Call to Action

How do we know when we're being called to action?

I'm a daydreamer. Maybe even a pipe dreamer if you'll excuse the expression. You know, I'm often looking for the radical response or action, not the conventional one.

This is radical:

What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he has lost one of them does not leave the ninety-nine in the open country, and go after the one that is lost, until he finds it? (Luke 15: 4)

The way it is phrased, "What man of you...?" sounds like the idea is to be taken as common knowledge, common expectation, not as something radical. But that's not what I consider common.

Indeed--which one of us really would leave behind 99% of what we are responsible for, whether that's sheep or people or job responsibilities or whatever you can come up with--to pursue a missing 1%? And not just leave behind, but leave "in the open country"? It sounds so reckless, so unprotected.

Even I would be more comfortable had Jesus said something like this: Be reasonable now. If one of your hundred sheep is missing, text a few friends and put it on Facebook. Then carefully secure the other ninety-nine inside the barn with a watchman on either side, and take food and drink for several days and an extra cellphone battery and a GPS and a team of friends and, after leaving solid instructions for delegating all your other tasks, and leaving a healthcare power of attorney and some cash and a credit card, then you can go on a search for a little while, as long as it doesn't interfere too much with your commitment to the ones back home. OK? Sound good? Off you go, then.

But no. None of that is here. It's primary. It's necessary. It's immediate. One is missing now, and that one is in immediate need, now, as well. The one is precious. Irreplaceable. There is an expectation of urgent involvement, and there is an expectation too of something else that doesn't come as naturally as it should: Trust.

Jesus has been telling parables and mixing that in with doing miracles and encouraging his followers not to be anxious (Chapter 12). I admit--I don't win any awards for not being anxious. Anxiety is something I've cultivated pretty well. It's because I can't hold on tightly enough, long enough, to trust. I've seen some improvement in the last year or two, with lots of attention and brain-training and reminders to trust being consciously put into place--and even with several failures to trust, I've been carried through losses and injuries and fears of losses and injuries to find that somehow, I'm still alive on the other side. Guess what: God is faithful.

It's in the context of that trust in a steadfast and sovereign God that Jesus speaks with the assumption that of course, we would be ready to act when called. Whatever it takes.

I'm rolling this around in my own life right now. Whatever it takes. I'm grappling in prayer for someone and waiting to hear whether prayer alone is what I am called to, or action. What is the course that will result in more joy in heaven? Am I to be passive here, or active? Do I trust enough to do whatever it takes? I love enough, yes. But do I trust enough?

Pray for me, readers? Pray for the ability to discern a calling. Pray for God himself to set right, to seek and find, to be found. But pray also for my openness to be used by him, if that is how he chooses to work.

Forever Autumn

Some things are just self-explanatory. If you hear it, and it makes those pangers in your heart, then you know. You know.



The summer sun is fading as the year grows old,
and darker days are drawing near.
The winter winds will be much colder
now you're not here.

I watch the birds fly south across the autumn sky
and one by one they disappear.
I wish that I was flying with them
now you're not here.

Like the sun through the trees you came to love me.
Like a leaf on a breeze you blew away.

Through autumn's golden gown we used to kick our way.
You always loved this time of year.
Those fallen leaves lie undisturbed now
'cause you're not here.

'Cause you're not here.
'Cause you're not here.

A gentle rain falls softly on my weary eyes
as if to hide a lonely tear.
My life will be forever autumn
'Cause you're not here.

'Cause you're not here.
'Cause you're not here.
                   --Jeff Wayne, Gary Osborne, Paul Vigrass

Always Waiting for What Comes Next

For the last week, this article (Single and Not Waiting) has been circulating on Facebook. It's been posted by several of my teen and young adult friends, and at least once by one of their parents. (Kudos to that parent, btw. It's a brave venture in this climate to publically encourage a young person to live his or her life now, even if that means embracing being unattached.)

I didn't read it at first because I thought it was the same article I had read a few years ago and shared with some friends in that age bracket. But just this morning I decided to look at it and found that this one was, indeed, new, but essentially saying the same thing. A young adult feels she is putting her present life on hold, waiting for God to deliver to her the man who will be her husband, and then, her life can begin. She feels "in between" places in life, and that feels like a static place to be. And the author is addressing how this perspective means she is not using her current days as well as she could be.

