"Shadowlands"

That year I didn't know if we would celebrate our 16th wedding anniversary together, let alone make it to our 40th. I remember standing by the Farmer's bedside after he was admitted to the hospital with chest pains wondering if I was about to become a young widow. 

He was hooked up to numerous monitors and devices, and I was attempting to soak it all in while listening to a doctor inform me that my husband, age 35, had suffered a heart attack. He was being prepped for a procedure, a procedure at that time I had never heard of, but one that would become quite familiar to us in the following years. I remember our two teenage sons standing on either side of me. Johnny was wearing long, khaki shorts with a favorite band t-shirt, and he had on a pair of Converse sneakers. Josh was wearing his baseball uniform. 

Unpredictable. That's my first word. 

Life is unpredictable. 

A man goes through the fire of multiple heart procedures and surgeries, including open heart, the removal of part of his colon, life threatening illnesses and conditions, one after another, near fatal accidents, one involving a dirt bike and a ruptured spleen and almost bleeding out, and somehow, so far, this man emerges from all of the trauma alive and well. 

In spite of the harrowing circumstances it has been subjected to, the Farmer's heart continues to fiercely beat like a war drum always prepared for battle. 

I have to admit I've grown to love that bull-headed heart. 

Maybe one can assume the ending of a bad movie, but certainly not the details, events, or outcome of one's life here inside the complexity of God's universe and his economy. A sick person lives. A healthy person dies. 

D.A. Hubbard said concerning the wisdom literature of the Bible, "Proverbs seems to say, 'Here are the rules for life try them and find that they will work.' Job and Ecclesiastes say, 'We did and they don't.'" 

This quote backs up our lives, doesn't it? The reality guards us from ever thinking if only we could find the magical, biblical formula, we could then receive this good thing. Possibly, but not always. You never know. In order to gain God's wisdom for life, we must read all three books and allow the tension of paradox to transform our thinking because God's wisdom along with his purposes are as nuanced and mysterious as his creative power. 

If we can catch a glimpse of this anomaly and allow the truth to take hold, the bold beauty will begin to redefine our lives causing us to truly live for the glory of the God who created us and who we can not tame.  

"He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end." Ecclesiastes 3:11

At first, I kicked and rebelled against the unpredictability of life. I didn't want to have to live that way, not ever knowing what was going to happen, angry that God wouldn't give me a guarantee like it seemed others had when I was still so young. 

But the unpredictability forced me to trust God and not the Farmer. 

Slowly I began to realize that we all live in the dark, unpredictable recesses of the Shadowlands, whether we accept it or not, a capricious kingdom where we are handed an irregular shape, a contorted silhouette of sorts, but never the full panorama. 

And unpredictability always invites suffering to the party with it because suffering has the stark ability to begin to uncover the frailty and neediness hidden within the shadows of our heart. 

Suffering is my second word. 

The fact that we've encountered so much suffering never knowing the outcome surprisingly didn't build a life for us of walking around on pins and needles or sinking into quicksand, but one forged on the trust of a God who loved us so much he would send his Son to bear our sins in his own suffering. That is where our faith arose, out of Christ's suffering, not a formula.  

I love how Dorothy Sayers put it:

“For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is— limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—He had the honesty and the courage to take His own medicine. Whatever game He is playing with His creation, He has kept His own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself. He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair and death. When He was a man, He played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile.”

And God isn't allowing anything to move into our lives and set up shop that would keep us from becoming like his Son. When I realized this truth I began to see how much God really did love us. And I began to love him back.  

Suffering can defeat pride and stir up humility because our weaknesses and our pain cause us to lean on our Father and depend on him. And he knows that's the only environment we can flourish within. Life outside of God isn't true life; it's just existence. 

He took away our false notions of predictability and prideful self-reliance at an early stage in our marriage, allowing us to feel like we were free falling towards the earth every single moment. It continues to make us who we are because it continues to make us rely on his grace every single second.  

Unpredictability and suffering do not live in comfy, luxurious dwellings; they live on the precarious cliffs and rocky edges of high places that always compel our eyes to look upward, focused on the summit above us as he secures our footing below us. 

In the sanctification process, if are we are becoming adept and determined mountain climbers, we're on the right track. 

We're becoming like Christ. 

I don't understand how it all works, and I want to be careful because some suffering in this world is nothing short of horrible. Some suffering is immense and dark and hopelessly painful. The Farmer has seen and experienced this here, but heart-wrenchingly more so in his travels overseas. Seeing human suffering on that deep level he admits, "has changed me and messed me up, but as hard as it has been, it's been for the better."

When we share in someone else's suffering, we are becoming like Jesus. When one spouse suffers, the other does too. God uses them both for his glory. 

Wherever we encounter suffering as disciples of Jesus we must run with the pain, outrage, and questions to our Father, as Peter said after listening to the difficult words of Jesus, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed and have come to know that you are the Holy One of God." ( John 6:68-69 ) 

Who else can we run to when suffering has knocked the breath of life out of us?  

If there's no God and mankind just evolved somehow from nothingness or primordial soup then there is no point to suffering or purpose in it. Why bother asking why it exists? It's just here by accident. It's random, no one's fault. But if there is a sovereign God who governs the world he made, even the suffering that comes to his creatures as the Book of Job shows us, then suffering has a purpose and an explanation behind it whether we see it in this life or not. 

That changes everything. 

