My singing Lord

 

Nothing scares me like pain. Physical pain, emotional pain, mental pain, you name it, it terrifies me. I’ve learned long ago that numbing it doesn’t make it go away, ignoring it or pretending it’s not there just makes it come up in ghastly dreams even worse than the reality of it. So that wasn’t a viable option for me. Instead, I’ve chosen to cling onto The Only One that can help. Pain, sneaky thing that it is, cared nothing for my resolve, so throughout the years has still come in all shapes and forms. Oh boy, did it come. The fact that I was clinging onto Him didn’t make it less painful one bit, any more than holding someone’s hand through an amputation doesn’t lessen the experience. But it gave meaning to my pain and that meaning echoed in eternity. Karl Marx said that religion is the opium of the masses because he thought it numbs the pain of true oppression coming from the governments. Naïve little Marx, how wrong he was. It numbs nothing, on the contrary it makes your senses even more heightened, and it increases the pain because the believer is in a predicament the atheist will never face. You’re holding onto The Almighty, The One who can turn a triangle into a square and when He doesn’t, a believer must face both his pain and a sense of betrayal while still choosing to trust. God doesn’t sedate you through pain until better times come along, instead He uses it for His purposes if you have the courage to let Him. Is it pretty? Absolutely not. Does it work? In the long run yes. I’m not going to lie though, I know people that couldn’t reconcile in themselves how a loving God that can do all things allows tragedy to happen, so they conclude He’s either not good or unwilling to help. I can’t fault them for their conclusions because it takes a truly insane person according to the human standards to determine that God is good regardless of their loss.

My most recent encounter with pain hasn’t been as I’d hoped. More accurately it has punched me right into a corner. It didn’t come unexpectedly. I prepared for it. I trained for it; Lord only knows how I’ve trained. It still knocked me out. I was under no illusion that it wouldn’t. The magnitude of the spot she occupied in my heart was bound to paralyze me once she was gone. I knew it was coming like a person whose plane is about to crash knows it’s imminent. So, I did what one does when they know they’re about to hit the ground and chances for survival are minimal, I locked in my seatbelt. I took all of God’s promises and wrapped them around my heart and waited for the impact, planning to survive if possible. I knew I wasn’t going to be one of those inspirational people that would give testimony about their plane crash and people marvel at their fortitude, I only hoped at the end I wouldn’t turn against The Only One who could help (Hosea 13:9). Once I crashed, I lost all sense of time and space. I couldn’t remember a single promise. I’m not sure I could have recited John 3:16 if pressed to do so. My soul’s ears were ringing with a dreadful refrain, “now what?!” I was aware I was still alive, still breathing but so empty and so alone that I couldn’t remember a time when good thoughts and feelings were filling that space. I felt abandoned. By her, by God, even by myself. Like a part of me has decided to flee the crash site because it didn’t recognize the crazy eyes of the survivor. I still prayed, I still read, I still functioned, but meaningless rituals were all I could offer. I didn’t outright rebel, I just checked out emotionally. There was no fist shaken towards heaven, just a closing of my eyes perhaps.

I kept hearing inside myself, “Is this it? Are you done now? Did this plane crash finish you off? Where’s your professed affection for Him now? Is this the sum of all your faith and hope? Is this what you are now, your pain? Are you really done now?” I had to answer it truthfully. After all I’ve made a deal with myself that I will not lie to myself. So, my answer was, “Obviously I’m not done! I’m just sulking. I can’t blame Him for this. I can’t blame her for dying on me and leaving me behind. I can’t blame life like some random idiot. I know better than that. I can’t blame myself because I haven’t caused it. I can’t blame the devil no matter how tempting that is and I really want to blame something as utterly absurd as that is. So no, I’m not done, only sulking…”

Then to my surprise, once the awareness of life has returned to me, I noticed my seatbelt still held. That it didn’t stop the plane from crashing, but I was still in my seat. Behold my seatbelt:

