The Provoking Love of God

There is only one thing that matters in life – love. Above and beyond every other thing – love conquers all. The love of God is the most precious thing that we can ever obtain, give, or understand. Love covers a multitude of sin. It breaks through every barrier. It makes sense when nothing else does.

What is love really? What is the love of God? Does love require us to be doormats? Does it require us to go along with others even when we see things differently? Does it require us to stay in situations that are unhealthy – for the sake of love? Does it require us to cower?

Knowing that Jesus was love, is love, and always will be LOVE – I look to him for the answers. While he was here walking the earth, Jesus was the epitome of all the gifts of the Spirit. He was kindness. He was gentleness. He was love. While reading the Scriptures, filtering it through my own natural flawed understanding, it has seemed to me that there were times when Jesus didn’t exemplify love – not the way I would naively comprehend the expression of love, anyway. Though my natural understanding brings me to this way of thinking, the Spirit of God stirs up my spirit and causes me to understand a deeper aspect of love. There is a deeper understanding that surpasses my naïve ignorant understanding of “nice” love.

In Matthew 15, we read of how the Gentile woman came to Jesus begging for him to heal her daughter who was demon-possessed. This woman was in a desperate situation and I imagine she was very distressed and a pitiful sight. The scriptures say that she was crying and begging. I can see her pulling on Jesus, begging Him not only with her words, but with her tear-stained eyes – her overall countenance reflecting the sorrow, torment, frustration and fatigue of her situation. But he answered her not a word. (verse 23).

What? He didn’t say anything? How could that be? How could Jesus – the Beautiful One – the Healer – the Deliverer – not say one thing to her? Did he not have compassion on her? Did it not grieve him to see her worn-out state? Did he not care?

Certainly, we know that Jesus cared. Isaiah 53:4 foretold of him: “Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows.” He cared from the moment he saw her. So why did he ignore her? Why did he not readily help her? He ignored her until even his disciples asked him to send her away because she was annoying them by crying after them. I imagine her pleading must have gone on for a considerable space of time, being that the disciples where so tired of her. Why did Jesus ignore her?

The desperate woman continued to beg Jesus for help and mercy and he finally spoke to her, telling her that he had come only for the people of Israel, implying that he would not help her. I’m sure her heart sank as the feelings of unworthiness shrouded over her hopes. I imagine the reality that she was not “one of God’s people,” but that she was an outsider, weighed upon her. She was only a Gentile. In that moment she had the choice to react or respond. She could have reacted with anger, insecurity, bitterness, rage, cowardice, wrath… or she could choose to respond with humility, worship, confidence, hope, and ultimately, faith. I believe that in that moment she saw directly into Jesus’ face. She looked into his eyes. She saw his Glory. She saw the Healer. She knew he was the one who came to bear all our burdens and take away all our infirmities. She chose in that moment to look beyond his human frown and look into his divine smile… and she worshipped him.

In verse 25, we read: “But she came and worshiped him….”

This was it! Jesus, in all appearances, had been cold and aloof with her. He had ignored her. He had seemingly rejected her. However, in his great love for her, he had drawn her in closer to himself. He did not want to make her feel unworthy, as some commentaries on this passage will explain. No. He wanted her to realize that she was beyond begging – that she could come to him confidently – that beyond all the rejection, all the excuses and reasons why she should not be blessed – that he saw her, he cared; and that more importantly, His love was greater than she had ever imagined. He loved her enough to spur her on to faith.

As her faith was rising, Jesus provoked her to step in a little further – to trust him a little more. As we will see by his next comment he even pushes her to declare this new understanding and faith that was rising up. He said to her as she begged for his mercy again, “It isn’t right to take food from the children and throw it to the dogs.” To the dogs? She had already looked into his loving glory. She had beheld her reflection in his eyes. She had just been embraced by his love – so she then boldly said, “That’s true, Lord, but even dogs are allowed to eat the scraps that fall beneath their masters’ table.” At this point, I believe she said this with a posture of confidence as the way one would speak winsomely yet humbly to a trusted friend. She had said it! She proclaimed that she was worth something – that she and her daughter, her people, were worthy to receive the blessings of God. She had proclaimed that she understood how great was his love for her. This love – the love of Christ – was bigger than the boundaries. It was stronger than the fear and pity. It was kinder than mere politeness. It was bold enough to provoke her to a deeper place. It was real. She got it.

