Here I am, Send Me

Each day I pray for divine appointments—for myself and for the missionaries and pastors in my ministry’s care.  You never know how you’re going to be led into a divine appointment, and you never know who will be your divine appointment.  Sometimes it is someone you know, sometimes it is a stranger, and sometimes the stranger becomes a friend as a result.  Sometimes my divine appointments are directly related to my ministry, but often it seems that I was the person who was handy for the Lord at the time.

Yesterday’s divine appointment was a handy one.  On the schedule all week we have known about a sing-along that was scheduled for yesterday afternoon.  And all week I was certain that I wouldn’t go because I’m not much of one for sing-alongs.  Then just half an hour before the sing-along, I had the urge to go to the common area for an afternoon cup of coffee.  I saw them arranging chairs for the sing-along, and it suddenly dawned on me that it would be a Christmas sing-along.  Now, do love singing Christmas Carols, so I decided to attend after all.

When it was over, I began to walk back toward the elevator to go to our apartment.  Joanne was also walking toward the elevator.  I don’t know Joanne very well because we don’t have much in common, besides living on the same floor.  What I do know about her is that she is a lousy bowler who curses loudly at every bad roll.  She drinks a lot, showing up sometimes for dinner drunk.  Her boyfriend, Phil, often spends the night in her apartment.  But I also know this about her, yesterday and also last Sunday, Joanne and Phil attended Sunday services at the residents’ chapel.

After the sing-along I could see that Joanne had been crying, and I knew that about a month ago she had lost her identical twin to cancer.  She had seemed to be handling it pretty well.  Then last week she suddenly shut herself up in her room and nobody but Phil had seen her.  Empty wine bottles began piling up in the recycling bin, and I knew that she was having a very hard time.  Phil told me that her niece had sent her 150 pictures from the funeral on Monday. Nobody but he had seen her since.  So I walked with her to the elevator, just making myself available for her to talk to.

People say unbelievably stupid things at funerals.  Things that they don’t even realize are cruel.  At her twin’s funeral last month her uncle said, “Today you buried half of yourself.”  I guess he thought he was being insightful, but the remark stung badly.  She wept as she told me and I could smell alcohol on her breath.  I don’t know how much she had been drinking, but her voice got louder and louder as she cried out in anguish: “This is so hard!  I don’t know how to do this!”  I said, “Joanne, you’ve got to turn that around: now you’ve got to live for her.”  And I added, “and you will stop self-medicating.” Her bloodshot eyes locked onto mine for a long moment.  And I prayed for her right there in the hall.  When we arrived at our floor, I pointed out our door and said, “If you need me, I’m right down the hall.”

I don’t know how Joanne’s story will end, but I do know this: Joanne seems to be reaching out to God, and God in response sent me.  God is good!

Beautiful God

This morning I was meditating on God’s beauty and goodness. Consider this: the most beautiful things and places on earth, whether natural or manmade, are only a pale reflection of His own great beauty. Likewise, everything good in life (friends, love, chocolate) is just a small glimpse of His own great goodness.

Take some time today to meditate on God’s beauty or to meditate on His great goodness. And give Him thanks and praise. God is good! I can’t overemphasize it: God is good!

Rescued by My Misfit Church

Two of Mom’s three dogs are “rescues,” that is that she got them from the pound instead of from breeders.  Rescues tend to be mixed breeds, and if not adopted, they will be euthanized.  In many ways, I can relate to rescues because I feel more like a mutt than a pedigreed purebred.  And like the dogs, I was under the sentence of death, but Jesus rescued me.

All my life I’ve felt like a misfit.  I didn’t know precisely what to call that feeling until I moved to Italy.  As a foreigner in Italy, I finally understood this misfit feeling to be feeling foreign.  Yes, all my life I’ve felt foreign in my own country, and even among my own family.  Peter Wagner in his amazing book, Your Spiritual Gifts can Help Your Church Grow, points out that this is a sign of a missionary gift and calling.

