How He loves.

Junior year of college, the song Who Am I? by Casting Crowns brought tremendous comfort to me during an emotional time.  Lighthouse’s orchestra was practicing it to accompany Eugene and Christine during church service, and I remember just taking the CD and sheet music to UCSD’s “underground” piano rooms and playing for hours, crying and praying my way through the song … over and over again.  In just a few weeks, we’d play it for the church, and did I believe what I was playing?  Would I rend the garment and not my heart?  God was good to give that song, among other things, during that time.  Where plain words would have been hard, truth sung and played to me brought untold comfort.

This past weekend, that “song” for me has been How He Loves by John Mark McMillan.  From what I understand, McMillan wrote it after losing a dear friend.  On Friday, I lost a dear friend, Michael — “dear” in terms of the place he had in my heart (in all our hearts) as I watched him grow from a little boy to a man who dreamed of being a teacher like his dad.  And I’ve never been so tempted to call a death “untimely” before, but this one … this one seems so untimely.  And my imagination fails me to foresee how God could possibly bring good from this, but this I know: He is good.  And He loves.  Oh, how He loves.  And sometimes, that is all we can do as we grieve: weep in the arms of our good and sovereign Abba who loves us.

I was asked yesterday to play during the offertory today at the church where we grew up, so I went to the church last night and practiced this song, How He Loves, again and again and again.  Grief and hope and pain and praise all stumbling over one another, trying to walk in harmony.  This morning, after I played for first service, I walked to the back of the church and cried with JoAnna.  It is possible to grieve and sing His truth at the same time.  And perhaps again, where plain words would be hard, truth sung and played apply the balm in just the right way.

Some songs are mostly great because of the lyrics; others are mostly great because the music expresses a yearning that words can’t articulate.  I think this is one of those songs.

How He loves.

He is jealous for me,
Loves like a hurricane,
I am a tree bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy.

When all of a sudden I am unaware of these
Afflictions eclipsed by glory.
And I realize just how beautiful You are and
How great Your affections are for me.

Oh, how He loves us.
Oh, oh, how He loves us,
How He loves us all.

And we are His portion and He is our prize,
Drawn to redemption by the grace in His eyes.
If His grace is an ocean, we’re all sinking.

And heaven meets earth like an unforeseen kiss
And my heart turns violently inside of my chest.
I don’t have time to maintain these regrets when I think about the way…

Oh, how He loves us.
Oh, oh, how He loves us,
How He loves us all.

How He loves!
Yeah, He loves us,
Oh how He loves us,
Oh how He loves us,
Oh how He loves.

Please pray especially for Michael’s mom.  She’s now lost both husband and only child — and both so suddenly.  As our pastor asked us to pray today, please pray that God would heal the deep places of her heart as only He can.

01.14.09

I asked the God who wept if He really cared.
I asked Immanuel if He was really near.
I asked the Man of Sorrows
What He knew of grief.
I asked Agape if He really meant, “I love you.”

I asked the Faithful One if He’d abandoned me.
I asked the God of all compassion if He had heard my pleas.
I asked the God who gave His Son
What He knew of loss.
I asked the God who sees if He noticed this.

And He said,

Precious child, dearly loved,
Don’t you know I’ve put your tears in My bottle?
Don’t you know how near I am to the brokenhearted?
Don’t you remember Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?
Don’t you know I’ve set My love on you before the foundation of the world?

And don’t you know that I’ll never leave you nor forsake you?
Don’t you know I hear even the faintest groans issuing from the tumult of your heart?
Don’t you remember the unspeakable price of It is finished?
Don’t you know I see even the sparrow’s fall?

Be still, precious child, dearly loved,
and know that I am God.
Even as I weep with you,
I am on My throne.

“When Giving Thanks Is Tough.”

Last night, my friend Jaimee called me.  Her 10-month old son, little Nathan, had been in the hospital for weeks.  I don’t understand all the medical terminology, but in brief, he’d had a handful of major surgeries on his brain and had been hospitalized.  She called me yesterday to tell me that the doctors said there was nothing they could for him anymore.  Nathan had (has) little time left.

This is one of those times when words fail.  When the hurting, the shattered hopes for his recovery, and the God, I don’t understand can only be expressed through tears (or worse, through a deadness that threatens to dry the tears and harden the heart).

On the way back from the hospital last night, I was trying so hard to reconcile what I believed to be true about who God is and what was happening.  When I woke up this morning, I compared my view of God with the image of Jaimee, TJ, and little Nathan in the hospital.  God who says He is Love and a broken, hurting family.  God who says He is sovereign and unchanged circumstances.  The Who and the what didn’t seem to fit together.

