Snapshots of Life...

I finally realised that I can upload my own photos right onto my blog. This could make my posts a bit more colourful!

I got a new coat for $8 at Goodwill this week. The funny thing is, it is almost exactly what I was looking for last year when I found out I was going to England (minus the hood - someone detached that). Does that mean I get to go back to England?







Last week Andréa and Kasey came to Colorado and we visited the Summit Semester clan at Snow Wolf Lodge. In this photo we are sporting our Nebraska gear in honour of Kasey.





Aren't my flatmates absolutely Beautiful? :) We're just missing the lovely Jacqueline.







Er, um, during my second visit to Semester (Alumni weekend/Farvest Hall) some of the guests made almond butter... Laura and I may have decided that licking the spatula was the most responsible way to clean it.


That's all for now, merry Thanksgiving to one and all!
~ Johanna

Christ Now and Then

"I wanted life itself, the colour and fire and loveliness of life. And Christ now and then, like a loved poem I could read when I wanted to. I didn’t want us to be swallowed up in God. I wanted holidays from the school of Christ.”

~ Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy (page 136)

There are many other, arguably better, quotations from A Severe Mercy. However, this one reminds me that I, too, don't always desire Jesus as I ought. It is sobering. Do I want holidays from the school of Christ? Sometimes. O God, help me to want more and still more of You!

In light of this struggle, I found another well-loved quotation from A Severe Mercy apropos:

“The best argument for Christianity is Christians: their joy, their certainty, their completeness. But the strongest argument against Christianity is also Christians--when they are sombre and joyless, when they are self-righteous and smug in complacent consecration, when they are narrow and repressive, then Christianity dies a thousand deaths. But, though it is just to condemn some Christians for these things, perhaps, after all, it is not just, though very easy, to condemn Christianity itself for them."

~ Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy

On the days I would rather have a holiday from the school of Christ, I find that I am not exhibiting the first characteristics Vanauken says are indicative of Christians. But even when I want holidays from the Master's school, the truth of Christianity does not shift or change. I shift, I falter like a shadow, but He is the light that dispels even my darkest desires. Persons may [rightly] reproach Christians, but no slander sticks to the Truth of Christ.

~ Johanna

Kyrie Eleison

Lord have mercy upon us
Christ have mercy upon us
Lord have mercy upon us
~ Kyrie Eleison

A beautiful way to start this snowy day. I'm watching fine flakes shaken like caster sugar over all the orange, yellow, and green leaves of Autumn... Thank You Jesus for Beauty!

And We Are Filled With Joy...

The LORD has done great things for us,
and we are filled with joy.

~ Psalm 126:3 (NiV)

What has the LORD done for you today that has filled you with joy?

Here is my list from the weekend:

• Good Summit friends from across the country converging in Colorado
• Sunset in Estes Park over jagged, snow-capped peaks across a still lake
• Bouldering with awesome friends
• Photo shoots
• RED maple trees at Celestial Seasonings factory, and all around Boulder in general
• Extreme yellow cottonwood-type trees along the river
  
• Good chilli at Snarf's sammich shop
• Fantastic conversations
• Fun and hoopla @ the Stonestreet's
  
• Laughing so hard that we cried @ Savannah's awesome stories
• Really, really good food - especially avocados
• Reading/Finishing Perelandra
• Good hymns and service at St. George's this morning + Middle School FUSE ;)
  
• Phone calls from good friends needing a listening ear and advice (and the same friends giving good advice and exhibiting humility)
• Amazing cups of tea with cream and sugar
  
• Liverwurst sammiches w/avocados
• John Michael Talbot and Michael Card music to chill out with in the evening
• Time to write letters
  
• A heated blanket on my comfy bed, and just having a bed!
  
• My car running like a champion through the Mountains and the Beautiful drive to/through Estes Park (and the moosen we saw in the woodsen!)
  
• Fun hikes and lovely walks
  
• Cold nights with clear skies and no moon; perfect for viewing the stars
• My friends Joseph and Edna who always bless me with good conversation and sweet, unlooked-for gifts
• Considering and mulling over the fact that at a literal point in history, God wasn't a man and that at one specific time He set aside His rightful glory and splendour to be clothed in flesh to share man's smudge and smell
• Psalm 126 (check out the end after the above verse... Soooo good!)

Ah! And there is a new week ahead to gather more realisations that God has done great things for us...

...And I am filled with joy!