“Sing aloud, O daughter of Zion; shout, O Israel! Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter of Jerusalem! The LORD has taken away the judgments against you; he has cleared away your enemies. The King of Israel, the LORD, is in your midst; you shall never again fear evil. On that day it shall be said to Jerusalem: “Fear not, O Zion; let not your hands grow weak. The LORD your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing.“ (Zephaniah 3:14-17)

Sing? Amid sheer sadness? Sing? With a broken voice? While I can only groan in pain? How can I sing The Lord’s song in a strange land? (Psalm 137:4) How can I sing when I am nowhere near where I should be? Answer: Because I have peace with God. Because He’s not holding a record of my sins against me, instead He took the record of my sins and nailed it to cross (Colossians 2:14) and silenced every tongue that rose up against me to accuse me. Because instead of justice I received mercy and pardon. That is reason enough to sing with a chocked voice, because He took away the judgement against me and cleared away my enemies.

“The King of Israel, the LORD, is in your midst; you shall never again fear evil.” In the midst of my crash site where I lie alone and scared, where no one dares to approach, my King is in the midst of my disaster. And although He doesn’t promise that evil won’t come, He does promise to give me a heart that will never again fear plane crashes.  

“On that day it shall be said to Jerusalem: “Fear not, O Zion; let not your hands grow weak. The LORD your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing.“

Fear not although there’s every human reason to be afraid. Let not your hands grow weak even if right now it feels you’ll never be able to move a finger again. Why? Because The Lord, my God is right next to me. My God, not some lucky charm that has failed to protect me, not some principle or notion that I hoped could sustain me during a mental earthquake. The Lord, my God, The Creator of everything that is seen and unseen is right in the midst of my crash site. Not to observe the calamity or to take note of where everything landed, but a mighty One who will save. He will rejoice over me with gladness. Not just tolerating my presence, not reluctantly, not because the terms of the covenant demand it, no! He will rejoice over me with gladness. He will quiet me by His love when I want to scream, “where were You?!” He will open my eyes to understand that there’s no reason for Him to be here, but that the same love that pushed Him to the cross, the same love that pushed Him to look for me through all my mental meanderings where I’ve managed to lose myself time and time again, THAT same love brought Him amid my plane crash. He will exult over me with loud singing. God will sing! His joy will be so abundant that it will make Him sing. I know that when He laid the foundation of the earth “the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy” (Job 38:7). It’s not recorded if it even made Him smile, but for me, for you, for everyone that trusts in Him, He rejoices so much that He breaks into song! And not a timid song, loudly! That thought alone makes me weep. That the prospect of Him saving me makes Him overjoyed. Me! Useless, pathetic, unprofitable, fickle, doubleminded, me! That instead of throwing his hands up in frustration declaring, “you’re hopeless!” my redemption brings Him more joy than it did to create the world. If that’s not love, then I don’t know what is.

I don’t need for things to be a fairy tale on this earth, I know they can’t be. I don’t need to be spared the pain and the tears. It’s enough to know that my God sings for joy over me. My broken heart will heal. One day I’ll see her again. Maybe I’ll live through more plane crashes. But I know He’ll find me in them all.

by Cristina Pop

Formless and void

 

“The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.” – Genesis 1:2

This is the verse I find most encouraging lately. The Bible is filled with encouraging, mind-blowing promises and declarations of love from God. Still, I find myself going to Genesis 1:2 to draw strength. Why? Because there was a moment in time or outside it, when the earth was formless and void and drowned in utter darkness and The Spirit of God was hovering over that humongous nothingness and darkness. Before the earth had form or sense, before the earth came out of the waters that were drowning it, before the earth was productive, before the earth even knew it could be productive, STILL, The Spirit of God was moving over that chaos. Not aimlessly. It was moving to act out on the earth what God would speak with His mouth. It was an intentional hovering.

