Quiet Hope . . . or Bitter Resignation?

And the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast. --  1 Peter 5:10

Wouldn't it be nice if emotions and feelings came with labels like green beans and cookies?  We could just scan the can or peruse the package and know whether this was going to be good for us or make us blow up like a balloon.  Or, how about a label to tell us where they came from, like "Made in China?"   The label might read, "Fashioned in a Deceitful Heart," or "Dredged up from Dependency."  Maybe a warning label would be nice:  "Warning:  Acting on this Feeling May Cause User to Spiral Out of Control," or "Beware:  This Emotion May Be Hazardous to Personal Stability."  Since so many feelings can be toxic, maybe the warning labels could contain antidotes:  turn, pray, flee.

But, for the person who struggles with sexual brokenness, life is not always nice and it is certainly not packaged for ease of opening.  Nor do all the pieces seem to easily go together, if they're even all there.  So we decorate the packages and overlook the missing and broken pieces and do our best to assemble the best life we can with whatever went into our basket at checkout.  Sometimes it shows; sometimes it doesn't.  It depends on our marketing skills and how well we sell ourselves to others . . . and to ourselves.  We know "the truth is out there," but we prefer to be in here.  We curl up with a little of the truth like a too-small blanket and want for greater comfort and security.

Is it "quiet hope" or "bitter resignation?"  Is it waiting or wilting?  When rains come, do they wash us clean and set our feet to freedom or could they be the final flood that grows ever deeper to sweep us away?

I remember a little girl who lived down the street from us in a small town when I was a boy.  In our fractured and unpredictable world, a good day was defined as a day that nothing bad happened.  We looked forward to those.  In her little world though, only a few blocks away, a day was defined as good.  Her Daddy was determined she know no bad.

We lived in the tornado belt and spring storms ranged from frequent to constant.  The dark clouds would come flying over the horizon, billowing miles high, filled with the flashes of lightning, thunder echoing throughout the sky.  Birds would flee and dogs would cower as the clouds organized into dangerous whirlwinds, sizing up targets and we would hide in bathtubs under rugs.  Soon, the sun would come out and the wet trees would glisten in amazing brilliance and we would ride our bikes in the tiny rivers along the curbs.  That was how life was:  powerful and menacing one moment; peaceful and contrite the next.  Just like at home:  blow up and tear up, then make up and clean up.

The Daddy of the little girl down the lane had a curious habit of making sure that everything bad turned out good.  After every storm, when the thunder ceased and the lightning faded, he would sneak out into their backyard and hang candy on the tree that grew in the center of the yard, just behind his daughter's bedroom.  She never saw him do it, but would see the candy dangling like magic outside her window and run out to get it and forget there had ever been a storm in the first place.  He assured her there never would be, not really.

Our trees were always bare after the storms, surrounded by a few broken branches and loosened leaves, but I would usually slip down the street to see if the candy had appeared.  I knew it was just her Dad, but I wanted to think that somehow God was doing it.

Of course, I've learned since then that sometimes the storm itself is the "candy," or at least the consequence.  It's the result of all the build up, the choices, the things we ignore, the wants we confuse with the needs, the piled-up discarded warning labels, the substituted ingredients, the parts we twisted in hopes they would fit.  Finally, a little thunder, a flash of lightning, a growing swirling and and the birds are fleeing and the dogs are cowering . . . and so are we, beneath the weight of our own heaviness, searching in vain for that little soft blanket of truth we used to pull over our heads before we weaved a bigger and expanding replacement from the fabric of false hope.  And then . . . thar she blows.

And our tears are like rain.  And they overflow.  And in our cowardly confusion, knowing we allowed this toxic storm into our lives, we ignore the antidote:  turn, pray, flee.  Indeed, many times we seek comfort in the darkness of the cloud itself and stir it to a greater intensity.

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows.  -- 2 Corinthians 1:3-5

We can trade our cowardly confusion for the compassion and comfort of Christ.

Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. -- Matthew 11:28

Come?
All?
Weary?
Burdened?
Rest?

Really then, what are our excuses for holding on and holding in those burdens that make us so weary that we perfect our storm-creation skills and run for cover when the actions of our hands and hearts grow into chaos?  Aren't we among the "all?"  Wouldn't we rather "rest?"  In Him.

