Lived truth: Walking up the stairway of life

A divine comfort through human obedience

The only comfort the heart can take cannot come from itself, but the comfort must come through itself.

A higher region: What is mine to do

To her surprise she found also that since her father’s death, many of her doubts had vanished. She had been lifted into a region higher than those questions which had so disturbed her peace. From a point of vision she saw things so differently that the questions she had were no longer relevant. The truth was being lived out in her that the business of life is to live, not to answer every objection the mind can raise to things spiritual. She had done that which was given her to do; therefore she progressed up the stairway of life. It is no matter that a man or woman be unable to explain or understand this or that. It does not matter as long as when they see a truth they do it; to see and not do would at once place them in eternal danger. There is in the man or woman who does the truth, the radiance of life essential – a glory infinitely beyond any that can belong to the intellect.

Selah.

George MacDonald, “Empty Houses,” The Lady’s Confession.

The hands of Jesus were bound

My Jesus is everything

by Anne Graham Lotz

The hands of Jesus were bound.
The hands of the Son of God.
The hands of the Creator!
Hands that had lifted in authority and calmed the storm at sea.
Hands that had gathered little children on His knee.
Hands that had smeared mud on the blind beggar's eyes
and given him sight.
Hands that had touched the leper and cleansed him.
Hands that had broken the fish and the bread and fed five thousand people.
Hands that had hung the worlds in space.
Hands that had formed Adam from the dust of the ground.
Hands that had formed the very men who were now binding Him.
Jesus was the center of His Father's will, yet He was bound.

Selah.

A word of joy in trial

If you remain in me and my words in you, ask whatever you wish and it will be given you… I have told you this, so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.

John 15:7, 11

Your Joy

“…your joy.”

A strange word to come from God, considering the circumstance, but it was the first that came to me…

I had never thought that I would be confined to a bed all day long. I expected always to be strengthened, so that I could either ignore or tread under foot any bodily illness, and [having earnestly prayed for this] to pass straight from the midst of problems without giving anyone a moment’s trouble.

What has happened, then, is strange to my nature. The shining happiness I experienced, through months when my will-power could do nothing to conquer pain [and it could not simply be ignored], was not natural. It was one of those surprises from our heavenly Lover, who never tires of giving us surprises.

This word came to me the morning after the accident. I experienced a terrible fall in the little Indian town called Joyous City, where some of us had gone to prepare for two missionaries from our group who were about to move there. The fall broke a bone, dislocated an ankle, and caused other internal hurts much harder to heal.

We made the difficult night drive of forty-six [Indian] miles back to our mission base, and by the time we arrived, the effects of the merciful painkiller were beginning to wear off. It was then, as if through a haze, I heard our chief nurse saying something about wishing to take the pain from me – and I knew she meant that she wanted to bear the pain herself, in my stead.

That was when I heard myself spontaneously answer, “Your joy, no one takes away…”

It was like echoing aloud something heard deep within me. I did not recognize it as a Scripture verse, only that it was a certain and heavenly word given to me – truly a word of peace, even exultation! I could see our whole missionary “family,” each one wanting to bear the pain for me. Yet because of the intense comfort of that word, I was glad and grateful that it was impossible for them to do so.

And now, so that you may know why I humbly venture to write to those who know so much more of the awful, trampling power of pain than I do, I will tell you how it was that I thought to write all I have learned.

One day, after many, many nights when, in spite of all that was done to induce sleep, it refused to come [except in brief snatches], I received a letter from a friend. It went on at some length, with what sounded almost like pleasure, about my “enforced rest,” and the silly phrase rankled me like a thorn. I was far too exhausted to laugh it off, as one can laugh off things when one feels well.

So this was supposed to be rest?

And was the Father breaking, crushing, “enforcing” by weight of sheer physical misery, a child who only longed to obey His slightest wish? These words – “enforced rest” – had what I now know was an absurd power to distress me. They held such an unkind, such a false conception of our Father.

Until the moment I’d read these words – although I was puzzled about my accident – I’d had not one unhappy minute or inner restlessness, and that was because I had been given peace in acceptance. The spirit can live above the flesh, and mine, helped by the tender love of our Lord Jesus and the dearness of those around me, had done so.

But the moment I read these words of “comfort,” and for a long while after, it was different. I had no peace. Not until I heard deep within me soft and soothing words again, such as a mother uses: “Let not your heart be troubled. Don’t you know that I understand what you are suffering? What do people’s words matter to Me, or to you?”

