Sacred Mundane: The Blog

I am applauding you.

You have traversed the jagged terrain of our disappointment discussion and haven’t quit reading! Thank you. Although this is our final post in the series, it’s likely not the last time disappointment will cross our minds. I am so thankful for the journey.

The good news is that although God does strategically disappoint us and thwart our expectations, His ultimate plans for us are not for disappointment, but for fulfillment.

God does keep His promises, doesn’t He?

Remember our list of who God disappoints? Let’s check out the way the stories end…

• Abraham: After 25 years of disappointment, God gives Isaac. The child of promise is born, and God does indeed raise up a great nation.  Every good word came to pass. Glorious fulfillment.

• Joseph: After 13-14 years of disappointment and unjust treatment, God does indeed bring his brothers to bow down before him. And God reveals His greater purpose: To preserve life. What was meant for evil, God uses for good. Glorious fulfillment.

• Moses: Though it was certainly a bumpy ride, God does indeed deliver His people from Pharoah, and does indeed deliver them into the promised land of milk and honey. Because of disobedience Moses sees the land from afar. But God’s people are delivered and they inhabit the promised land. Glorious fulfillment.

• David: After 13-14 years hiding in caves, God executes justice on Saul and indeed raises up David as king. Not only that, He establishes David’s throne forever, establishing the royal line through which Jesus Christ our King would come. Above and beyond what he could ever imagine. Glorious Fulfillment.

• Disciples: Yes, Jesus was dead and buried, all hope was lost. But on the third day He conquered death, rose again, and purchased the salvation of all who would believe. Glorious Fulfillment. The ultimate fulfillment.

Your story isn’t over.

Yes, God strategically disappoints us, even appearing cruel at times as He lets us grieve, alone, for four days like Mary and Martha. But His plans are always for fulfillment, for faith, to do immeasurably more than we can ever ask or imagine.  We may not see the end of the story until glory, but there is an end and it is fulfillment. And my experience has been that even here on earth God fulfills His good plans over and over and over and over.

Over and over and over because …

It’s a cycle.

The fulfillment cycle is what we jump into, by faith, when we finally get off the disappointment cycle.  It goes like this:

FAITH –> EXPECTANCY –> FULFILLMENT –>

Remember how all expectation is fueled by fear? True expectancy is always fueled by faith. When we grow in faith we grow in expectations. And remember how God cannot bless our expectations because God cannot bless that which stems from fear? Well expectancy is fueled by faith and faith is what pleases God. God loves to fulfill His beautiful plans when our hearts are filled with childlike faith and true expectancy. He fulfills, which builds our faith, which creates even more expectancy, which leads to more fulfillment which builds our faith! See the glorious cycle?

And the sooner we get off the disappointment cycle the sooner we can get on the fulfillment cycle. And the longer we’re on the fulfillment cycle the more we can look back and know with resolve: God is faithful.

His past faithfulness demands our present trust.

Our present expectancy.

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Where have you already seen God’s glorious fulfillment in your life? Write it down! Remember. Recite. Recount. Do all the re-ing you can to command your heart to trust Him now. Today. If you have a pulse, He is still writing your story. This is good news!

{ Jeff and I are flying to London as we speak, and would covet your prayers for a safe and blessed time teaching God’s word and soaking up His grace. Thank you, friends, for journeying with me in prayer. We will, Lord willing, have fun pics and posts to share along the way.}

Remember where we left off?

“Yet I will rejoice in the LORD. I will be joyful in God my Savior.”

When expectations have died and we’ve fought by faith long and hard, we move forward in expectancy. True hope is birthed.  The sixth and final key to living in expectancy without expectation:

We study, focus, meditate on, memorize, and fix our gaze on the beauty and character of God.  We will trust God when we know God.  When we know God we will trust God.

God is perfect. Because He is infinite, His characteristics are His perfections. Think about this. When God is wise He is perfectly wise. When God is trustworthy He is perfectly trustworthy. When God is just he is perfectly just.  All that He is He is perfectly. So the more we get to know God, the more we will trust Him.

So the remedy for this malady of fear, of not trusting God enough to relinquish our expectations, is to form a greater understanding of the character of God.

Now we can read entire books on this, you can do a study of the attributes of God, you can pray through thanking God for his attributes, there are a million ways to dwell more on his attributes and study them. For today I just want to share the three-legged stool of who God is.

On this three-faceted perfection we rest.

These three, put together, hold our view of God in perfect balance.  Without one of these, we tip over, but if we can rest firmly on these three, our faith and our expectancy will be firmly fixed.

