DON'T GIVE UP!

     I have been very slowly reading my way through Romans this summer. I hadn't read it in it's entirety in years. The experience has been life giving and challenging. So much of what we say we believe as Christians is found in that one l book of the bible. I keep coming back to Romans 5:3-5, the verse pictured above. Here is the message translation, parenthesis are mine:

There's more to come: We continue to shout our praise even when we're hemmed in with troubles, because we know

TROUBLES can develop PASSIONATE PATIENCE in us, and how that PATIENCE in turn forges the tempered steel of VIRTUE, keeping us ALERT (expectant, HOPEFUL) for whatever God will do next. In alert EXPECTANCY such as this, we're never left feeling shortchanged. Quite the contrary - we can't round up enough containers to hold everything God generously pours into our lives through the Holy Spirit!

     Regardless of which translation you prefer the truth here is the same, pain, suffering, trials, tribulations - whatever name you give it - that is just the starting place. Pain is inevitable. We live in a fallen broken world. However I think many have whitewashed our faith to exclude the reality of pain at all. We subscribe more to the American Declaration of Independence which espouses, "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". Being happy is a billion dollar industry. Everybody is striving to get there. But I want to pose it is impossible to attain true happiness outside of the Creator. He is perfect love personified. He created us to be in relationship with Him and every since the original fall, he has been working to reconcile us to perfect LOVE. When we as mere mortals, experience moments of happiness, think about it, those are moments we feel connected to something other than ourselves. Happiness isn't the prize, knowing the ONE who hard wired us for the very concept is.

     Please don't get me wrong. I am not promoting suffering. I hate suffering. God does too. That's why when you get to the end of scripture it states the final plans: "He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death' or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away." Revelations 21:4. But in the meantime, He isn't sugar coating it either. We all die. People we love die. Horrible things happen. Things are messed up, and this is how we know they are, pain. However, if we stick our heads in the sand and pretend that nothing bad will ever happen or ascribe to some philosophy that bad things only happen to bad people, well then our butts are fully exposed. The challenge becomes what to do with pain?

     I finally got around to watching Fault in Our Stars. This was the last book Taylor and I shared. Spoiler alert if you haven't read it or seen the movie you may want to skip this bit. The whole idea of this book was about pain, specifically the pain of losing someone you love. It's easy to see then, why I wasn't anxious to revisit this as a movie. However in watching the movie, and sobbing at times as I related my own pain to Hazel's, I was reminded of this quote: "Pain demands to be felt." It is so true. The more we try to avoid pain, or ignore it, the more damage we do to ourselves. I mean, that is the entire plot to Pixar's latest blockbuster Inside Out. We stunt spiritual and emotional growth when we try and wish the pain away. So let's look at what we are supposed to do with our pain instead.

     According to Romans 5 we need to acknowledge our pain and then give thanks. Having personally lived this day in and day out for a year and a half now - you know, pain that is a 10 - I think this is where people get off target. It isn't saying you should be happy about being in pain. No, pain demands to be felt. It is a balancing act of acknowledging how badly it hurts and then looking to the source. Remember him? The One who said my ultimate plan is no more pain? You give thanks for Him. You rejoice that this isn't all there is. You give thanks that someone loves you so much they have been pursuing you your whole life. You focus on the LOVE that has been poured out to you, over and over in your life, even when you didn't recognize it. He isn't the source of your pain. Pitfall #1 is to feel the pain and get stuck there in a blame game with God. Think about toddlers. They are such great examples of how we often relate to God. Your toddler wants to eat chocolate for lunch, color freely on the walls of your home, and refuse to ever sleep. Are we a mean parent for insisting they eat something with nutritional value, they color on the paper you provided, and they get some very much needed sleep? No absolutely not! What about when they are running full force down a hill and fall and scrap their knees? Is that our fault too? Are we bad parents because the law of gravity exists? Of course not and yet we still scoop them up and help them in all there wailing. If they only focus on the pain they are feeling and refuse to see us as loving people, they will go to a very dark place indeed. The second pitfall we face is when we don't acknowledge the pain at all and try to pretend it's all rainbows and unicorns. Looking at the same toddler analogy, if the child continues to fight the urge to sleep they become more and more irritable. Sure they want to play some more because toys are so fun, but it isn't fun for anyone when the toddler is screaming his/her head off every time the toy doesn't do what he/she wants. My family called this "sideways anger" after we lost T. You know, when you don't properly express what you are really mad and sad about and it all builds up and goes Pompeii on a poor innocent bystander. So to recap, the first part of Romans 5:3 is asking us to acknowledge that we are under it big time and then look to God and give thanks to for who He is.

