Lilacs

The other day, I grabbed my camera and set out to wrestle God in prayer and to see if I could scrape some pictures together. I don't know. The camera was my afterthought--though I don't think it was God's afterthought. For as I stepped out the door and trudged down the street, gravel crackling like a radio with static, I was heavy with the weight of hefty decisions, life as an adult, and feeling like a thorough failure. 

I began, as I do so often lately, it seems, with not knowing what to say, yet feeling the Holy Spirit's groaning within me, longing to pour out in words, yet unable to form them--whether because they hurt to speak or maybe even because they didn't hurt--and I wanted them to. 

It was about halfway down the street that I saw my first lilacs. 

  

They lined the white picket fence, and I breathed their scent in deeply (is there anything that smells better than lilacs? I don't think so), letting all of the broken attempts at words fall out of my mind.

After I had taken my fill of these particular lilacs, I continued to the edge of the street, looked left and right, and turned left, because the road was lined with more lilacs. Follow the lilacs, I whispered to myself.

Because I was drowning, man. And I was scared. I was scared that if I prayed, God would answer with another no, a trial, a test to see how much I trusted Him. Oh, weary heart. How you deceive yourself.

When did I forget that God gives good gifts, in abundance? Just as He plants a thousand lilac bushes to line my way back to Him--it's almost as if I can see Him laughing and beckoning me to follow as purple and white and pink flowers burst into bloom behind Him.

The love of God is so overwhelming, so fathomless, so beautiful--I can't wrap my mind around it. My heart aches with the fullness of it. Because I had been trying to bear all of it myself--trying to be somehow good enough, to somehow fit everything I deemed spiritual into one day, trying to fabricate piety in my own strength.

Come, and let us flee to Jesus and hide ourselves in Him until we are clothed with His humility. That alone is our holiness. --Andrew Murray

It's not about what we do. It's about who He is. Always, always, always. Let not my mind be corrupted from this simplicity! For every good thing flows from Him--it cannot be formed within myself. Every good work, every good word, every good thought flows from a heart that is so obsessed with Jesus that it cannot beat for anything else.

Flee to Jesus. Hide in Him. He is enough. He is always enough.

(I literally took like 100 pictures of lilacs. And then I accidentally deleted like half of them. But I figured that I probably had enough anyway.)

God is Good

I say God is good.

The veil was torn top to bottom,

The thickness of sin and the separation from God

Obliterated

With that final breath.

I say God is good.

Why do you call me ‘good’? For no one is good except God alone.

I have no good apart from you.

I say God is good.

The testimony is my lungs,

Expanding as they inhale another grace-given breath,

And my eyes, still blinking, still seeing, opening this morning,

Ready to close again, to open again,

My heart, beating away,

I’m alive.

I say God is good.

The promise is in the fierce and firm belief that death

Has no hold

Over me.

For, sick with sin, I was drowning, I was dying with every breath,

Seeing but the dullness of the created world, but the fallenness,

Only the lies and nothing of truth,

For I had blinded my eyes to it, longing only for darkness.

Sinner. Wretched, filthy, hopeless sinner, your justice has come.

In that very justice, in that very judgment of sin,

I say that God is good.

For without judgment, sin reigns on,

But I am sick of it. I am sick of the darkness,

I am sick of the spots and blemishes, the imperfect, rotting souls,

I am sick of living half-alive.

And so justice must be done.

I must die to pay the debt I owe, for I have sinned against God and against man.

Yet I stood in the courtroom and I closed my eyes and waited for the sentence to be spoken,

For the axe to fall,

But it never came and when I opened my eyes I saw before me a Lamb standing,

As though it had been slain, and as though it had risen again,

Reaching out pierced hands, saying, “Touch me,

Your redemption has come.

I have paid in full.”

So I say God is good.

Not good like the person I thought that I was,

But holy and true and perfect and righteous,

Just and gracious and merciful and wrathful and beautiful,

Pure and faithful and patient and good.

