Please write this one word on my heart

Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. John 15:4-5

This is Nicole’s word.  It dances across her room.  Bursts out from page after page of her journals.  It’s even the password on her college debt.  A reminder of what is true.  One word that sums up the Law and the Prophets to their very essence.  

Apart from Me, you can do nothing.  

So please don’t even try.  It’s quite ugly, and more often than not, does more harm than good.  

I simply cannot produce apart from Him.  Therefore.  Abide.

Out front with the broken drawers and splintered particle board

If anyone does not abide in me he is thrown away like a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned.  John 15:6

It is Brush and Bulky trash pickup next week, so the heaps are beginning to build in front of the houses along the street. Chopped out prickly pear cactus, armloads of dry grassy weeds and most of all spiny mesquite branches. Personally I can wax eloquently about the honey mesquite with its darkly curving boughs twisting upward echoed by strong roots reaching downward, sucking up every last drop of water. But once it’s chopped, it is only good for the fire.  Well, that’s what I think.  The weeks building up to Brush and Bulky are always a little tense around the Voelkel compound, as different family members define “useless and good for nothing” differently.  The pile out front is smaller than some of us would like after others have sifted through it hopefully.  And the beat goes on.

However, things are perfectly clear here.  If the branch is not connected to the vine, it cannot produce fruit.  And it is useless and good for nothing.  And while discussions can spin around about eternity security and “If what he has built survives, he will receive his reward. If it is burned up, he will suffer loss; he himself will be saved, but only as one escaping through the flames” the big point of the story is the fruit.  The “faith without works is dead,” point.  

Thus, the Spirit reminds me that if the love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, meekness, temperance, faith is lacking, I need to do something about it.  Immediately.  Drop my nets, drop my tax table, drop my serving dishes.  

Abide.

Like the Israelites before me, I am a stiff-necked people.  And like Moses, I ask, “If your Presence does not go with me, do not send me up from here.” 

And the LORD replied, “My Presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.”

Abide.

If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples. As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love.If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love. These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full. John 15:7-11

And joy.  Joy is the point of abiding.  In full.  

Beyond a mumbled grace

Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. John 14:1

So I was pretty much soaring off the crabby charts.  Writing irate but of course fully justified letters to well-intentioned but misguided souls before the sun had started leaking through the many cracks in our front door.  

And in the midst of my three-point outlines with lots of supporting evidence and more than a few finely-honed words, God whacked me upside the head.  And brought to mind and heart a wondering question from Nicole, just wondering.  

So I went back to 1000 Gifts: Dare to live fully right where you are by Anne Voskamp and the story of the ten lepers and the one, the heathen, who returned to give thanks.  And it was this act of faith, this kneeling in gratitude, which made him whole.  Whole beyond the you-are-clean-and-have-the-priest-check-it-out whole, but soza whole.  

The Greek word soza is beyond whole.  It means saved, saved from who we are, from all of our bleak brokenness, into true wellness, complete wellness.  To live soza is to live the full life, the abundant life promised by Jesus, for which He came.  

We only live the full life if our faith gives thanks.  Thanksgiving is the evidence our our acceptance of what He gives.

If the church is in Christ, its initial act is always an act of thanksgiving, of returning the world to God.

He who sacrifices thank offerings honors me, and he prepares the way so that I may show him the salvation of God.  Psalm 50:33

The act of sacrificing thank offerings to God—even for the bread and cup of cost, cancer and crucifixion—this prepares the way for God to show us Hs fullest salvation from bitter, angry, resentful lives and all sin that estranges us from Him.  At the Eucharist, Christ breaks his heart to heal ours—Christ, the complete accomplishment of our salvation, and the miracle of eucharisteo never ends. Thanksgiving is what precedes the miracle of that salvation being worked out in our lives. 

Because I wasn’t taking everything in my life and falling at His feet and thanking Him.  I sit still, blinded.  Sitting all those years in church but my soul holes had never fully healed.  

Eucharisteo, the Greek word with the hard meaning and the harder meaning to live—this is the only way from empty to full.

I may even have known that change requires more than merely thinking warm and fuzzy thoughts about a door and a way through and that Greek word, eucharisteo, holding the mystery to the full life and the ever after.  

How in the world, for the sake of my joy, do I learn to use eucharisteo to overcome my ugly and self-destructive habit of ingratitude (that causes both my cosmic and daily fall) with the saving habit of gratitude—that would lead me back to deep God-communion?

And Jesus took the bread gave thanks, and broke it, and gave it to them.  

Naming is Edenic.

I name gifts and I go back to the Garden and God in the beginning and who first speaks a name and lets what is come into existence.  This naming is how the emptiness of space fills: the naming of light and land and sea.  And the first man’s first task is to name.  Adam completes creation with his Maker through the act of naming creatures, releasing land from chaos, from the teeming, indefinable mass. 

All I can see, think is that the whim of writing one thousand gratitudes, the naming of the moments, is a holy work.  

In naming what is right before me, that which I’d otherwise miss, the invisible becomes visible.

The name that spans my inner emptiness fill in the naming.

I name.  I know the face I face.

God’s.  God is in the details.  God in is the moment.  God is in all that blurs by in a life.  God.

It’s so frustratingly common—it’s offensive.

Driving nails into a life always is.

Paul said twice that he had to learn it—learn to be content and thankful.  And learning requires practice—sometimes even mind-numbing practice.  C. S. Lewis said it too, to a man looking for fullest life: “If you think of this world as place intended for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: but if you think of it as a place of training and correction and it’s not so bad.”

Practice until it becomes second nature, the first skin.  Practice is the training, and training is the essence of transformation.  Practice, practice, practice.  Hammer, hammer, hammer.