I think sometimes we get so busy counting the costs that we forget to rejoice in the gains.  For one, we've not been swept away, we've been swept up.  We've not been given the dead limp limbs from a dying weeping willow, but the sweet fruits of grace and mercy dangling deliciously from a strong and mighty tree.  We're not tossed about and discarded, we're lifted up and swept high. 

Don't think I am putting my head in the clouds and dismissing the damages.  I hurt.  You hurt.  Struggling does that.  It takes a portion of us and puts it in opposition to the rest of us, so we feel the pulling until it seems we might just come apart.  And then, behold, the One who knit us together in our mothers' wombs offers to restore and redeem and repair.

If we hope.  If we do not succumb to the bitterness of resignation.  If we can look just above the heap of loss to the horizon of hope.

My struggles have cost me the love of my children, the security of my former career, the respect of those who saw the candy but missed the brittle branches of deception on which they hung and turned away, repelling at the revelation.  But, in all these things I have hope.  I am not resigned.

Why?

The storms that erupt don't just tear away the good, they wash away the bad.  The just and the unjust.  So much decaying debris has now been swept away it was like a rushing flood crashing through a logjam.  Perhaps when our lives get so filled with crud, there is nothing we can do but experience a flood to allow for removal and replacing.  A flood of repentance.

I know a lot of people are just trying to hold on.  Struggling with sexual brokenness is a form of suffering that often seems deserved not only in the eyes of our observers, but in our own.  Why are we so weak? Inquiring minds really really really want to know.

What we should be asking ourselves is why we are so hesitant to ask the Strong Deliverer, the One who never grows weary, never faints, defends the weak, comforts, gives us hope, and offers to lift us up on wings like Eagles, to do so.  He will outlast every storm. 

So, where are you today?  Reaching high in quiet hope?  Bent low in bitter resignation?  I know your hurt is real.  Those storms are not imaginary.  And no one runs around behind them hanging treats to make your fear subside.  I know the hope is real too.  And the reward of our hope is forgiveness, redemption, truth and love and freedom. 

The reward of resignation is . . . . bitterness.  And inaction.  We become stumps, perhaps impervious to the pounding of the storms, but resistant to the sun as well.  We stop growing.

Maybe you're somewhere in the middle, a little short of hope, just skirting the border of bitterness.  Often it is when we are muddled in the middle that we discover the clarity of Grace to drive us in the better direction.

Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God.  Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance. -- Romans 5:1-3

There's the reward:  faith . . . peace . . . grace . . . hope . . . perseverance.  And there's the choice:  rejoice in our sufferings and persevere or resign to them and drown in bitterness.

Resigned to Rejoice,

Thom

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Sorting is Such Sweet Sorrow

The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For out of the overflow of his heart his mouth speaks. -- Luke 6:45

Most of my memories are all too real, but sometimes I like to create one here and there on the assumption that it probably happened for me, just like it surely did for all the other boys.   For instance, I "remember" that on a camping trip decades ago I lay on my back alongside my dad and pointed into the deep dark sky and learned the positions of the big and little dippers and God's placement of Cassiopeia, Cepheus and Draco.  The ground was softened by pine needles, a brook babbled nearby, two unidentified bright eyes gazed at us from the perimeter, the campfire crackled a few yards away and a night bird flew by quietly, though I could feel its wings.  And I fell asleep there 'till dawn.  Or maybe I didn't, but I so should have that I surely could have.  Couldn't I?

I love dawn.  Perhaps because I am a rare visitor to its daily bow.  I like how it peeks in slowly and then jumps at you. However, I really like the moon.  It seems like it's an "it's alright" nightlight, as opposed to the harsh realities of the sun, which comes so peacefully and then pounces so powerfully. It stares at you all day, but you don't dare stare back.  Sunset always seems to be a relief.  A "you-made-it-again" moment, followed by the soothing cool white presence of the lesser light.

I always appreciated the clear distinction between the sun and moon.  One is bright and hot, the other is not . . . and not.  The difference between the two is so intentional that it is comforting. 

It would be nice if everything else was so clear-cut.  The sun by day; the moon by night.  Man wants woman; woman wants man.  Man and woman marry and live happily ever after, forsaking all others just as surely as the sun and moon do exactly as God intended, ever after . . . or at least until He decides otherwise.  Clearly the firmaments were not blessed with a free will.