And eyes washed with His spit, I finally see,

Hands washed with His blood I am finally clean,

By His wounds, I am finally free.

So I can say, with the multitude, with the host of heaven,

By the power of the one true God, the Creator of the Heavens and the Earth and all that is within them,

The Author and Perfector of our Faith,

The Prince of Peace, the Everlasting Father,

The Holy One, Jehovah Jireh,

The Perfect Lamb of God,

This God is good.  

Recycled Mistakes

I fell to shambles in the battle,

Torn down by recycled mistakes.

I lay in the mud and gasped for breath.

I thought that I was strong, but I’m not.

And now that there’s mud in my teeth and blood under my fingernails,

I know. I have fallen. Again.

I shall rise.

For I believe in a day where all of this mess will break forth into a masterpiece.

I believe in a day with no more sin to weigh us downward.

I believe in a day where all of the same mistakes that used to torment me will be no more.

Perhaps it is good to lay in the mud of the battlefield,

For I must realize that I am weak,

That I need something more than my tin can armor that I fashioned for myself,

More than my make-believe piety to get me safely through this life.

I need a Savior. Every single day.

There is One, a Holy One,

My Captain, my King,

Whose banner I hold clutched in my fist,

Whose name I have emblazoned on my soul.

This Man walked forth from the tomb.

He rose.

The dawn, it comes red with blood and grace.

Fear

You’ve got a lot of fear, you said.

It took me a while to admit that you were right.

But I see it now, like the tangled roots of a fallen tree,

The fear has broken my soil and shown me what lies underneath,

Like worms and crawling things that I don’t want to see.

Surely after all this time, I would know not to be afraid,

But I don’t. Even my words are laced with fear,

As I push them outward, wishing that instead they would pour from me,

But too afraid that they will look all wrong—

Like corpses and stains and broken bones and things that don’t fit right.

You’ve got a lot of fear.

I know.

It is that fear that wearies me, not the muscles that it takes to run at breakneck speed.

It hollows my lungs out and leaves no breath in them,

While my heart beats in time with the word, No, no, no,

Until I finally admit to myself that I am so, so scared,

And I crouch in my bed with my covers up over my head

Like a child who sees monsters in the closet, except this time,

The monster is me and I don’t know how to chase it away

Because my light switch is suddenly not the weapon I knew it to be.

You’ve got a lot of fear.

I know, I know, I know!

I grip even tighter the things that I am afraid of losing,

Friends, family, the way that life used to be,

And everything that was given freely, not earned—

Like grace.

I admit that most days, I’m afraid it will run out,

I will fall yet again and will take a drop of the cordial to heal my bones,

And it will be empty.

How many times do you have to tell me that it is unending?

Maybe it takes all of this failing and receiving over and over and over again to realize that

You cannot run out.

You are the Lord God Almighty,

Holy, holy, holy art thou, with a voice of many waters and feet of burnished bronze,

In your right hand is the church, and you hold the power to judge—

And to have mercy.

You are the I AM in the wilderness,

The Jehovah Jireh that raises the mountains to the sky,

The King of Kings and the Prince of Peace.

Who am I? Who am I even in the thunder and rain, in the tiny glimpses of your glory?

Who am I when the whirlwind comes?

I am but dust, brought to life with the breath of you,

Set into motion by the sinews and muscles and organs designed by you,

Made in the very image of you,

Yet still, I fill myself with all of this me—

With everything that is not of you,

With loneliness and selfishness and pride

That all sprout from this fear that I thought that I was immune to

Because I was too scared to admit that I needed you.

You have a lot of fear.

Yes. And you have the solution, the sacrifice that twisted fear around and destroyed it,

You have, no, you are the Perfect Love that casteth it out—

Not like a boomerang, to be brought back again,

Not tied to strings to reel it in,

You cast it out into deepest ocean and there is no fishing, no diving, and no picking up shells here.

