On Weeding

I've been neglecting my front yard for way too long.  I knew the weeds were growing there, shooting up through the healthy grass and causing my lawn mower to groan, but I just didn't want to deal with the hard work, sweat and tears it would take to get rid of them. 

I guess I just kept hoping the grass would take over eventually and choke the weeds out.  Or that maybe some friendly neighbor would jog by my house, notice how ugly the lawn looked, and stop to pull them out for me.  But, no.  It looks like I'm going to have to do this. 

This is a good time to do it.  We've been pounded by rain this spring. We have had the storms, I'll say! Hitting us from every side. Dumping more water on us than we have known how to deal with at times.  It's caused damage. Devastating destruction in some cases.  But it's also made the soil easier to work with. So this morning I kneel here, in the dirt, digging and tugging and tossing, trying to avoid touching the slugs or injuring the earthworms. 

I like it when I get my fingers around a big fat root that pulls up and leads to runners that also come up easily. It's satisfying to take down a whole section of the invasive growth in one handful.  Others, the smaller ones, need a more tedious treatment. I just have to dig away, pulling them up one by one, and reminding myself that I am dealing with the problem, little by little.

Of course I know I'm not really solving the problem forever. I'm pulling up as many of the roots as I can get my fingers around, but they still have very healthy ends buried below the grass.  I'm afraid getting rid of them will involve more of a long-term commitment.  I will have to keep an eye on things and take time to yank up more roots as they sprout. 

One thing I wonder is why the good soil nurtures both weeds and the plants that feed us and beautify our lives?  I wish it were more selective.  Instead, the soil provides nourishment to all growth, and leaves it up to us to decide which species will be planted, will survive, or will thrive in it.

And sometimes it seems like the weeds are stronger. Why is it the good plants require more nurturing from us--more deliberate planting and tending and TLC in order to survive? It's almost as if we were meant to participate in nature in some way--to choose what kind of plants we want to promote and protect. That's a big responsibility, one I'm not sure I can handle.

But I feel a little better when I remember that I am only responsible for the weeds in my own yard. If I had to worry about the weeds in my neighbors' lawns the task would be hopeless.  

Wait a minute. I do need to worry about his weeds.  If he doesn't pull his dandelions up by the roots I'll be dealing with the consequences when they go to seed and the wind blows my way.  I should probably get onto him about that.

But wait another minute. If I complain about his dandelions, the neighbor on the other side might growl at me for the clover that's growing across the boundary between my lawn and his. I'm not ready to deal with the clover yet.  Right now it's just the buttercups. No, I can't afford to worry about the neighbors' weeds.  I have enough trouble dealing with my own.

There is some light peeking through the rainclouds though. I've heard that a good, healthy grass lawn can actually crowd the weeds out eventually. That's heartening.  I plan to "overseed" once I've cleared out enough of the weeds to expose the soil.  So eventually, with enough rain, and sun, and seed and good soil, maybe the whole neighborhood will begin to look a lot better. 

On Finding God

A couple of people have asked me lately about how I came to "find God."  That's interesting,

because I feel like my coming to faith was actually a matter of God finding me, rather than me finding Him.

My faith journey began very early on. I grew up with parents who were Christians and they taught me about God from my childhood. I decided when I was less than two years old that I wanted God, and so one day I just asked Jesus to come into my heart! 

I was not much of a logical thinker then, of course!  At that time, the desire for God just seemed to tug at my heart and I responded, almost without thinking, in the same way that a child will instinctively run to their father's arms. 

But in my teens, when I began to think about the process of "finding God," I questioned whether I had really been able to make that choice without understanding more about the process at the time. My mother's diary had recorded the decision, and it was obvious from her description that it had meant something to me then.  The day after I prayed that simple prayer, I was telling everyone I met about it, and asking them if Jesus was in their heart too. But as a teen, it bothered me that I could not remember such an important decision.

I tend to take life pretty seriously, so I spent a year agonizing over whether or not I had "filled in all the blanks" on my "application for salvation!" Had I believed enough, repented enough, committed enough to really "make" it happen?  Was there something important I had missed in the process that would invalidate the application?

