What an unmarried woman had to say about that!

Tonight was the Bible study I wrote about a few weeks ago, where I'd be leading on the book The Power of a Praying Wife. Unbeknownst to me when last I wrote, I HAD volunteered for the week that the chapter was actually on the subject of marriage! So here I sat, an unmarried woman waxing eloquent while six married women listened. Only God does these sorts of things.
I was afraid of boring them, and perhaps I did (Dora insists I didn't). Yet, I enjoyed teaching what I did. Several days ago I was talking to my dad on the phone and he popped out with one of those memory-blazing phrases -- the sort that will in the future will always be prefaced with a "my dad says...." What did he say? Ah yes, good of you to ask.

"Satan is always warring against love. He is always warring against relationships."

I've thought about it several times since, especially as I prepared for leading this study. It is so true, and so infrequently considered seriously. Oh, we're aware of the enemy's involvement in major things like divorce and bitterness and adultery. But the little things escape our notice: irritation, annoyance, self-preservation, fear, accusations. The list is extensive, so I won't even attempt to complete it. The point is, we are actually in a war. If we never recognize the fact, we will never violently and vigilantly act to preserve the way of love.

God IS love, and we are made in His image. This means that what Satan hates in God, he hates in us also. The enemy hates love.

Can you imagine this? Really? A personality that hates love? I find it horrific.

We can already see how effective the enemy is in this. Our culture guzzles divorce like beer. What are our defenses against such an all-out attack? What are our counter-weapons? What tools and strategies has the Lord given us to counter this onslaught of powerful hate?

Prayer is the first. Love is the second.

There are two aspects to this love. The first is following the law of love toward one another. That law says that we are to love the other as we love ourselves, that we are to prefer the other above ourselves, that we are to lay down our life for the sake of the other. (Ever notice how much easier it is to follow this law of sacrificial love toward our friends and neighbors than toward our family and spouses?)

The second aspect is this: we are married to two men at once. One marriage will last about 50 years. The other will last over 50 million years (to name a smallish sort of number). Our marriage to Jesus is our first, and our longest. It is the real thing, of which our physical marriage is a picture and shadow and reflection. It is the blueprint. It is the guide.

What does this mean practically? Our capacity for love is greater than a human being will ever be able to fill. We are deeper people than our spouses will ever be able to plumb. Women (and men, I assume) habitually look to their spouses to fill needs God created so extensive that only He could fill them. He left room in us for Himself!

He took me once through the 23rd Psalm, having me declare back to Him that He was my shepherd, my husband wasn't. He was my provider, my husband wasn't. He would give my soul rest and peace, my husband wouldn't. And so on... It was a wonderful exercise. At each verse I acknowledged that God might use my husband as a tool and an avenue, such as providing for me financially and physically. But in the ultimate sense, at the end of the story, a spouse is not going to ever complete what only God can.

I told the girls tonight that they will always be in want, they will always be in need. No husband will supply what God designed only to be satisfied by Himself. Until the marriage of the Lamb and the bride, we will always be waiting. The only way for a physical marriage to be all it was designed to be, is for it to be second to our marriage to God. The only way to really love your spouse, is to love God more than your spouse.

And that's what an unmarried woman had to say about that!

I Am More Beautiful

Whatever you’ve heard about Hawaii, believe. Unless someone tells you it’s paradise. A friend was praying a week before I flew here and he accidentally asked God to bless me in heaven. It was quickly reworded, “Hawaii,” as we all giggled. My very first impression when I saw the mountains that surround my brother’s house, (one which has lasted these three months) was not that I would find beauty here, but that I would find the Lord. Every time I have paused to take in a sight and have intentionally opened my spirit to hear His comments on it, He has said this: “I am more beautiful.” It is no denigration of the creation lying in front of us. It is just simple truth. And I love that truth!

I was reminded of this in Kauai this past week. The beauty there should have been overwhelming, and to many people it probably is. But I’m just me, and God keeps whispering this thing in my ear, and I stare at lush mountains and white-frosted aqua seas and they seem remote and half-way compared to the tangible presence of Jesus.

The two things I don’t have pictures of are what most impressed a mark on me. At the organic farm where we camped one night we hung out in the “cookhouse” with a pile of the hippies who work 15 hours a week in exchange for a campsite. Laid-back, earthy, dull, and-in spite of their grasped and obtained “freedom”-visibly repressed, they welcomed us with an ease and a carelessness that was little interested in whether we were or were not. Two thoughts were paramount during those hours with them. One was whether or not it’s possible to get high accidentally off the fumes of someone else’s weed (oh, I’m so ignorant…it’s funny, but don’t laugh at me, Anna Lew!) and the other, fighting for predominance and winning, was how I could possibly share the good news with this group of people so in need of it. Conversation was not engaged in, openings were not being made, and I felt myself so ill-equipped (as Mr. Darcy might say) to recommend myself to strangers such as these. Why would they listen to a clean, groomed girl who had spent the last few nights in a posh resort, was a college graduate, and politely declined their offers to share in the joints? The more they smoked, the more each retreated into their own internal world and the chance slipped further out of my fingers. Do you know how frustrating it is to know how to save a drowning man but be tied to your boat? I kept praying for some sort of opening and finally God gave me the opportunity He had built into the evening. Hippie girl #1 (bubbly and carefree) had been to the store and bought markers and a journal. It was decided that everyone who stayed there should write in it, and Deanna and I were to inaugurate the book since we were the first who would be “leaving” the farm. When it finally got into my hands I knew what to write about—His voice, continually telling me, “I am more beautiful than this,” and my joy at having something more to look forward to than the beauty in the natural realm.