I can imagine a huge loving smile shining across Jesus’ face as he immediately said to her, “Dear woman, your faith is great. Your request is granted.” Her daughter was healed instantly.

Though faith for her daughter’s healing was the Gentile woman’s focus, I believe Jesus’ focus was to get her to understand his great love for her – that she would walk away that day knowing that she was not “less-than,” or rejected or unworthy, but that he thought of her as worthy, strong and full of faith. Healing her daughter was no big deal for Jesus. Nowhere else do we see that he required that the ones being healed meet all these standards and go through this kind of procedure. The entire thing was a divine way for Jesus to show his great love for this woman and to let that love transform her from a pitiful begging weak wretch into a confident, loved, empowered woman. He was showing off his Glory. He was showing it off in her situation. She was changed and he was glorified. The love of Christ was made known to her and I believe she carried that love onward from that day.

Sometimes, love does not look pretty. It can even look harsh. It can be an uncomfortable process getting to the deeper understanding of God’s love and truth. The road to a deep faith is a hard journey with lots of tests, trials, confrontations, and hurt-feelings along the way. As in the story of the Gentile woman, I believe Jesus still works this way today with us. He provokes us to stand up and truly declare not only the nice things of God, but the powerful things. He provokes us to look beyond the face-value of Christianity, which often defines us as the poor wretched beggars, and instead, look into his design and purpose for us – which is that we would be transformed into carriers of his glory and power. His words are not always nice – but they are always powerful. As C.S. Lewis says of Aslan in Narnia: he is not tame, but he is good.

This one thing I know… He is good.

Scriptures: Matthew 15: 21-28 (New Living Translation)

Connecting

Would love for you to follow my blog and join with me in faith for the Appalachian Mountians. God is doing some amazing things in these mountains and the words we release collectively are shifting the atmosphere. I invite you to follow, comment, and even message me with your questions and ideas. If you have a blog, I'd love to know about it too. Even through our blogs, we are collectively being built together to become a dwelling place for Him. (Ephesians 2:21.22)

In the Depths of the Bloom

Wayne gave me a single pink rose. The smell is almost ethereal. Today, as I buried my face in the full bloom of its beauty, I noticed how, though it is fully bloomed, it still has a small bud inside that is tightly wrapped. There are many more petals to unravel and bring beauty and fragrance. This made me think of how it is in our lives. Sometimes we come to a place where we think we surely have fully bloomed, the fragrance is good and we’ve become “mature.” If we will bow our faces deep and “take it all in” – even naively, as though we have never smelled a rose before, I think we will find that there is still a tightly wrapped place inside us… and inside life – a place of more beauty and depth – a place of fresh revelation, just waiting to unravel its petals.

In our region – the Appalachian Mountains – the churches in our area – well, actually, almost the whole religious structure here, has an atmosphere of complacency and apathy. The churches here are set in our ways – we have pressed the petals of ten year-old-roses between the pages of our bibles and our minds. We have built memoirs and monuments to the old experiences. We have settled. We have lost the passion of our first love. Well of course, aren’t we mature now? Have we arrived? Have we fully bloomed? Is this all there is? I hope not.

There is a remnant of people in these mountains who are pressing their faces into the rose. They are seeking the fresh fragrance of the knowledge of Christ – the renewal of love for Him and Him alone. It is as if they have never known Him before, never smelled His fragrance. There is a tightly wrapped bud of revelation and goodness that is getting ready to bloom and though the outer petals may become spent and drop away, the fresh new fragrance of knowing Him is going to overtake the atmosphere.

God's "Organic" Harvest

I awakened this morning thinking about our garden. This year, our family planted our very first garden in a new plot of land that had never been gardened before. We decided we were going to go completely natural and organic and not add any chemical fertilizers to the soil. Now, being from the mountains, I know rich soil when I see it. When we plowed up the garden plot, I was a little disappointed because I could tell the soil was not the best. It was rocky and not very dark. We hadn’t had the time yet to make compost and add that to the soil to make it nice and rich so we decided to clear out the rocks and go ahead and plant; we refused to use chemicals or pesticides on our food even if the land wasn’t quite where it needed to be. The plot we had laid out for our garden was huge, so finding enough compost or buying enough natural compost for all that land was out of the question. I thought, “this garden is way too big for a ‘first-garden-ever,’” but we chose to “go big” or not at all. We were diving in – not just “playing in the water.” A friend wisely advised that our expectation shouldn’t be too high for the first year until we had time to really work up the soil and get it where it needed to be to have a great harvest. That was good advice.