Again, it was God who reached out to "find" me in my distress.  One day at the end of that year I was reading my Bible and one verse seemed to literally jump off the page at me.  In John 15:16 Jesus says to his disciples: "You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that you should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain. . ." 

That day I felt God speak that truth into my heart. I realized that our "finding" God is always initiated by Him, and it's completed by Him.  It's not what we do, but it's what He did, and does, for us. I chose John 15:16 as my life verse, and it settled my angst about my eternal destiny at that time.

I had other anxieties to wrestle with during my growing up years however.  When I was seven years old, my father was killed at work, and the trauma was so extreme for me that I suffered what would probably be called PTSD today.  I remember dreaming, one night shortly after his death, that he was crawling on the low roof of our house and a bear was trying to reach up and get him.  The dream ended before that happened, but I knew my father would lose that battle.  The thought that he was not all powerful after all pushed me gently toward the understanding that only in God could I find security.  All through my childhood and even into my adult life, as I lived with the grief and insecurity, I found myself forced to lean on the steady, gentle sense that an unchanging Heavenly Father was with me and loved me.  So my faith grew.

My faith met another challenge when I was a young adult.  Up until then I had been surrounded by Christian thought.  I'd graduated from a Christian high school and gone on to take two years of Bible studies at a Christian college before I found myself out of money and needing to move on to a public university.

I'd not known much about other religions or beliefs up until that time, and my first year in university was an eye-opener. I had entered the secular world being confident that God would protect me from all the erroneous philosophies that would challenge my faith. Then I got a job as secretary to the newly formed Philosophy department at Northern Arizona University, and I spent the next three years in very close association with professors who worked hard to enlighten me about the "real" Truth.

I remember thinking, at one point, that it was like all my life I had been walking up a hill following one road.  It was the only road.  Then I got to the top of the hill and looked down the other side and saw that there were many roads, and I began to wonder how I could be so sure that my road was the only right one.  It might just be the one I had grown up believing because I didn't know better. 

The big, seemingly insurmountable problem that brought me to this point of doubt is one that brings many people to question whether or not there is a God.  It's a universal question, and it's very hard to answer:  

If there is a good God, then why is there evil in the world? 

I could not answer that question and it made me really think.  It also scared me a little. I had built my whole life--my whole identity--on my belief in God. If he did not exist, that meant I had been building on a false premise and I would have to rethink everything I had ever believed, even who I really was.  

I had a decision to make at that point.  I had to decide whether my faith was the most important thing to me, or knowing the truth.  If my faith was false, would I be willing to give it up?  

It didn't take me long to decide that Truth had to be the most important thing.  I had always loved Truth, and I wasn't willing to keep on believing a lie just because it was comfortable and comforting to me.  So, in my mind, I actually let go of my Christian faith so I could objectively investigate what was actually true.  

But when I did that, it also didn't take me long to find my answer, because once I embraced the idea that the existence of evil disproves the existence of a good God,  I found myself confronted with an opposite question:  

If there is no God, then how do we explain the existence of good in the world? 

It is hard to explain "evil" if there is a good God, but it seemed to me that it would be impossible to explain "good" if there wasn't a good God.  I came to believe that Good is the reality.  Evil is just the absence of that reality.

After deciding that there had to be a good God, it was an easy step for me to see Christianity as being God's way of eliminating the evil. The Christian message made sense to me on a whole different level.  If evil separates us from the good, it's no wonder that "finding" God is so hard.  So hard, in fact, that the initiation of our discovery of God has to come from him.  I began to see that all those other roads going down the hill were only human constructs--human endeavors to "find" God. But Christianity was different.  Christianity was God reaching down to find us.

Some people say that their logical thinking has led them away from a belief in God, but in my case, it was logical thinking that led me to him in the end.  I experienced my "crisis of faith" and came out on the other side being even more convinced that the faith that had tugged at my heart when I was a baby was a true one, and to this day I am convinced that Christianity is the only logical explanation for it all.