We retreated then, using a cell phone to guide our stumbling feet along ruts and mango rows and vegetables growing in the red dirt. Before bed we were invited into the owner’s metal barn-home, where we were supposed to be watching a movie but instead watched scuttling cockroaches in relief against the bright computer screen-the only bit of light in all that huge, dirty space. I was glad they were on the screen, for then they were not on me (at least, so I hoped).

The second interaction that impressed me was with Vladimir, the Russian-named Brazilian to whom we fed s’mores roasted to perfection in Lawrence’s beach campfire. Lawrence had gotten a job recently, but didn’t have enough yet to snag a place to live, so he was camping on the beach until he’d saved up. Tom, his friend, came and zipped himself up in his bag next to the fire, accepted one of our s’mores, and promptly slipped into an oblivion of sleep only the homeless achieve. The starry sky above us would surely turn rainy at some point during the night. I didn’t remember Tom being there until morning, after I had survived the disturbing hours of high wind and crashing surf from under the safe cover of a Marine combat tent. How Tom fared I don’t know. He was gone before we rose. But Vladimir, who was so handsome and thought he knew so much…who accepted our food and our help in the dark rain then carelessly insulted all we had told him of ourselves…whose request to impose himself on the rest of our trip we refused, yet who unknowingly slept all night as a tent guard between us and the creepo in the camp beyond… this man I tried to reason gently with under the stars. There is absolute truth. Religions are made by man, but God is still Himself, whatever we may say of Him. Should we throw away reality because someone else once offered us a twisted rendition of it? But he would not listen. Perhaps he was thinking too much about sleeping on the beach under such stars, or about managing to get a place in our car the next day, or about the very American experience of campfire s’mores next to pretty, kind girls. In any event, I was glad when rain abruptly sent us scattering to our various tents.

That is not a very complete rendition of our Kauai trip, which also involved treacherous hikes toward the wettest place on earth, views of an unparalleled Napali coastline, dances in the festival crowds around very Hawaiian bands, tastes of Kauai pie ice cream (coffee, coconut, macadamias, fudge), sushi and poke, destroyers anchoring off swimming beaches, birds playing among the resort’s breakfast buffeters while early surfers dotted the waves just beyond, pervasive and permanent red dirt, packaging up 70 lbs fresh mangoes for transport to the airport then Hilo, Queen’s Bath’s salty buoyancy giving us the ability to swim and watch the schools of fish around our feet at the same time… The beauty of Kauai is extreme, but even in the midst of it, He kept whispering the same thing to me: “I am more beautiful than this.” And I am so glad. I would be sorely disappointed if anything I could see or experience on this earth was the pinnacle of joy and beauty. I need more to look forward to than that, and I have it.

I've posted tons of photos w/lots of explanatory captions on facebook. Here's a link, for those of you who are interested :)

Dormancy and Bloom

Chicago.

The rain, which has been full and steady all day, has turned to snow. I suspected it a few moments ago, when the tall dining-room bays that overlook a row of neighbors' backyards seemed to be framing something in the air more substantial than transparent water. I looked hard then, but a change into snow is easier to detect by accident than by close observation, and I walked away unsure. Water falls so fast. But now it has all become apparent, because it has all become snow. Things with less substance, like snowflakes, are easier to see. Do you find that as odd as it is?

I arrived less than two weeks ago and there weren't even buds on the bare tree branches lacing the city's streets. Now everything is spring green. The tulip trees (I don't know what they're really called) have budded and bloomed great big hand-sized flowers. Green leaves are already pushing the blooms off, and the beautiful shedding process has begun. It will leave pink-and-white carpeted circles on the ground for a few weeks more. In fact, the entire city is the light, Irish-yellowish green of spring. It took only several days for the huge tree outside my window to produce egg-sized buds, spring them open, and form Dr. Seuss-like pinwheels of tall cone flower topping four spikes which each drip six long, finger-like leaves. Only a few days. To move from nothing, to multiple plant formations each at least 8 inches in diameter. Spring is like a corpse coming to life again. I suppose that is the nature of the very word we use to describe it. "Spring." But I still find it shocking.

Dormancy can be so ugly, so bare, and so unpromising. There is little to distinguish it from deadness, if such is a word. Yet an entire world could fill the void between the two. In the one, life is being stored up, tucked away, harbored and secreted. In the other, life is utterly gone; the shell and carcase might as well be burned.

When my parents purchased their home, theirs and their neighbors' yards both sported trimmed Mulberry trees. Less than six feet tall, with trunks perhaps 6 inches in diameter, the trees look like miniatures. It's a mystery how long they've been here, continually trimmed back every year into a neat, ball-shaped package. Mom is a gardener, more along the lines of the rambling English cottage than the pin-tucked tightness of little brick ranch-houses, and she treats her plants the same way. Our two Mulberries were not trimmed into tight shapes the next year, though they've been judiciously pruned. The neighbors (new owners, now) still have their just-under-six-feet tall miniature trees, and my parents...two Mulberries now tower over their four-storey house, assisting squirrels who want to caper on the roof and visually overshadowing the hundred-year-old structure. Many years had those Mulberries remained in what seemed like stasis--small, awkward, not fully themselves. But how deep was the root system they spread during that time? How wide and strong did each become underground, while above it nothing was happening?

Spring and dormancy are like this in lives, in ministry. What exactly is God doing underground? How strong are the pruning and the trials and the hiddenness making us? And what will happen when He says "Now" and everything is unleashed to grow? Nutrition absorbed over years and years will shoot to the tips of short branches, bulging out in a space of days into blooms and fruit and stunning, light-catching, attention-arresting foliage. Pruning will always be needed and life-preserving, but those times when He chooses spring, those times that come at the end of a long but silent nourishment, are insurpassible in pleasure.

This, the bloom, is not only to be hoped for but to be expected, because we are not of those who are dead! Dormant, perhaps. Dead? Never again.