was sure there were naked dancers there. Yep. Music seeps out of her. Always has. From the first hairbrush she used for a microphone while she sang passionately into it as she stood in the middle of the living room to yesterday when she led our church into the presence of God, she has been God's songbird. She is my intrepid defender, filled with mercy for her very flawed mother. We argue more than I do with my other kids. We also pray together more. Passion touching passion. I need her point of view--to know what she thinks.

Will. The 5th William in the family. Tenderhearted. He captivated me from the start with his heart...and his big blue eyes. He used to stroke my face when I put him to bed as a young boy, telling me he wanted to look just like me someday. Never mind that he'd have whiskers, tattoos and hairy legs. Because he was so much younger than the girls, we had lots of time together, just he and I. I remember bicycle rides with him on the back, blond hair blowing in the breeze while he snoozed in his little seat. Thunder Cat three-wheelers and leaving him at preschool that first day when he clung to the fence begging me not to go. Then high school when he chose to eat his lunch with a physically challenged young man because if he didn't, the boy would be alone. All Will's friends joined him there. On the beach, with his little neighbor friend, when they both ran over to show us what they'd written in the sand. Will. Both of them wrote Will. He's a cop now. William means protector. It's what he is. Responsible, argumentative and a little bit shy. I can't imagine life without knowing my son.

In an age where we conveniently do away with the fruit of our wombs because the fetus is an imposition, I'm humbled by these verses. My children were uniquely and wonderfully made from the moment of conception, designed before the foundations of the world to be a skein in the embroidery that our God is creating. Necessary. Purposeful. Powerful. Fruit to be enjoyed, savored. A blessing from God impossibly beautiful. And like the arrows in the hands of a warrior, they are our biggest defenders, our greatest fans, our heritage and our joy. Like the father at the gate of the city talking with the elders, I'm proud of the fruit of my womb. I'd not be who I am today without them. Behold!  Look at them! They are indeed a gift from the Lord!