And I knew once again that the Father understood His child, and the child her Father…

I will share my crumb of comfort: Do not be weighted down with loose words. Do not expect your peace to come from human mouths. And do not allow the ignorant stock phrases of the “well” to the “ill” to break your shield. How can they, the unwounded, know anything about the matter?

But the Lord our Creator knows! And all who have suffered know: Pain and helplessness are not “rest” and never can be; nor is the weakness that follows acute pain; nor is the great tiredness of inner weariness – tired of being inwardly tired. These things are poles apart from true rest.

Our Father knows our rest is only found in receiving a sense of well-being – a well-being that, no matter what our circumstances, is like the sense one has after a gallop on horseback, or a plunge in a forest or the glorious sea… He knows it! He created us, so can the Creator ever forget? If He remembers what true rest is, what does it matter that others forget?

Thus, we can be comforted and filled with His gift, an inward sweetness. And we can thank Him even when others trample unawares upon us, talking loose, easy nothings.

Prayer

My Father, you know the things that weigh me down… hurtful words… crushing circumstances…

I will be grateful when others offer me faulty, superficial words. I will listen only for your words, and let my spirit rest in the assurance that comes from your every whisper to me…

Selah.

Amy Carmichael, Rose from Brier: 1

A soul that enters into iron

Don’t be deceived my brothers. Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.

For no matter how many promises God has made, they are “Yes” in Christ. And so, through Him, the “Amen” is spoken by us, to the glory of God.

James 1:16-17; 2 Cor. 1:20

Wishes that become clouds

Amy Carmichael

I had asked the doctor how long it would be before I could get back to my work. He said I must be in splints for eight weeks, and I had taken this to mean I would be well in eight weeks. [And even that time looked like eight years to look forward to.]

I never dreamt of what really lay ahead…

For some days the pain was dulled; then it came on with a severity that was to last for many weeks [and in one form or another, for months]. Then came a day when I was opened to a new and deeper experience of the Lord’s presence with me.

It began when I read a heretofore not much noticed word, from Psalm 105:18. Speaking of Joseph, the psalmist writes, “[his] feet they hurt with fetters; he was laid in iron.” Curious, I looked up this verse in a Greek translation of the Hebrew text, where a commentator rendered a different view of this scripture: “Joseph’s soul entered into iron – entered, whole and entire in its desire to obey God, into the cruel torture.”

My soul was not in “cruel torture,” but my foot was badly hurt. And as I lay there, unable to move, it came to me that what was asked of Joseph [in a far greater degree] was asked of me now. Would I merely “endure it,” praying for the grace not to make too much over my poor circumstances? Or would my soul willingly enter into the iron of this new and difficult experience?

There could only be one answer to that. And when on the following Sunday evening a word was given from Philippians 1:13 – “My bonds in Christ” – I knew that all was well indeed…

So there could be nothing but peaceful acceptance. And when one accepts, then all that is included in the thing accepted is accepted too – in my case, the helplessness, the limitations, the disappointments of hope deferred, the suffering.

I now know this is important in keeping our spiritual atmosphere clear. For if we let even a fugitive wisp of a cloud float across our sky [in the form of a wish – that is, a wistful thought that things were different!] then the whole sweet blue of our spirit is swiftly overcast.

But if we refuse that wisp of cloud…! If we look up and meet the love of the Lord that shines down on us, and say to Him about that particular detail of the trial, “Dear Lord, yes…”

Then in one moment, our sky is blue again.

Prayer

My Father, I will say – no matter what shadows of circumstance blow my way – you are my Father of Lights. Coming down from heaven are good and perfect gifts to me…

All the promises of your love and goodness are still… Yes! and Amen!

Alleluia!

Selah.

Amy Carmichael, Rose from Brier: 2

The life of the warrior

Courteous words or else hard knocks are a warrior’s only language.

The impossibility of the warrior

C.S. Lewis

His journey to Perelandra was not a moral exercise, nor a sham fight. If the issue lay in Maleldil's hands, Ransom and the Lady were those hands. The fate of a world really depended on how they behaved in the next few hours…