I've taken recently the advice of my own pastor in several areas of life in which my mindset is creating a false reality. "Rebecca, you have to change the way you think about that," he says. "Thinking that way isn't going to do you any good." He consistently offers an optimistic alternative, but I have to take it and apply it myself. It's advice that reaches broadly into many areas of life's challenges, and I think the author of this article has realized it fits her current situation too.

But what I wanted to say to her, and to my young adult friends, and to probably most of you who take the time to read, is that the "waiting for what's next" mindset isn't just affecting young single people. I'm in my 40s now. And, as I've said to several of you young adults, it's not just marriage that you're waiting for, so that life can begin.

It's an ongoing thing. Even now, I still find myself wondering when it's all going to REALLY start. Life is insanely busy, but I still have that sense of waiting for what's next. For the really important stuff. For the "what I'm really here for" part to make itself clear.

Just yesterday, as I was doing various tasks about the house, editing an article here, scrolling through other news stories there, doing what my hand found to do, I had the same thoughts turning in my mind. About a month ago, I withdrew from my second graduate school class. At the time, I thought I should also withdraw completely from the program. I was at a stage of defeat and felt that by walking away from the class I could not complete well through distance learning, I was also walking away from the entire program, the degree, the future in teaching that I had hoped to have. So yesterday, I was wondering, "What next?" I had that same sense of waiting: If only I could get that degree, that education, then I could do what God wants me to do with my life. Then I could be where he wants me to be.

I wasn't looking at today. I have work. Important work. I have family. Steadfast brothers, amazing children. I have friends. Delightful friends. I have a church community.  I have a neighborhood. I have a readership. And I still have that longing for finding what's next, so that the next stage can get started.

It doesn't go away.

Then I read the article, and realized that two years later, here's another author saying the same thing I forwarded to friends back then, and it's still current and applicable enough to go viral. So the issue hasn't been solved, and I asked the question, "Why?"

Usually, at the root of our most disruptive longings, there is an idolatry, and at the root of the idolatry, there is a truth planted, and I believe it's the same thing in this case--for the teen waiting to graduate from high school; for the single adults waiting to get married (whether it's the first time, or holding onto hope for a redemptive second); for the married waiting to own a house or find the perfect job; for the couple waiting to just have that first baby; for the sick waiting to be healed; for the adult waiting to get that degree or promotion, or whatever.

And the truth we all share is that none of us have fully arrived.

But that's not bad news. It may seem that way, but it isn't. Because there's a deeper truth even yet: We WILL. "He who began a good work in you WILL SEE IT TO COMPLETION."

It's a promise, from the Promise Keeper Himself. We are works in progress, and we know that much. What we don't know, or can't seem to remember, is that it already began. Think about it. How does Genesis start: In the beginning, God. . . .  Ephesians 1: He chose us in him before the foundation of the world. 

You have already begun. The beginning was recorded. This is it. The present, the now, you are in it. This is your life. This is my life. We who are created and chosen are being equipped for every good work in the now, not just for the later.

Yes, there is waiting. Waiting for what's already prepared to come next, but that waiting shouldn't be a burden to the now. And it should not paralyze. That's a tool of the enemy--paralysis. We have life more abundant at this very moment, for those who have been freed from the fear of ever being lost again from the Creator/Father/Author of our existence.

Come out, then. Be real. God walks with us through the very days we have now. Maybe all those things we are waiting for will come to pass for us, but whether they do or not, we each have purpose right now. Keep doing the work he's given you to do today. Keep gathering together. Keep encouraging one another, as long as it is called today. Keep your eyes open for the wounded on the side of the road, for the thirsty, for the orphans and widows, for even the rich young ruler who went away sad--maybe his waiting time has not yet come to completion and perhaps your path will intersect to help him along his way. If there is a person in your reach, you can be sure you are not placed there accidentally.

One of the potentially paralyzing tenets of the single-but-waiting-for-The-One mindset has been to cloister oneself from anything but superficial community while waiting. It is presented as a type of emotional "purity" even if it has nothing sexual associated with it. (Amazing to me, in my generation, how we were taught to abstain from sexual immorality, but today's Christian generation, even if they've held that line well, are given the new burden of trying to discern an emotional immorality to carry as well. Its definition varies greatly from one to another, as a new doctrine not fully worked out among its proponents, but within that range, I've known several truly well-intentioned young adults finding themselves laden with false guilt over fears of caring for the people God put in his or her path now, because if they let themselves invest emotion, it might conflict with that which belonsg exclusively instead to some unknown individual who may materialize years down the road. Does not God tell us he owns the future, and that divination is a lack of trust in him?) It's tied closely to this idea of putting all of oneself on hold for one singular goal: marriage. It's not consistent with the picture of the community both Paul (in Ephesians and Philippians) and Peter (in 1 Peter) promote for a church--individuals united in Christ, truly knowing one another with hearts purified by God's word, and seeking to abound more and more in knowledge and discernment about how to love one another better, genuinely, from the heart.