I moved to Asheville over a year ago, but in truth I have spent very little time living here.  During this time I have visited a few churches to which I had been invited, but mostly attending Mom’s church and going to Bible studies and services here in the retirement community.

The first church that I was invited to (the day after moving day) was the church next door.  It is a small, very friendly church and the worship style is chandelier-swinging—which I love.  I like worship that is uninhibited and free because then I know that the people behind me (I prefer sitting down front) aren’t shocked by my uninhibited show of love for my Lord.  I have visited some churches where I have gotten comments about the freedom of my worship.  One pair of teenage girls once told me, “Wow!  You just don’t care!”  That could be taken a number of ways, but I prefer to take it as a compliment.

Most of the time I live in Italy.  And because of my traveling lifestyle, even when I’m in the US, I haven’t had a whole lot of opportunities to attend this church or get to know its people.  Until now, that is!  Before going to the conference in Dallas, I attended a Sunday evening service (before Thanksgiving) in which each of us was asked to share what we are thankful to God for.  In hearing about what they were thankful for, I learned that almost everybody there was a rescue like me—rescued first by others in the church, and then by Jesus.  Many of them are misfits like me.

The associate pastor told me that the church’s mission is to help those people who have been wounded by bad church experiences.  Certainly there are a lot of those, not just in Asheville, but all over the US.  It certainly is good to know that there is a place where misfits can fit together and all of us can be rescued—by each other and by the Lord.  I love my misfit church!  God is good!

Devotional Journal

Today’s page from my Devotional Journal

At the end of August I bought a diary, and started recording the daily personal words that God was giving me.  Since the dates in the diary start about a month before I began keeping my devotional journal, I began inserting dreams on those blank pages.  That’s why the date on the page pictured in my post of November 4 (see Swedish Fish and the Nice Young Man says (in Italian) August 23.  (Tomorrow I will write about some of those dreams—stay tuned!)

Here’s how my devotional journal works: after prayer time, I always ask the Lord if He has a word for me for today, and He gives it to me like this: I get the impression in my mind (sometimes hearing His voice) of a verse.  For example, today’s word, He said in my mind: “Jonah 4:2.”  So I looked it up, having no idea what it said.  All I knew is that by the fourth chapter of Jonah, Nineveh had repented and been spared, and that Jonah sat outside of town, angry that God had spared those rotten Ninevites.  So here’s what it says:

O Lord, is this not what I said when I was yet in my country?  This is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that You are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster.

Forgiving Nineveh is no small thing when you understand how offensive sin is to God.  People sometimes think that the God of the Old Testament had a terrible temper and that His anger was way over the top.  But the reality is that sin is so vile and offensive to our Holy God that His justice cannot allow it to go unpunished.  The God of the Old Testament is the same as the God of the New Testament.  The difference is that Jesus took the punishment for our sins, so now we can enjoy God’s mercy.  See how Jonah describes Him in this verse: gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster.  That doesn’t sound like most people’s idea of the Old Testament God, but He is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

So, here’s what this verse means to me, personally: I have resolved the robbery issue as much as possible at this time, so this morning my mind went back to the thing with Barbara and Leo throwing me out of their house (see my recent post Kicked When I was Down).  Why go over the whole thing again?  Honestly, I would rather forget it and move on.  But here’s the thing, they involved a family member—one who has always been ready to think the worst of me.  I will have to go to family get-togethers with this person.  I’m not going to slink off like someone who was in the wrong, but family get-togethers with him could be very uncomfortable for me from now on.  Nor am I going to stop speaking to him, although I feel very threatened and defensive, and not at all ready to see him again.

I hate confrontation, but the passive-aggressive way that Barbara and Leo treated me was very hurtful.  And my family member’s willing involvement in that passive-aggression was very hurtful—even more so.  Nobody ever asked for or heard my side.  Then I found out that there was also gossip about me and this situation, and still my side has never been told.