It never "dawned" on me when I was a little boy that occasionally the sun and the moon encroach on each others' territories.  The sun comes up and the moon lingers.  The moon pops in before sunset.  The first time I really noticed that was when I was 15.  Out in the country -- not camping with my dad -- but hanging with a bunch of older guys from work who had discovered that a couple of sisters who worked where we did were not exactly wholesome, following in the footsteps of their mother.  On Fridays, their home was the all-night party.  Their old home overlooked a pond.  On Fridays from midnight to well-past dawn, it would become littered with beer cans and bodies, tossed around on blankets beside the banks of the pond.  The boys from work greatly-out-numbered the hostesses, but it never seemed a problem.

I've wondered if my life would have been different had I mingled on a blanket that night instead of hiding in the trees along a trail that lead away from the pond, where I waited for the dawn.  I did not say "better."  I said "different."  I remember waiting for the moon to disappear and the sun to announce that this bad night had passed.  But, the sun rose in the east and the moon sat high, only slowly fading.  Their presence seemed to mock my own confusion as I hid from myself.

Walking back in the still-dim morning light to the house to find a ride home, I came across one of the sisters nearly passed out on a dewy blanket.  She offered herself to me.  A friend standing nearby laughed as I fumbled away and I heard for the first time in my life in the context of sexuality:  "What's wrong with you?"  And I began to wonder if perhaps something was.

The condemnation and judgment from others and from the self that those of us who struggle with same-sex attraction bear always seemed to me to be disproportionate.  I know it is because we sin against our very beings when we act out, but I also know that sin is sin and God condemns adultery and the using of others for personal satisfaction regardless.  Only marriage fits his design  . . . and no one around that pond was married, or intending to be anytime soon . . . at least not to any of the Friday-nighters.

I also know that God's forgiveness is extended equally to all.  Jesus didn't die a little bit for some and a whole lot for others.

I've come to see that anyone who struggles with sexual brokenness -- and if you think that term is too lenient and soft, just try thinking of yourself as "broken" -- feels as much pain about their malady as I do mine.  Men who are attracted to men and women who are attracted to women, each looking for something missing within themselves.  They're broken.  Men and women addicted to pornography lose touch with all reality, hiding their shame and their addiction behind smiles and shrugs.  They're broken.  Men and women who seek sex with other men and women outside of marriage, whether as curious and uncontrolled singles and teenagers, or as adulterous and wandering marrieds.  They are broken.  Men and women who have given in to rampant self-satisfaction -- masturbation -- are losing touch with real relationships and can't explain why they find themselves more pleasurable than others.  They're broken.  Men and women abuse and control each other to show their power because they know they're weak.  They're broken.  Men and women hate and fear each other because they don't know how to love and need each other.  They're broken. 

We all remember what happens to things that are broken.  Even our most favorite toys just hung around for awhile with duct-taped pieces . . . and finally ended up on the curb on clean-up Saturday.  The best dishes hit the floor and are swept away in unrecognizable shards.  No one wants to end up on the curb, so we apply the duct-tape liberally in the form of lies and stories and counter-measures.  We glue it all together.  All the while, the heart keeps right on storing up the real, readying itself for revelation.

For from within, out of men's hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and make a man 'unclean.' " -- Mark 7:21-23

Fortunately, we're not stuck being evil.  We can be made clean.  All that stuff we stored up can be swept away.  All the inner junk that was far beneath garage-sale quality becomes brand new.

Now in a large house there are not only gold and silver vessels, but also vessels of wood and of earthenware, and some to honor and some to dishonor. Therefore, if anyone cleanses himself from these things, he will be a vessel for honor, sanctified, useful to the Master, prepared for every good work.-- 2 Timothy 2:20-21

So, I guess it's just our lot in life to be either an honorable silver goblet in which to serve fine wine, or to be a dishonorable wooden bowl to carry the slop out to the pigs?  And what's more, we may be broken by others and of little use at all?   Not if God has anything to do with it.

Like the sun and moon each have a purpose and yield appropriately to each other, we have to realize that we can't shake God’s absolute sovereignty and we can't shirk our full responsibility for our sins. We have a choice: We can be a filthy vessel that God uses for dishonor or a clean vessel that God uses for honor. We may not be accountable for all the circumstances -- those things that others did to us that bent us or broke us -- but we are accountable for the choices we make as a result.

