Thursday, March 26, 2015

Let Him Clip the Chip

For eight weeks I held my broken elbow close to my heart. I held it in front of my chest for the first few hours after my late-night injury, waiting for the snow to stop and the morning to start so I could get to the emergency room and have it examined. For weeks after my resultant surgery it was first a cloth sling and then a metal brace locked in one position that me no choice but to hold my arm in similar fashion. And yet it wasn't the physical restrictions that kept me from using my arm so much as it was the words I heard whispered in my ear repeatedly during that time, telling me that my ability to do the things I most enjoyed had been stolen away by one misstep on an icy parking lot.

I didn't just listen to those words; I believed them.

My mindset became one of inactivity in the physical realm. Repeatedly when my husband asked my to do even simple tasks my first reaction was to express my inability because of my injury. But God was having none of it. Before I could get the whole sentence out He would stop me in the middle of the second word. Thus my “I can'ts were trimmed to the “I can” response God knew to be true. Still disbelieving, I reluctantly gave each task a try and was usually surprised at the result...all because God didn't allow me to voice the lie that was waiting on my lips to defeat me.

How often have we likewise allowed an emotional injury of some kind prevent us from working in God's house? There are those who have suffered incredible blows in their walk through life, the magnitude of which has simply taken their spiritual breath away. But others of us have taken even little irritations and petty aggravations to heart and listened to the enemy's lies about lost love and purpose in the spiritual realm. We have allowed a chip on our shoulder to put us on the shelf, spiritually speaking, when God has the power to turn our situation around for our greater good and the good of the Kingdom, if given the chance. His ability is limited only by our belief in His desire to do so and His power inside of us.

Even once freed from external medical hardware, my arm remained bent in a frozen and locked position. When weeks of physical therapy failed to release it, it seemed to me to be time to be getting back to work, despite the fact that my arm remained locked in a ninety-degree angle. Surely I could just make do. But my doctor refused to sign off on that. He said there was no way I could function in my post with such a limited range of mobility. When additional x-rays revealed that a small piece of bone had grown up behind the elbow joint, he scheduled further surgery to clip the bone chip that was preventing the full extension of my arm.

The Great Physcician says the same thing when we are tempted to cut short our spiritual recovery times and simply get back to work in the Kingdom. He knows when there's further work to be done, however anxious we may be to avoid going deeper into issues that are painful. He writes His prescription in His Word: “let endurance and steadfastness and patience have full play and do a thorough work, so that you may be [people] perfectly and fully developed [with no defects], lacking in nothing” (James 1:4 AMP). God simply doesn't want us to come up short in any area of our existence. He wants us to be all that He knows we can be.

But there is more to it than that. I had already been feeling strain in my shoulder as it struggled to take up the slack for my limited reach. And likewise the church struggles as a whole when some parts of the body have to function outside their skill sets to cover for those who are currently unwilling or unable to function in the gifts they were given. Every piece of the puzzle is necessary, every member of the body has a place and a part to play if the church is to minister effectively. Simply put, you have a job to do, and nobody else was given the exact tools to accomplish it but you. The Kingdom of God needs you to be fully operational in the tasks you were assigned.

And so God works with our words, as He did with mine. A huge part of our problem is simply unbelief in His ability to overcome our obstacles. He stops us short in our “I can't”s by replacing them with His “But I can!” And when our I-won't-believe-it-till-I-see-it attitude gets in the way of our own recovery, He offers us the Cross as His ultimate proof.

We're not the first to struggle with issues of unbelief. Perhaps Jesus had doubting Thomas touch His scars so we too would believe He has the power to work through ours.

I can do all things through Christ who strengthen me.”
(Philippians 4:13 NKJV)

Wednesday, March 4, 2015

Raise Your Praise

Maybe it's because I've raised a family of poker enthusiasts that references to the game have come up a lot in my conversations with God of late. While not a gambler in any sense of the word, I'm willing to bet it hasn't happened by chance.

On a recent morning I was driving to town, and spread before me was a scene of magnificent beauty in the skies. The dark clouds on the horizon were pierced with shafts of light that spilled sunshine through the gray curtain that still hid the sun from view. A huge fan of sunbeams, I delighted in the sight, and knew that God was waiting in the wings of His stage in the heavenlies to see if I noticed the gift He had placed in my way.

I wonder if my response surprised Him as much as it did me. I said, “I see You, God, and I raise You five.” Then I lifted my left hand off the steering wheel, raised my hand high in praise and waved my five fingers before Him in worship.

What?! We both laughed. It was simply a wonderful way to start the day. Since then it's become a catch phrase between us, a way to tell God that I have seen and received a particular grace or gift from His hand, a personalized way to simply say thanks.

Saying “I'll see you and raise you” in response to a poker hand means that you accept the bet that is on the table and are raising it a stated amount. Outside of the game, the phrase is used when attempting to one-up a statement made by someone with a response of one's own.

Surely there is no way to match what God lays on the table before us each day, let alone improve on it in any way. All we can do is respond to what we see around us by calling it out specifically before Him and responding with praise and thanksgiving for the offering. Of course, it's easy to see God's hand in moments of beauty as described above; much more difficult when the goodness of God is hidden by difficulty or trouble of some kind.

In sending a card to a friend recently, I wrote that our hopes for the early Spring now seemed buried in a succession of February snowstorms, as surely as the crocuses she said were blooming in her backyard were now covered in a blanket of winter white. And likewise sometimes our hopes for seeing God come through in the serious life situations we are dealing with get buried in a barrage of in circumstances beyond our control. Hope, faith and belief in the goodness of God are lost to sight in the snowdrifts of doubt the devil loves to dump on us. We spend all our time trying to dig our way out, when our hearts should be looking for the Son to rise in their midst and simply melt them all away.

The answers we need come easy to an almighty God. It's the believing Him for them that is hard. Holding on to our faith in the goodness of God when there is no physical evidence in of the same in the circumstances surrounding us is immensely difficult. How awesome it would be for God to see me raise my hand in praise on a day when I didn't see the sky lit up with shafts of lights...when the dark clouds around me were instead just gray and heavy and menacing. What if I picked the moment when trouble is pressing in to say, “I'm raising my praise and my level in faith in You, because I know my troubles are no match for Your power”? Faith like that shoots light through the darkness and causes God to see and raise His hand in action, blessing us beyond our wildest imaginings. ..to the point that we don't even care about the situation at hand anymore, so taken are with by the new level of relationship we've found through it with Him.

As I slipped the card I was writing in the envelope, my eye caught sight of the the word “Spring” in the embossed DaySpring logo likewise just barely visible in the surrounding white paper. May the springtime my heart is longing for likewise be ever visible to the eyes of my spirit, despite the white of the current snow, causing my lips to say, “I see You, God, and I raise my praise.”

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
(Hebrews 11:1 KJV)
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