Pascal once said that there is a God-shaped vacuum in every heart that can only be filled by him. Maybe all the brokenness and disconnectedness we feel in our world can be explained by that statement. 

I'm glad that God knocked on the door of my heart when I was too young to ponder too much about things.  Sometimes it is easier for a child to respond to God, before intellectual abilities cloud the truth. It's harder for smart people, who are older, educated and confident, to by-pass their internal critic when seeking spiritual reality. I do believe in logic, but I have found it can only take us so far in discovering truth about God. When we get to the edge of that cliff, we have to recognize the limitations of our own understanding, and reach out, and let God "find" us.

On Stepping Off the Path

At this stage of my life, I find that what seems just a slight bit of disobedience on my part puts a damper on my enjoyment of God's presence in my life.

When that cloud passes between me and the Son, it's a sign that something is wrong, and it always eventually brings me back to the source of the problem.  Then I can acknowledge the thing that is in the way, ask God to forgive me, and immediately bask in the sense of his Presence again.

He has promised never to leave me or forsake me, so I can count on it that he is present always, just like I can know that the sun always shines above the clouds on dark days.

So when it feels like he has moved away, it's really only that there's a cloud between us.  And he is always standing by, ready and willing to blow it away.  He just waits for us to ask.

David's 3000-year-old songs are universally true.  They are as useful to us today as they were to him back then.

Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.  Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me.  Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit to sustain me.

Psalm 51:10-12

 

Death: Google It

Apparently, the keyword, "death," has been showing up in Google searches a lot recently. It's no wonder. Death has been pretty much in our faces over the last three months.

And that's not necessarily a bad thing.

When things are going well for us we tend to live in the moment, and living in the present is a good thing to do--as long as living in the present moment doesn't interfere with our making plans for a good future.

It's funny that we are keen to plan for a happy retirement, but it doesn't occur to us to plan for a happy afterlife.  Death comes after retirement. And sometimes it takes us by surprise: for some of us, death will come before retirement. In any case, death is inevitable for all of us, and so it's worth doing some serious thinking about.

It's good to enjoy the present, but it's also good to plan for the future, not just the near future, but also for our ultimate future.

We probably avoid thinking about death, and what might come after, because we feel there's really nothing we can do about it. It's all a big mystery and we assume that means we should just ignore it.

Death is mysterious, for sure, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't explore that mystery. You might have noticed that Christians are more serene in the midst of the COVID 19 turmoil around us. They are less perturbed about the thought of death than others. There's a reason for that. Christians believe that God has given us information about death and the afterlife, and has urged us to prepare for it. 

In fact, God has provided the opportunity for a good afterlife for all of us. He's made a happy afterlife a free gift. All we have to do is choose to receive it.

Christians believe that, because God loves us, He has provided for us, through Jesus' life and death, the ultimate afterlife insurance policy.  Christians are less worried about death because they believe God's promise that if we put our faith in Jesus we will live "happily ever after."

This sounds simplistic.  But what if the simple answer is the true one? What if the answer to a happy afterlife is so simple a child can grasp it? Maybe the answer is worth pursuing?

Today's suggested Bible reading explains why Christians are able to relax into the present difficult situation, as well as into their future destination. It explains the process by which God has made eternal happiness available to us all.

Click on this hyperlink to read the explanation:  Our Eternal Hope

Should We Fear The End of The World As We Know It?

Some years ago, Jerry Jenkins and Tim LeHaye released a series of books called Left Behind.  The movie eventually followed, and it scared the hell out of some people.  The movie portrays a world thrown into chaos by the instant disappearance of a large part of its population.

The story works because it's intriguing to imagine the chaos that would occur if that many people, all over the world, instantly ceased to exist.  It's only a story, of course.  A preposterous one.  We shake our heads at the gullibility of movie-goers, but people who saw the movie were shaking in their boots.

There have always been naysayers--those who question the-end-of-the-world-as we-know-it.  They say, "Where is this coming he promised? Ever since our fathers died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation." 

