On Sunday evening, I was humming the tune to “No Place Better (Psalm 84)” as I sat down to read to Julian, our seven year old. As I was getting his story up on my kindle, he made the comment, “It would be really hard to want to be with God more than all the other things, more than silver and gold.” It’s true, isn’t it? One commentator says of Psalm 131, which speaks of this pursuit, that it is one of the shortest Psalms to read but the longest to live into:
O Lord, my heart is not lifted up;
my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things
too great and too marvelous for me.
But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child is my soul within me.
O Israel, hope in the Lord
from this time forth and forevermore.
Like a weaned child—a child who has received good things from his mother, and has grown to desire the presence of his mother more than anything he may receive from her. The phrase, “calmed and quieted,” echoes our Lord’s words to the wind and the waves, the storm on the sea that threatened the lives of his friends. He calmed the wind, he quieted the sea with just his word. But we’ve also recently read through the book of Jonah in evening prayers, and in that story the wind and the waves, the storm that threatens the lives of the sailors, is quieted and calmed only when Jonah has been thrown into the deep. When the scribes and Pharisees ask Jesus for a sign in Matthew 12, presumably to prove his authority to cast out demons comes from God and not from Satan, Jesus replies, “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah.” Our Lord threw himself into the storm of God’s wrath to save us, and he desires to enter into our hearts—even throw himself into the places of death that reside in each of us in order to bring his resurrection life yet more fully in you and in me. He is able to calm and quiet the wind and the waves; he is able to calm and quiet our souls.
Hannah
Scripture Reflections
And he allowed no one to follow him except Peter and James and John the brother of James. (Mark 5:37)
This verse from Sunday’s Gospel reading points to a reality that can be hard to acknowledge: We are not all given the same experience of God’s work in our lives.
From a very early age, most of us are concerned with fairness. Our general conception of fairness is that everyone should get the same opportunity. Offering the same opportunity is important at a societal level, but parents realize that each child needs different things. The reason we should offer the same opportunities to everyone at the societal level is because it takes intimate personal knowledge to rightly change the opportunities and still maintain fairness. You must know the child to know what opportunities he or she needs—in other words, tailoring what you give requires a personal knowledge that is impossible at the societal level, and so we establish fairness by trying to give the same opportunity to all.
God’s sense of fairness is much more like a parent giving very different things to each child than it is like a society giving the same opportunities to all. In fact, the Bible says explicitly that we are given different gifts and even different amounts of faith (Romans 12:3-8). Because he knows us, he gives to each of us differently. This isn’t just gifting, but instead includes experiences and faith itself!
This means that some of us will have an easier time believing than others. Some will have more experience of God’s power than others. Some will have a greater sense of the presence of the Spirit than others. God deals with each of us differently, as he sees fit. Some will receive gifts that others are denied.
This may be frustrating, especially when we look at what someone else received. Why did Peter, James, and John (but not the other disciples) get to see the little girl raised from the dead? Why don’t we have the same blessings as another in the church? But God’s differing gifts to each of us spring from his deep knowledge of us and his profound love for us. Rather than wish that we had received something else, we ought to realize that there is something unique and beautiful that he is seeking to do in each of us.
In Christ,
Steven+
Scripture Reflections
In re-reading CS Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew recently, I found myself identifying with Uncle Andrew—an uncomfortable experience!
Uncle Andrew is a self-centered, power-grasping man whose experiments with magic land him and a few others in Narnia as Aslan is creating that world. Due to his fear and desire to keep control of what is utterly beyond his control or even understanding, Uncle Andrew’s experience of Narnia’s creation has little to do with reality. While Aslan is singing Narnia and its inhabitants into being and then bestowing the gift of speech on particular creatures, Uncle Andrew sees only wild animals and hears only roaring from Aslan and growls and screeches and the like from the talking animals. Some of these animals find Uncle Andrew and, thinking he might be a tree, try to plant him in the newly formed soil of Narnia, soil that is still bursting with life. As Aslan says, “The song with which I called it into life still hangs in the air and rumbles in the ground.” While the animals debate which way up to plant him, Uncle Andrew is held upside down briefly, and the silver and gold pieces from his pockets are shaken out onto the ground. The next morning, those coins have grown into a tree of silver and another of gold, which are later used to forge the crowns for the first king and queen of Narnia. Uncle Andrew, however, has undergone no transformation beyond the muddying of his clothes and further souring of his disposition.
When I look at my circumstances and nod along with the grumblings of my flesh, which can sound remarkably like Uncle Andrew, it’s tempting to think I’m facing reality. After all, the waves truly are huge, and I can’t navigate my boat through them anymore—the boat’s already filling with water! Uncle Andrew judged his experience of Narnia as if he were still in his own world; he’s shown to be a fool in the story because of course he isn’t in his own world anymore, he’s in Aslan’s world. You and I have a similar choice to make—will we judge our circumstances as if we are in the kingdom of this world, as if we are alone in our boat, or will we remember where we truly are and who is with us, in the kingdom of heaven with the King of heaven? We can cry out to the One who loves us, who brought us out of the domain of death and brought us into his glorious light—he is with us! And just as he did for the disciples in our reading from Mark 4:35-41, he will speak: “Peace! Be still!” Or, as he has spoken to us in Psalm 46:
“Be still, and know that I am God.
I will be exalted among the nations,
I will be exalted in the earth!”
The Lord of hosts is with us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress.
Every wind and every wave will someday be stilled and all their destruction be redeemed. Today, may your heart and mine respond to our Savior’s loving command, for he is with us and that truth changes the very world we live in.
Hannah