Temptation to Vacation

This past week, I have vacationed.  I’ve slept late.  The kids haven’t had school, so I haven’t been teaching.  I got way behind on laundry.  I haven’t had anything to prepare for at church.  Geoff and I had a getaway.   I ate Chateaubriande and indulged in desserts.  I have taken a break from all of my responsibilities.

And I’ve taken a break from devoting myself to my Lord. 

It’s curious to me that, during this week of vacation, when I found more time to spend quality relational time with the people that I love, I found less time to relate to Him.

A.W. Tozer reminds me, “God is a person, and in the deep of His mighty nature He thinks, wills, enjoys, feels, loves, desires, and suffers as any other person may.  In making Himself known to us He stays by the familiar pattern of personality.  He communicates with us through the avenues of our minds, our wills and our emotions.  The continuous and unembarrassed interchange of love and thought between God and the soul of the redeemed man is the throbbing heart of New Testament religion.”

If I truly know God as a person, why is it that I am still tempted to view conversations with Him as a responsibility?  A duty?

There have been many times in our marriage when I have found myself at moments of choosing… to take the hard road of moving toward my husband when every sinful tendency in me wants to avoid.  In those moments, the temptation to flee… to hide… to vacation from the relationship is overwhelmingly strong. 

It’s this temptation that has crept into my life with my Lord lately… to vacation from the relationship. 

And yet, it’s the grace of my husband’s love and the promises he made that draw me back and keep me pressing into the hard work of staying connected, confessing my temptation to vacation even as I choose to unpack my bags and stay home with him.

Thomas a Kempis said, “Temptations reveal who we are… And yet, temptations can be useful to us even though they seem to cause us nothing but pain.  They are useful because they can make us humble, they can cleanse us, and they can teach us… the key to victory is true humility and patience; in them we overcome the enemy.”

Love draws me.  Grace keeps me.  I sadly confess my temptation to vacation… and begin to unpack my bags.

Entertaining Grief

I’ve been entertaining grief… Which explains why I didn’t write last week.

Last week, sitting at the table with my uninvited guest meant having a hard time finding words.  It meant more silence than usual… more long pauses… less enthusiasm for ordinary communication (although blogging hardly feels ordinary to me yet).

In one of the long pauses last week, I was reading a little book about thriving.  In it, I learned more about joy and connectedness and the brain’s elasticity and potential for healing. There is a part of the brain, a ‘joy center’ that grows in response to joy-filled relationships – the kind where people are delighted to be with each other… the kind where you feel energized and more alive.  Most of the brain stops growing (or at least dramatically slows) at different stages of development… but the right orbital prefrontal cortex, the ‘joy center’, never loses its capacity to grow.  In this part of the brain, broken records are re-recorded… old dogs learn new tricks… and hopelessness is pregnant with expectation.  We can truly be transformed by the renewing of our minds (Rom. 12:2).

But instead of joy as our center, many of us live with fear at our core.  Rather than being drawn by the delight we experience in the presence of others, we are driven by the threat of all that could go wrong.  Rather than faithfully pursuing the good, we haphazardly run from impending disaster.  Our fundamental attitude toward living is one of defense and protection…

This was my posture through most of my childhood.  This was the way I limped through the first two years of grief after losing Mom.  I never wanted to feel this awful again… this was to be avoided at all costs.  But in the midst of the misery, Immanuel found me… and sat with me in the deep dark pit… no explanation was given… only presence.

“He reached down from on high and took hold of me… He brought me out into a spacious place; he rescued me because He delighted in me.”  And that delight sparked the renewing of my mind… began physically shifting my ‘center’ away from fear and into joy.  “People underestimate how good it is to live with joy in charge instead of fear.” 

And it was grief that began the shift… it was in entertaining the uninvited guest that the far off Yahweh began to become Immanuel.  

http://gapingvoid.com/2009/02/10/joy

Uninvited Guest

An uninvited guest showed up on my doorstep this week… The Thanksgiving leftovers had been eaten, given away or frozen; the Christmas decorations were up… and we were three days into our Jesse Tree tradition.  And suddenly, there was Grief… uninvited, but refusing to be ignored.  Tapping me on the shoulder and whispering into my ear… “Remember me?”

It had been a while… and I had forgotten how commanding a presence this uninvited guest can have… how duplicitous: one moment, a strident voice piercing any other conversation, the next moment a sullen shadow lurking in corners.  I had forgotten that Grief must be greeted… engaged… given a seat at the table… how Grief must be listened to and even appreciated… how the energy required to ignore Grief is better spent being hospitable…

This will be my 12^th Christmas without my Mom, the 7^th without my Grandfather, and the first without my Grandma.  Grief has visited at different times and in different ways… and has stayed for different amounts of time.  But this time, something new is happening when Grief visits.

In this past year, I have learned much about joy and the way joy can heal… the way that joy can transform the brain.  “Joy is being with someone who is glad to be with us,” says Jim Wilder.  There is only one person who can always be glad to be with me… And as I build joy in relationship with Immanuel, I build capacity to fully live… and to entertain Grief.  (more on this in future posts)

And so, as Grief makes its first appearance this season, it is different.  Rather than dominating, Grief is sitting beside Joy… and God is with us… the Joy of the Lord, becoming my strength (Neh. 8:10).