Love Poured Out

It seems as if I could be plagiarizing, but I am not sure what song. Oops.

Oh great God, matchless King;

Ruler over everything.

We give our hearts and our lives;

Let us dwell in Your sacrifice.

Living God, consume our souls,

Let us not our love withhold.

Focus our gaze; enlarge our hearts;

Faithful One, You will not depart.

You have come and set us free

And we’ll always dwell with thee.

You took our sin and our shame;

You are coming back again.

Hallelujah, hallelujah sin is gone and Christ’s alive!

Hallelujah, hallelujah to the One who reigns on high.

Moms on the Foreign Field

It has taken me awhile, but I love the expats. I have formed bonds and friendships with the foreigners here that I will cherish for the rest of my days.

The moms in our community are AMAZING! Most of them have 3 or more children, in China, in a foreign language, preparing their homes and food, all with foreign supplies. Their abilities, endurance, and fearlessness astounds me. I admire them greatly.

The mom in my small group particularly amazes me with what she can cook. She came to China in the late 80s/early 90s. She smuggled Bibles in to China from Taiwan (southern China). She came to China when she had to make her own cheese and milk. She had to learn the language on her own, use vouchers to purchase food on her own, and make do through her own ingenuity.

Now, she has four children and China has become more open to the West.

This Chun Jie two-week break she has been inviting families and singles over regularly. My friend and I went over a couple days ago. This woman made an AMAZING homemade/pizzeria-like crust with a white, garlic sauce. After this delicious lunch, she made homemade chocolate sauce to go on top of our homemade vanilla ice cream (rolled in a ice cream maker ball by the family – this gift was sent to them by her parents in Maine). Most of her “from scratch” recipes come from the Wycliffe cookbook. THOSE wives/mothers must be PARTICULARLY amazing!! (We discussed this that day.)

Every Tuesday the singles in our small group go to their home for dinner. We joke that hers is the best meal we get in the week. We are never disappointed. The rule of her house is to not leave hungry. We do not.

Another family came here (for the second time) with four children all 5-years-old and under. How do you do it? How do you suck it up, bundle up the surplus of children (as compared to the Chinese requirement of 1 and the Korean usual of 2,) and try to pay bills and buy groceries with a limited amount of language in a limited amount of space? How do you balance the allowance of touching and attention that your cute, foreign babies will bring with the decision to say, “Gou la! Zai jian!” (“Enough! See you later!”)

You do it because you must and this is your job. You do it even though the world stares at you because of your many blonde-haired, blue-eyed babies. You do it because that is what the Lord has given you to do and you decided to respond to His call.

May the Lord strengthen the hands of these ladies! May they trust in the Lord to meet all their needs of companionship, with-it-ness, and patience. May they look at the unknown of each day and bring it to the Lord. May they be content with the job the LORD has given to them, at home, and not be bitter or jealous of their husbands who seem like they are being more productive for the kingdom in this new country. (This new country where they don’t know HOW they are ministering in it…when they are doing the stuff at their foreign home that they could have done much better in their home-country home.)

Indeed, they will learn how to survive and then, by God’s grace and their sanctification, they will learn how to thrive.

Pray for these ladies! May they find their contentment in Him and joy in the jobs they have at home that often limit them from being able to reach out to neighbors (whose language they often cannot speak – yet). The beginning is always frustrating, but with time and patience and study, it will come and their ministries will be opened wide. (Hallelujah!)

Psalm 29:3-4

Ascribe to the Lord, O Heavenly Beings

Ascribe to the Lord GLORY and STRENGTH.

Ascribe to the Lord the GLORY due His Name; worship the Lord in the splendor of holiness.

--In the clothing of holiness.

Set apart. Consecrated.

Living Sacrifice.

The voice of the Lord is over the waters;

The God of glory thunders,

The Lord over many waters.

The voice of the Lord is powerful.

2) the capacity or ability to direct or influence the behavior of others or the course of events.

3) physical strength and force exerted by something or someone: the power of the storm.

The voice of the Lord is full of majesty. 

1) impressive stateliness, dignity, or beauty: experience the majesty of the Rockies.

Ascribe to the Lord, O Heavenly Beings. (command)

Ascribe to the Lord GLORY and STRENGTH. (command)

Ascribe to the Lord the GLORY due His Name; (command)

worship the Lord in the SPLENDOR of HOLINESS. (command)

“Ascribing” is also a type of call to worship – we are attributing to Him certain characteristics. Bringing GLORY to His Name because we are declaring our delight and love for Him and Who He is.

Four times we are commanded.

We are even told WHAT to ascribe – glory and strength.

We are even told how we may come – in the SPLENDOR of holiness.

And, HALLEUJAH, how do we get these garments of splendor?

I cannot make them myself – only through the death and resurrection of Jesus ad the indwelling of His Holy Spirit. THEN we will be presented blameless before Him – in our garments of holy splendor.

Now, we fight and press on for those garments.

Now we stand in the complete work of Christ – fixing our eyes on Jesus; setting our minds on Heavenly things; presenting ourselves as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to Him. (Hebrews 11; Colossians 3; Romans 8)

The voice of the Lord is over the waters.