~ Johanna

Stepping Stones

Have you ever tried to cross a creek by jumping from stone to stone? I often go about this task rather gingerly (and not just because I am red-headed). Stones in a creek can be slippy, moss-covered, treacherous, and wobbly. Sometimes it is no easy task picking your way across such hazards; especially when you do not know which (if any) you will meet on your trek.

Life is rather like crossing an immense stream by stepping from rock to rock. It is hard to tell if you will have sure footing, if the shallow water rushing over a stone is perilous, or if you will find a solid place to pause. Sometimes one puts their foot out onto a stone, trusting their weight to it, only to find that it is weak and wriggling. When this happens to me I usually make a mad dash to find the next rock in the chain of stones. If the next stone is solid it is a good halting place to recover balance and nerve; but when the next step is also shaky, it can be a disastrous course. Sometimes I get wet.

Reality is like that... I trust my heart to something inordinately more than God (people, intellect, work, and on it goes) and I find that thing too weak to support me. Not because the thing is bad of itself, but because I rely on it disproportionately to trusting God. If I do not change my course and seek the solid rock of obedience to Jesus I end up getting wet. Sometimes just my 'shoes' are sopping and soggy; other times I am completely submerged in the rushing river coursing between the stones.

"I held it truth, with him who sings
To one clear harp in divers tones,
That men may rise on stepping stones
Of their dead selves to higher things."
~ Tennyson

My friend Andrew shared the above lines on his blog recently and it struck a chord inside of me. There are times when our course lies across a part of the stream where there are no stones we can reach. Unless the Creator Himself lays a path before us (which He does surprisingly often), He often gives us things to sacrifice to become the next step.

As the Israelites built altars of memorial stones when God did something great, we too, at times build memorials to God out of things offered or sacrificed to Him. We offer Him the root of bitterness, lust, lies, or some other brokenness needing to be consumed from our lives. We sacrifice the good things in our lives, seeking the best things. We offer praise and thanksgiving at all times, even in sorrow and suffering. These things are memorial stones to the testimony of the power, kindness, and goodness of God. It is with these stones that the Father paves our way before us. We step upon our dead selves, our dead past, to step closer to Him.

What stepping stones does the LORD desire to lay before you? What sacrifices can be made into altars of memorial? Will you let the Shepherd take your weakness, brokenness, and sin and turn them into a place of surrender and hope [confident expectation]? What part of you needs to be crucified and stepped upon to reach the next step in life?

Would you be so bold as to comment below with your answer to one (or all) of these questions? I will go first... Right now the LORD is working in me to be better disciplined with my time, especially in giving Him the first fruits/portion of the day... And He is reminding me not to fall into old habits where I waste mornings by sleeping in - which reminds me that I need to go to bed so I can rise to spend tomorrow with my dear friends from out of town. Goodnight all!

~ Johanna

Pressed, but not crushed...

"Remember, however, that to be breakable is not the same as to be perishable."
~ G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Chesterton pens the above line in a chapter labelled "The Ethics of Elfland" in his superior little book Orthodoxy. (Project Gutenberg has the entire book on-line for free, see above link. You can even download it to your Kindle.)

I thought of Paul describing all of the punishments he had endured for the sake of Christ, how he was pressed, but not crushed, persecuted, but not abandoned. And then the line from Job, "Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him" came to mind. So I have been pondering what it means to allow God to break me, while knowing He won't discard me.

I go back to Chesterton's thought: God has made us imperishable, yet breakable. Why? He has built us with frailty in us (need for food, sleep, etc.). Why? After all, in Him there is no frailty, no shadow of turning, no going back on His word.

The Psalmist understood that we were built with frailty in us when he said,

"My heart was hot within me;
While I was musing, the fire burned.
Then I spoke with my tongue:

'LORD, make me to know my end,
And what is the measure of my days,
That I may know how frail I am'."
~ Psalm 39:3-4

God is so different from us, yet He not only knows that we exist, He knows us! I am overwhelmed with this realisation... That God would know us, care for us, draw us in to the most intimate fellowship with Him under the shadow of His wings. It is too much, He is too much!

That is my thought for today, God is too much. He is far more than 'enough'. He is beyond the scope of our greatest imaginings. When we remember how great God is, how good He is in spite of circumstances, how kind and patient He is, we find that we can be pressed, but we are not crushed. We are breakable, but not disposable or perishable. Let us be breakable in the Father's hands, which is the safest place to be broken.