I know there is poor and hideous suffering, and I’ve seen the hungry and guns that go to war.  I have lived pain, and my life can tell, I only deepen the wound of the world when I neglect to give thanks for the early light dappled through leaves and the heavy perfume of roses in early July and the song of crickets on humid nights and the rives that run and the stars that rise and the rain that falls and the good things that a good God gives. When we let joy penetrate our cracked and dry places, let joy soak into our broken skin and deep crevices, life grows.

This dare to write down a thousand things I love is really a dare to name all of the ways that He loves me.  To move into His presence and listen to His love unending and know the grace uncontainable.  This is the value of the miracles.  The only thing that can change us, the world, is this—all His love. 

I am on number 200.  

Beyond a mumbled grace.  Naming His love, one moment after one moment.  Naming gives power and truth.  

When Daniel knew that the document had been signed, he went to his house where he had windows in his upper chamber open toward Jerusalem. He got down on his knees three times a day and prayed and gave thanks before his God, as he had done previously.  Daniel 6:10-11

And all of Daniel’s wisdom and influence and true living.  Where did it come from?  Just wondering.

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.  J. R. R. Tolkien

Floating in the great pool of His peace

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.  John 14:26

And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful.  Colossians 3:15

Ah.  

To let the peace of Christ rule.  Rip out all the busy fretful thoughts as so many weeds popping up in monsoon season.  Rip them lest they take root and choke out the fruit which springs forth from a life filled with His Spirit.  The love.  The joy.  The peace.

And be thankful.  

Curling up with my bowl of beans

Let not your hearts be troubled.  John 14:1

And next to him was Shammah, the son of Agee the Hararite. The Philistines gathered together at Lehi, where there was a plot of ground full of lentils, and the men fled from the Philistines. But he took his stand in the midst of the plot and defended it and struck down the Philistines, and the Lord worked a great victory.  2 Samuel 23:11-12

Take a stand.  And the LORD will do His work.  

We probably looked more than a little out of place, but everyone pretended not to notice the old people, me and my parents, in the Elevate Youth Church at Victory last night.  And it was okay if my dad fell asleep sometimes during the service no matter how loudly the drummer pounded, how high the kids jumped, and how brightly the swirling lights reflected in a million sparks.  Because everyone was wholeheartedly focused on one thing, worshipping the Glorious One.  

And I wish I could remember more of the message about mighty men of valor.  And being more than a conquerer and the great illustration of receiving the bounty from the hand of the conquerer, who does the actual fighting.  And surrendering to His dream.  

But I do remember that my calling is to take a stand in the field.  And He will do His work.  

And I need to own this field.  Even if it is just a bunch of lentil bushes.  And if I don’t own it in the depths of my heart, ask Him to fill me with love and passion to where He has placed me in this moment.  In the midst of it all, to stand firm.  

And once again the weight was lifted.  And once again, yet once again, I hear His voice: ‘Come to me, all you who labor and are overburdened, and I will give you rest. Shoulder my yoke and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. Yes, my yoke is easy and my burden light.’

It's not the gold standard

A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. John 13:34

At first, I wonder, “What is so new about this?  Haven’t we been commanded to love before?  Isn’t that the Golden Rule?”

But no this isn’t the Golden Rule— to love others as ourselves, this is a much higher standard.  Our love for ourselves is fraught with misconceptions, instability and double-mindedness, and is often includes bulwarks against past hurts. Big ugly cement walls.  And that is pretty much how we do love our neighbor.  Inconsistently and with lots of foolishness tossed in.

But this new commandment is radically different.  Not to love our neighbor as myself, but to love him exactly in the same way as Christ has loved me, kneeling at my feet in tender service with no reservation or position, in all wisdom and grace and mercy.  THAT is how I am to love my neighbor. 

By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

Not my feet only but also my hands and my head

"Never, while the world lasts," said Peter, "shall you wash my feet." 

"If I do not wash you," replied Jesus, "you have no share with me."  John 13:8

Nicole has been dragging a book behind her all around the world, spending an entire year looking at life through the lens of Listening.  Now it has not always been fun to have this task ever-present haunting the to do list, although it has been a sweet gift to be able to pay for all of those foreign vistas, looking down on swirling clouds and glimmering ancient towers.  

And things are bubbling up to a crescendo.  Sifting and sorting and swelling.  And yesterday this word was spoken: 

God’s message to His people through His prophets, His priests, His kings, and finally though Jesus Christ, has been that of a lover: “Come, my beloved, and be my Bride.”  The Bible is the longest going love-story that has ever been written, and is being written today on the hearts of humanity. The groom has given everything for His love, and is on bended knee, asking, “Will you come and make one life with me?”  We don’t truly understand, or we would never see “works” as an appropriate response. Works tremble and shudder, and hoarsely whisper back, “I washed the dishes. I folded the laundry. I walked the dog. Am I good enough yet? Will you accept me if I clean up the rest of the house?”  Servile fear has never even heard the words of love that were spoken from the heart of tenderness and bloodshed. It’s a response that crushes her lover, as He longs for her to recognize the freedom and value He has crowned her with through His ardor.

Can I accept His love? Offered on bended knee?  

When someone is washing my feet, I really can’t do much.  I certainly can’t dash off here or there or interrupt and help out a bit.  I just sit there.  Withs all unmerited humility.  

Freely given with no dangling strings to bind me and trip me up.  Over and over this week that has been the message: I love you.  And that is enough.  To walk in the way of love.  

And all of that stuff and bother that Paul lists out in Ephesians is a description of oh-by-the-way-this-is-what-love-looks-like, being light in the LORD, cleansed in His love.  

And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge —that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.  Ephesians 3:17-18