The opportunities are there, today, no matter what else we think we are waiting for--as long as we go with him into those opportunities.

Can we open our arms, our hearts, ourselves (like the doves spread on the altar) to not just accept with grumbling but embrace with confidence the very moment of today and our lives in it as they are, while we also wait with confidence for the completion that is to come? Can we live to own the promise in the present?

Gift of Darkness

"Someone I loved
Once gave me a box
Full of darkness.

It took me years
to understand
That this, too,
Was a gift."

--Mary Oliver


How are gifts honed and matured? How is precious metal purified?

There is the trial by fire. There is the trial by market. I would not say one is more painful than the other.

Flannery O'Connor's prayer journal has been published, posthumously. It records her youthful prayers--prayers that God would make her gifts mature.

She died at the age of 39. That's a short life. She was stricken with lupus. It left her crippled, and rejected by lovers. She remained single. But she begat two novels and 32 short stories, and garnered the National Book Award. She held a slot in my freshman literature anthology. Very few female authors can say the same.

When in the fire, we can't see what the smelting is doing. We can't know what the result will really look like.

I was observing my friend Phillip the other day. As I listened to him, I thought to myself, "Everything about him is tempered." I meant it in the way of being softened, well-managed, controlled. And then I thought to wonder, "What hell has he endured to come to this?" Tempered by fire? There must have been dross consumed. I don't see it now, but I believe we all have such corruption woven in among the mitochondria.

Would Flannery have traded her crutches for legs that leapt and danced with suitors, if with them she also lost the craft and wordsmithery she craved? What might Phillip be, without the woes he most certainly must have experienced? And what of you? And of me?

When my young friend H confessed her heart-felt agony about her own idolatry, I begged our God to hear her prayer but handle her gently. Do I know what I am asking? Of course not.

Someone I loved once gave me a box of darkness. I will never be the same again. But who was I then? And even if the wounds never heal, can I be sure I am not actually better for it now?

Bind Me Again! I Don't Want To Be Free

It is for freedom Christ has set you free, says Paul at the opening of Galatians chapter 5. I'm free for freedom's sake? Freedom itself is the goal?

A Janis Joplin song declared the frightening nature of freedom in this way: Freedom's just another word for 'nothin' left to lose.'

We find so many ways to refuse to accept it, substantial freedom. How do we respond?

Bind me! Bind me up again!

Do not submit again to a yoke of slavery, Paul says, even leading it off with the full expectation that we're going to want to: Stand firm, he encourages. He knows our weakness. We don't want to be free. It's scary. It's loose. We can't control total freedom and boy, how we like to be in control.

I just had a very brief exchange with a creative young friend who has imposed some restrictions upon herself for the purpose of a designated challenge. And while she wants to meet those rules to comply with the terms of the challenge, she took a moment to complain openly about the fact that now, she's restricted from beginning her project until the time the rules (which were made and entered into voluntarily) allow. This is, of course, no big deal at all. There is no sin in casting those rules aside and starting earlier by her desire to do so. There is no sin in waiting. There may be lost opportunity to achieve as much with the full fervor that would be there if the project were heart-directed all the way through, instead of bound and hindered while the clock ticks off some arbitrary number of seconds until that formerly arbitrarily determined date arrives. But so be it. It's no big deal in the cosmos.

However, it's such a symbolic parallel for how we humans often go about our lives, and that can be a big deal in the cosmos. Loki, in the movie The Avengers, stood over a crowd of terrified humans and scoffed at them as they knelt in fear before him: You were made to be ruled. There's a truth in that. We were and we know it. But by whom or by what?

Only one man stood to face him, saying, Not by men like you. And yet, by men like ourselves? Because if we fear we have too much freedom, we set about with diligence to find ways to bind ourselves again. Personal preferences become policy. Self-revelation becomes reason for restriction. Fear wins the day.