I've learned that suffering, somehow someway, gives us a glimpse of the glory of God that we could not see otherwise. But we have to remain steadfast in the Lord in order for suffering to do its work. I believe this because I've lived this. 

Unpredictability and suffering have the potential to paralyze us with fear or to persuade us to live in the moment, but even more than that, they can empower us to live 'for' the moment, the moment when we will stand before our heavenly Father after using every "talent" he has equipped us with in this broken world as good stewards. 

Especially the talents no one in their right minds would ever refer to as gifts or talents, but the only ones that enable us to be like Jesus. We share in his glory and his suffering. ( Romans 8:17-18 ) 

And we will live for the moment when we can finally say farewell to these thorns and thistles east of Eden and enter the glorious Kingdom of our Heavenly Father where Jesus will wipe away every tear and make all things new. Where we will truly come to life in a resplendent shade of glory we can only image now here in the Shadowlands. ( Revelation 21 )

I understand that we can't know all God is doing in our lives. Even still, while the Farmer and I were traveling to visit family on our special 40th this month, we speculated on what we would be like today if we had not endure the suffering we've encountered in our married life together, and it wasn't a pretty picture, even if it was painfully predictable.  

I wrote this almost two years ago, and as we approach our 42nd, I have a third word to add to my list of life words, a word that wraps unpredictability and suffering up splendidly together in celebratory papers of silver and gold: 

Providence. 

God's providence. 

Soli Deo Gloria 💜

"For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life." ( John 3:16 ) 

"Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own." ( Philippians 3:12 )

The Power of Beauty

"One thing have I asked of the LORD, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to inquire in his temple." ( Psalm 27:4 )

The Farmer rotated his humble herd this past week into the lower pasture. Since this field doesn't have access to a water source, I fill up a couple of those big, sturdy rubber tubs sold at a local farm store with an extended garden hose connected to a nozzle at the well pump in the upper field. 

Yesterday when I went to check the cow's water supply I felt bad because I had let it get empty. Cows can really go through water in this heat! The cows, resting in the shade of a nearby oasis of locust trees, remained in their reposeful positions except for the Farmer's bull. He stood and began to approach slowly understanding my present chore.  

When the cool, fresh water began to cascade from the hose and into the main tub, the bull drew closer. I lifted the hose occasionally and sprayed him off a bit. The steam lifted from his smooth black fur in the midst of the liquid droplets dancing in the air. 

I admired his strength.  

The Farmer had brought him home from another farm in our area almost two years prior as a young bull calf with good breeding potential. He had since sired several nice, brawny calfs, honestly, too well. He seemed to be a gentle soul of a bull. I had not known him to be raucous or aggressive. 

But today, waiting in the unrelenting, late summer heat as the sun poured out full throttle, standing still for more than a few minutes, I realized that his majesty had snuck up on me. 

His sleek, ebony hide stretched amply across a mass of healthy, protruding shoulder muscles. I noticed that his head, once small, barely rising above the overgrown stick weed in the pasture, was now wide and most prominent as he turned it gradually toward the fresh supply of water before him. His long, thick tail continued to take occasional swipes at the annoying swarm of flies buzzing above him. He swallowed huge gulps of water from the tub, and then lifted his massive head to take a breath. 

At once I seemed to come to my senses, and a chill ran from the top of my ball cap to the bottom of my dirty tennis shoes. The reality of the two feet of empty space between us with my only defense being a flimsy garden hose had sunk into my brain. I backed up gently and let myself out of the gate putting the electric fence between us while allowing the water hose to continue flowing into the tubs above the fence, replenishing the gallons of water he had inhaled.   

I had permitted myself to be enthralled in his beauty, becoming unaware of anything else around me.  

It registered with me as I finished filling the troughs that this captivation can be good or bad. Bad when we become so enamored with something in this world that we lose sight of reality and everything else around us. Even good things can become idols. 

However, when we are captivated with the transcendent beauty of Jesus, paradoxically, it actually awakens our senses to the world around us, to the suffering and to the grace. Reordering our loves, as Augustine taught, will cause us to love everyone and everything else in our lives much better. We also develop grace to endure the processes that enable those changes to occur.  

I never understood the beauty of Jesus because I never understood salvation; I thought I did. Once I held still long enough to gaze over and into the Scriptures, his beauty became real to me; I became better at pointing others toward it. I wasn't as intimidated anymore because I had experienced it for myself through his Word. 

We must never stop praying for God to open our eyes and stop our wayward feet from wandering away into the things of this world from the beauty of Christ before us, to secure deep inside of us a desire to fix our gaze on him. 

The beauty of Jesus opens our eyes to see the beauty in his creation, to see the budding, awkward calf mature into the handsome, majestic bull. And to delight in it. His beauty gives us the ability to see through the brokenness, and to rejoice at the hope of one day seeing creation restored, imaging the resplendency of the world to come. 

More importantly, the knowledge of his beauty, his love and sacrifice, the emptying of himself for us, empowers us through the power of the Holy Spirit in the life of a believer to see ourselves and others growing from immaturity and pride into wisdom and humility. 

That is sanctification, God's will for our lives: The Holy Spirit transforming us into the image of Christ. 

When we egin to awaken as disciples of Jesus, mesmerized in the majesty, beauty, and holiness of the resurrected Christ against the backdrop of broken humanity, that is not just before us, but has come to live in us, if this merciful, gracious truth awakens a sudden holy fear in our souls we know we are close. 

Starlight and her young bull calf from the Farmer's bull