For you I wait ...

Walk with me in a meditation on the word at Psalm 25:1-10:

To you, O LORD, I lift up my soul.

There is one God; I acknowledge you as God, and confess I am not God. Help me to pray and act that way.

O my God, in you I trust; do not let me be put to shame;
do not let my enemies exult over me.
Do not let those who wait for you be put to shame;
let them be ashamed who are wantonly treacherous.

I put my trust in the one who has always loved me and always sought to help me. I trust you, O God, and I trust those who choose to trust in you. I have my enemies, and I do not expect that I will always be right, or that I will always win. Please, on the days I will not be victorious, on the days I must be humbled, let it be humility that I learn and not humiliation that I experience. Help me to watch and wait for your movement, O God, so that I may walk alongside you and avoid vain, ignorant, or evil ways. At the end of the day, may shame be the reward of those who have behaved shamefully, for those who knowingly and persistently ignore your will and your way.

Make me to know your ways, O LORD;
teach me your paths.
Lead me in your truth, and teach me,
for you are the God of my salvation;
for you I wait all day long.

Your word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light upon my path. Your word reveals your path to me, and yet, you mark the way that I should go in other ways as well. You bless some efforts more than others. You provide the resources for some work and not others. You bring me joy, a spiritual satisfaction, when I do certain things that is notably different than others. You create fruit from certain seeds that I plant, and not others. Let me examine my life to see what you mark, where you bless, what you provide, when you bring joy, and what you multiply. Let me examine this in prayer with you until a path is clearer, if it takes me all day long. If the path remains foggy, help me understand the lack of clarity tells me something, too.

Be mindful of your mercy, O LORD,
and of your steadfast love, for they have been from of old.
Do not remember the sins of my youth or my transgressions;
according to your steadfast love remember me,
for your goodness' sake, O LORD!

Your love and mercy are ancient and everlasting; they changed this world before I was born, and they will continue to bring life long after I am dust. You have not forgotten the first time I faithfully spoke your name as a child, and yet I ask you to forget the first time, and every time, I acted like I didn’t know you at all. You must wonder if I will ever grow up. After I have learned my lesson, help me to forget the details. Let me have at least temporary amnesia, so that I might be able to function without attempting to carry the oppressive burden that Jesus has already taken away from me. Remember my faithfulness, remember my love, remember the good things in my life, O Lord, because you are good. Your steadfast love never ceases. May your goodness bear fruit in my life for your glory, O God.

Good and upright is the LORD;
therefore he instructs sinners in the way.
He leads the humble in what is right,
and teaches the humble his way.

You are really the only one who can believably teach us what is good. Thank you, O God, that you do instruct us, hard-headed, hard-nosed, stiff necked people, in your way. Instead of living in immoderate pride, help us to see ourselves as you see us, God. May we understand humility, not as some sort of feigned self-abasement. Instead, help us to see humility as understand who you are, understand who others are, and understanding who we are. You value us, perhaps for reasons we do not understand. As we become truly humble, may your path for us become more clear.

All the paths of the LORD are steadfast love and faithfulness,
for those who keep his covenant and his decrees.

Whatever path is yours, we will always be able to recognize this about it: it will be the way of steadfast love, it will be the way of faithfulness. Knowing that, let us behave toward you as you have behaved toward us.

Grace, and peace,

Ron

Your favor, O king ...

Hear the word of the Lord:

Esther 7:1-6, 9-10; 9:20-22

So the king and Haman went in to feast with Queen Esther.

On the second day, as they were drinking wine, the king again said to Esther, "What is your petition, Queen Esther? It shall be granted you. And what is your request? Even to the half of my kingdom, it shall be fulfilled."

Then Queen Esther answered, "If I have won your favor, O king, and if it pleases the king, let my life be given me -- that is my petition -- and the lives of my people -- that is my request. For we have been sold, I and my people, to be destroyed, to be killed, and to be annihilated. If we had been sold merely as slaves, men and women, I would have held my peace; but no enemy can compensate for this damage to the king."

Then King Ahasuerus said to Queen Esther, "Who is he, and where is he, who has presumed to do this?"

