September green

Looking out the window, I see our largest maple tree dancing in the wind, its green leaves reflecting the sunlight and casting shimmers of verdure toward all who watch. Patches of sunlight on the green lawn celebrate the wind and the trees with a shadow puppet show, ever changing with the wind speed and direction. 

In the final days of summer, there is a crispness to the air and a sense of waiting, of hesitation, as if the world of green is not quite ready to admit to the changing of the seasons. My soul echoes that hesitation with a sense of urgency: I want to get out in the sunshine and experience its warmth before the world leans into winter. 

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I do so love the autumn (fewer bugs and more colours!), but these last valiant days of summer inspire me to be true to myself to the end, to give of myself and to enjoy each day as a gift - the present, as someone said once - and I find myself reflecting on how to best let that enjoyment play out. 

Truly, I don't know what the next season in my life will hold. However, I can hold onto the image of September green in my mind as I make each choice each day. I can be grateful and make music in my heart for the wonderful gifts the Great Maestro has allowed me to experience: love, friendship, and so much more. I can enjoy those gifts and invest myself in them even more deeply. I can spend quality time with loved ones. I can calm my soul and relax in the goodness of the Creator. I can be inspired to pay forward to the world the light I have received. 

In tender moments like this, I perceive a sense of real communion with creation and with the Creator who has given to me all things to enjoy. It quiets me. I feel peaceful, grateful, blessed, and rejuvenated. 

And somehow, today, I wanted to share that with you.
 

An Awesome God

There's a little chorus that our kids grew up in church learning.  It was the first song that we sang together in harmony as a family and occasionally the kids still want to sing it with us.

Our God is an awesome God -
He reigns in Heaven above
With wisdom, power and love
Our God is an awesome God!

Such simple words.  


I was reminded of this little chorus one night last week as I gathered with a group of believers and listened to a song by Chris Tomlin called "Our God (is greater)" - it's from his new album I think.  If you haven't heard it yet - go to Youtube (yes, that's the link) and listen to it.  It is FABULOUS.  The message is much the same as that little chorus.  

I need songs like that.  I need to remember that God is bigger than me because even though I give lip service to it, sometimes my behavior and my attitude is that I'm bigger than He is.  

Nature itself screams that He is greater, bigger, higher than I am, a consuming fire against which nothing and no one can stand.  I'm not talking about a nice little campfire that people like to poke sticks at and roast marshmallows in.  I'm talking about a raging inferno, a wildfire that goes where it wants.  I guess this post is an expansion of my last one on God not being safe, that I ask Him if He will do something for me but don't assume that He will just because I follow a certain formula or say certain words or quote scripture or really get myself worked up.  (Didn't the prophets of Baal have much the same attitude on Mount Carmel? OUCH!)

And yet with all His incredible power and majesty, His awesomeness, He still cares about the little things.  He still wants to have a relationship with me.  Puny me.

It boggles the mind.  

Who am I that He should even think about me?  Yet He does.  Why should He care about what concerns me?  Yet... He cares.  He cares enough to have foreseen my bankrupt state without Him and sent a way for me to come into relationship with Him - my only hope.

There is a sort of credo that describes the unadorned Christian life, one which I have come to hold dear lately.  Part of that credo is that I came to believe that a power greater than myself could restore me to sanity.  The kind of life I was living, even as a Christian for decades, was so full of contradictions, doubts, fears, things that didn't work, resentments against "all-that-is-not-of-God", fault-finding, seeing demons in dishrags, that kind of thing.  It was insane!!  All the while, I was ostracizing the very people I wanted to reach, more and more becoming the object of ridicule - or pity, or contempt - by those who saw what I was doing to myself by toeing the Christian party line and having my head stuck in the clouds - or somewhere else, it could be argued.  SO out of touch with reality that even my speech was affected ... saying Amen after every statement and turning it into a question... Christianizing my everyday speech so much that nobody could figure out what the heck I was saying - I could go on at length but I won't, since that's another topic.  

But the word "greater" from that statement / credo jumped out at me recently, and it is that concept on which I've been meditating.  Someone put it to me this way - "God's got broad shoulders and good ears.  He's not deaf and He doesn't need you to defend Him.  He's got everything figured out.  So let Him be who He is!!"  At that point I realized (once again) that I was the god of my life and I was treating the God of the universe like a puppet, pulling strings to try to get Him to do my bidding.  It was time for me to decrease and for Him to take His rightful place as 'somebody bigger than you and I.'  When I gave Him back the strings, it was amazing how He grew in my life.

Sometimes I usurp His role; I end up flat on my face every time.  But when He is greater than I, He can be truly God - to me. 

Pathway to Happiness - Getting out the Broom

The list I made of people that hurt me, the one that also listed what part I played in my own demise, called to me.