The voluble self protested, wildly, swiftly, like the propeller of a ship racing when it is out of the water. The imprudence, the unfairness, the absurdity of it! Did Maleldil want to lose worlds? What was the sense of so arranging things that anything really important should finally and absolutely depend on such a man of straw as himself? And at that moment, far away on Earth, as he now could not help remembering, men were at war, and white-faced subalterns and freckled corporals who had but lately begun to shave, stood in horrible gaps or crawled forward in deadly darkness, awaking, like him, to the preposterous truth that all really depended on their actions; and far away in time, Horatious stood on the bridge, and Constantine settled in his mind whether he would or would not embrace the new religion, and Eve herself stood looking upon the forbidden fruit and the Heaven of Heavens waited for her decision. He writhed and ground his teeth, but could not help seeing. Thus and not otherwise, the world was made. Either something or nothing must depend on individual choices. And if something, who could set bounds to it? A stone may determine the course of a river. He was that stone at this horrible moment which had become the centre of the whole universe. The eldila of all worlds, the sinless organisms of everlasting light, were silent in Deep Heaven to see what Elwin Ransom of Cambridge would do…

Truths like terrible jewels

It was fortunate that something so horrible [as physical combat with the un-man] should be so obviously out of the question. Almost, but not quite, Ransom decreed that whatever the Silence and the Darkness seemed to be saying about this, no such crude, materialistic struggle could possibly be what Maleldil really intended. Any suggestion to the contrary must be only his own morbid fancy. It would degrade the spiritual warfare to the condition of mere mythology. But here he got another check.

Long since on Mars, and more strongly since he came to Perelandra, Ransom had been perceiving that the triple distinction of truth from myth and of both from fact was purely terrestrial - was part and parcel of that unhappy division between soul and body which resulted from the Fall. Even on earth the sacraments existed as a permanent reminder that the division was neither wholesome nor final. The Incarnation had been the beginning of its disappearance. In Perelandra it would have no meaning at all. Whatever happened here would be of such a nature that earth-men would call it mythological. All this he had thought before. Now he knew it. The Presence in the darkness, never before so formidable, was putting these truths into his hands, like terrible jewels.

The divine plan in little details...

"It is not for nothing that you are named Ransom," said the Voice.

And he knew that this was no fancy of his own. He knew it for a very curious reason – because he had known for many years that his surname was derived not from ransom but from Ranolf's son. It would never have occurred to him thus to associate the two words. To connect the name Ransom with the act of ransoming would have been for him a mere pun. But even his voluble self did not now dare to suggest that the Voice was making a play upon words. All in a moment of time he perceived that what was, to human philologists, a merely accidental resemblance of two sounds, was in truth no accident.

The whole distinction between things accidental and things designed, like the distinction between fact and myth, was purely terrestrial. The pattern is so large that within the little frame of earthly experience there appear pieces of it between which we can see no connection, and other pieces between which we can. Hence we rightly, for our use, distinguish the accidental from the essential. But step outside that frame and the distinction drops down into the void, fluttering useless wings. He had been forced out of the frame, caught up into the larger pattern...

"My name also is Ransom," said the Voice.

The nature of the enemy

[Ransom] had full opportunity to learn the falsity of the maxim that the Prince of Darkness is a gentleman. Again and again he felt that a suave and subtle Mephistopheles with red cloak and rapier and a feather in his cap, or even the somber tragic Satan out of Paradise Lost, would have been a welcome release from the thing he was actually doomed to watch. It was not like dealing with a wicked politician at all: it was much more like being set to guard an imbecile or a monkey or a very nasty child… It showed plenty of subtlety and intelligence when talking to the Lady; but Ransom soon perceived that it regarded intelligence simply and solely as a weapon, which it had no more wish to employ in its off-duty hours than a soldier has to do bayonet practice when he is on leave. Thought was for it a device necessary to certain ends, but thought in itself did not interest it. It assumed reason as externally and inorganically as it had assumed Weston's body…

A victory in the impossible

"Mercy," he groaned; and then, "Lord, why me?" But there was no answer.

The thing still seemed impossible. But gradually something happened to him which had happened to him only twice before in his life. It had happened once while he was trying to make up his mind to do a very dangerous job in the last war. It had happened again while he was screwing his resolution to go and see a certain man in London and make to him an excessively embarrassing confession which justice demanded. In both cases the thing had seemed a sheer impossibility: he had not thought but known that, being what he was, he was psychologically incapable of doing it; and then, without any apparent movement of the will, as objective and unemotional as the reading on a dial, there had arisen before him, with perfect certitude, the knowledge “about this time tomorrow you will have done the impossible.”

The same thing happened now…

Selah.

Little girl...

Eyes wide open.
Confusion flooding

Her nightmares are coming true.
Abandoned and alone, she waits.
Perhaps a rescuer will come and take her away.
Perhaps a god will show her the way.

Wait and wait she does
But silence is all she knows.

The day has come
When all have gone
And now she is alone.
Alone and scared.

She is left to fight for herself.
She must now take the rings and overcome.