Living and breathing are symbols God gave us to let us experience something of what freedom is, but life, real life, comes from him and through him. Still, he knows how we are. When he raised Lazarus from the dead, he knew. Lazarus will be back. So will you and so will I. So Jesus himself didn't remove the man's graveclothes. He called him from the tomb, summoned spirit back to decaying body, restored the components for life, and watched Lazarus obey the command to Come forth!

But then Jesus turned to Lazarus' friends with a charge: Unbind him and let him go free.

We have to keep freeing each other. We have to keep reminding one another that we have been freed, that we are covered, that we can't be lost again. We have to keep unbinding each other. Or else our lives, though still not lost from the Father's hand, can be pictures of such tragedy. And as Jesus raised Lazarus and then commanded his unbinding, so also he wants us to live abundantly, not bound.

Speaking of tragedy, of being left bound reminds me of Nathaniel Hawthorne's protagonist (I suppose that's how we are to think of him) in the short story The Minister's Black Veil. The man elected to lead a flock could not for all his life believe that God's grace was really for him, in this very day, in this life. And so horrified was he of his own unspoken sin, that he covered his face with a black veil. As life went on about him, he refused to lift the veil. And it ate away at his life, a life he chose of loneliness, because he could not believe the power of Christ was great enough to walk with him, with others, in the day to day.
Thus, from beneath the black veil, there rolled a cloud into the sunshine, an ambiguity of sin or sorrow, which enveloped the poor minister, so that love or sympathy could never reach him.

Love or sympathy could never reach him, it says. He chose to maintain a superficial level of relationship with his flock, even his beloved, rather than let the light into his box of darkness. He clung instead to being bound to his sin, instead of letting his friends unbind him so that he could go free. Was it because he was simply worse than they? No. Even the minister, the one who delivered the word of God to others, for all his outward goodness, he simply could not grasp grace.

Dell Tackett says in The Truth Project that one cannot open up a box of darkness and have it overcome the light. No. Light enters into the darkness when it is opened. Light wins! It is dark inside a closet. But if you open the door, even just a crack, light floods in and overtakes the darkness. It is not the other way around.

But addictive people that we are, we can't believe it for long. We're so skeptical, accustomed to the "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is" mantra. Grace can't be that big a deal. I still have the same old junk. I've got to cover it up and maintain it and polish it on Saturdays to keep up the best I can do. And that becomes our addiction. Return to being bound.

The musical artist Gotye sings, You can get addicted to a certain kind of sadness. It's scientifically true, actually. Peptide receptors in the cells of our bodies grow and reproduce to respond to the type of hormones our bodies produce. Make a lot of happy ones, you'll have more happy receptors. So when your happy hormones start to run out, your body will literally crave more happiness, prompting you, perhaps, to phone a friend, or sing a song, or write an encouraging note, or go out dancing, or whatever floats your boat. But if you make a lot of sad or guilty or frightened hormones, those peptide receptors will flourish to receive and deal with the results of those emotions. And when they get hungry again, they want more sadness, more fear. You can get addicted to a certain kind of sadness. But it is still a pattern that can be broken with effort and commitment, or at least made better. I'm discovering this. There is freedom to be found, even from profound grief, loneliness, and heartbreak. Even from the misery of knowing who I really am.

But first we must find victory (or at least some control) over that willful desire to maintain superficiality that prevents the unbinding. A willfull loneliness. For some of us, its an argumentative nature: I made my rules and by golly, I'm going to live by them! Self-righteous pride and saving face can become more important than even our own goals and contentment being met. For others, it can be a concocted piety. I'm supposed to deny myself, so I can be sure I keep on suffering here. I deserve nothing better. Others of us identify ourselves with our sin. Oh, woe is me. I'm too corrupt to be unbound. Or too hurt. We might identify ourselves with our pain (mea culpa).

And I think at the heart of all that, is our desire to not need grace. Because knowing grace really answers it all. Everything. The most important thing I've found in breaking that addiction of returning to my chains is always the same thing: believing grace. Believing the Spirit of adoption. (As a tangential aside, I will offer that sometimes I have been envious of children who were adopted--specifically chosen by their parents. What better picture is there of the kind of love God gives us? Did you ever have someone tell you they chose you, with no DNA in common, no bloodline, to be at the level of family? That means they wanted YOU for you. That's how God loves. He can't be scandalized away from us. He knows exactly who we are, and chooses us anyway. That's the Spirit of adoption.)