Today, I read through my notes from last week’s sermon again, When Giving Thanks Is Tough (Habakkuk):

Habakkuk asks God, “O LORD, how long…?”  He’s tired and disillusioned, even angry, but he’s honestly seeking God’s face.  (God would rather we move toward Him in complaint than away from Him in disappointment and disbelief.)

When He feels distant, when He seems to be silent, we’re given the choice to fasten our hope on God’s unchanging character — not just as a knee-jerk reaction to blessing but in the midst of dismal circumstances.

Habakkuk questions God’s concern … and then His very goodness.

C.S. Lewis wrote this in his journal after his wife died of cancer: I don’t think I’m in much danger of ceasing to believe in God.  The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him.  The conclusion I dread is not, “So, there’s no God after all,” but “So this is what God is really like…”

When every ropes breaks.  When every door shuts.  When you ask for strength but only see weakness.  You think, “He knows my hurt, my struggle, my concern … then why?”

Our problem and concern is the hurt.  God’s concern is us … perseverance …

In Habakkuk 2:1, Habakkuk says, “I will take my stand at my watchpost and station myself on the tower, and look out to see what He will say to me, and I will answer concerning my complaint.”

Part of the LORD’s response to him is, “But the LORD is in His holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before Him” (Habakkuk 2:20).  He is in His holy temple.

We cannot always grasp His methods, but we can know Him.  This doesn’t mean that there’s no pain, but it’s tempered by the knowledge of who He is.

Habakkuk prays.  His prayer is a walk through the past, remembering God and His deeds.  I don’t know much about His ways and methods now than I did then … but I know Him.

Habakkuk praises God.  Circumstances haven’t changed, but he has.

Habakkuk 3:17-18 — “Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the product of the olive fail and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the LORD; I will take joy in the God of my salvation.”

Though all visible signs of God’s blessings are stripped away and even when His presence seems to be absent, I will rejoice.  That’s the kind of trust He desires in us and a gratitude that doesn’t change, because it’s fixed on His unchanging goodness.

Habakkuk wasn’t born like this.  Remember the clenched fist?  It didn’t come naturally to him.  He learned it.

Reflect and remember.  Rejoice, because He’s always good and faithful.

When I gave up thinking within myself about the theological implications of this painful situation and instead began taking my conflicted, broken thoughts to God Himself, I began to remember (not just in the sense of recalling to my mind but really knowing and remembering) who He is … because I was talking to Him.  He’s Abba.

He is on His throne.  He is also near, so near, to the brokenhearted and the crushed in spirit — to Jaimee and TJ, to Grandma Kit and Grandpa Jim, to other family, to little Nathan, to our church family.

And we will praise Him … even if it’s through tears and struggles.

Who > Why.

For about the past four years, I’d been praying for a dear friend’s health.  She struggled those four years (and the 10 years prior to that) just wanting the doctors to be able to discover what was wrong.

She wasn’t a believer back then.

Now, four years later, she loves Jesus.

And now, the doctors do know what’s wrong.  And she’s hiding herself in Him, thankful she met the tempest after finding Refuge (or rather, after Refuge found her).

Still, knowing now hurts.  Deep.

“Trusting when it costs.”

Sometimes I wonder why I even bother to keep a blog when most of it is filled with words spoken or written by people other than myself … but as someone who is most encouraged by words, I can’t help but post words that have encouraged me, in hopes that it might encourage those who stop by here, too.

This is from an email that my pastor sent out today:

Many know the story. When in November of 1873 Horatio Spafford learned his four daughters had perished when their ocean liner, the S.S.Ville Du Havre, was rammed and sunk by the English vessel, Lochearn, out of a mixture of grief and hope he wrote one of the church’s most cherished hymns:

When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll,
Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,
It is well, it is well, with my soul.

Less well known are the words Spafford confided to a friend shortly after the tragedy:

I am glad to trust God when it costs me something.

Being a dad, it’s difficult for me to grasp, to imagine how a father could respond that way to such an unspeakable loss. I suppose in part the explanation is that God gives sufficient grace in the moment of need, not in advance. The other part must be this: Spafford’s faith in the crisis, his bulging bicep faith was so defined because he had developed it as a habit of life in the gym of everyday trials.

We sometimes wonder (I do): If this huge thing, this painful tragedy happened to me; if I lost this or suffered that, would I still trust God, could I thank Him for the privilege of trusting Him when it costs, when it really costs me something? The answer is literally in front of our faces: Are we trusting Him with the thing before us now?

(Pastor John Helveston, East Valley Church)

What to say when the world caves in.

“Be ready to bow in humility before the impenetrable acts of a Sovereign God.”

“Job is victorious when he understands that God is not punishing him (as his own heart and his friends assume), but rather that He is teaching him something wonderful about Himself.”