So what to do?  I don’t want to ruin the next family gathering, but every meal at his house will leave me feeling scrutinized to see if I clear the table and wash the dishes.  Of course, I’ll have to—and promptly.  And if he tells me that I don’t have to wash dishes, then the whole thing could come exploding out of me.  I don’t want that, either, but my side has never been told.

Through this verse, I see the Jonah in me and my attitude.  I feel the Lord telling me that I must forgive.  Forgive them (which I have already done) and forgive him (which I’m trying to do).

What do I want?  I want to forgive, forget it, and move on.  I want my emotions to catch up with my intellectual decision to forgive.  I have learned that there are some people that I need to forgive every time they come to mind because the hurt goes so deep.  But I know that if I faithfully hold onto that decision to forgive, eventually, the hurt will be gone, and the offense forgotten.

Forgive like God, who truly forgets the offense.  God is good!

The Retroactive Power of Invisibility

“Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory for ever and ever. Amen,” (1 Timothy 1:17, emphasis mine).

I was surprised to realize this morning that I’ve never written about invisibility—not God’s invisibility, mine.  I remember seeing The Invisible Man when I was a kid.  And all the cartoon characters had to do was put on vanishing cream and *poof* they were invisible.  So as a kid, I was fascinated with the idea of invisibility.  I even had a strange belief (for a little while anyway) that if I couldn’t (or didn’t) see the other person, they couldn’t see me.  Obviously, I gave that up the first time that someone came up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder.  But invisibility was an idea that continued to fascinate me.

When I was about 35 years old, we lived in Durham, North Carolina, our house was in a good neighborhood that was just a few blocks away from the projects, with a major street that served as a boundary between the 2 neighborhoods.  Halloween saw lots of kids from the projects coming into our neighborhood to trick-or-treat, but there was never any trouble.  However, the businesses just a few blocks past our neighborhood were robbed constantly.  One morning I woke up very early, and just couldn’t get back to sleep.  So I went for a walk.  When I got to the road leading to the projects, I turned left—away from the projects and toward the businesses.

About a block away I saw 2 young men walking toward the projects—toward me, but on the other side of the street.  They looked like they were out looking for trouble, and I don’t say that just because they were black.  You can tell when someone’s up to no good, and although I don’t remember what they said as I got closer, I could hear that they were talking about robbery.  I quickly prayed, “Lord, if these 2 are looking to hurt me, please make me invisible,” and I continued walking.

When I got close to them, they suddenly stopped talking, stopped walking, and one of them looked in my direction.  I stopped walking, too.  Something said, “Be cool, say hi to them like nothing’s wrong.”  But I fought that urge and remained silent.  It wasn’t until later that I realized what had happened.  The devil hadn’t heard my prayer, prayed silently inside my mind.  But he could see the fruit of that prayer, so he had tried to get me to come out from God’s protection.

It was clear that they had heard my footsteps on the gravely road.   His eyes scanned right where I was, but he obviously did not see me.  We were near enough to street lights that he should have easily been able to see me, but he didn’t.  Soon they started walking again, and so did I.  A couple of times I saw the guy turn and look back, but he never saw me.

It wasn’t until months later that I realized that God had taken that prayer for invisibility, prayed when I was about 35, and had applied it at other times when I was in danger of someone wanting to hurt or kill me.  He answered that prayer retroactively—how cool is that?  And that’s easy for God, since He exists outside of the confines of our 4 dimensions (3 spatial plus time).  (For those who like science, and especially the science of God, here’s a great sermon by Chuck Missler, explaining the extra-dimensionality of God: An Extraterrestrial Message.)