1. God is All-Powerful. Omnipotent.  (Psalm 115:3)  God is able to do all things.  He is the most powerful being in the world.  Greater than life, greater than death. This means He can do anything He wants.  He can make something out of nothing.  He can heal, He can raise the dead, He can bring death, life, he can cause conception, He can deliver from evil. He can do all things. Rest in this.
2. God is All-Knowing. Omniscient. (Psalm 139:2-6) This means that God KNOWS exactly how to use his power. If he were only all-powerful, but didn’t know all things, it’d be pretty useless. But because He knows all things, He knows where the sick child is, He knows your pain, your situation. He knows exactly how to use the power which he has.
3. God is All-Good. (Psalm 136:1) If He were only all powerful and all knowing, but malevolent, then He could NOT be trusted with our lives. But because he is all three it means that not only can He do all things, and not only does He know exactly how to exercise His power over all things, it means that He is using his infinite power and infinite knowledge for our good and for His glory at all times. (Romans 8:28) This is the amazing truth that fits it all together.  All fear and doubt questions the goodness of God. All anxiety is practical atheism.  When Eve sinned in the garden she believed the oldest lie in the book-God is keeping something from you because He is not good. You hear that same beneath the surface in Mary’s words: If you would have been here.

We must maintain a Three-legged Theodicy. God can do all things, knows all things, and is ever and always using this power and knowledge for our good and His glory.

Now to live it. We have to keep these things in the forefront of our minds and hearts.  Because God did not destine us for disappointment.

We’re destined for fulfillment. Remember all those heroes of the faith God strategically disappointed? The story doesn’t end there, does it?

Good news tomorrow. Thanks for reading.

Expectancy without expectation certainly isn’t easy. It’s difficult not only because it’s hard to relinquish things, but also because we are called to pray specifically, asking God for what we need. But we also have limited understanding, and so most of the time we don’t even know what we need.  Ever felt confused by this?

So how do we do it?  We’re called to pray for Shawna, and yet we’re also called to relinquish the results to God and not have expectations.  Someone please tell me how this is possible?!

I think that it is possible, but not easy. We do it by faith but only God knows exactly how all this works.   If we can easily relinquish the outcome of a situation, chances are it’s not that important to us.

True expectancy wrestles.  True expectancy fights by faith.

Habakkuk is the best example of this.  Habakkuk is a prophet, and his little letter is basically his wrestling conversation with God.  It goes like this:

Habakkuk says, “God do something!  Your people are awful!  Draw them back to you!”

And God says, “I am doing something! I’m sending the Chaldeans to come destroy them and carry them all away captive in exile.”

And then Habakkuk says, “Uh, not exactly what I had in mind, God!  How can you use the horrible Chaldeans, heathens, and let them have victory over US, your people? That’s not fair!”

And God says, “I am God. I have chosen this as my means of both exercising judgment and of drawing my people back to me.”

There you have it.

There is a struggle. There is the wrestling. Habbakuk is an example to us of this wrestling.  We don’t just go, “Oh ok, kill us all.  Conquer us, let us die of disease. Ok.”  But we wrestle in prayer, we fight by faith, we cry out to God, we plead, we fast, we pray, we intercede for what we understand to be God’s best, as best as we know.

“If this cup can pass…

…But let thy will be done.”

And Habbakuk finishes with this, after God’s judgment is determined, the outcome is final.  It is then that he concludes his book: with amazing joyful resolve:

Though the fig tree does not bud
and there are no grapes on the vines,
though the olive crop fails
and the fields produce no food,
though there are no sheep in the pen
and no cattle in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the LORD,
I will be joyful in God my Savior. (3:17-18)

This is not a lay-down-and-die sort of thing. It is a process of wrestling, a fight of faith. A process like this:

We first identify what it is that we’re expecting and how we’ve already experienced the disappointment of thwarted expectations.  Then we process through that pain and allow ourselves to be vulnerable with God, recognizing the things we fear, and allowing those expectations to die.  And then, here, we begin to root ourselves deeper, we wrestle with God, fight with faith as Habbakuk does.  We plead and implore, we intercede, we let ourselves get involved in the situation.  And then as we wrestle through this, we begin to let a quiet sweet resolve break through, when death is impending, when invasion by the Chaldeans is imminent, when the thing, the hope, the dream has died, then we realize that our expectancy must be in God, our expectations may have been thwarted, our dreams may have died …

… But our faith is alive.

And so is our God.

When all is stripped away, our gaze falls on the One True God: The final key to expectancy. Will you join me tomorrow?  Until then, can we be brave enough to wrestle? To fight with faith, tears and prayers, and then say,

…I will rejoice in the LORD.

Thank you for reading.