Elyse Fitzpatrick was the speaker for General Session #1. She spoke on “What to Say When the World Caves In: Counsel from the Book of Job.” (I’ll just be highlighting certain points from the message … If you’d like a copy of the full notes, let me know! I’d be more than happy to email them to you.)

She said something at the beginning of the session that touched my heart: “That this would be the beginning of laying down our lives for the sisters in our local congregation.” I thought of the sisters at my church when she said this. It’s not a waste of a life to lay down our lives that they might draw nearer to Christ in love and trust; if we did nothing else but this our whole lives, our lives would not have been in vain …

Job’s friends were “sorry comforters,” according to Job, and had not “spoken of [God] what is right,” according to God. The counsel they offered to Job reflected the legalism in their hearts. They thought they had God figured out — that He always repaid the good with good and the evil with evil. “All of us are legalists at heart,” said Elyse. “Many of us tend to think that God is chronically displeased or disappointed with us.” In short, we forget the cross of Christ and the wrath poured out on Christ that God’s loving favor might be poured out on us.

But we can’t always assume we know what God is doing. We cannot assume that we have Him all figured out, that we can accurately interpret life’s trials according to our often-warped view of God and His dealings with man. We can’t expect that He will work in the future as He has always worked in the past (note: we cannot expect His methods to be the same, but we can be confident that His character never changes).

Here are some of her notes on what kinds of mistakes we can making in counseling (note: whether counseling other or counseling ourselves while speaking within our own hearts):

1. We can assume that God always, and in every case, responds in the expected way; that He has the same plan for everyone. We can treat Him like a scientific formula rather than as the omniscient and Sovereign God of the Universe. In other words we can miss the depth of God’s inscrutable wisdom and counsel.

2. We can assume that there is a direct one-for-one correlation between suffering and righteousness forgetting the Suffering Servant. If Eliphaz [one of Job's friends] had observed Christ on the cross, what would his assessment have been?

3. We can forget that God’s perspective on justice differs from ours, the way it did with Job and the Son. If Bildad [another of Job's friends] had seen the Lord suffer before the Sanhedrin, with whom would he have sided?

4. We can mistakenly assume that suffering is punitive rather than redemptive forgetting that God sends both blessings and afflictions as an act of love: “Whether for correction, or for His world, or for lovingkindness, He causes it to happen” (Job 37:13; Lamentations 3:38). “He delivers the afflicted by their affliction and opens their ear by adversity” (Job 36:15).

5. We can assume that we know everything about God’s providence (1 Corinthians 13:4-5a).

It was a fitting message for that weekend. I was feeling somewhat “out of sorts” that weekend, burnt out and somewhat calloused. The world didn’t exactly cave in on me, but the reality of my grandpa’s death began to settle in.

Grace sat next to me a couple of times, and during one of the praise times, my heart began to ache as we (strangely) sang a lot of songs that spoke of heaven. After the songs and after the message, I turned to Grace and said, “I think I’m just starting to grieve now …” And I did. For about an hour and a half, I just cried. And she cried with me. A lady from behind us, whose heart was heavy with family issues, hugged me and cried with me, too. Then we prayed together, and that woman (she had, I think, a Russian name, but she said to call her Helen) spoke such tender words of truth and comfort …

Afterward, I thought to myself, “If Job had friends such as these …”

In my Father’s keeping.

I picked up Corrie ten Boom’s The Hiding Place, her life story welded together with an account of the Holocaust from her perspective.

She wrote about certain experiences she had as a child that prepared her, whether in a small way or a great way, for the horrors she would see later in her life as an adult — experiences that would sustain her hope in Christ even when she saw nothing but despair, cruelty, and seemingly God-forsaken people all around her in Holland, in prison, and in the concentration camp.

One experience, a lesson from her godly father, happened when she was 10 or 11 years old . . .

Seated next to Father in the train compartment, I suddenly asked [him about what a certain word meant, a word that I had heard at school that Mother and Tante Jans would not tell me the meaning of].

He turned to look at me, as he always did when answering a question, but to my surprise, he said nothing. At last he stood up, lifted his traveling case from the rack over our heads, and set it on the floor.

“Will you carry it off the train, Corrie?” he said.

I stood up at tugged at it. It was crammed with the watches and spare parts he had purchased that morning.

“It’s too heavy,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “And it would be a pretty poor father who would ask his little girl to carry such a load. It’s the same way, Corrie, with knowledge. Some knowledge is too heavy for children. When you are older and stronger you can bear it. For now you must trust me to carry it for you.”

And I was satisfied. More than satisfied — wonderfully at peace. There were answers to this and all my hard questions — for now I was content to leave them in my father’s keeping.

