Forget about what’s happened; don’t keep going over old history. Be alert, be present. I’m about to do something brand-new. It’s bursting out! Don’t you see it?
And one aspect of his life, the part he doesn’t notice, points at the reality of what my life could look like.
If I can only find my freedom.
I look desperately in my closet for a flying suit.
For something to make me look like one of those flying squirrels.
Flying squirrels DON’T, in fact, fly.
They take longer to land because of the large flaps of skin under their armpits.
But even counterfeit flying is more than I have the strength to hope for.
No luck.
No squirrel costumes were tucked away in my closet or my mind.
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fly.
I sit down to my lunch again and to my thousands of notifications online. I’m busy. I forgot that I lost my hope.
And then, through his example, this pastor opened the window in that stale room where I placed my discouragement.
Maybe there is hope I can shake this fear after all? Fear follows me when I try to fly like a rock tied to my foot. I try to shake it off.
When I don’t rise very high on the spiritual adventure God bids me to take with him, I shrug my shoulders and move on.
Because we all carry rocks, don’t we? Time to sit back down and enjoy my lunch and … wait! What did the pastor say?
He told us, “Be careful walking to your car. There are some interesting characters out.”
He warns us to be careful in our sleepy, mostly nonviolent town. There are indeed some guys on bikes doing who knows what. But these ruffians are harmless for the most part when they interact with strangers passing by.
The surprising part is this pastor’s grace extended to OUR fears compared to his OWN freedom in response to fear.
On the one hand, he warns us, protects us, and wants to ensure we feel comfortable in the most minuscule place of danger.
On the other hand, he just returned from another lone trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo last week, where civil unrest and bloodshed are as commonplace as the birds singing each morning here in our tiny town.
He is genuinely concerned about our fears – real or imagined. However, fear is not a significant factor in limiting his obedience to the voice of God. The opposite extremes startle me.
The “I don’t want you to feel unsafe” and “I travel to nutso places 99.999% of us wishy-washy first-world types would never dream of going of our own volition” is jarring.
He’s not a cowboy type, swaggering his bravado and making fun of us skinny wimps in the corner, afraid to speak at the high school dance. He takes our fears, real or imagined, seriously.
The amaryllis is slowing diminishing in size and splendour, and shrinking back to that mysterious place in its pot where life begins.
My amaryllis blossom will be no more very soon.
You plant a “dead” seed; soon there is a flourishing plant.
The Message
And like all death, the point is not that there has been a death but that a new season is beginning for those who carry on.
Plants take time to grow. He has time to wait. And though this amaryllis flower has no voice, God spoke quietly, inaudibly to human ears, through the life of this ordinary bulb when it flowered for the first time in twenty years, as described here.
This flower is a megaphone, taking the inaudible sound of the voice of Jesus from deep, deep within the earth and transforming His words into a glorious flower that our eyes can perceive.
The flower has no mouth to magnify the words spoken by God, and yet its life points us to Jesus, to the place in His heart where inaudible sounds are translated to the muffled sounds that we pick up and examine and ask each other to help us translate.
This flower is another clue on the journey.
Are you ready to go on an adventure with me, dear friend, and to try to unpack what God may be whispering through the life of an ordinary plant, one that blooms for as long as we can stare at our watches, unhurried, before it’s life is consumed, once more in darkness?
This flower teaches us how we should live, our lives erupting as a firework from below ground, to just as quickly be extinguished as the fire of our lives burns out, and we return to dust.
And this silent flower has spoken so loudly to my soul that an awakening has occurred deep, deep within. Do you sense it, too? Come with me, friend, on a journey of waking up, sitting up, opening our ears, getting our legs to move and run, and learning to fly.
And as is the case, whenever the most important lessons are to be grasped, we find our most significant clues in the things the world ignores. I sent this plant on its last stop before the garbage dump, not once but twice. I didn’t have patience for the things that required me to be transformed before I could perceive them.
This amaryllis plant became my teacher.