Notice that the verse above does say "if anyone cleanses himself."  It's our job to do it.  Obviously it's in doubt as to whether or not we will.  Thus the word "if."   If we cleanse ourselves.  If we come to grips with our own sins and . . . cleanse ourselves.

But . . . what can wash away my sin?

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, purifies us from all sin.  1 John 1:7

Sunrise. Sunset. Swiftly flow the days.  The days are long past when I can lay on the ground with my father or even my sons and point out the constellations placed by the father above.  The days are past when I can claim confusion or surprise by the sins and consequences any more than I can by the passing of night to day and the movements of the sun and the moon.  I'm responsible.  Time to sort it out.  The good and the evil.  The dark and the light.  The broken and the beautiful. 

You can do it.  Just lay back with your Father -- God -- and he will point them out and help you sort and be made new.  Such sweet sorrow to see those old things go.

God Bless,

Thom 

The Bully in the Barn

He is jealous for me
Loves like a hurricane
I am a tree
Bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy
When all of a sudden
I am unaware of these
Afflictions eclipsed by glory
And I realize just how beautiful you are and
How great Your affections are for me

          -- John Mark MacMillan

This is a story about a kid named Spike. He was, for me, a great affliction.  I have asked for forgiveness for thinking of him as such, but I will never forget the "Summer of Spike."

Jonathan Edwards, preacher and missionary to Native Americans back in the 1700s, and widely acknowledged to be America's most important and original philosophical theologian and a great intellect, included affliction among his famous resolutions about how to live his life, which he wrote in 1723.  There it was, number 67 out of 70:  

Resolved, after afflictions, to inquire, what I am the better for them, what good I have got by them, and what I might have got by them.  

Jonathan Edwards read his resolutions every week . . . as if afflictions need a reminder. Jonathan Edwards never spent a summer with Spike.  

One encounter with Spike and you would never forget him, no matter how resolved you might be to do so.  And though my encounter with him took place only over the span of perhaps three days, I call it the Summer of Spike because I really don't remember anything else about that summer.  He was an impactful kind of kid.

The Summer of Spike might be more aptly remembered as the Summer of Shame.  It followed a winter of abandonment and a spring of seduction.  Winter being the season of my father's separation from my life and Spring being the following season of sexual abuse at the hands of the evil one who presumed to take my father's place as my protector and mentor.

As I moved into that summer, I was a much-too-wise eight-years-old and a bearer of secrets. Secrets deep within me were going through the metamorphosis that would convert them into scars.  Silence like a cancer grows?  In me, it was more like silence like a cancer flows.  I had turned into a bed-wetter. The shame I hid during my daytime interactions with "normal" people seeped out of me at night and multiplied itself.  I would try not to drink.  I would try not to sleep.  I would have tried anything.  None of it worked.  The stain that had taken hold of my life, which I buried out of sight, would find its way out in the midst of a sad dream and show up in the morning as a stain on my sheets.  It was just another reason to wish I had never been born.

I would soon wish someone else had never been born.

My new stepfather's parents lived on a farm near Stroud, Oklahoma.  It was picturesque.  A fading red barn with implements and tractors all around, big horses and rowdy cows, bins full of cornstalks, a sawdust floor, an owl in the rafters, ropes hanging from the beams for uses I couldn't imagine, a rooster in the second-floor window, a weather vane on the peak.  And a sorta' cousin named Spike, whose parents -- for some odd reason -- had sent him there to spend the summer with his grandparents.  

I never caught my step-grandparents' names and knew them only as "Mom" and "Dad," which is what my stepfather called them.  I caught my cousin's name right off.  I'd never known a Spike and I wonder now how his parents could have been so prophetic in naming their child. 

I was a skinny little eight-year-old bed-wetter in the hands of a twelve-year-old bully pursuing perfection for his chosen calling.  I wasted no time inviting affliction upon myself.  Spike was a farm boy, and by the end of the first night I was so exhausted from all the things he had done to me trying to turn me into his little farmhand, that I fell fast asleep . . . deeply asleep . . . in the same bed as Spike.  He woke up yellowed and yelling.

"Mom" chased me into the bathroom on the hall where I ended up standing naked in an old claw-footed bathtub while she poured cold water on me and pronounced me as lazy and stupid. Spike stood outside the open door pointing and laughing.  

It gets worse.