One of my favorite life-lesson stories, from May 2008…

I’m painfully aware once again that my sense of fairness or justice is far from God’s.

I’m painfully aware that God cannot be manipulated.

I’m painfully aware that there is no sucker for me today.

I’m painfully aware that it’s time to grow up.

A few months ago I was taking Dutch to get his check-up and immunizations, and realized I needed a Tetanus shot.  So while we waited for Dutch’s doctor, a nurse zipped into our room and while I was still holding Dutch, she pulled up my sleeve, sunk in her needle, patted the spot with her guaze and was out the door in 30 seconds.

Then later Dutch’s turn came.  First I gave him some Tylenol so it wouldn’t hurt so bad, then I held him close to me, while the nurse took great care in giving the shots, then found special little Cars bandaids, and offered him a sucker for being so brave.  Later, as I put Dutch into his carseat, I of course was extra careful not to bump his little arm with the straps, and hurried him home.  As I drove I thought of the significant truth:

“Funny they didn’t offer me a sucker.”

Of course they didn’t offer me a sucker. I am a grown woman. A mom.  They know I don’t need to be coddled and treated for every little brave thing I do.  And that’s right and appropriate.

So why can’t I accept that as right and appropriate from God?  Unknowingly I have set up a set of fairness rules in my mind.  If I sacrifice something, God will give me something in return.  If I respond rightly and obediently, God will bless me in tangible ways.  If I have to get a shot, there will be a sucker at the end. In fact, there have been so many times this year that I have found myself thinking, “Oh I can’t wait to see the cool things God will do at the end of this year, and how He will bless us!”  I might call it faith, but really it’s just an immature and childish notion that if I sacrifice something or endure some painful shot of adversity, God will reward me with a sucker. And even worse, thinking that way is nothing more than manipulating God.  We’re saying “If I give this up to God, He will give me something better in return.”

God will not be manipulated.  So here we are, at the end of the year.  The spiritual infant that I am thinks that somehow because I think I have sacrificed somewhat I deserve some candy from God.  And instead God turns to me and says, “Thank you, my daughter. You’ve done what I’ve asked.”

And…what else God??  Don’t you have a sucker for me?!  Don’t you have something cool for me to show for it?  What’s that?  You mean to say there’s nothing at the end of the rainbow except the satisfaction of knowing You’re pleased? And sadly, the truth is that my wicked heart had hoped for more.  Is God’s favor not enough? How sad that I still act like a spiritual infant, demanding candy for a simple act of obedience.

Well, He did give me more than that, actually. Today as I sat on the couch crying, disappointed once again with the direction life is going, I opened my laptop and discovered an amazing email from a girl who reads this blog.  A girl in Florida who I’ve never met, who stumbled across it and has been faithfully reading.  Her words made me cry even more, realizing that these words poured out, my life poured out, does matter, it does impact people…in ways we may never know.  That is a gift.  As I prayed I thought of the times I’d asked God to pour me out for His glory, to pour out my life for the sake of others. But as I sat here today praying, all that could escape my lips was the infant pounding her fists saying, “But I don’t want to be poured out. I don’t want to be poured out.“

I want a sucker. “No, my child,” God says, “I love you, and it’s time for you to grow up.”

Scan to another scene–Multnomah graduation last Friday.  We went to celebrate with our dear friends Adam and Grace.  Afterwards we heard all the stories from the graduates–the pastoral positions, the awesome opportunities oversees, the exciting jobs.  A part of my heart rejoiced with them, but you know what a big part of it felt:  Nothing more than selfish toddler-style envy. With no more maturity than Dutch when he walks over and takes a toy from another baby, my heart inside wished that we had a cool story, wished that we had a neat job opportunity, wished that we had some sucker to enjoy.

And so I turn again to God right now and repent.  I ask Him to forgive me of my infantile desire for toys and candy from my heavenly Father.  For my immature view of fairness and justice. For my sublte desire to manipulate Him by thinking that by giving something up I’ll get something in return, like a person saying “You take the bigger piece of cake” knowing full well that the person will then give you the larger slice.

Growing up is hard.  I still like suckers.  But I think I want God more. I want to love Him with more than a childish desire for the toys and candy of life.  I’m not there yet, but I’m somewhere along the way.  And today there are no suckers, only God, and He’s enough.

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Expectancy, true expectancy, surrenders the reward of surrender. We don’t hand over our expectation secretly hoping God will give us our way.

We hand over our way.

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Is there some way, dear friends, that you’ve found yourself demanding a sucker from God? Or “surrendering” with the hidden expectation that He’ll really give you your way? No shame in that, but perhaps He’s encouraging us all to grow up today? Thanks so much for taking the time today to meet me here…