WHEN GOOD IS ENOUGH

            There are those who go through life accustomed to having the best, buying only the best. We encourage our children to do their best. Truth be told, sometimes we want to be the best. We feel the sting of not being able to afford the best- of not being able to give our children the best, only good. But is it possible that good can be, and is, good enough?

            The NIV hosts 43 verses using the term “good things.”  I just read through all 43 and it blew my “superlatives-only” gasket. Psalm 34: 8-10 instructs me: “Taste and see that the Lord is good. Blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him. Fear the Lord, you His saints, for those who fear Him lack nothing…those who seek the Lord lack no good thing.” That is a no holds barred promise. Those who seek the Lord lack no good thing. The openendedness of the verse leaves it to the reader to imagine: what good thing am I lacking? Our Father who spoke the verse into being placed no limitation on having the good things but one. The limitation is not on the number of good things. The qualifier is not on the one who seeks. The qualifier on having the good things is on the good thing for whom the seeker seeks. If we seek the Lord, and not just the things of his hand, we will, indeed, already have every good thing.

            Not too long ago we hosted a two year old overnight. It has been several years since we have had a toddler overnight and so my children spoiled her. Whatever she wanted was not too much. Watch the same movie five times?  Sure. Eat ice cream for dinner? Sure. Cookies for dessert? Absolutely. Carry her from room to room on the shoulders? Sure. Nothing was too much for her. Treats? Sure. On Sunday, when we were supposed to deliver this sugar laden child back to her father, her heart’s desire was reflected in her question as soon as she walked into church: “where’s daddy?” If her daddy had met her grizzled, scruffy, in his pajamas and with the worst morning breath-he would have been enough for this child. He needed no treat in his hand. He needed no toy in his backpack to offer her. He was enough. In fact, I think, had he not been there and we had tried to buy her calm with treats and sweets, she would have seen right through our ploy. I do believe that her question would have raised the roof: “Where’s daddy?” 

            In the midst of our hard times, painful circumstances, we whisper to Him: “You are my daddy; apart from you I have no good thing.” (Psalm 16:2). He whispers back to us, with accents sweet and clear: Child, seek me, I will withhold no good thing from you. I will satisfy your hunger with good things. I will fill your house with good things. Seek me and find the good things I will do for you according to my love and compassion. (Psalm 84:11, Psalm 104:28, Psalm 107:9, Isaiah 63:7)

SEAMLESS LOVE

                We’ve heard of timeless love, endless love, May-December love, puppy love…all kinds of love. Timeless love –love that makes time stand still. Endless love- love without end. Puppy love- love that is immature. This summer I learned of a different kind of love: seamless love. Seamless love-love without seams, is coherent, without lines or wrinkles, blemish or interruption.  Seamless love is beautiful and wondrous to behold.

My father is 82 and in July suffered a cerebral hemorrhagic stroke. It left him pretty well motionless on his right side and unable to communicate well. That is an understatement. Since the stroke, he has had two bad infections, one of which nearly killed him. It has been a journey for all of us, most particularly, my father and mother. The stroke happened about three weeks after they celebrated their 60^th anniversary. They were married in Jakarta, Indonesia, moved to the Netherlands and then to America. My parents had five children, suffered much discrimination as immigrants to America and managed to become quite successful. They have gone through much together across three continents. But that is not what seamless love is.

I saw seamless love one day as my mother and I waited forty five minutes for an aide to come. My father, at that time, was still fairly well incapacitated, unable to walk or stand. He had had a bowel movement. My mother pressed the button for the nurse to come. I went out to the nurse’s station and explained that my father needed help. No one came. So we waited. No one came. We waited some more. And still, no one came.  My father was uncomfortable in a different way then I was uncomfortable. It is an odd feeling to know your father cannot control his bladder or bowels. My mother is not one to bother with feelings of discomfort. So she did what she always does. She did it herself…the cleaning, I mean.

She didn’t want help. She walked over to the bed, then, very gently and tenderly started talking to my father, explaining that she was going to clean him and clucking her tongue, chiding the aides for not coming.  My mother laughed a little, making secret little jokes, All the while, she was rolling him on his side so she could remove the filthy diaper. Gently, so gently she pulled down his sweatpants, took off his diaper. Never, not once, did I detect one hint of resentment or disgust.