There was unfinished business. I'd asked God to remove the defects of character that led me to treat people the way I had, to react the way I did. But those people were still out there. With some people, I was already prepared to ask forgiveness for my behavior and attitudes. And in some cases, it was much harder. For these people, it was more difficult because I had to get past the "but they hurt me first" hurdle. I had to become willing - and this was not in my own strength but as a direct result of my prayer for God to remove my character defects - to not only ask forgiveness of these people but begin to treat them differently: with respect rather than with contempt. That was a tall order in some cases. I had to let go and trust that God would bring me to that place. I've never been a big fan of "fake it til you make it" theology. This had to be real or it wasn't going to happen.

My journal helped me keep track of all of this as it unfolded. Slowly, the list of people to whom I knew I had to make amends, started to have little check marks beside them. As I went on I knew - for the most part - who I could approach and who I couldn't. Not primarily because I was scared, (okay, well, the whole thing scared me - I've always hated confrontation even if it's not about me!) but also because of their own fragility and poor self-image. With these people, it was enough just to begin to see them differently, to treat them with more respect and kindness. However, the times I refrained from apology were few and far between; usually God would (I was going to say hound) keep gently reminding me of this person or that person on the list.

My kids were on the list too. I remember what happened as I sincerely apologized to my oldest (who was near the top of the list). She took the brunt of a lot of my "stuff" in her growing-up years. Now she was 20 years old. She listened carefully to me. And she forgave me - no holds barred. We talked for a long time after that, heart to heart ... Finally she said with tears in her eyes, "Wow, Mom. That really means a LOT. I'm so glad you came to me and we could talk like this - it all makes sense now!"

As I took that step of going to people individually and apologizing for specific things and general attitudes, there was a feeling of vulnerability in me; it became so strong that I could almost touch it. But as people I loved forgave me freely, one after another, there was a growing sense of freedom as well, and - yes, I'll say it - happiness. There was an inner lightness, a delight to which I was not accustomed.

I was curious about the feeling of vulnerability, until I realized something - again from the story of Lazarus. Once the wrappings started to come off, guess what was underneath? He was naked under there! So here he is, still stinking of the slime from the mummy-wrappings (I'll leave that to your imagination; if you've ever watched a crime scene investigation show on TV then you'll know what I'm thinking). He's standing there totally naked, in front of friends and family. Someone else has to give him their cloak probably - (and believe me, they won't want it back!!) to cover his nakedness. He'll have to spend 7 days purifying himself of the filth because that is what a practicing Jew did if he even touched a dead body. He WAS a dead body.

So I learned to live with that feeling; it was a sensation of being exposed for what in many cases was the first time. It meant the wrappings were loosening and coming off.

That feeling of happiness was worth my new-found transparency - and discomfort.

Whenever I'm tempted to hold onto or grab back some of those resentments and dance with them - and I am tempted because I lived like that for so long that it's familiar, even comfortable, I inevitably feel the maggots start to gnaw at me again. So to avoid that return to the limiting, one-sided, narrow-minded and dogmatic prison I was in, I TRY to remember the smell of death. I TRY to remember the wrappings. The bondage. The pain I put people through. And I TRY to remember the new depths of relationship to which God has brought me and the promise of even deeper intimacy with Him.

Do I really want to sacrifice that freedom ... to go back to the tomb ?

God wasn't finished, however. There was even more.

Boy it's HOT!!

Don't get me wrong - I love the heat. One of my favorite places is curled up next to a fireplace on a cold winter's night. But summer - I hate to complain because it happens for such a short time in our part of the country.

I love the warm temperatures. It's the humidity and the bugs that annoy me.

I could spend a lot of time complaining about the weather, the climate, the economy, the construction that never happens except when the population triples during tourist season and people are already stressed to the max because crazy Uncle Max has decided to descend on the family (no I don't have an uncle called Max and I don't know anyone who does...) and the kids are more and more bored: "There's nothing to do!!" - so their idea of fun is going to a mall and spending our hard-earned money.

I could even spend a lot of time complaining any other time of year. In the winter it's the cold and wind. In the spring it's the wet and the muck. In the fall it's - well, it's that winter is right around the corner and autumn lasts an even shorter time than summer does.

But I can turn this whole thought process on its ear and look for the praiseworthy things. It's something I'm training myself to do.

In the summertime, the sun is nice and hot, the vitamin D is plenteous, I get to go on vacation, and I'm not encumbered with heavy coats, caps, scarves and gloves when I have to buckle myself in the car.

In the fall, - well - what's not to like about the fall? Beautiful colors, not as much lawn-mowing, the extra expenses of the summer (air conditioner, electricity, eating out because it's too hot to cook) are gone, and the neighborhood kids are back in school and not setting firecrackers off in the middle of the night.

In the winter - hallelujah, NO BUGS! The driving isn't all that bad - even the potholes are filled in with the snow and ice. And since winter lasts such a long time here, the crime rate is lower than in most places - criminals don't like the cold either.

In the spring, there is hope for warmer temperatures. The trees and crocus are the bravest souls - they bud long before I would venture out. The days are getting longer - spirits are up. The birds are coming back - one of my favorite sounds is the cooing of mourning doves early in the morning... that or the twittering of the sparrows in the hedge.

It's been said that attitude determines altitude.
I like that.