I've been reading today, because I'm home sick, and it's miserable. But even in sickness is this little mercy: time to read uninterrupted, whatever I want. And what I want is Three Free Sins by Steve Brown. Because my peptide receptors are demanding more and more of the certainty of knowing grace, and Steve finally got it. As an old man, he wrote a book about the futility of his life spent trying to make rules for what obedience ought to look like, and promoting his own piety, and expecting others to meet his set standards and rules. Chains upon chains upon chains. And then he realized that he was just following his addictions.

He says, and I love this because I know this of myself, Christians, by and large, are neurotic about purity, obedience, and holiness. [As if we even really knew what any of those things meant! and yet, we focus so much on our actions by our own definitions!] It is probably the main reason we're not very pure, obedient, and holy. And in order to maintain our 'witness' [quotes mine], we have learned to fake it.

Why?

Because we don't believe grace. We still can't buy this deal. It's too good to be true. Done for me? Forever? For certain? Can't be lost? And it's not all about what I do any more? Bind me again! I want it to be about what I do! scream the peptide receptors of self-righteousness.

What is this grace anyway? It's a word we use so much that we may forget how total and overarching it is. I've even heard a pastor friend say grace is such a big concept that we humans ought not speak of offering it to one another. It's so big, ONLY God can offer it.

I think that is an appropriate expression of reverence for the uniqueness of grace. I still think you and I can try, just like we toddle along after our Lord, to offer our best efforts of grace one to another, as we seek to speak the truths that unbind, as we seek to be like our Lord in offering forgiveness and compassion. But we may never be able to hit the big GRACE thing, because we are finite and faulty, and we just don't have the same raw materials to work with.

You see, Grace is absolute certainty. It is certainty that no matter how much you may have to hide behind your own dark veil, you really, truly are already OK. It's done. It's good. You have right standing that can never, ever, no matter what you think you're still clinging to, or possibly capable of, NEVER be lost. It's cemented there for eternity. God loves you. You are his. Period. It's more than cemented. Even concrete is going to crumble away one day but your right standing with God, if you've received his grace (and he's offering) will never alter, shift, diminish, lessen, or fade away. It's not an insurance policy. It is already paid out. It can't be taken back.

Light came into the darkness, and overcame it. That's the way it works. It's science. It's fact. It's grace. The yoke has been lifted in the very real sense. What? You still feel it there? Well so do I. But that doesn't mean a thing. God doesn't see it. To him, it's gone. Dealt with.

I think we get deceived into thinking that we aren't really free if we don't feel healed. So we put back on the chains and start working again at trying to heal ourselves until we FEEL better. We convince ourselves it's karma. I didn't really do everything right yet, so God's not blessing me with liberation. I must do this thing in a "more godly" way, and then he'll bless me.

Maybe, instead, God has us right where he wants us, because he wants us with him. Pastor Stuart Mizelle says that 1 John 1:7 (But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin) tells us how to keep moving forward without having to wear our own dark, separating veils, our own chains, our own self-righteousness. Walking with Christ does illuminate our dreadful condition. When the light falls on our sin, it exposes it. We want to cover ourselves. It is our fleshly, self-protective response. Hide me! Veil me! Let me earn my way out of this!

But Stuart says no. Just see it. And acknowledge: I see it there, Father. Thank you for Jesus. Accept the grace that says, EVEN with that in your makeup, God loves you still. And you are permanently, perfectly his. Your acknowledgement that the sin is there, and your acknowledgement that he alone is God who can deal with it, and not you, is enough. Even if you don't yet feel better, it's gone. You're safe. So go. Have fellowship one with another. Do what your hand finds to do, and do it with your might. Fear not. Unbind someone else. Stand firm, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery, beloved.

"I can't carry it for you...but I can carry you!"

Samwise Gamgee, always the loyal, faithful friend, told his exhausted and over-tried companion Frodo Baggins, regarding the trial placed on him, “I can’t carry it for you. But I can carry you.”

There is the literal carrying, and on rare occasions, we get to do that. Think of Forrest and Bubba. But it’s the figurative we all can relate to.

U2 camped on it in their song One—obligation or privilege? Option or responsibility? It’s a very real, rather tumultuous, utterly committed picture of relationship. We get to carry each other, carry each other.

Today someone I love is hurting. Waiting. Wondering. How can I carry her?

I can’t relieve the burden for her. I can’t carry it for her. Can I lessen her other life obligations somehow? Not easily, and not always a good approach. Busyness, neededness, regularity, consistency are often a means of coping in hardship.