~ Johanna

Autumn: Nothing Gold Can Stay

September is my favourite month. The days are sunny and warm with a nip in the air. The nights are chilly, allowing me to snuggle under my down comforter. Most of the trees here in the foothills are still green, but oft their edges are tipped with gold, their hardest hue to hold, as Mr. Frost so aptly penned.

This morning the sun chased me from under my warm nest of covers. I slipped outside as the Morning Star illumined the yellow leaves of a tree that had turned early. My eyes lingered on the half-green, half-amber dryads lining the river. A gilded stream of leaves coursed through the channel along the sidewalk. The chill breeze chased the citron leaves along the street, their frail frames scuttling the direction I, too, traversed. They chased me like an unbidden memory invades the present. I let them come. Indeed, I hardly had the power to stop their swirling dance any more than I could quell an impetuous memory.

Freshness hung in the air, mingling with the aroma of crunching leaves. Sunshine filtered through the torn cotton clouds and settled on the distant Pike's Peak, crowning it with gold. But even the gold of early dawn could not long tarry, and neither could I. I dropped my letters in the post box and made for home, eager to read the next chapter in Orthodoxy; but that is a topic for another post.

Nature's first green is gold
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

~ Nothing Gold Can Stay, Robert Frost

Bearing the Cost

Recently I have been re-reading the classic Hinds' Feet on High Places by Hannah Hurnard. My dad first read the book to me when I was quite young, and then again around high school. I have read it myself a couple of times also. I learn something new (or in a deeper way) every time I read it.

Hinds' Feet is an allegory of sorts, with the main character, Much Afraid, allowing the Shepherd to plant the seed (thorn) of love in her heart and lead her on a journey to the High Places. Her first check comes when the Shepherd begins to lead her directly away from the mountains and through a vast desert. Here she learns the first lesson in love, Acceptance with Joy. In the desert sand where a few drops of water happen to splash from a spring, there is a single golden flower persevering; its name is Acceptance with Joy.

As Much Afraid continues her journey through the desert she does not turn toward the high places, but is led toward the Sea of Loneliness. There are many lessons to be learned here and in the next part of the journey, but finally the Shepherd leads her toward the mountains again. Now she has circuited the range and finds herself at a sheer, seemingly impassable precipice. The Shepherd tells her that to make her lame feet like hinds' feet she has to come this harder way. He promises her that she will learn the next lesson of love as she climbs the Precipice of Injury (not to be confused with Mt. Reviling or Persecution) with her strong companions, Sorrow and Suffering.

On the second day of her journey, in a lonely cleft in the sheer rock, Much Afraid meets a blood-red flower, glowing in the sunrise. The flower is named 'Bearing the Cost' (though some call it 'Forgiveness'). At one point it says,

"I was separated from all my companions, exiled from home, carried here and imprisoned in this rock. It was not my choice, but the work of others who, when they had dropped me here, went away and left me to bear the results of what they had done..."

In spite of ill treatment, the little flower continues that in this lonely and desolate place there is nothing to distract it from its Love, the sun.

"He shines upon me and makes me to rejoice, and has atoned for me all that was taken from me and done against me. There is no flower in all the world more blessed or more satisfied than I, for I look up to [my Love] as a weaned child and say, 'Whom have I in heaven but Thee, and there is none upon earth that I desire but Thee'."

I just loved the little flower's response to adversity and loneliness: Now there is no distraction from my Love. There is no flower in all the world more blessed or more satisfied than I.

What an attitude to have! Rather than seeing our circumstances as hard, impossible, and solitary, we can both accept them with joy and bear the cost. We find that in the isolated places there is nothing to distract us from our Love: Jesus.

The passage that Bearing the Cost quotes from is Psalm 73. I have expanded it below for the sake of having some context. At the beginning of Psalm 73 the psalmist objects that the wicked prosper and do not seem to experience pain or poverty. However, like a sonnet there is a volta, a turning point; the writer thinks these things until he goes in to the Sanctuary of God. Then he realises his error and misunderstanding. He finishes with these thoughts (vv 23-28):

Nevertheless I am continually with You;
You hold me by my right hand.
You will guide me with Your counsel,
And afterward receive me to glory.

Whom have I in heaven but You?
And there is none upon earth that I desire besides You.
My flesh and my heart fail;
But God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

For indeed, those who are far from You shall perish;
You have destroyed all those who desert You for harlotry.
But it is good for me to draw near to God;
I have put my trust in the Lord GOD,
That I may declare all Your works.