     What happens if we do this? We build something called perseverance. 

per·se·ver·ance

ˌpərsəˈvirəns/

noun

1. steadfastness in doing something despite difficulty or delay in achieving success.

   "his perseverance with the technique illustrates his single-mindedness"

   synonyms:

   persistence, tenacity, determination, staying power, indefatigability,steadfastness, purposefulness; patience, endurance

Here is the part where you don't give up. Every day you may wake up and still feel the pain, and so every day you get to choose again. Do I look to the One who loves me and worship Him? Do I stay at deathcon 4 of anger and explode on everybody? Do I try to pretend something very real doesn't exist and fall into depression or even worse, lose my grip on reality altogether? I've traveled all roads. It's a choice daily, hourly, moment by moment. 

Psalm 121: 1,2

I lift up my eyes to the mountains -

Where does my help come from?

My help comes from the LORD,

the Maker of heaven and earth

     And after you cultivate perseverance, you get this crazy little thing called character. People are desperate for it these days because we are surrounded by a plethora of people without character. Politicians, celebrities, preachers, teachers, athletes, you name it. Because we have focused on happiness, rather than the source, we have made people devoid of any kind of character famous. We like that they are successful, and we want to be successful too. Isn't that going to make you happy? Apparently not according to our media crazy society. We love to put them on a pedestal and then yank it out from underneath them the first moment lack of character is revealed. They are just people though. People just like you and me. They have to decide daily too. You can't have character without having endured something, and you can't endure if you let the pain crush you or consume you. Character isn't about how tough we are. Bull@#$% ! Character is about letting Christ refine us. It is about 

WHO 

HE 

IS!

Character is a result of becoming a reflective surface for His glory. We become like the moon, only shining when the Sun shines on us.

     This is where we get to the good stuff. The stuff we all want from the start without all the hurdles and other mess. This is where we get to HOPE. 

Without hope, the heart in pain will surely be crushed. It is hope that relieves some of the pain.  Hope that allows us to see a brighter day not colored completely by the pain we feel. Hope is amazing and feels fantastic. I love when I get to the hope part! I think it is wonderful how this passage in Romans 5 ties it all up with not just hope, but God's love. "Now hope does not disappoint, because the LOVE of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us." What does the scripture tell us about this Holy Spirit? Again depending on your translation of John 14:26 he is known as: The Comforter, The Advocate, The Helper. Are you getting that? The comforter/advocate/helper is there to allow you to experience the Love of God. Once you experience this, you my friend, have laid hold of hope. So in essence it a circle story. We start out giving thanks for something we cannot see or feel. We give thanks for God's love even when all we feel is pain, and these leads to perseverance, which builds characters, which provides hope, and HOPE allows us to experience, feel, touch the love of God in our lives!

     It all goes back to being a toddler. Do you trust? Even when you cannot understand why life is hard do you trust that He loves you? If you do then you will focus on that love and you will have peace in the midst of the unthinkable. I love you friends. He loves you INFINITELY more.

     

Beauty for Ashes: The Divine Exchange

This is my daughter's urn. My mind is spinning in a thousand different directions and I have erased at least as many words trying to talk about this, her ashes. First of all, no parent ever believes they will bury a child. That is a fear too great, a pain too deep to ponder. If anyone did, they surely would decline having children all together. Secondly, I never in a million years thought anyone I loved would be cremated. Everyone I knew or loved had simply been buried. For me, cremation seemed so much more permanent than burial. I know, the logic is ridiculous. The person is dead either way, but at least with burial, the family gets one last view of the body that housed the person they loved. Ashes speak of total destruction of everything you have loved.

Recently I have been pondering this whole idea of ashes, the ashes in our lives. Losing my daughter is hands down the single most devastating event in my life. I have literal and figurative ashes if you will. However, many people are walking around with figurative ashes. They may not have endured the loss of a child, however the wound in their hearts is just as gaping.

For something to become ash, it has to be destroyed to it's most base state. Have you endured a pain like that? If you haven't, I am willing to bet at some point in your life you will. It's the nature of a broken world. And if you are like me the pain will seem unbearable. There were many days I simply wanted to curl up in the fetal position around her urn and just die too. When you feel like the walking dead, that a sign you have ashes.