And that we would be content to leave our hard questions in our Father’s keeping, too. That it’d be enough to know that He knows.

. . .

I’ll be in San Diego ’til Monday morning. Congratulations Kevin & Mabel, soon to be married!!!

He knows.

He knows.

He knows.

I can’t begin to tell how much comfort this truth has brought recently.

He knows what these trials are producing in us, He knows what the outcome will be of present uncertainties, He knows the pain of loss, He knows our innermost thoughts, He knows what is in our hearts, He knows exactly what to say to comfort us in each circumstance, He knows how to humble us, He knows our needs, He knows what He is doing, & He knows we are but dust (even when our proud hearts boast otherwise).

The past few weeks, circumstantially, have been relentless; & the flames have been more painful because they’ve revealed more dross in my heart than I ever suspected was there. I’m not half as strong, half as principled, half as loving, half as interested in Christ’s interests as I wanted to believe that I was.

It would be one thing to face life’s gales (or to come alongside a loved one who is enduring them) with a humble, sweet spirit.  But it’s been agonizing to do those same things while at the same time struggling with the obstinate sins & hardness of heart that the gales have uncovered within.  Trials without, but no sweetness of spirit within.

But He knew that, too.  How vast, really, is His love?  According to “my” calculations, love should have dried up a long time ago.  How is it, then, that I still find myself so inundated with love that I’m unable to feel the bottom?  Who is He that He would love like this?

Losses, the feeling of death’s finality, questions of whether a loved one will make it through an illness, the workload that gives no heed to cries of weariness, the constant battle with sin & pride . . .

He knows.  He — God Almighty, the God who says He is Love, the One who is unfolding life moment by moment according to His perfect plan & good pleasure, our Savior from first to last.

I don’t know. I don’t know what will happen. I don’t know how to comfort the grieving. I don’t know how to minister to those I love. I don’t know what is in my heart. I don’t know how to wholly give this life to Him. I don’t know.

But He knows. His person, His knowledge of all things, & His constant love; I can lean with my full weight on these things.

I need not look elsewhere. He will never fail.

The people who sing.

When I’m hurting the most, I’ll usually look for a quiet place where I can take a keyboard or guitar & a praise book. Then I’ll spend hours singing & playing through the songs. It does my heart good to sing His praises — to sing of who He is — especially when I hurt.

“A group of Christians in Africa are not called Christians by those around them. Instead they are called the people who sing. When someone wants to join their church, they say, ‘I want to sing.’ In the midst of very difficult lives full of pain and suffering, poverty and hardship, they sing. They sing from hearts full of joy in Christ. We should tune our hearts to hear such singing. We should marvel at the beauty of their song.”
- Stephen J. Nichols, Heaven on Earth: Capturing Jonathan Edwards’s Vision of Living in Between (Thanks, Cesar, for the excerpt.)

May we be people who sing through times of joy & through times of grief, because our God is always praiseworthy. Our hearts always have reason to sing — maybe not because of circumstances but because of our sovereign God.

The thankful Christian sings. The joyful Christian sings. &, as we were reminded in November, trials enhance joy.

Let’s sing. & let’s sing all the more when the day becomes night.

“By day the LORD commands His steadfast love, & at night His song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life.” ( Psalm 42:8 )

“It is good to give thanks to the LORD, to sing praises to Your name, O Most High; to declare Your steadfast love in the morning, & Your faithfulness by night, to the music of the lute & the harp, to the melody of the lyre.” (Psalm 92:1-3)

“& when they had inflicted many blows upon them, they threw them into prison, ordering the jailer to keep them safely. Having received this order, he put them into the inner prison & fastened their feet in the stocks. About midnight Paul & Silas were praying & singing hymns to God, & the prisoners were listening to them.” (Acts 16:23-25)

January 8, 1998.

It is well, it is well with my soul.

. . .

“There is no attribute more comforting to His children than that of God’s Sovereignty. Under the most adverse circumstances, in the most severe trials, they believe that Sovereignty has ordained their afflictions, that Sovereignty overrules them . . . We proclaim an enthroned God, & His right to do as He will with His own.” (C.H. Spurgeon)

“That God is good is taught or implied on every page of the Bible & must be received as an article of faith as impregnable as the throne of God.” (A.W. Tozer)

“‘He knows the way He taketh’ . . . [He] knows what He is doing, & ‘doeth all things well,’ even if for the moment He hides His hand. We can trust Him & rejoice in Him, even when we cannot discern His path.” (J.I. Packer)

“He is ever the same. His purpose is fixed, His will is stable, His word is sure. Here then is a rock on which we may fix our feet, while the might torrent is sweeping away everything around us.” (A.W. Pink)