Esther said, "A foe and enemy, this wicked Haman!" Then Haman was terrified before the king and the queen.

Then Harbona, one of the eunuchs in attendance on the king, said, "Look, the very gallows that Haman has prepared for Mordecai, whose word saved the king, stands at Haman's house, fifty cubits high." And the king said, "Hang him on that." So they hanged Haman on the gallows that he had prepared for Mordecai. Then the anger of the king abated.

Mordecai recorded these things, and sent letters to all the Jews who were in all the provinces of King Ahasuerus, both near and far, enjoining them that they should keep the fourteenth day of the month Adar and also the fifteenth day of the same month, year by year, as the days on which the Jews gained relief from their enemies, and as the month that had been turned for them from sorrow into gladness and from mourning into a holiday; that they should make them days of feasting and gladness, days for sending gifts of food to one another and presents to the poor.

Letting go ...

Today we have the last devotional of Shiann’s “Shack” series:

Forgiveness is not about forgetting, Mack; it’s about letting go of another man’s throat.

I don’t know about your brain, but mine doesn’t forget things I’d like it to while it forgets tons of things that I want to keep. I do suspect it to be the human condition, but it is not God’s condition. God has the ability to forget or remember at will. He forgets because he chooses to do so. He forgives our sins and then doesn’t see them anymore.

I don’t forget the sins I have committed or those others have used, intentionally or not, to hurt me. Forgiveness is not the same as reconciliation. Reconciliation is the fullness of the process, as discussed in a previous thought, but they are not the same. I repeat that for several reasons. When we tell someone to forgive and forget, we are telling him/her something that God does not command.

In the context of this quote, forgiveness is freeing a person into God’s hand. When I forgive, I allow God to pursue the other and allow my heart to be softened.

Forgiveness has a long list of “it is nots.” It is not reconciliation. It is not sweeping the wrong under the rug. It is not a discontinuation of consequences.

There are times that we need to walk away. We need to forget in the sense that we don’t allow things to hold power over us. We need to allow ourselves to forget enough to allow another the room to heal and grow. We need to forget by not using a truth as a weapon.

There are times when we need to remember; times when forgetting would compromise safety of ourselves and others. Remember so that we can learn and not make a similar mistake.

I hope you have the courage to forgive in the hard times. I hope you have the courage to allow reconciliation even when you don’t feel like it.

When you choose to forgive another, you love him well.

May you choose to love another well today.

Many Blessings,

Shiann

The end will be bitter ...

But Joab and Abishai pursued Abner. As the sun was going down they came to the hill of Ammah, which lies before Giah on the way to the wilderness of Gibeon. The Benjaminites rallied around Abner and formed a single band; they took their stand on the top of a hill. Then Abner called to Joab, "Is the sword to keep devouring forever? Do you not know that the end will be bitter? How long will it be before you order your people to turn from the pursuit of their kinsmen?" Joab said, "As God lives, if you had not spoken, the people would have continued to pursue their kinsmen, not stopping until morning." Joab sounded the trumpet and all the people stopped; they no longer pursued Israel or engaged in battle any further.

Abner and his men traveled all that night through the Arabah; they crossed the Jordan, and, marching the whole forenoon, they came to Mahanaim. Joab returned from the pursuit of Abner; and when he had gathered all the people together, there were missing of David's servants nineteen men besides Asahel. But the servants of David had killed of Benjamin three hundred sixty of Abner's men. They took up Asahel and buried him in the tomb of his father, which was at Bethlehem. Joab and his men marched all night, and the day broke upon them at Hebron.
2 Samuel 2:24-32 - NRSV

Civil war is a horrible thing. Relationships between friends and family that once were significant are smashed by terrible events, the memories of which are not easily forgotten, perhaps not even over a lifetime. The toll here is the loss of life; hundreds of lives, with many more to come.

Fortunately we never engage in civil wars, do we? Our relationships with friends and family are never smashed by terrible events, like careless or hurtful things that we might say or do to one another, are they? I don’t know about you, but all of the mistakes that I make are easily forgiven and forgotten. Surely none of the mistakes that you ever make stay in your, or someone else’s, memory for very long, do they? Nobody ever gets hurt – nothing is ever lost, is it?