A series of blog posts (if I remember to write them) will describe what this plant taught me so far, including:
1. It’s not our lives that matter, dear friend, and we comfort each other once we have the strength to recognize this truth. And yet, when our lives produce an aroma like fresh bread, that strengthens another, God’s orchestra produced from the instruments of each life overwhelms the darkness. This symbolic orchestra is our hope.
2. Sometimes, God upturns the soil of our lives. This uprooting is chaotic for us and disorienting. But this is also where we find hope.
3. Where is God about to grow a new leaf in your life? We can never tell exactly where the amaryllis will sprout leaves, only that it will, eventually, despite all apparent odds, sprout. Everything living must grow.
Can you remove the rocks where He may be hovering over the waters or the soil, about to spout new life in you?
4. Do you need a friend who can help you lift the rocky burden that stops the new life from flourishing, where His Spirit is hovering? We need those who see in the Spirit when we are looking for our eyes on the ground next to us. We need a doula or a medical doctor to help us give birth. Journeying with others is safer for the life we carry. Who is on your team?
5. The thing that kept me awake at night back then, that my community and I pleaded with God to change, is the amaryllis that has grown through my softened heart this season. Noticing how God watered, tended and then showed us a new leaf sprouting in our past hopeless situations or dry amaryllis pots gives us faith for the next impossible thing He whispers.
God, give us faith for the hope you long to spring forth from our dry amaryllis pots. You have enough breaths from Your Spirit of guidance and encouragement for every seemingly hopeless situation. Give us eyes to see further than the mundane ordinary.
And so, children sometimes peel back the curtain of heaven for us to quickly glimpse before the curtain is closed again. All we have left is a memory. What is our response to hearing stories that seem to push us into the realm of the divine, whether we want to go there or not?
Will the divine moments that we hear about be wasted on us?
There are three typical responses to another’s spiritual experiences: we become blind, jealous, or thirsty.
Most commonly, we become blind. Like a beautiful pristine camping spot, one mountain range further than we usually travel on our summer holidays, we won’t go there. It is not within the realm of our routine.
And so we are unable to see.
WAS there ever a pristine camping spot one mountain range over, we wonder, years later? WAS it an angel she said she saw? And then we are distracted again by our lunch.
The second most frequent response to stories of divine encounters is jealousy.
Instead of falling on our knees in worship and petitioning for a similar outpouring of the divine in our parched lives, some of us will compare. The soil of our hearts hardens just a little bit. That didn’t happen to ME.
They must think they are SPECIAL, we reason. They must assume they are MORE SPECIAL than ME. Often, that idea hadn’t crossed their minds.
But we’ve already tossed the implications of the divine moment in self-righteous indignation.
The third response, that very few travel, is a recognition of our spiritual thirst.
This heart response is gas for our car. We understand that each of us is offered an adoption certificate into the family of God, which comes with a royal inheritance. And from that identity, we can petition the Father, on our knees before Him, and ask, “Can You please pour out the divine in my life, God?”
We can beg Him for water because we see another who seems to have found a drink.
He always has more water.
I want you woven into a tapestry of love, in touch with everything there is to know of God.
God, soften the soil of our hearts equally through the encounters we experience in ourselves and those we hear about from others. Thank you that we can come to You with our doubts too and that You meet us exactly where we are. I pray we stop trying to stuff You into a box.
What is the best way to make decisions? Does God play a part in our future decision-making? And if so, how?
Do we sit alone in our bedroom, eyes tightly closed and hope for a magic genie or an angel to answer questions about our careers or other important life decisions?
Or do we say a quick prayer and then do what seems right in our eyes, ignoring God until Sunday morning?
Or is there a middle way, where He sometimes speaks and where we sometimes hear Him?
I choose the rolling a dice option.
Roll the dice. My degree major is . . .
Four years later, I exited college, holding that degree certificate and wondering whether to turn left or right at the next fork in the road.
Can I borrow your dice?
We expect to make decisions this way.
This is mostly because we’d never heard of strolling through life any other way.
The chatty stranger I met yesterday recalled that when he was in his late teens, his mom announced that she wouldn’t have a son of hers playing video games in the basement! (There may have been an interesting story there, but he skipped that part.)
Regardless, it was time for him to find a job.