So now, we are coming into harvest time and we are getting lots of nice things from our garden, though I admit they are not as pretty and lush as most other people’s produce, but I keep in my heart that we will keep working the ground – building up what we need to do to get that soil rich and full of goodness. I have faith still, that our garden will prosper in a completely natural way – the way God intended. We will keep working it. We will see a beautiful harvest.

As I ponder about the garden, I see how it is the same spiritually here in these mountains of Appalachia. We will see a beautiful harvest of the good things of God, of souls, of experiential times of His Glory, of lives being transformed and touched by His love. We will see it. It will be beautiful. We will not only see a little goodness here and there, but we will see a massive harvest of the beautiful things of God here in these mountains.

As in the natural, I think our challenge is with the soil, the land – the spiritual soil, the spiritual land, metaphorically speaking. Though our deep foundation is good, we are steeped in layers of rocky, dull soil – soil that is not very impressive, not very rich, not very life-giving. Speaking of our spiritual foundation here in the mountains, I believe that deep down there is a powerful solid rock, but in recent years many layers have been adding up here in the mountains – layers of denominationalism, layers of brow-beating, layers of gospel-killing man-made traditions, layers of indifference, layers of fancy-sounding theology and programs, layers of hype and flattery, layers of complacency, layers of depression, and doubt, and poverty-mentality. All these layers are man’s junk – the stuff we add to the truth of God’s beauty and call it “church” – call it “religion.” It’s time we think differently. It’s time we have our minds renewed and come back to the way God intended things to be.

For many years now, even the country farmers here in the mountains, whose parents and grandparents did everything naturally concerning their gardens, have bought into the lie that chemical and man-made supplements are the way to go for raising a garden, though these procedures actually harm the soil and cause them to be dependent on feeding that process – thus making the farmers dependent on, not the land, but on the industry that sells them the products. It makes them dependent on the world rather than on God’s blessings. It’s a way for the farmers to control the outcome rather than allowing God’s natural way to just “be.” Though they may have quick lush produce, they also have food that is full of unnatural ingredients. They have a counterfeit.

How many of our churches in the mountains have bought into the lie that we can add in all the man-made stuff, get a good big crowd and a good big proud-looking image, and a good amount of money as well, and still think that we have a good harvest, even though what we really have is a counterfeit – something that looks good on the outside but in the depths of it, there is not much real life there. The real harvest of God, the beautiful harvest of God is truly life-giving. It looks beautiful even when it’s humble and small. It is real. It is authentic, even to the depths.

This is what I know we will see.

A Journey into Repentance - Encountering Mountaintop Removal

A Journey into Repentance

Encountering Mountaintop Removal

(Journal from a trip last week.)

Today my husband, Wayne, and I traveled across the mountains of West Virginia. In route, we crossed a mountain that has been devastated by mountaintop removal. Mountaintop removal is a devastating procedure used to access coal seams deep within the mountains. It mainly affects our Appalachian mountains, as the last bits of coal here become evermore scarce. With mountain-top-removal, coal companies literally blow the tops off of mountains to get at the coal. Sometimes miles of the tops of mountains are removed just to get at thin coal seams. The debris is dumped into valleys, polluting the headwaters of our streams. Toxic sludge ponds are “created” to hold all the mess that comes from this procedure. The ground, air, and water pollution is, in many cases, traumatic to local communities in the mountains.

As we drove across the winding mountain road, which we have driven across many times witnessing the ever-increasing annihilation of those mountains, today our eyes met a valley completely filled with dust. The ugly gray roads deeply carved into what used to be a mountain where barely visible. The smoke and dust went to the depths of the valley below and to the heights above us into the view of the sky. Today we could not see the miles of ugly gray rock and torn-apart land. We could not see the cliffs and gutted out sections of what used to be a beautiful forested mountain. We could not see the huge trucks that carried the few men that worked on the strip-mine along those roads, filling their lungs with dust and embedding their skin with dirt and coal dust. We could not see it as we had seen it before. Today, it was as if the “not-seeing” was uglier than the “seeing.” It was knowing that it was there and not ever being able to get those images out of our hearts that made the dust seem to be more clear than the examination of the torn-apart land. It was the “not-seeing” that bothered me most. It reminded me of all those years that I did not see the problem – did not know it existed, even though I lived in these mountains and were a part of them. It was haunting.