If you don’t hear the irony in that last paragraph, then go back and read it again.

The reality is that the best of us hurts other people. Usually that hurt is unintentional; we don’t mean to hurt someone, but nonetheless, it happens. Sometimes that hurt happens because we get hurt ourselves; we feel the pain of someone else’s words, and we lash back without thinking, or without a care for their hurt. They started it, after all.

What do we do with all of this pain? Do we just “bury the dead” and then wait for the opportunity for revenge? Do we sneak away in the night and wait for the opportunity to stab someone in the back later on? (After all, Joab does have plans for Abner.)

Jesus said, “If another disciple sins, you must rebuke the offender, and if there is repentance, you must forgive. And if the same person sins against you seven times a day, and turns back to you seven times and says, 'I repent,' you must forgive."

See, you might say, they haven’t repented so I don’t have to forgive … But Jesus also said, “And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.” So do we?

Somebody has to stop the battle.

He also said, “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses."

This forgiveness thing is so hard because it demands a love which requires us to be so vulnerable. We want to protect ourselves, but when we do, too frequently we just hurt someone else. This kind of forgiveness can only happen when we let go of power: first over the lives of others, and finally, to a certain extent, in our own lives as well.

This is so hard for me because I am so easily hurt. Yet I can also be so insensitive to how I hurt other people, too. So I don’t speak about this as an expert, or one who is innocent. Nothing could be farther from the truth. But we need to talk about it, nonetheless.

Forgive …

Ron

Lk 17:3-4; Lk 11:4; Mt 6:14-15 - NRSV

Remember to forget

Today, a poem to bring the word of the day to us.

“Forgetfulness”
by Billy Collins

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,
as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
Long ago you kissed the names of the nine muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,
something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.
Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue
or even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.
It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall
on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.
No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

“Forget” is an important, if not often used word in the Bible.
Moses, as he preaches his way through Deuteronomy,
seems to be very concerned:

Concerned that we don’t forget the things that we have seen,
Concerned that we don’t forget the covenant with the Lord,
Concerned that we don’t forget the Lord who gave it,
Concerned that we will forget God by not keeping his commandments,
Concerned that we will forget God and serve other gods,
Concerned that we will forget the times that we have provoked God to wrath.

God is too important to forget.
God’s covenant faithfulness is too powerful to forget.
God’s generosity in blessing would make one ungrateful to forget.
God’s commandments provide protection to us
that it is in our best interest not to forget.
God with a capital G is to be remembered,
while gods with a little g need to be forgotten.
Then, at the end of his sermon, Moses gives the children of Israel
an odd little command:
he tells them to not forget to forget the Amalekites.
I’m serious.

Here it is:

“Therefore when the Lord your God has given you rest from all your enemies on every hand, in the land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance to possess, you shall blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; do not forget" (Dt 25:19).

So how do you remember if you’ve kept the instructions of Moses?
If you remember, have you forgotten what you were supposed to forget?
At first this question may seem absurd, and even frivolous.
But it’s not.
Let me explain.

Being human means that six things happen in our lives most every day:
1 - We do good things to other people,
2 - They do good things to us,
3 - Other people do good things to other people;
4 - We do bad things to other people,
5 - They do bad things to us,
6 - Other people do bad things to other people.

Now, certain things seem immediately and intuitively obvious:

We would like to wipe 4, 5, and 6 off the list.
Sometimes people think they’re doing 2 or 3 and yet they’re really doing 5 or 6.
Sometimes we think that we are doing 1, but really what we’re up to is number 4.

Since, to quote Novalee Nation, “we've all got meanness in us,” sometimes we even do 4-6 on purpose.
These six things are all part of being human.

The Amalekites were humans who had done some bad things to the children of Israel.
Things so bad that you wouldn’t want to talk about them in front of the children.
Moses told the children of Israel to forget that the Amalekites even existed, to “blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.”
Somebody wrote it down so that the children of Israel wouldn’t forget the command to forget. Ironic, hunh.