He flipped through the local college career guide like a Sears catalogue and chose “Millwright.”
The term had a nice ring to it.
Thirty working years later, he was sitting in a local coffee shop recounting this story to me.
It was time for his daughter to flip through an updated Sears catalogue, close her eyes, point to a career option and . . . BINGO! What career lay under her finger when she opened her eyes? Better dedicate the next 40 years to that option….!
What if there is a better way?
There is.
I recently chatted with two local teens from our church at a sledding party. We discussed their futures between the “Yahoo!” and crashes.
For a few minutes.
I had been thinking recently of offering to pray for discernment with her, to sort out the youth’s fears from her passions, to think through whether red herring motives, such as a desire for excessive money, praise of others, or prestige, were the sneaky drivers in their car, leading eventually to a crash when these idols failed 5 or 15 or 20 years later.
To pray and listen together.
We didn’t make the time for that, but it was on my to-do list. Way, way down on my to-do list. But on my heart.
When I spoke to one of them yesterday, I felt Holy Spirit guiding the questions.
And then, as she spoke about something else, Holy Spirit whispered, teacher. She’s a teacher.
I was startled.
So was she.
Fear of being good enough at explaining things had been holding her back. However, she was offered a part-time teaching assistant job at a local school she hadn’t applied to yet. I encouraged her to update her resume, apply for this part-time job and check it out.
She had been procrastinating, letting fear hold her back.
Then the teen confided that many years ago, while praying, a young girl told her that she thought God was saying she would be a teacher, also.
Hmmm . . . maybe God IS like the potter, shaping us, moulding us, knowing who we are.
It sure beats rolling a dice.
If you don’t know what you’re doing, pray to the Father. He loves to help.
The Message
Whether she chooses to work through her fears is her decision. My role was only to plant a seed. She may dig up the plant and toss it aside or water and nurture it if she senses God also guiding her in this direction.
And if I was wrong, then she can slap me in the face and we move on! (Actually she doesn’t slap me in the face. She has to love me!) But if I got it wrong, as I strain to understand and practice listening to God with my broken ears, I chalk it up to a learning experience and try again tomorrow.
We’re learning together how to walk in faith.
And sometimes, when we pray for and love one another, what He says is amazing.
Thank you, Jesus, for loving to answer us when we call to You! Help us let You steer our cars. We pray you blow your healing wind on our ears so the muffled sounds make sense to our hearts with broken motives and unhealed desires.
God is very different from who I thought He would be.
I’m a lot different from who I thought I would eventually become when I first started longing to know more about God, too.
At Sunday school or elsewhere when we first heard about God, He often appeared as a “turn the other cheek” when an enemy tried to smack Him kind of a guy.
And since we are made in His image, I had a vague impression that the ultimate goal of the spiritual life is to become the kind of person who lies down so people can wipe their feet on us.
If that’s the case, then I was blown away by what God spoke into the recesses of my heart that day. God, are you who I think you are?
Of course not,
is His inaudible answer, and in his fury at the audacity of the question, He erupts as a violent volcano, splashing the earth with ashes of his love.
A volcano . . . erupting . . . love? I can explain because I am a mini-volcano formed in His image. I haven’t exploded yet. But I can feel the rumble, and I know it is coming.
And he is edging me on.
Don’t be afraid of your anger,
He spoke gently into the recesses of my heart recently. He comforted me in empathy, the way my dad would rub my back when I was a child, just before I would throw up. You know that feeling just before you are sick when you remember you will feel much better to have the bile removed from inside of you? That’s how I have been feeling.
I had been covering up the threatening volcanic eruption with my best church bonnet and long white Sunday dress.
Like the person who travels to a volcano that threatens eruption, and pours a bit of water, a shovel full at a time, on top of the huge mountain to pacify it a little bit, I placated my growing anger.
I shoved the equivalent of a baby pacifier into my mouth at church, turned aside, and listened to relentless chatter. Another shovelful of water, please. Or she’s a gonna blow.
My anger terrifies me.