The GOD of GLORY THUNDERS,

The Lord, over many waters.

Repetition to make a point.

Review.

Pictures of Genesis 1:2 come to my mind.

How can a voice be “hovering” (so to speak) over the waters?

“Hovering” brings to mind a picture of thickness.

I love that phrase, “the God of glory THUNDERS.”

Wouldn’t you love to hear that delightfully horrifying sound?

A sound that strengthens you but shakes you to the core of your being – the ultimate adrenaline rush.

I can’t wait to hear His Voice and not just the shadows of it in our thunder.

Maybe that’s why we, as a people are drawn to the sights and sounds of the storms and the waters.

Truth be told, I like the ocean waters so much that I get a little teary-eyed when I think about their absence in the new earth. (Of course, whatever is there will be MUCH better and I will laugh at myself for being so silly.)

Perhaps, because the voice of the Lord thunders and sounds like rushing waters, maybe the need for the ocean’s waves is gone.

Maybe the sounds of the seraphim and cherubim and the four living creatures and the elders will scatter away in “lost dreams” the sounds of the ocean.

How is a voice “full of majesty”?

I looked it up and my computer dictionary had a good sentence, “Experience the majesty of the Rockies.”

Breath-taking and overwhelming is the voice of the Lord.

A voice that is foreshadowed by all the created things I love: oceans, mountains, and thunderstorms.

Ascribe to the Lord the glory DUE His Name.

Forever is not enough.

A Little Breakfast with My Science

As I took my breakfast from the refrigerator this morning I was thinking about my “disciplined” life – if it could happen. It just seems that with the unpredictability of the world, this is not possible. People come, you talk, and the whole schedule of the day (life) changes. You aren’t working, so work gets put off. As you talk, more work comes. You work on work at a later time because of the aforementioned conversation. You go to bed later than scheduled. Going to bed later makes it much harder to get up at the appointed time. You push snooze. Pushing snooze then makes you unable to shower AND work out AND have quiet time. And so, you must make a choice. Schedules shape life, life changes the schedule. Nothing in my schedule can be for sure, it would seem.

Life is unreliable because I don’t know it.

Maybe that’s (one reason) why tragedy is so shocking for us. Tragedy is unplanned and it messes up your schedule for the rest of your (day) life. It's the horrible, black, unknown that controls you suddenly, when you had other plans for your future and didn’t want to be controlled.

As I continued down this thought-path of nothing being for sure, not being able to count on anything, and why try when all plans get tossed out the window anyways, I realized that I was (and do) depend on something.

I was relying on the reality of the laws of physics. I was relying on the hope that the fridge will remain upright and will not crush me (as long as there is no earthquake and I don’t try to pull too hard to open the door).

The vegetable is held in its place by gravity and I can see it, reach out my hand, aim for the vegetable, move my fingers to grab it, pull it up, and bring it to my mouth. The position of the vegetable does not suddenly change, at this moment I can control my arm and hand muscles, and the location of my mouth remains the same.

Laws/attributes of physics, though they are subject to sudden change, are reliable. Even when physical changes suddenly occur, they happen within and according to the laws of physical/chemical/biological/geological/etc. possibilities.

We walk without worrying too much about bleeding-out on the ceiling.

Could these things be manifestations of the character of God? A cry to the world that there are laws, standards, constants?

Of course, the reality that we identify and live according to constants would seem to display the reality that they had to be organized and ordered -- by Something.

They can’t all be questioned and left forever in that “almost law because we can never be sure that something won’t change and so we can never actually know anything to be absolute.”

I don’t live that way.

I open my fridge (with the correct amount of force,) and I trust that it will not crush me. I don’t cringe in fear, worrying that this could be the moment when we discover that these laws, (which I don’t know,) aren’t actually laws after all.

Of course, physics is the great mystery – the mystical world of science. The developments of Einstein, the theory of relativity, the metaphysical world.

The physical world is beyond us.

 (Ironic, what we are is too much for us to be and know.)

The physical and the “outside of what we see and experience” have different dimensions.

Another testament?

God is reliable and does not change. He can be trusted. He can speak and we can believe His Words.

And yet, He is also far beyond our comprehension. Far beyond what we can comprehend, or even fully appreciate and worship. We cannot know Him fully nor predict what He will do or why He will do it, but we can rely on what He has revealed of Himself.

And He calls on us to know Him.

He wants to be known.

He has opened to us the mystery of knowing Him.

Mystery.

Must be solved.

Mystery with an answer.

Mystery with several layers.

Some reliable and told.

Some yet to be revealed and unpredictable.

The knowable, reliable, trustworthy, mysterious, and powerful I AM.

And so, though there is this mystery of the unknown and inability to comprehend, overall there is consistency in our world. Even if it is shocking, unplanned, and upsetting, we trust that the night will come, and then the sun will rise. The world continues to rotate and we (developed countries) continue to grab food from our fridges in order to feed our bodies.

The reliable within the ungraspable.