I noticed how dead the trees were near the road, even though we were miles from the strip-mine – obviously they had been killed-out by all that pollution. It was a heartache to know that this was a way-of-life for the people who lived right there on that mountain. Sure, maybe there were a few who made a living there; there were surely families that lived there and thought that was a normal way of life; and there were many that in their ignorance, thought that this was why those mountains were there – “to use.” I was deeply saddened. I was saddened for the land, for the people, and for my Creator. Surely this was not His will.

My husband once worked for gas-well companies in this area and many times he, out of naivety or lack of knowledge, took part in practices that were also devastating to the land. There were times that briny (toxic) water was dumped onto the ground or even into the rivers. There were unsafe practices that put people and their animals (livestock and pets) in unsafe conditions. There was pollution that could have poisoned people’s drinking water-wells and tainted their fields where they grew their food. For the companies, it was the way of the business, and for the most part, the men that worked there did not have any knowledge of the devastation that could come from this way of business. To them it was the way of earning a living. To my husband, it was just his job.

Recently though, after spending some time away from the mountains, and coming back home, we have learned to appreciate the mountains more and we feel like God has placed in our hearts a love for the land like we never had before. We proudly call ourselves people of the mountains, specifically - Appalachian Mountain People. We love the ways of mountain people and now see more than ever, how mountain people depend on and have a relationship with the land. The land gives us food; it provides for our animals; it gives us medicine and fresh water. A vigorous and blooming land is vital to the livelihood of people in the mountains. The hope of rich lives is tied to the land. In addition, the land gives us something deeper: a sunset in the mountains gives us a sense of awe that can’t be found any other way; the starry sky over a meadow full of singing crickets and frogs and fireflies gives serenity that can not compare with anything else; the rustle of trees blowing through our forests is an unspeakable joy. I could go on and on of the beauties of these mountains that nourish the soul and cause a deep connection with not only the land, but with the Creator – with God.

So as we looked at this devastation and thought of regrets over the past, we felt a deep sense of repentance welling up. We wanted to repent of our ignorance; of our uncaring attitudes that we had for many years while growing up in these mountains; for not recognizing the wonder of God’s creation; for still-yet doing nothing to make a difference. So as we talked about this, we realized that we, because of who we are – mountain people – have a right to offer repentance to God for the devastation that is even now happening. We are one with this problem – it is our land. Our hearts are broken because of the devastation that is here. It is time we recognize our sense of stewardship of this land and help our children to know the value of this land and what threatens its vitality. It is time to speak up about what is going on here and to repent of how we have failed to take care of what has been given us. It is time to say, “Forgive us, oh God, for not caring for your creation – for the goodness you have given us.”

As a family, we are planning to take our children to see this devastation first-hand. We will ask forgiveness for our regrets. We will make promises for the future. And as we look through that mask of dust – that “not-seeing place” we will be determined to see into the providence of God, a bright future – a future that will be beautiful for our children – our mountain children.

Shake the Mountains, God.

As I begin this blog about transformation in the Appalachian Mountains, my mind wonders into all the questions, doubts, and disappointments from the past, and I think, "Will this really happen? Will you, God, pour out your Glory here and change this place?" It's so easy to doubt. Faith is a gift from God, so I pray for faith.

As my mind wonders, my spirit rises and I hear the Voice of God saying, "Yes." So I say, "Yes." Sometimes, God is just waiting on our, "yes." I believe God is going to do, and even now is doing, some radical things in these mountains. I believe He is redefining the Appalachian Mountains. I believe He is pouring out something so beautiful and lasting that we can not even comprehend it yet. He is even now shaking these mountains. He can shake these mountains... even with just a whisper.

Click the video link below and as you listen to this awesome song by Lifehouse, ask the Lord to give you the gift of faith for these mountains and join me as I pray, "Shake the mountains, God."