Tried With Fire

“I have chosen you in the furnace of affliction.” Isaiah 48:10. "“I have chosen you in the furnace of affliction.” I chose you before you were here. Yea, I chose you before you had a being, and when all creatures lay before Me in the pure mass of creatureship, and I could create or not create as I pleased, I chose and created you a vessel of mercy appointed unto eternal life. And when you, in common with the whole race, had fallen, though I might have crushed you with them and sent you down to hell, I chose you in your fallen condition and I provided for your redemption. In the fullness of time, I sent My Son, who fulfilled My law and made it honorable. I chose you at your birth, when a helpless infant you did sleep upon your mother’s breast. I chose you when you did grow up in childhood, with all your follies and your sins. Determined to save you, I watched o’er your path when, as Satan’s blind slave, you did sport with death. I chose you when, in manhood, you did sin agai...

Last fall, I came face to face with mortality and death when my dad's health began to decline. When he died, there were three things that the Holy Spirit used to comfort me - my pastor's recent sermons on the resurrection from 1 Corinthians 15, the Apostles' Creed, and the first question and answer from the Heidelberg catechism. While it is true that my dad is in the presence of the Lord and free from physical suffering, this is not his end state. To be fully human is to be body and soul. Death severs that union, but the resurrection will unite what has been torn apart. So my dad is awaiting "the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting." 1 And everyone in Christ has this hope because "with body and soul, both in life and in death, am not my own, but belong to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ." 2 The resurrection offers great comfort when faced with death, but I can think of practical implications now. Namely, if we affirm the resurrection, wh...

Life becomes harder and more complicated when you grow older. I'm not there yet, but my parents are. I've just come home from helping move my mom into memory care, and I will be heading back to help move my dad into assisted living. The packing and physical move were the easy part. The hard part is the emotional and mental adjustment to living in a new place, which is difficult for anyone let alone for someone with Alzheimer's. It's also hard to watch and try to help from afar; the lion's share is on my sister and brother-in-law. I'm thankful for my parents and how God has kept them. I also want to use this situation to learn and adjust now before it will become harder to do so. On the drive home, I shared with my daughter the lessons I want to learn, so here they are. Maybe they will help you too. 1. Don't wait to declutter. The saying goes, "You can't take it with you," and maybe my daughter won't want to take it with her either. Ask ...

Walking Through Twilight: A Wife's Illness - A Philosopher's Lament by Douglas Groothuis is a book that is tragic, moving, but beautiful at the same time. The author's wife has a form of dementia that has robbed her of words, both written and verbal, due to the area of the brain that the disease has affected. This is especially painful because Rebecca Groothuis was a gifted writer, editor, and Mensa member. I have a few of her books on my shelf. Her husband, Douglas, is a philosophy professor by trade, so he writes of the sorrow, struggle, and trying to find meaning while holding on to the grace of God and the gospel. "I am hanging by a thread, but the thread is knit by God." (pg. 153) One thing worth noting, Rebecca Groothuis is one of the editors of the Council for Biblical Equality's Discovering Biblical Equality: Complementarity Without Hierarchy . Yes, they are egalitarians. There are assumptions made by non-egals about egalitarians, sometimes even qu...

I'm posting at Out of the Ordinary today. It's funny how my pastor's recent sermons have provided the exact encouragement I needed from the Word at exactly the right time. Being reminded of who God is in His Word is a lifeline in the middle of a trial, so God's timing is pretty amazing. I just got off the phone with my dad. Today was a rough day for him and my mom. He never knows what the dementia may bring, but the stress ramps up when my mom won't comply with the care that is necessary and good for her. Because of the disease, she will question and argue, and because of the disease, trying to reason with her is futile. This is hard for my dad when all he wants to do is help his wife whom he loves. I encouraged him as best as I could, and we prayed together on the phone. When I hung up, then I could release the tears I had been holding inside. It's no wonder the Heidelberg Catechism refers to this life as a vale of tears. Read the rest of the post here ...

I'm posting at Out of the Ordinary today. "This was also the first time I said goodbye to my parents wondering how many more times I would be able to see them in this life., and it hit me hard. As we were driving home, I grieved for my parents. Dementia is so cruel because it robs a person from the inside out, and it inflicts such loss, not just on the sufferer but on the surrounding family too. But as I was praying, I asked myself - is this life and its eventual deterioration all my parents have to look forward to? And as I asked the Lord to comfort us, the first question of the Heidelberg Catechism came to mind: What is your only comfort in life and in death?" Read the rest here .