These lingering remnants of fear are but what I have illegally taken and hidden,

And you know that I cling to the threads of myself, you know that I take them out at night and count them one by one.

And so you come to me in the still small voice, and you say,

You’ve got a lot of fear.

And I look up at you with those big, fat tears in my eyes,

Like a child caught in the act of theft,

Ashamed of everything that makes up who I am.

I am afraid, I say.

Afraid of what?

The dark.

I am light.

Losing things.

I am gain.

Change.

I am the steady rock.

Messing up.

I am your strength and your completion.

Fear.

I am Perfect Love.

Being alone.

I am here.

Myself.

I am.

~~

Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean;

Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.

Let me hear joy and gladness,

Let the bones that you have broken rejoice.

Hide your face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities.

Create in me a clean heart, O God,

And renew a right spirit within me.

Cast me not away from your presence,

And take not your Holy Spirit from me.

Restore to me the joy of your salvation,

And uphold me with a willing spirit. 

Psalm 51:7-12

Only You

by Cally Declan

The soil of my heart is furrowed and plowed,

And I stand at the edge of the garden and wait.

Would that I could see this place in its fullness,

When the trees have grown tall and the roots have grown deep,

And the flowers, all in bloom, fill the air with their fragrance.

But for now, I wait.

Words tumble from my pen like a fountain,

And I try to catch them before they fall into the earth,

Try to formulate something sensible onto a page.

Yet the words in the earth sprout clumsily, each green shoot easy to trample on.

These will bear fruit. These I will keep,

For they will not return void.

And when the words cease, I scribble my pen across the page in a different way,

Trying to form faces among the lines.

To imitate the world as I see it—beautiful.

But my hand is shaky and my lines respond, and it is but a broken image of the garden I know.

In frustration, I crumple my pages of words and drawings,

And I turn once more.

My instruments lay in the corner, oft-forgotten,

And I mourn their silence, but I fear the tuneless notes,

The crooked melody.

Still, I try, and I ache for perfection,

To somehow portray this unfathomable weight of glory that cries out words of redemption even now.

So I pray for words, or art, or a song,

To somehow be birthed out of these unskilled hands.

Anything, Oh Lord, anything true,

Anything honorable, anything just,

Anything pure, lovely, commendable,

Of excellence, worthy of praise—

Oh Lord, only you.

May my heart cry out not for the work of my hands,

But for you and only you.

I have no good apart from you, and this I know, though I still seek it elsewhere.

Oh fickle heart! Turn and see thy God!

So I stand at the edge of the garden and wait,

Not for words, not for art, not for music,

Not even for the garden to be in full bloom,

But for you.

And I know that you are coming,

Yes, even that you are here. 

Children of the Living God

Hosea. 

The story of a man who took for a wife a prostitute, in symbolism of the whoredom of Israel against her God. 

I'll admit, the first reading (and perhaps second and third...) of the first chapter of this particular book in the Bible seems rather harsh. Yet, what we miss when we come to our God with the impression of a harsh God. What we miss when we read the Old Testament with the idea that the OT God is different than the NT God. 

I'll give you a hint, He's not different.

When she had weaned No Mercy, she conceived and bore a son. And the LORD said, "Call his name Not My People, for you are not my people, and I am not your God."

Hosea 1:8-9

Can we take a moment to stop and grieve? There is such a rawness to these verses. Can you just imagine the turmoil that Hosea went through when God called him to name his son Not My People. He had beheld the sin of the nation, how they forsook their God and went after false idols. Much like our world now, Israel had found more pleasure in the lusts of the flesh than in the almighty power of the One True God. 

Sin is real. Is not the thing that stands between us and our God the coldest, harshest, most brutal of things ever? Like a wolf that stands snarling between a mother and her child, yet we ourselves created the wolf. This is the harshness. This is where the line must be drawn. So God says, "Call his name Not My People, for you are not my people, and I am not your God."