Ironic because it points out the extreme difficulty of forgetting when
someone inflicts a trauma on us.
Ironic because it also points out the dangers of trying to bury the memory
in our subconscious as well.
So what were the children of Israel supposed to do with their pain
and their memories of it?
What are we supposed to do with our pain and our memories of it?

We can’t, and we shouldn’t, forget the pain caused by other people.
We can’t, and we shouldn’t, forget the other people.

We can and we should wipe out the power of that pain over our life. And, until they repent and repair the relationship, we should wipe out the power of those other people in our life.
Absolutely.

That doesn’t mean that we forget those other people.
That doesn’t mean that stop praying for those other people.
It might even help if we can love those other people,
because then we can start loving ourselves again.
Especially when we’re supposed to be a part of the same family.

“It takes two to tango,” our dads may have told us
as we tried to blame the fight on our sister or our brother.
And we believed it, because much of the time it is true.

So when we hate somebody else for something they have done to us
there remains a little nagging voice, whispering in our ear, that says,
“There might be, you know, just one half of one ten thousandth of a part
of possibility that I might have, possibly, contributed to the problem.”

So, maybe, just maybe, to be mad at,
or to hate somebody for something they have done
causes some of that anger, or loathing, or hate to stick to ourselves.
Which just kills us. Much worse than it affects anybody else.
Does that mean that we shouldn’t me mad, or angry, or even furious at someone
who wrongs us?
Absolutely not.

Pull out your Bible. Turn to Psalms.
It is full of psalms called laments.
Laments are songs where the children of God have been getting mugged by the “others”.
The children of God get tired of it, so they cry out to God.
Unfiltered. Uncensored. Unafraid. Inspired.
Here is a small sample:

"Break the arm of the wicked and evildoers; seek out their wickedness until you find none” (Ps 10:15).

“The Lord tests the righteous and the wicked, and his soul hates the lover of violence. On the wicked he will rain coals of fire and sulfur; a scorching wind shall be the portion of their cup” (Ps 11:5-6).

“May the Lord cut off all flattering lips, the tongue that makes great boasts, those who say, ‘With our tongues we will prevail; our lips are our own — who is our master?’” (Ps 12:3-4).

Notice that the children of God are not asking God to let them break arms,
rain coals, and cut off lips.
They’re asking God to do it.
They want God to “cry ‘Havoc’ and let loose the dogs of war.”
This is an extreme variant of number 6.
And then they do an amazing thing: they leave it up to God to do,
or not to do, what they have asked.

First, they describe in great detail exactly how they feel about their pain
to the Creator of the Universe,
then they describe in graphic detail the kind of pain
they want their enemies to experience,
and then they let it go.
Probably not after one lament;
maybe not even after one hundred.

But as long as they’ve got a hold on the pain and anger,
it has a hold on them.
As long as we have a hold on it,
it has a hold on us.
We can’t stop the memories in the present of the power of pain in our past,
But the pain will stop when we stop giving the memories of our past
power over the present.

Forget the Amalekites; God has removed us from their power.
Forget the Amalekites; God has dealt with them,
or is going to, soon, and very soon.
Forget the Amalekites.

I know that this sounds simplistic.
Perhaps it is; but perhaps sometimes we just make the answers too complex.
We tend to think that our problems are too complex for simple solutions.
And that may be.
Yet sometimes the truth is that we just have to keep doing the simple thing
until it finally works.
Sooner or later the children of God have to decide:

Decide to go gather straw and begin making brick again, or
start picking grapes, grapes in clusters as big as a man.
Decide to parse out every violation of the Law they have ever done, or
praise God for the grace that saved them from that indictment.
Decide to bathe in the river of wrongs done by the Pharaoh in Egypt
and themselves in the desert, or
cross the river and wipe out the power of the past
by embracing God’s power in the present.

What do we need to decide?

Our Father is trying to awaken us out of our nightmare to show us that
he has disposed of our monsters, chased off our fears.
Now we need to recognize his face, remember his strength,
see where we’re at, and decide to forget the monsters.
Remember to forget.

Grace, grace gives peace,

Ron