I can listen, yes, if that’s what she needs. The offer stands. I’m here if needed. But what more?

Not too long ago, in a heart-to-heart email exchange, a friend told me of how she had carried another in intense hardship. Her very close friend was battling cancer. Part of the fight included a double mastectomy—a life-saving necessity. But that didn’t end her battle. She still had to face surgical recovery and further treatment. Staying alive moment by moment was her focus. And so my friend took the mourning of the physical loss upon herself. While the one in ongoing trial could not stop to mourn her own loss, her friend could. Our mutual friend couldn’t carry the trial for her; but it was absolutely appropriate that the loss should be mourned, and so she carried that portion for her. In a way, I think that is like carrying her. “Let me take this part as you carry on with the urgent at present.”

I don’t know that I would have thought specifically to do that. I think that kind of heart prompting comes from a true concern for the other person—a closeness that lets the unspoken need be recognized—and from a source outside ourselves.

How Do We See Miracles?

Galatians 3: 1-6
 ¹O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified.  ²Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith?  ³Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?  ⁴Did you suffer so many things in vain—if indeed it was in vain?  ⁵Does he who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you do so by works of the law, or by hearing with faith— ⁶just as Abraham “believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness”?

I have a very hard time believing in mere coincidences. I can’t accept that events which occur and plant themselves before our eyes as noteworthy and remarkable can be dismissed as meaninglessness and chance. But still, I probably don’t use the word “miracle” very often. It seems to me something that should be used sparingly, like “hero,” or “despair,” or cilantro. Be sure you need it before you use it.

But I do believe in miracles, and I do believe they come directly from the hand of a personal God, and that they work into individual lives in dramatic, “in the moment” ways, even while they ripple out, maybe invisibly, into the greater work he is doing in history.

So after hearing today’s sermon, I could hardly consider it a coincidence that I had been asked to reflect on this one for the church blog. God knows what he is up to, even if I can’t see it very clearly.

I was particularly thankful for the pastor's explanation of the three approaches in modern thought to miracles: Cessationist, Continuationist, and Analogous. As he predicted, most of us have heard of, whether by formal name or not, both of the first two positions. But the “third way” comes into play here, and hearing it named was new to me—though it is where I think I fit best.

I was never at home in either the Cessationist or Continuationist camps. I accept that the scriptures are complete, and so I agree with the first position in that regard. Everything we need to know about God's work and how it brings us to salvation is in the book already.

But in my own personal experience, I have seen too many things I cannot call coincidences to accept that God does not still act in some regard, supernaturally, outside of the normal order of things as we expect it.
The description of the Analogous position is satisfying to me: God is still involved. He still turns the king’s heart like a watercourse and reaches into my life to touch with healing, or presence, or provision in ways I cannot explain away as the workings of an impersonal universe. But it isn’t new revelation.

It is instead affirmation of the revelation the Bible has already given. It is the work of the Holy Spirit continuing to testify to all that the apostles, and Christ himself, and the prophets, and the God who took his people by the hand and led them out of Egypt have been saying all along: I AM is with you.

And I need that affirmation. I have a chronic case of spiritual amnesia. I hear it’s a plague among believers, and I am absolutely infected. I have no excuse. I know his voice, and I’ve seen the physical miracles in my own life so many times. Evidence as clear as manna falling from heaven.

When we were newlyweds, God clearly met me before I, in my seedling faith, had even thought to ask him. I was paying household bills and found we were $90 short of all that was due, with no paycheck for either of us coming for weeks yet. I remember sitting at our tiny kitchen table fretting. Just fretting. Not praying. Not asking him for help. I was living the naturalist then: We don’t have it. My pristine credit is about to get a black mark. Oh woe is me, what shall I ever do? And then the phone rang. I mean it. Right then, the phone rang. I wish I could say with smug piety that I had prayed and God answered, but that isn’t honest. I didn’t pray. He still came.

A local businessman who was an acquaintance was on the phone. He owned a property less than a half mile from our house and he was also in charge of maintenance for his church’s property. His lawn care guys had spontaneously quit on him, and both properties needed to be mowed ASAP. Could Bill just load up his mower and quickly run over to both and mow the grass to make it presentable? He’d be glad to pay and his budget was . . . wait for it . . . $90. Exactly. Oh you of little faith? Why do you still doubt?