Yet, with God, there is more. We see the Problem (sin) but we cannot stop there because there is the Solution. 

Hosea, imbued with the breath of the Living God to write the scriptures, did not stop with verse nine. He did not stop with the raw proclamation of the sin that carves the gap between God and man. 

Yet the number of the children of Israel shall be like the sand of the sea, which cannot be measured or numbered. And in the place where it was said to them, "You are not my people," it shall be said to them, "Children of the living God."

Hosea 1:10

Not due to any works on the part of Israel, for they, like Gomer, had given themselves over to the passions of the flesh and into union with false gods, but through the grace of a God who said, "It's not over yet," the promise stood that where the engraving on our hearts that had once stated 'You are not my people,' would crack with our hearts of stone and would instead pulse with the words, "Children of the living God." Hosea took Gomer to be his lawful wedded wife. 

Eve believed the deception of a serpent and approached the forbidden fruit, biting into it in sin, and then she gave the fruit to Adam, who took and ate. 

God's answer?

"Take, eat; this is my body."

Matthew 26:26b

I do not know if I can cope with the fathomless power of this grace. Yet there it is, in simple truth and profound mystery. 

Hallelujah. 

The West Peak

Dawn was on fire.

The flames licked the golden grass and set the meadow ablaze.

The air was thin and cold and quiet,

My heartbeat was the only sound.

The mountain was bare and still, and my will quavered at its height.

Conquer it, conquer the peak, I muttered,

But within one step I knew that I, not it, was conquered,

For my ankles were weak and my lungs were heavy,

And the mountain stood, unmoved.

Oh, that I would have the faith to say to this mountain to remove itself, and yet—

I do not want it to be moved, I realize.

I want to climb it, not to say I conquered it,

Not to boast my strength,

But, Oh God, to see the view.

But now I stumble if I look around, so I must watch my feet,

Head bowed, like prayer.

So I step forward, and I slip backward,

At moments, I crawl.

I trip, and I fall.

And it is good.

The grace of God is unfailing, I say, with hands gripping rocks and eyes lowered,

Even here, on the stones of trial and injury,

Through strife and weakness,

I call upon the Lord and He answers me.

If I had wings to fly up the side of this mountain,

I should not now know the nature of my God,

I would not believe that He is near to those who are weary in spirit,

I would not feel His love for the least of these,

I would not comprehend the promise that even David prophesied in his distress,

That I may not hear your voice in the silence of the wind,

That I may lay awake at night in fear,

Yet, you are holy.

Even on the barren side of the mountain I am not put to shame,

For my hope is in you. Indeed, my hope is you.

So with trembling legs and aching lungs, I set my foot upon the heights.

The summit is mine, for a moment, but I surrender it back to the One who made it,

Who formed every stone with care, and who placed my feet there.

And I look out, Oh God, to see the view.

I behold with wonder the immensity of the sky,

Stretching to the North, South, East, and West,

Breaking upon the distant horizon carved out of mountain ranges,

An ocean of blue, and barely a cloud to break the endless sea.

Wonder does not cease with the sky,

For the valley is seamed with the gold of aspens ready, born ready,

To be sown in anticipation of resurrection.

What joy they have in their death,

And what glory they bring to their Father, knowing full well of His goodness

And proclaiming it to the world with all the might that flows through them like refined gold.

Is this, then, why we burn? Is this why the mountainside is rocks without end?

For to be like the aspens, ready to die for my beloved,

And, even more so, ready to be resurrected to eternal life with Him,

I must first be sanctified, clothed in His righteousness,

Bathed in His blood and wrapped in His garments,

Like a babe, born again,

And these are the labor pains.

But behold, I have looked out over the Promised Land,

I have seen its glory, and when I die I shall enter there and its splendor shall be more than I could ever imagine,

Because my King is the lamp; my God is the light that defeats all of the shadows.

So I wait in hope and in joy for what shall come with the dawn. 

Photos taken by my Papa