  

The original plan had not been for me to stay at the farm that day when we had visited, but Spike had begged and my mother relented and left me there . . . with only the clothes I had on, which were also the clothes I had later slept in.  My clothes were now in the wash and I was stuck wearing a pair of Spike's shorts.  He was not a little 12-year-old by any stretch and my legs looked like they were extending from dual parachutes as we headed to the barn to feed the horses and play in the hay in the rafters.

About halfway up the ladder, I heard Spike's laughter and looked down to see him pointing.  He could see up my --well, his -- shorts and was ridiculing me in a way that an experience-damaged little boy can't just accept as teasing.  It was torment and torture.  Spike had already wrestled me into surrender on a dusty floor, thrown me into a near-stagnant stock pond, bludgeoned me with a pillow, offered me as a human sacrifice to a bunch of hungry cows and mocked me in a bathtub.

I heard years later that Spike had dived into a shallow swimming pool later that summer while showing off and cracked his burred head.  I never saw him again, but heard he had survived, yet would always have a nasty and permanent scar.  So did I.

Even after we survive our childhood, I think there are times when we just give in and see ourselves as others sometimes see us, as less than them, as somehow not put together quite right, as willingly astray, pleasurably-broken, struggle-embracing, skinny little creatures paralyzed on a ladder, ridiculed and diminished and deserving to be so.  

We need to see ourselves as Jesus sees us.  Jesus see us as complete.  He doesn't toss us into stock ponds; He picks us up and wraps us in His arms and simply loves us.  He doesn't wrestle us into forced surrender; He invites us to surrender and soothes us with grace and peace.  He doesn't point and mock, reducing us to shame; He holds and hears and builds us back up with hope.

Jesus doesn't exploit our weaknesses; He turns them into our strengths.  He never makes us wish we had never been born; he makes us rejoice to be born again.

I wish all the afflictions which serve as such fertile soil for the morphing of experiences into the scars that so taunt strugglers could vanish into the night like the hoots of the old barn owl that no longer haunt me.  Rather than manifesting themselves into such burdens, I wish these afflictions could be as distant a memory for you as Spike is now for me. 

But . . . what of Jonathan Edwards and his resolution that such afflictions are to be turned into good?  And, what about Joseph, sold into slavery by his very brothers?  That was certainly worse than being roughed up in a hay barn by a crazy cousin.

You intended to harm me, but God intended it all for good. He brought me to this position so I could save the lives of many people.  -- Genesis 50:20

I know it is tough to "count it all joy."  I know it is hard to see how God can intend it all for good.  But if we allow ourselves to be trapped inside the vision that others have created for us and wear the label they have fashioned for us, and limit ourselves to their diminished hope, we empower Satan. If we trust God and take Him at His word and obey Him and surrender and find our hope in Glory, we confound Satan. 

Our afflictions are eclipsed by Glory.  Our earthly afflictions are no match for His heavenly affections.  Oh . . . how He loves us.

I rarely think of Spike.  He's probably a kind grandfather somewhere.  Maybe when he sees "shortcomings" in his grandchildren he thinks of his "Summer of Thom" and cuts them a little slack.  He usually only comes to my mind when  a sportscaster notes the futility that leads a quarterback to "spike" the ball.  I always think of Spike diving into that pool.

Be strong.  Be courageous.  Be obedient.  And when you find yourself being less than what God intends and trapped somewhere in what man pretends, remember how much He loves you.  Vanquish the bully in the barn and walk with the One who really knows you.

God Bless,

Thom 

Plugging the Leak in the Lifeboat

Sometimes we can become so attached to the familiarity of life -- the good and the bad -- that we become far too comfortable, whether we are wallowing or jubilating.  Snug in our surroundings and safe in our stability or even in our instability, we become satisfied that at least it is us.  Black or white, wrong or right, the reflection in the mirror, smiling or frowning, singing or crying, is me.

I have been asked why it is that I seem okay today, despite the harsh realities of reaping.  Entering another year still separated from my children, some past church issues still unsettled, my not-quite-completely-resolved mind stubbornly challenging my clearly-resolved soul for clarity and purpose.  Add to that lack of clarity a blurred vision for my future as a provider and my place as a servant.  But I'm okay.  Or, to use that all-purpose Christian four-letter word: I'm fine.

My okayness is more than just going with the flow.  At an early age, I thought life would never be all that good . . . and it has turned out far better than good, based on my internal measurements.  Observers -- both the casual and the highly-critical, may disagree, but experience tells me that the value of observation can be greatly affected by both distance and distortion.