My inner world feels like it’s in chaos. Formless and void. Darkness and gloom, but the same Spirit of God that was hovering over the face of the waters, is hovering over my chaos. The same Spirit that brought into existence everything that God commanded, will execute in me God’s will. Even more, “the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you”. (Romans 8:11)

I might feel like this is the end. It’s probably gonna feel like the end for a long time, yet I’m not without hope. “But I am not ashamed, for I know whom I have believed, and I am convinced that he is able to guard until that day what has been entrusted to me.” (2 Timothy 1:12)

by Cristina Pop

About love - Some quotes by C. S. Lewis

 

“God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them. He creates the universe, already foreseeing - or should we say "seeing"? there are no tenses in God - the buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven through the mesial nerves, the repeated incipient suffocation as the body droops, the repeated torture of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath's sake, hitched up. If I may dare the biological image, God is a "host" who deliberately creates His own parasites; causes us to be that we may exploit and "take advantage of" Him. Herein is love. This is the diagram of Love Himself, the inventor of all loves.”

― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

 

“Nature never taught me that there exists a God of glory and of infinite majesty. I had to learn that in other ways. But nature gave the word glory a meaning for me. I still do not know where else I could have found one. I do not see how "fear" of God could have ever meant to me anything but the lowest prudential efforts to be safe, if I had never seen certain ominous ravines and unapproachable crags. And if nature had never awakened certain longings in me, huge areas of what I can now mean by "love" of God would never, so far as I can see, have existed.”

― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

 

 

“Of all arguments against love, none makes so strong an appeal to my nature as "Careful! This might lead you to suffering."

To my nature, my temperament, yes. Not to my conscience. When I respond to that appeal I seem to myself to be a thousand miles away from Christ. If I am sure of anything I am sure that His teaching was never meant to confirm my congenital preference for safe investments and limited liabilities. I doubt whether there is anything in me that pleases Him less. And who could conceivably begin to love God on such a prudential ground-- because the security (so to speak) is better? Who could even include it among the grounds for loving?”

― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

 

“He has impressed upon our natures or states—must be an imitation of God incarnate: our model is the Jesus, not only of Calvary, but of the workshop, the roads, the crowds, the clamorous demands and surly oppositions, the lack of all peace and privacy, the interruptions. For this, so strangely unlike anything we can attribute to the Divine life in itself, is apparently not only like, but is, the Divine life operating under human conditions.”

― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

 

“Medicine labours to restore 'natural' structure or 'normal' function. But greed, egoism, self-deception, and self-pity are not abnormal in the same sense as astigmatism or a floating kidney. For whom, in Heaven's name, would describe as natural or normal any man from whom these failings were wholly absent? 'Natural,' if you like, in a quite different sense; arch natural, unfallen. We have only seen one such Man. And he was not at all like the psychologist's picture of the integrated, balanced, adjusted, happily married, employed, popular citizen. You can't really be 'well adjusted' to your world if it says, 'you have a devil' and ends by nailing you up naked to a stake of wood.”

― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

 

“Every Christian would agree that a man’s spiritual health is exactly proportional to his love for God. But man’s love for God, from the very nature of the case, must always be very largely, and must often be entirely, a Need-love. This is obvious when we implore forgiveness for our sins or support in our tribulations. But in the long run it is perhaps even more apparent in our growing—for it ought to be growing—awareness that our whole being by its very nature is one vast need; incomplete, preparatory, empty yet cluttered, crying out for Him who can untie things that are now knotted together and tie up things that are still dangling loose.”

― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

 

“The very condition of having Friends is that we should want something else besides Friends. Where the truthful answer to the question "Do you see the same truth?" would be "I see nothing and I don't care about the truth; I only want a Friend," no Friendship can arise - though Affection of course may. There would be nothing for the Friendship to be about; and Friendship must be about something, even if it were only an enthusiasm for dominoes or white mice. Those who have nothing can share nothing; those who are going nowhere can have no fellow-travellers.”

― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

 

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”

― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves