Jordan Stones...Blessings at the Gate of the New Year

-

 Beloveds, welcome into a fresh turn of digits and a fresh trip around the sun as 2024 opens its unwritten pages for us to live out.


 I have shared with many of you that, personally, I am starting 2024 out with a limp.  I have a meniscus tear that is not healing and it will be patched up in surgery on January 9th. 


I was thinking how sometimes God gets his best work done when we are wrestling to be OK, when we  are in unsure places, when we limp.   When Jacob wrestled for his blessing from God and ended up with a new name, Israel, the father of the 12 tribes of Israel…from where Jesus came to us.  I would say that was worth the wrestle in the night. (Genesis 32: 22-32)

 

As we poise ourselves toward whatever we hope for in the new year, the lyrics of a song we sing at church often comes to my mind: “Whatever picture I have isn’t big enough; Whatever picture I have isn’t good enough; Whatever picture I have doesn’t sum you up; Couldn’t sum you up”. 




If you are like me, limp and all… it doesn’t seem to my natural eyes like this idea that his good is going to outdo my idea of good  is for real.  It’s just an emotional song.  Jut a pipe dream, wishful thinking.  But, what if there is more than meets the natural eye going on?  C.S. Lewis knows how to make the most true, wise, and profound things clear to me.  He speaks to this pain of seeing dimly with my natural eye and doubting his goodness in this excerpt:  


“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of—throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Touchstone, 1996), pp. 175–176. 





When Jacob wrestled with God and got not just a new name but a limp….he also got a promise.  He had no idea that he would not only escape the consequence of wronging his brother in exchange for forgiveness  (see Genesis 33), but he would be a part of the lineage of the savior of the world that makes all of our wrong things right.  Jacob was beseeching for the blessing he knew to ask for…God was giving the blessing Jacob couldn’t dream up. 


In the words of Lisa Terkeurst:  We see a cottage. God sees a palace.  We see destruction. God sees construction.  We see only what the human mind can imagine.  God is building something we cannot even fathom. It’s not what we wanted, but it is so very good. And in the end, maybe it’s not what God is working on but how God is working in us that matters most of all. 


Finally, if any of you are Lectio 365 App listeners, this was offered on 12/31/23 and I love it so much I want to offer it to you as a blessing over 2024:



Mandi 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Psychological Approach or Spiritual Approach?

-
Resting in the blend of  spirit, mind, emotions, and body that I dwell in, I come into contact with the edges of this question all the time.  It is easy to lean more fully on one or the other.  Most of us have a comfortable automatic bend toward finding solutions in spirit or material ways.  Robert Mulholland, a respected spiritual formation writer and trusted Christian theologian, expands an answer to this wondering that satisfies my soul.  I hope it illuminates for you as well: "We need to realize that not only is psychology not a substitute for spirituality, but spirituality is not a substitute for psychology. While most Christians would not tend to make the first assertion, many would and do tend to make the second. As we have already noted, spiritual formation is often seen as the answer to all problems.  Often, profound, deep-seated psychological problems are met with demands for deeper faith, more rigorous obedience, more vital spirituality. Psychological brokenness
Read more

Boundaries you Cannot See And Cannot Ignore

-
Image
Let me begin by introducing you to one of my personal favorite emotional coping tricks.  Prayer Pictures.   What is a Prayer Picture? A Prayer Picture is a term I coined to mean an image or symbol, representing a bigger, more complex or powerful insight that came to you at some point. One of those…an “oh, that is good!” moments or one line from a podcast or a book that was just for you and you know you are going to need it in the future.   When we are on the fly we are zipping through appointments and classes and shopping and relating and debating and carpooling and deal making and number crunching...whatever fills your hustle.  It is my experience that it is pretty near impossible to pull down a complex psychosocial/psychospiritual clarity or coping mechanism on the go.  Our brains are built to serve us on the fly and put us in a sympathetic chemical (autopilot) brain atmosphere.  When we are there, automatic reaction mostly determines choices, behavior, and outcome.  So, in an effort
Read more

A Tale of Two Disturbing Poems

-
Image
I have that feeling…that as we come out of the hush or bustle of the summer, something is presenting itself.  Something that presents Itself with hopes we will say Yes.  Quite often, the fall season calls for a re-arranging, a new-year-esque lens to see our moments, coming and going, what we are up to, our rhythms of rest and work, through.  Examination.  It’s a soul-giving thing to stop and let it do its work.   This poem recently came across my email via more than one list I am signed up to receive…which means you should listen, right?  It is a poem I think we need to encounter in certain intervals of our process…in order to be “disturbed”  toward what is next, in spite of our self-sabotaging settlement in the too small, too known, too safe.   If it is available, gift yourself a moment of stillness and breath.   Get quite inside and when you find you can receive…slowly roll the lines of this poem over in your mind.  You might even practice a lectio divina-like reading of it, maybe
Read more