I had low expectations from an early age and I stand amazed at the goodness of God despite what I expect or suspect.  My perspective has changed through the experience of the grading process, the piling up of tests; some failed, some passed.  I have experienced the blessing of being graded on the curve.

When I was about 10, the good part of my life revolved around a couple of goofy friends, a bicycle with a banana seat and high-rise handlebars, and a place to ride it.  The bad part of my life resided in a small drab apartment ruled by a stepfather who drank a lot of whiskey, smoked a lot of cigarettes, shouted a lot of curse words and slept a lot of time away in front of the TV.  Outside was the place to be, even if it was miles of parking lots crammed between other drab apartment buildings stretching on for blocks.

Freedom could be found in the acres of land outside our Houston suburb that had been cleared for the building of a major expressway.  The bulldozers had fashioned mountains of dirt and we carved trails through them and raced each other up and down and around, flying faster each time because we were so familiar. We followed our own tracks. Our rubber tires were so "one-with-the-dirt," we could have flown through the dusty mountain trails hands-raised with blindfolds on.

Flying became more real one morning when I came to the end of the tallest "mountain" and found that the bulldozers which had given had begun the taketh away phase.  The end of the mountain was gone; a cliff was there and I pedaled into the sky and the rubber became one with the air.  It doesn't take long for a 10-year-old's life to flash before his eyes, even a life as muddled and odd as the one I had already lived.

I survived.  A bit of blood, a bunch of bruises, a lot of bends in the bike.  I realized that even the best-laid trails can turn against you.

About five years ago, on a cold winter night, I came home from teaching an evening writing class at the university.  Lisa was out that evening and left a dinner in the fridge, which I warmed up.  I carried it to the living room to watch "24."  I took a bite, took a drink, took a bite, took a drink.  And then I panicked.  Not one bite of food, not one swallow of iced tea had followed the trail -- the esophagus -- down to the eager stomach.  I could not swallow at all.  My mind -- which has never been very scientific -- deduced that if I could not swallow, I could not breathe.  I just knew I was dying, sitting on a couch with a plate of uneaten leftovers, all alone on a cold night.  I wouldn't even have time to leave a thank-you note behind.

Of course, we don't breathe through the esophagus.  Our lungs are not attached to our stomachs.  As soon as the now-longer life quit flashing before my eyes, I had to force myself to throw up, called my wife and then a doctor and the next day went in to have the esophagus dilated and opened up so I could eat again.  I celebrated with a chocolate shake. 

I survived.

Maybe we all need, once or twice, to face the reality of death, even if it is not really real reality, just a panic as the gap closes between us and the hard ground . . . or the mind confuses the anatomy and declares it's closing time.

One of the things I've learned in 2009 is that my lack of trust in the Lord tended often to result in a transfer of trust to others.  I think it's good to know people we can trust and believe in, but "In God We Trust" are not just four little words that started appearing on a two-cent coin in 1864 as a result of a minister's plea following the Civil War.  "In God We Trust" are the words that will guide us through our own civil wars, when one side of us stands in opposition to the other and we threaten to tear ourselves apart.

We are a sea of strugglers.  Who calmed the seas?  So, in whom shall we trust? Perhaps the One who turns the raging sea of remorse into the enabling sea of forgetfulness?  No one else can do it . . . and if you are looking for someone else . . . your lifeboat has a serious leak.

I know you don't want carry the excess baggage of 2009 into 2010.  I don't either.  I want to travel lighter, be more sure of foot, choose a better trail, become one with the One.  I grew so sick of stumbling in the past that I was gravely in danger of dropping all pretense of walking.  But . . . we press on.

Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. -- Philippians 3:13-14

Forgetting what is behind?
Straining toward what is ahead?
Pressing on toward the goal?
For which God has called . . . . me?

My resolution for 2010?  Trust God.

Not the trails I laid out for myself.  Not my body.  Not my mind.  Not people . . . though there are those placed in my life who are trust-merchants for the Lord.  Trust God.

The road to the resolution's success will be cleared by removing the separation that remains between me and Him because of the sins I hold so dear.  The familiarity of the life I choose has too-long veiled the adventure of the one to which He calls.  I am moving from the valley of low expectations to the peaks of His promises. 

Trust.
Trust God.
Mighty God.

God Bless,

Thom