Indeed, may I declare in trials and loneliness that there is now nothing to distract me from my Love. May I discover that there is no person in all the world as blessed and satisfied as me. And may I truly be able to declare that there is none that I desire besides Jesus.

~ Johanna

An Arrow in Flight

When was the last time you sat down to read a good novel? For me it was last night. I picked up Pride and Prejudice to read for 'a little bit' and found myself still reading it two hours later. When was the last time you sat down to read Scripture like a novel? When was the last time you were astonished to find an hour or two had elapsed when you were reading the Bible?

A story draws us in, brings the reader in to the character's thoughts and observations, and often teaches by delighting*. Many Christians tend to think of the Bible as an instruction manual, a textbook, or a collection of sayings, stories, parables, and rules. The Bible becomes bits and pieces 'suitable' for reading in 10 or 15 minutes before dashing out the door for our busy and 'important' lives. However, the Bible is actually a story.

Now, I'm not Dawkins or some emergent church advocate calling the Bible a sham; but what if I told you the Bible is a myth, a fairytale, a metanarrative, and the like? You see, the Bible is a myth, a tale, a metanarrative (overarching story). It just happens to be a true myth, a real tale, and THE big story. (If you have heard metanarratives slandered and dismissed, or if you think they are bad, see Goheen's very readable explanation.)

If you are like me, you secretly harbour the desire to walk through a wardrobe and find yourself in a snowy land of always winter and never Christmas. Deep down you wish that dwarves, elves, talking beasts, and Hobbits really lived in a land you could sail to. We want myths and fairytales to be true. We want to step into the world of Jane Austin's or Charles Dickens' novels. We want a story-line, a hero, a victorious, happy, or peaceful ending.

Though the Bible contains various genres of writing (poetry, parables, prophecy, principles, proverbs, and past events) it is all one story. When you aim an arrow, you know from the beginning where you want it to go. If someone else sees the arrow in flight he can tell by the trajectory (at least generally) where the arrow came from and where it is going. The same is true of Scripture, we see where everything began and the track of the story. We can also see that it isn't over yet, but we have been told that the ending is victorious, joyful, and beyond restorative.

How can we see this big picture in Scripture if we only read a few verses, maybe a chapter at a time? We need to begin reading Scripture as holistically as possible. Read a complete gospel in one sitting. Read a few of Paul's letters all together. Read through all of Genesis, or Isaiah, or Jeremiah, etc. Yes, it takes time. Just remember that it is a story; it is supposed to be read as such. Remember, too, that it is a true story. Not all of it is "applicable" to life, but it does show the character of God and sets the stage for the New Testament, or the chapter of the story in which we find ourselves here and now.

* As Philip Sidney says in his Defence of Poetry: "Poesy therefore is an art of imitation...that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth - to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture - with this end, to teach and delight."  (A Defence of Poetry Oxford University Press ©1966 - page 25)

Exposing the Lies of Lust

Hello new territory...

Normally my blog is a place where I discuss books (usually older books, at that) or things God has been teaching me through circumstances, etc. Today, however, I want to talk about an issue that churches are not dealing with: the struggle women have with lust.

Lust is not only a 'male problem' - it never has been. But we have been raised to think it is only guys who struggle with knowing where to set their eyes on a summer's day (one of my friends always said that summer was 'sidewalk season' because it was the only safe place to look). We are told that only men have a black thought-life, and only males are stimulated by scantily clad women on billboards or in the windows of Victoria's Secret.

But the secret is that women struggle, too. Probably not in the same way that men do - men and women think and process differently, of course. Yet lust is a human sin, not geared towards males alone. I have found this to be the case time and again with the girls I encounter... And I would be lying if I didn't say that those billboards, et cetera are distracting to me, too. Few churches (very few, in fact) address the issue, making young women feel like they are alone in their sin, having nowhere to turn in getting help.

Here I will turn things over to someone who has thought this through and polished her writing a bit more (okay, a LOT more) than I have. Please click the link below to read the full post. It isn't long and it is eye-opening.

We need to clearly teach that lust is a human condition, not just a masculine one. Knowing God's glory is at stake, we need to create humble church cultures where secret sin is not kept in the dark, but rather brought into the light...

...The roaring lion waits in the cover of darkness to attack what he finds there, but "whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God" (John 3:21).

~ Carolyn McCulley
Lust: Not for Men Only, 22 July 2011