Our culture is extremely good at anesthetizing us from pain. We don't do pain or mourning or grief. So many people know they are hurting but they try to pretend like the wound is not there. They try to hide the ashes or reject their very existence. Some of us stay super busy. Some of us go the positive, self-help, pull myself up from boot straps route. Some of us medicate, legally or otherwise. Some of us burn everything that reminds of us the ashes to the ground and walk away to start "a new life". Some of us lash out at everything and everybody as the cause for our pain. Some of us quit life, pull the covers over our head and refuse to participate, or quit all together breathing. There are a million different scenarios. I have tried an assortment myself. The point is we all have ashes.

Recently I had an opportunity to release some of Taylor's ashes in a place I thought she would have loved experiencing. I didn't have any big plans or tell anyone I was doing it. I just felt like it needed to be done. It just so happened that one of my friends accompanied me on this adventure. She asked if she could say a prayer as I released the ashes. I consented. What followed was her praying Psalm 126:

Restore us to our former glory!

May streams of Your refreshing flow over us,

Until our dry hearts are drenched again.

Those that sow their tears as seeds,

Will reap a harvest with joyful shouts of glee.

They may weep as they go out

Carrying their seed to sow,

But they will return with joyful laughter,

And shouting and gladness as they

Bring back armloads of blessing,

And a harvest overflowing!

All I knew in that moment was that I was definitely sowing in tears but there is a promise it will not always be so. I want to be very clear here. I am not espousing a fake it until you make it gospel. The challenge with ashes and the pain that brought them to us, is that it hurts like no other. We have to be willing to acknowledge the pain, mourn the loss, and sow in tears. By nature, we want to skip parts 1,2, and 3 and jump right to the feeling better part. Back in the day when I was young and the queen of denial a very wise woman told me, "You can only experience the highs in life to the same proportions as you have experienced the lows. If you try and keep everything copesthetic, you limit your potential for joy." We need to weep of over the ashes in our lives and mourn the loss that comes with them. We need to acknowledge what brought the ashes to us and feel the loss of no more.

What I also know is after releasing those ashes, I began to experience an overall release. This is called the divine exchange. You give God your tears, He in turn brings healing. It might be hope. It might be joy. It might be trust. You bring the ruins, He provides something more beautiful than you could have ever imagined. The very crux of the gospel as prophesied in Isaiah 53: 4-5 is this: "Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; Yet we esteemed Him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But He was wounded for our trangressions, He was bruised for our iniquities." The very broken nature of humanity is too blame.  The scripture says we blamed Jesus' pain as punishment from God. We blame our pain on others, on circumstances, on God, on lack of "faith", and on and on... the list is endless. But the good news is, God doesn't care who you blame - He is willing to take our sorrow, our grief, our ashes. 

He has sent (Jesus) to heal the brokenhearted,

To proclaim liberty to the captives, ...

To comfort all who mourn, ...

To give them Beauty for ashes

Isaiah 61: 1,3

What I want you to understand is that this is a DIVINE exchange. There is no formula, no earning it. We release the ashes and He does the rest. It is not instantaneous necessarily or miraculous. Sometimes it just slowly happens one breath at a time. Don't beat yourself up if you are living in the ashes. Just look up. God is big and wild and untamable and He loves you more than anything. So much so that even if your ashes are the result of your own poor choices, He will meet you there. Even when the ashes were the result of something completely out of your control, He will meet you there. He loves you. He feels our brokenness. He mourns with us and He will sit with us in the ashes until we are able to receive beauty.

I was hesitant to write this post. A certain famous American has been in a lot of hot water lately for commenting that parents who were still mourning the loss of their child years later were "stuck". Please hear my heart, this is not what I am trying to say here. It's quite the opposite really. What I am saying is that no amount of anything this side of heaven will ever lift you out of the ashes permanently. Whether it is the loss of a child or a marriage or whatever. It has to be a divine exchange: beauty for ashes. Do I still cry over the loss of my daughter? Regularly. Do I still feel an ache in my heart like no other? Absolutely. However, the shift for me is that I can function now. I can engage in life instead of being on auto-pilot and hiding under the covers. This was my divine exchange. It's nothing we can do except release the "ashes" and let him Him fill our hearts and hands with something beautiful. Letting go does not imply that I am letting go of my daughter, never. My husband said a very wise thing not long after we brought her ashes home. "The way I look at it is that everything we are responsible for making is in there (her urn) and everything God is responsible for making is with Him." I can never let go of Taylor because she is something I cannot hold. She is not the ashes. The ashes are the ruins. God only wants us to exchange the desolate burned out places in our lives for something truly alive. Sometimes you may be fooled like me, and fall in love with the ashes thinking that is all you have left. You may be tempted to curl up around the ashes in your life and lay down and "die".  By letting go, you are not losing anything real. You are only partnering in the divine exchange. Let Him give you beauty for ashes.