While I was watching this act of selflessness occur in slow motion, I found myself in disbelief and a thousand thoughts raced through my head: oh my goodness, it smells. This is her husband. This is her lover. This is her life companion. She’s cleaning his bottom. She’s using wipes. This is weird. My father wears a diaper now. This is beautiful. This is humbling. This is humiliating. That’s my father. And, all the while, my mother was whispering, laughing with him, talking gently to him to make sure that he was not uncomfortable. Then in about ten minutes, she was finished.

Without skipping a beat, without interruption, without a wrinkle, my mother moved from cleaning and serving my father, to romancing him. She leaned over, nuzzled him and whispered: “Hey I miss sleeping with you at night. You need to get better and come home. I miss you.”  To her, I was not even in the room. I just started to cry because I was witnessing beauty and intimacy-seamless love. To witness such a moment of seamless love is an honor and humbling.

What is seamless love? It is the seamless movement from the dirt and filth of reality and life into the wonder, delight and intimacy of true and genuine love. It is a woman who is able to clean her lover’s bottom of his waste and love him and whisper her aching and longing for him. It is the seamless movement of a father lifting up his robes, running down the road to embrace his pig slopped son. It is a God who takes us out of the pit of our disgusting filthy sin, picks us up into His divine arms and holds us close in redemptive love and grace. That is seamless love. And when we recognize seamless love, it overpowers us with its beauty and grace. May God reveal to us more and more the beauty of His seamless love in us and through us.

An Odd Connection: Muggeridge Meets Elihu

I scare myself. My mind makes such odd connections sometimes. The odd connections fascinate me, but simultaneously confuse me. They fascinate me because typically the odd connection is to a verse in the Bible which I have read many times and I get excited to see the link. The thoughts confuse me because I typically have not heard a preacher connect that Bible verse to anything else, which makes me wonder “am I the only one who thinks such strange things?”

For instance, I was listening to Ravi Zacharias on a podcast recently as he lectured a group of students at Oxford. He quoted Malcolm Muggeridge: “Indeed, I can say with complete truthfulness that everything I have learned in my seventy-five years in this world, everything that has truly enhanced and enlightened my existence, has been through affliction and not through happiness, whether pursued or attained. In other words, if it ever were to be possible to eliminate affliction from our earthly existence…the result would not be to make life delectable, but to make it too banal or trivial to be endurable. This of course is what the cross signifies, and it is the cross more than anything else, that has called me inexorably to Christ.”  

As I listened to that quote, I heard the distinct sound of two previously unrelated thoughts, separated by time and space, come together like two railroad cars, now linked together on the same track. As I listened to the Muggeridge quote, I thought of a verse tucked away in the book of Job, words spoken by Elihu, the only wise man among the four friends of Job. 

"But those who suffer he delivers in their suffering;
   he speaks to them in their affliction.
 ¹⁶ “He is wooing you from the jaws of distress
   to a spacious place free from restriction,
   to the comfort of your table laden with choice food.
¹⁷ But now you are laden with the judgment due the wicked;
   judgment and justice have taken hold of you.
¹⁸ Be careful that no one entices you by riches;
   do not let a large bribe turn you aside.
¹⁹ Would your wealth or even all your mighty efforts
   sustain you so you would not be in distress?
²⁰ Do not long for the night,
   to drag people away from their homes.
²¹ Beware of turning to evil,
   which you seem to prefer to affliction."

Elihu was the last of Job’s friends to speak, hesitant because of his youth and his respect for the elders who had spoken before him. What I find so interesting is the last line from this speech: “Beware of turning to evil, which you seem to prefer to affliction.” Couple this with Muggeridge’s quote: “everything that has truly enhanced and enlightened my existence, has been through affliction and not through happiness, whether pursued or attained. In other words, if it ever were to be possible to eliminate affliction from our earthly existence…the result would not be to make life delectable, but to make it too banal or trivial to be endurable.”

Odd things to say, perhaps, even cold and heartless things to say to a man who had suffered as Job had; by this time. Job had lost house, property, servants, family, prestige, health and even the support of his wife. There seemed to be nothing else that could be taken away from him. Yet, Muggeridge, a writer and editorialist, who witnessed much affliction in the lives of others and experienced it in his own life apparently agreed with Elihu.  A twentieth century brilliant writer agreed with the sentiments of Elihu, spoken around 450 B.C., by some accounts.