I’ve held a tiny, beautiful newborn in my arms and listened while her pediatrician counted off the assortment of symptoms she had: double inguinal hernia, hypercalcemia, failure to thrive, stellate irises, upturned nose, narrow chin, small stature, heart murmur. They ticked off identical to a checklist for a frightening genetic disorder called Williams syndrome. You’d better believe I prayed that time. And miraculously, over the next few months, I saw those symptoms and the possible diagnosis just evaporate. Miraculous healing? Or no-less-miraculous revelation that it was not ever her condition at all, despite the great weight of evidence suggesting it was?

I’ve seen another of my babies, who was predicted not to live, pull a ventilator tube out of her own lungs when just a few hours old and proceed to thrive against all expectations. I’ve known what it is to experience the mercy of my believing grandmother passing into the Lord’s presence while I was on my way to give her the worst news a mother could ever hear: that her youngest, her baby girl, was on her way to that same place as well. I consider it a perfectly timed act of the loving, merciful Holy Spirit that she never had to hear those words, that I never had to speak them to her, and that in her blessed passing, my own suffering mother was released from her need to “hang on for Mama’s sake,” and was able to go as well just 36 hours later.

I see in all those things a miraculous provision of physical needs. And I know: Our God is with us. Yet even so, I forget. A week later, a month later, I do need to be reminded again. I forget too the spiritual preparation the Spirit has done before each of those events too. My presumed self-sufficiency in the first example needed to be addressed. And he did it so lovingly. Rather than run us into financial ruin to show me my need for him, he let me think myself sufficient, momentarily showed me the falsehood in it, and immediately provided. He entered with power and I wasn’t even looking for him at all in that scenario. But I learned. He’s there, even when I’m not noticing.

And oh, how he prepared me for the birth of Jane, with all her many issues then. It is no coincidence that for most of two years prior to Jane’s arrival, my older daughter would bring me one and only one book to read to her, over and over and over again: The Baby in the Basket—a very young version of the story of baby Moses. Sometimes the message has to come simply and repeated until it sinks in. I read that story at least three times a week for two straight years. I read it to her from Exodus as well, so she would know all the details. Every baby doll in our house was named Moses. But the character that I drew closest to was Jochebed, the baby’s mother. Even before I found out that my next child might be seriously ill, the Spirit spoke to me through that mom, from millennia ago. I had wrestled deeply alongside the mother who had to surrender her beloved infant—no ordinary child—to the current of God’s will, knowing that holding too tightly would mean his certain doom. I had come to praise God for doing that which we all as parents long for him to guarantee: that if we truly do give them to him, he will give them back. He had prepared me spiritually for surrender. He’s there, even before I think I need him.

At a time of sheer panic, with a baby seemingly dying inside me, and me, strapped to a gurney in complete helplessness, I was calmed by the word of God’s power speaking within me, assuring me of his presence and activeness in even that desperate situation. Preparing me spiritually for what was about to happen, when I would see his power enacted physically as well.

My core issue, at the heart of my spiritual amnesia, is to forget that God has set his love upon me permanently. I am much more prone to believe that I am unloved and unlovable, that God will lose interest in me and cast me aside. It is my lack of faith. It is calling him a liar. Regardless of our position on miracles, Pastor Dave tells us there are two undeniable miracles every believer in any time will experience (even me): 1) Faith in Jesus guarantees a raised soul from the dead, eternally and forever in his presence. That is a supernatural and miraculous work. And 2) Every believer, after leaving this planet, will experience a complete transformation that makes us like Christ. That too is a supernatural and miraculous work.
That is the truth of our common faith.

The presence of the Holy Spirit with us now is proof of those two miracles to come. He is already here, acting, working, reminding me of those truths. Every “lesser” miracle I’ve seen has illustrated his presence with me. I am not abandoned. I am not left an orphan. The miracles of daily life don’t give me new insight into what God is doing in history. But they do affirm and remind me of what I knew in the beginning, when I first believed. They refresh my love and affection for him, which fades like the flower of the field in the tedium and turmoil of this life, when I am so focused on my own wants and needs and plans instead of on him. They testify to the “already” condition—that he is with me always, even to the very end of the world—and look ahead to the “not yet,” those two guaranteed miracles we will know once the time is accomplished.

No, I don’t believe in coincidences. My God is with me, the Great Physician is acting through his Holy Spirit to heal me progressively of this blight of spiritual amnesia by never leaving my presence. There is a balm in Gilead—even for the weak and faithless such as I.