I once climbed an active volcano in Costa Rica, la Rincon de la Vieja. Tourists would never have been allowed that close to an active volcano in ultra-safe Canada. They wouldn’t have been allowed within miles of that place. And as I stood at the top of that mountain and looked around, I was shocked at the scale of the devastation.
An entire mountainside of bare rocks, with the jungle forest beginning abruptly in the valley far below.
Yet scientists know that after the initial devastation, volcanic ash enriches the soil with its dense nutrient load.
Soil from this ash produces some of the lushest plant life on earth.
So as God rubs my back, gently telling me it’s okay to be sick, I realize that holding in my anger only makes me feel sicker.
At that moment, the clerk at the checkout counter seemed to silently ask me as she wrapped my package with a smile, “Would you like modern-day slavery with that?¨
And my anger, rightly expressed as love, compels me to take one small step in a direction that opens the door to better alignment with my true identity.
And this anger, no longer stuffed inside but rightly expelled as love, contains the soil that can nourish the seed of hope.
Does anyone dare despise this day of small beginnings?
The amaryllis opened its two enormous blossoms this week, revealing pink and white splendour and raising the scent profile of the room to a higher level.
And I am that amaryllis.
And so are you.
Let me explain.
About two decades ago, a neighbour gave us an amaryllis bulb in a cardboard package. “Water is all that is needed!” the box guaranteed. Beauty was promised to erupt from within this dry soil and ordinary pot.
I was excited about this, but I forgot about the plant in its little cardboard box in the rush of moving to another city. I felt guilty when I noticed it again a couple of years later. It was strewn between other forgotten items in our garage.
I gave it a few drops of water half-heartedly, looking at my watch as I waited for it to sprout life.
Then I got distracted.
“Well, I gave that a try, at least,” I thought, many years later when I saw the pot, out of its box now at least, but perched precariously on some items that needed sorting in the bowels of our garage. At least my guilt at not having TRIED to bring it to life was dissipated. “But I should give it another try,” I thought on my lunch break one day years later.
But when lunch was over, to-do items kept me running in circles. Days stretched to weeks and months. Another decade passed.
Our kids outgrew even more clothes, and I returned their small clothing items to the garage to deal with later.
“Remember me?” the amaryllis seemed to ask that year as I dumped a pile of too-small clothes on the floor beside it.
“We sometimes have to admit defeat,” I thought to myself, my advancing years having created a deep wisdom, called complacency, within. My few strands of grey hair had made me more rational and truthful. I didn’t look up from the floor as I spoke to myself.
What impossible seed has He planted that you have forgotten about or nearly given up on? Does He want to plant an impossible seed in you today? Can you squeeze a few drops of Easter hope from dry soil to water this seed?
Consider asking for the strength to ponder this question, clean ears to hear His love, a heart to trust His goodness, and hope from the water of His Spirit.
And may your life blossom in great fullness against all expectations too, friend.
Instead of insisting on freedom to create spiritual reality, shouldn’t we be seeking to discover it and disciplining ourselves to live according to it? . . .
In many areas of life, freedom is not so much the absence of restrictions as finding the right ones, the liberating restrictions.
Closer, nearer, pungent aroma of steamy breath, foul stench of death surrounds me
“HALT!” I yell. “BACK DOWN!”
It cowers at my feet
My raised hand bears the silhouette of a dagger
In this eerie place
I light my torch
It’s blazing fire light comforts
And the dragon vanishes with the darkness
It lurks nearby, I know
Ready to draw nearer, to pounce
Should I forget, again, who I AM
It flies at me again
Like a mosquito
Irritating
Except it is the dragon
It will consume me if I let it
It seems to be only a minor irrigation
But it will leave me cowardly, a broken shrivelled residue of myself if I listen
To my thoughts
And so I pick up my sword
And I fight
Though I am already exhausted
And I win
Only when I remember
Who I AM
The Accuser of our brothers and sisters thrown out, who accused them day and night before God . . . So rejoice, O Heavens, and all who live there . . .
God, may we no longer be blustered by accusations. May we remember who You are, and therefore remember who we are as heirs of the King. Please empty our head of the thoughts that do not align with how You think of us.