Do we agree?  Do we normally perceive, let alone, accept, affliction in this way-whether that affliction be in our own lives or in the lives of those we love? I dare say not. Normally, in our earthly skin, we typically seek comfort and are averse to affliction. We do all we can to avoid affliction. I avoid it not only for myself, but even try to keep my teenage children from encountering affliction, even though at times it seems they are on a willful and intentional crash course with what I know will be cause for affliction. Affliction is, at all costs, something we seek to avoid, deflect, and pray, end quickly. In fact, affliction has become nearly synonymous with evil; it is unwanted, unwelcome and unappreciated. 

Elihu saw, however, that for all of the afflictions that had befallen Job, those afflictions were, in fact, being used by a sovereign God to woo Job from the very jaws of distress, being used by a perfect God to bring Job into a spacious place free from distress. And, he warns Job to not “kick against the goads” as it were. Sometimes, to resist affliction is, perhaps, a preference for evil over affliction. Indeed, to return to Muggeridge’s wisdom, a life free from all affliction will most likely turn us to ingratitude, to boredom, and ultimately, to evil. 

Elihu reminds Job, and us, that in the midst of affliction, God speaks to us.  As the famous twentieth century apologist, C.S. Lewis wrote in The Problem of Pain” “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”  May we be people who train our hearts to not run from affliction, but in the midst of our affliction to run straight into the arms of the loving God who speaks to us, holds us in His tight divine embrace and whispers His love to us.

LOVING QUIETLY

I live. I mother. I wife.  I lawyer. I daughter.  I sister, and I friend.  All those non verbs, all those things that I am, demand that I do.  So I cook, clean, love, make love, talk, cry, help, read, analyze, marvel, think, process, make decisions, raise teenagers, cry some more, kiss my husband, laugh, dance with my children, and the list could go on touching most every verb in Webster’s Dictionary from Aa through Zz. My life is far from quiet. It is a continual melding of activities and blending of significant and peripheral people’s lives into mine and mine into theirs. But in the past two months, my life has been pushed into a period of reflection simply because many markers have suddenly appeared on my life‘s road. Suddenly, not as in unexpected.  Suddenly, as in, “wow, am I already this far along on the journey?” 

For instance, my husband and I celebrated twenty years of married bliss…and we thought about our first date, first kiss and first night.  Our daughter went back for another year of college...fraught with all the tension that the process of finding and forming identity brings.  Our twin sons turned 15 and it was easy to think back to holding them at the Chiang mai airport for the first time face to face. Our second daughter is thinking through college choices and mapping her career. My father had a stroke and this very intelligent man who speaks at least three languages fluently, now tells my sister that his hand is a fox. My mother is learning to live a new normal after 60 years of intimate and day to day conversations with her husband who is now significantly hampered in his ability to communicate.  My routine now consists of regular drives to Cleveland with many monotonous miles of highway on which to think and reflect.

This is what I have been thinking today: that my Father in heaven has often been, and is now, often very quiet in His love for me. What I mean is that He is so often not flashy in the ways He demonstrates love for me. I thought about this when my daughter mentioned something about a gift she had been given and was asking me if I remembered any conversations which would have set the giving of the gift in motion. Ah, my maternal pride would have loved to say “yes, I was totally behind it.” But I could not honestly say that. And I simply had to admit: “sometimes the Lord is just quiet in the ways He loves us.”  Sometimes, He leaves no calling card, no gift card other than the gift itself. And He leaves it up to us to trace the gift to the Giver.

Why?  Why not have flash and bang and sis boom bah when He leaves the gift?  A little gift card that unabashedly and incontrovertibly announces: “To: Ellen,  Love: God.”  It makes things so much easier at bridal showers, for instance, when someone sits beside the bride to be. This person’s sole duty is to meticulously and carefully keep track of who gave what. That way no giver will feel unappreciated or unloved. In fact, nowadays, the givers all receive little note cards, prestamped with the bride to be’s return address already written,  on which the giver writes her address, so as to make it easy for the bride to be. Why doesn’t God make it that easy and just leave His prestamped, self-addressed calling card or gift card along with every gift? Why risk being unappreciated and unloved or why not get acknowledged?

I think it is because the gift card mandates “thank me.”  But, when our precious Father in heaven quietly leaves a gift it says “seek me.”  We start the process of tracing the gift to the Giver and coming face to face, we can say to Him, “thank you…I didn’t realize it was you. But now I see.” 

I know that “every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights.” (James 1:17) But sometimes, in the midst of verbs and doing, I forget that thanking does not always lead to seeking Him, but seeking Him and finding Him as the giver of every good and perfect gift does lead to thanking Him.