II Peter 3:4

So far the questioners have been right.  The world has not ended.  Yes, there have been frightening events.  But every time a catastrophe happens the world hiccups, rights itself, and goes on as before.  So why should we fear the end of the whole world?

Christians say we should fear the end of the world because God says it will end. The end is not yet, but it's still predicted, and, according to the Bible, it will literally be earth-shattering when it does come:

"But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare."

II Peter 3:10

A Warning to be Heeded?

It's beginning to look like this warning should not be taken lightly.  Yes, the world has survived, for millennia, but there's no natural law that says it will go on forever. In fact there are serious indications that it might not.  

For the first time in recorded history, we have the technological capability to destroy the whole global community. We are no longer dealing with hiccups. Disasters that used to spread out in gentle ripples now hit us more like tidal waves that wash up on the shores of our own beachfront properties.  The bad things that happen in our world happen to us, individually and collectively as a human race, and those bad things continue to happen. 

Any one of them could be the last of the world as we know it.

So should we fear the end of the world as we know it?  It's a question the questioners question.  But maybe it's time we started questioning the questioners.

Thankfully, there is one good reason why we don't have to worry about the end of the world as we know it.  God's amazing grace gives us a warning.  There are reasons to fear, of course.  That's why John Newton says, in his famous hymn: "Twas grace that taught my heart to fear." It's God's grace that causes our hearts to fear, because that fear, if we confront the reality of it, can lead us to the only One who has the power and authority to relieve those fears.

For God loved the world so much that He gave us His Son, that whoever believes in Him will not perish but will have everlasting life.

The story of Amazing Grace

Deep Thoughts in Times Like This

In times like these, I begin to think about the hard questions. 

Like....

What is the worst thing that could happen to me with this virus?

What am I most afraid of?

The worst thing would be that I could die, or someone I love could die. 

            Death is the ultimate evil thing, right?

So what would happen to me if I died?  

Would I survive somewhere after death? 

And would it be a happy place or a not so happy one? 

If I were to survive death, and find myself standing before the Creator of the universe, what would I say to convince Him that I should be allowed into heaven?

            I would probably tell Him that I have been a good person. 

But what if He probed a bit.  What if He said, "How good were you?"

            I could say, "Well, I was a lot better person than Donald Trump." 

Hmm.  That might not be saying a whole lot.

            I could say, "Well, I've been better than most people actually.  

            I've done lots of good things and I certainly haven't done any really evil things. 

            I'm over 50% good.  Way over."

            So I've probably made a passing grade.

But what if there is no grade?

What if it's just, "Are you good or not?" 

How good is good enough?

But the Creator is supposed to be good too, right?  He cares about people.  And He should appreciate all that goodness He would see in me.  

Maybe He would say, 

"Yes, you're right.  You've been pretty good.  In fact, there's only one or two little tiny sins I ever remember you committing.  A little lie or two.  Oh, yes, and that small bit of mean gossip you passed on about your coworker. 

But those little sins would not even show up under a microscope. The rest of you is really clean.

I think you're probably clean enough to enter heaven."

(Whew.  What a relief.)

"I'm sure one little microscopic bit of sinful virus won't amount to much. So we'll overlook that.  

Welcome into my perfect home."

           

The Voices in Your Head are Lying

The voices in your head hate you. 
They hate you because God loves you, and they hate God.  
The voices in your head want to destroy you.  
That's why they tell you to destroy yourself.

The lying voices in your head tell you that no one cares about you. 

The Truth: You may cast all your cares upon God, because He cares about you. 

The lying voices say that no one understands you. 

The Truth: God searches out your heart and He knows you.

The lying voices say you have no hope; 
that life will not get better for you; 
that it will only get worse.

The Truth: God knows the plans that He has for you, and they are plans to prosper you and give you good things.

Don't listen to the voices.  
Tell them to go away.  
Jesus has given you the right to do that.  
Speak the name, Jesus, to the voices and they will leave. 
Then look around you for a person who can help you overcome the voices; 
go to that person and share your story with them.

God says,  I have loved you with an everlasting love.