May we keep Your thoughts of us, Jesus, closer than the dragon’s.
As you listen to the song below, consider asking Holy Spirit, “How do You see me?”
I have been giving him treats for “staying” and lying down in one position for more than a minute or two.
One ear cocked to the side, yawning sometimes – the dog’s instinctual response to say, “I’m trying to understand you here!” – sometimes excitedly getting it.
But most of the time, he stares at me, wondering how to get more treats.
And this is a perfect example of what we are like as we come before God.
He has something to give to us. The analogy breaks down here because God doesn’t simply tempt us with crumbs but has the full banqueting table to offer. But you get the point.
My dog sometimes forgets about me and my rewards and lies down distractedly.
And then I give him a treat.
And doesn’t that happen to us too? We forget about God, go about our business, and then we hear His heart whispering. He offers us food when we least expect it.
Well done, God comforted me, excitedly offering me a food reward. Huh? “What the . . .” I had just woken up. In my heart, I looked up at God, my head cocked to the side, confused.
He comforted me in His love, in His presence.
What was I doing right? I stumbled to the coffee machine, trying to put the puzzle together. The machine brewed, and God poured delight into my heart as the coffee machine poured delight into my cup. I scratched my head, trying to figure out why God was pleased with me.
I listened to HIS cues.
I responded to HIS call to obey.
The fundamental fact of existence is that this trust in God, this faith, is the firm foundation under everything that makes life worth living. It’s our handle on what we can’t see. The act of faith is what distinguished our ancestors, set them above the crowd.
He had been asking me to wake early, to write, to offer this page of food to you, dear reader.
And I obeyed.
That’s it.
Regardless of outcomes as defined by our culture, in God’s eyes, this writing is a success because it is motivated by obedience. Like a child with a crooked, smudged, stick-figure drawing, the parent is pleased with her art. God, the parent, is pleased with our crooked efforts at responding to His whispers.
And what you are seeing is the actor on the stage, the polished version of me for you to read about.
God says write.
I write.
Applause.
End of show.
But behind the scenes, there is chaos. An entire repertoire of people, those on lights and sound, and the director helped me look polished for you. They cried tears, remade the costumes, and helped me fit into my new identity.
I offer credit where credit is due:
1. Thank you to our friend who scared back the monsters intimidating me and offered me his hand. “Stand,” he said. And he prayed passionately that day in our kitchen, “She is about the King’s business!” he declared.
And I believed him. And I exchanged another piece of my old heart, the one linked to how people judge my life, for a princess robe. And I danced in joy.
And You danced with me, Jesus. Keep dancing, you whispered. Keep following Me where I lead child, regardless of what they say.
And I’m still dancing.
2. Thank you to my husband, the giant man. When I was in the metaphorical hide out, the place I shouldn’t have been, God led him to find me. He ducked to half his height to enter the place that held me captive.
When he entered, the evil shapes fled. He is not scared of the same things I am. His lack of fear terrifies them.
“Come, friend,” he offered, holding out his hand. “Don’t be afraid.” And he held me in his arms and comforted me as I wept. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
And there wasn’t. Because he regularly prays I will dance in freedom, in that grassy place. And so I do.
3. And I say thank you to so many of my friends. You prayed for me. And you told me what you thought God was saying to me, though you didn’t always understand.
And I took those pieces, precious as each one was, and I thought and considered and prayed and placed them into the puzzle of my life. Thank you. I honor you.
4.And I thank you for the eagle you sent, Jesus, who swooped down and woke me and fed me. “Get up.” She nudged me, and I rolled over, trying to go back to sleep.
But she was persistent, unphased by my life’s lack of spiritual success.“Try this food,” she suggested. I tossed that aside, too. I wasn’t used to the taste.
She tried milk, and I drank it with relish. I was thirsty. Later on, my stomach could hold a bite or two of meat. I was growing up.
“How is your time of worship?” she asked me again, and again, and again. Finally, I could answer her to say that I am learning to abide more frequently in Your presence. And the next time I danced, I held the sceptre you gave me, Holy Spirit.
And so thank you, Jesus, for the many, many actors behind the scenes of our lives.