But something is not right.
For she is so little,
So small, so weak
And the task seems so tall.

Night and night she cries alone
But nobody knows
And more than that, nobody cares.
So she learns to hide the pain...

Read the rest of the poem by Jordyne at Jordyne's world.

It is an evocative and moving picture of a girl's heart, seeking solace, yet finding none... until being held by her heavenly Father. Thanks Jordyne for sharing your world with us, and your faith!

Visit her site and tell her if her words touch your heart in grace!

God finds it hard to give, because He would give the best

Let no one undervalue the difficulty of God

George MacDonald

Let no soul think that to say God undertook a hard labor in willing that many sons and daughters should be sharers of the divine nature, is to abate His glory!

The greater the difficulty, the greater is the glory of Him who does the thing He has undertaken — without shadow of compromise, with no half-success, but with a triumph of absolute satisfaction to innumerable radiant souls! He knew what it would cost! — not energy of will alone, or merely that utterance and separation from himself which is but the first of creation, though that may well itself be pain — but sore suffering such as we cannot imagine, and could only be God’s, in the bringing out, call it birth or development, of the God-life in the individual soul — a suffering still renewed, a labor thwarted ever by that soul itself, compelling Him to take, still at the cost of suffering, the not absolutely best, only the best possible means left him by the resistance of His creature.

Humans find it hard to get what they want, because they do not want the best; God finds it hard to give, because He would give the best, and humans will not take it.

His wounds bring sons and daughters to glory

How deep the Father's love for us
How vast beyond all measure
That He should give His only Son
To make a wretch His treasure
How great the pain of searing loss
the Father turns His face away
As wounds which mar the Chosen One
Bring many sons to Glory!

Selah.

Amy Carmichael: Have you no scar?

Have You No Scar?

by Amy Carmichael

Jesus speaks to us:

Have you no scar? No hidden scar on foot, or side, or hand?
I hear you sung as mighty in the land.
I hear them hail your bright ascendant star.
Have you no scar?
Have you no wound?

Yet, I was wounded by the archers, spent, leaned me against the tree to die,
and rent -- by ravenous beasts that encompassed me
I swooned.
Have you no wound?
No wound? No scar?

Yes, as the master shall the servant be,
and pierced are the feet that follow Me,
but yours are whole.
Can he have followed far -- who has no wound? No scar?
Can she have followed far -- who has no wound? No scar?


[selah: silence]

[personal prayer]


Meditation on wounds

The Apostle James says that we are healed as we confess: Moral element to healing (5:16).

The Apostle John speaks of the one Christ told, ‘Take up your bed and walk!’ (John 5:1-9ff) Carry that which carried you: Emotional, vocational commitment to healing: Healing means that we accept God’s unknown over our comfortable [sick] known.

True healing: Willing to be weak where the world is strong; willing to be strong where the world is weak. Think about it…

God’s purposes for sickness: death (cf. 2 Kings 13:21), discipline (Heb. 12:5ff, Prov. 3:11f, et al), or the glory of God (John 9:3).

Not all who are physically ill are unhealed. Some are destined to receive healing through that illness…

Receiving healing: Accepting God's future over my past and present reality

My father, Rev. G. L. Mershimer contracted polio as a boy. He should have died, they said. But the disease left him without proper use of both legs, one arm and some other muscles. Dad often talked about his polio condition, and the part it played in bringing him to the ministry. He wondered if he’d have accepted God's calling on his life if polio hadn't entered. In his heart, he didn't believe he would have followed the call without the reverses of that illness, its deep struggle and pain. If that is true…then all of his subsequent life, his travelling across the country to attend school, his meeting mom...his marriage to her as he obeyed the call, his four children, his incredible, incarnational ministry -- all of this was due to a polio condition that God used to bring blessing through. If this is true, then my very existence is due to a wound. All of my actions that echo for good, every life I touch or prayer I pray, every word I say or write...this very blog...is a continuation of the healing that God brought through a wound: actions of a child that would not have been born without polio and the call. The Mershimer family is an entity called forth by God's healing power...still echoing in the world, through one polio condition.

What is your wound?

What healing does God want to bring to you and others through the condition you are currently in? What wholeness does God want to give as you hear the call in your scar? Open to His good purpose!

Open to His calling...

For it is good...there is trueness and wholeness. New life through the wound...

Alleluia!

Prayer: God, you can have all of me. I accept all of your purposes for me…even in my present condition, which is caught up in my past, I accept your future, your wholeness, and heed your call...in me, in this, in all. In Jesus’ name I pray, Amen.