The first time that God made me invisible was when I was 9 years old.  This is the stupidest thing I ever did, and it’s embarrassing to admit that I was ever this stupid, even as a child.  I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, in the sleepy little town of Burlingame.  During that time (the mid- to late-60’s) the Hells Angels were active and headquartered in northern California not far from Burlingame.  But they weren’t the do-good bike club that they are now.  At that time they really lived up to the name.  They were bloodthirsty men who killed for sport.  They would surround a car on a remote highway, force it off the road and kill the driver—often not even bothering to take his money.

Behind my elementary school there was a hill with lots of trails and one dirt road big enough for a car.  One summer day I was on the dirt road, intending to explore the trails—one of my favorite activities as a kid.  I was at the bend in the road when I heard a motorcycle coming up the road behind me.  I hid in a bush just past the bend and waited.  When the motorcycle rounded the bend, I jumped out of the bush and yelled, “Boo!”  The driver was so startled that he almost wrecked his bike, and going fast enough that he went on another 50 yards or so, fishtailing and cursing loudly.  I saw the Hells Angels jacket, and I knew that if he got his hands on me, he would kill me.

I ran to the other side of the road and climbed a tree.  But I didn’t climb a big tree.  This tree was no bigger around than your arm, with nowhere near enough greenery to hide me.  So there I was in a small tree, wearing a pink and yellow outfit.  I hung on tightly, hoping that the tree wasn’t shaking—I’m sure that I must have looked like a giant pink and yellow gooney bird.  He came back down the road, still cursing and muttering threats.  He looked into the bush that I had jumped out of, then came over to the side of the road where I was up the tree.  I squeezed my eyes shut, sure that if I continued to look at him, he would feel my eyes on him and look up.

Before long, I heard him go back to his bike, turn the motor on, and continue up the road, still cursing.  I got down out of the tree, ran down the road, and all the way home.  When I got home, I locked myself in my room until the terror had finished running through my system.  The question in my mind that ran over and over and over was: “How did he not see me?”  It was inexplicable.  But the answer is that God had made me invisible.  In fact, it really is the only answer that makes sense.

Another time, I was in my late twenties, and we lived in Marietta, Georgia at the time.  Again I had woken up very early and couldn’t sleep.  So I had gone out for a walk.  We lived in a quiet neighborhood at the edge of town.  I saw a van drive past me and the driver slammed on his brakes.  He turned the van around, and I knew that he was coming to get me.  So I ran to a tree and stood very still by it.  I was still in plain sight because it was a pine tree with no low branches.  The van drove past me very slowly, then turned around and drove past me again.  The driver turned around to make another pass and I ran to some juniper bushes nearby and hid.  The van turned at the end of the block and stopped.  It was between me and the house.  It sat there for a long time, just waiting.  I saw cigarettes flicked from both front windows, and knew that I was outnumbered.  My leg muscles began to cramp from the cool morning air, and to be honest, I had gotten bored.  So I slipped out of my hiding place and walked in the opposite direction, intending just to continue my walk.  I walked to my son’s school a few blocks away, and that’s when the van drove up to the school.  Again I stood still, this time among a small grove of pine trees.  I wasn’t by a tree, but I stood still, hoping that I looked more like a tree than a human.  It was a pretty ridiculous hope, because pine trees don’t usually have arms and long hair.  But they didn’t see me because God had made me invisible.

God had answered my prayer for invisibility retroactively as well as in the present.  How is this possible?  Nothing is impossible for God.  The Bible says that God knows the end from the beginning (Isaiah 46:10).  God’s foreknowledge (really all-knowledge, omniscience) makes answering prayer retroactively not only possible, but even likely by a loving God who intends to protect a stupid little girl up a tree about to be killed by an angry Hells Angel.  The Bible also says, “I will answer them before they even call to Me,” (Isaiah 65:24, NLT).

By far, the most amazing retroactively answered prayer is the one that every believer has prayed: the prayer of salvation.  Jesus died for our sins before we were even born!

God doesn’t make me invisible when I’m in no physical danger.  But He is faithful to answer prayers prayed in faith—retroactively, too!  God is good!