One benefit of being the church librarian is I get the fun job of finding new books for the church. The downside is that when I flip through the new additions, I get engrossed and end up wanting to get a copy for myself because I can't mark the church's copy.  Embodied Hope: A Theological Meditation on Pain and Suffering  is one of those books. Suffering is an important topic, but how we handle it can make all the difference between adding to that suffering or comforting the sufferer. Early in this book, author Kelly Kapic notes that ever since the Enlightenment, there's a subtle sense that we can analyze God by putting Him and His ways under a microscope, as it were, and find an explanation. Perhaps there's even a subtle pressure to explain . But God is bigger than that, and we aren't always privy to what He has not made plain. Also people are more complicated. Just because we may have a plausible explanation for a person's trial doesn't mean that an...

It is hard to watch people I love going through times of suffering. It's especially hard when I haven't been through it myself, so I don't know what to say. In an effort to try to relate, I may search my experience database to see if there is any commonality, but even if that is the case, situations are so nuanced that it probably isn't wise to project my experience onto someone else. In an effort to break the silence, it's tempting to say "This reminds me of ..." which may not be helpful at all. But why is silence even a problem? Job's friends gave their best comfort when they sat quietly with him and mourned. Keeping their mouths shut would have saved him a lot of additional pain. But maybe what matters isn't about how closely I can relate or even give advice. When one member of the body suffers, we all suffer. Then isn't it enough to weep with those who weep because we love them even if we don't fully understand? A simple, "I don...

pg. 49 "Any experience of vulnerability without authority is painful, but the deepest and most intractable examples of suffering are communal and multigenerational. ... even if you are personally materially well-off, if your community is mired in suffering - if your parents, people and nation have known little for generations but enforced helplessness due to tragedy and injustice - then you are not free from the oppressive reality of suffering. And this kind of suffering is far deeper, and far less tractable than the suffering all of us experience a individuals - because simply escaping it as an individual does nothing to change the fundamental systems of vulnerability without authority. " Strong and Weak, Andy Crouch, InterVarsity Press, 2016, pp. 60-61. (italics mine)

I am posting at Out of the Ordinary today: "It is no good telling the bereaved mother that Christ still loves and cares for her if she has only been taught to think of Christ in terms of how he works on her own feelings and in her own experiences. She needs to be able to see that God is much greater than her experience of him; she needs to know that, whatever her current feelings of anguish and despair, God is trustworthy and loving; and she needs to know that assurance is not necessarily about emotional highs but about knowing that God is faithful even though the whole world appears to be falling apart around her..."   Carl Trueman She needs to be able to see that God is much greater than her experience of him... This passage by Carl Trueman hits close to home. I was not a bereaved mother but a heartbroken wife wondering where God was when my husband walked out the door. I would never have owned it at the time, but God was pretty much the God of my experience...

Left: The struggle to make sense of life when a parent leaves , Jonathan C. Edwards, Rainer Publishing, July 2016, 198 pages. When my ex-husband moved out and made it clear that he intended to pursue a divorce, I met another Christian woman who had been in my situation. She told me that the awful stories about children growing up with divorced parents don't have to come true. In fact, she believed that they could come through relatively unscathed. She meant to encourage me, but this was idealistic. If the obvious rebellion and acting out one usually thinks of is absent, then it would be easy to think that kids came through with nary a scratch. But given that divorce is such a traumatic event, how can children not be affected by it? How can there not be wounds when the foundation of their security has crumbled beneath them? What is really going on beneath the surface? Left pulls back the curtain on what it's like to be a child of divorce. Jonathan Edwards (not the Puritan...

Suffering has been the latest Sunday school topic at my church. The class has been very helpful and thought-provoking. It has probably been challenging for the teacher to try to condense this weighty subject because suffering touches on the sovereignty of God, the problem of evil, justice, and ethics to name a few. But the class has been the easy part. The hard part will be applying what I have learned. Also a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Just because I've read books or have been through a class on suffering doesn't necessarily mean I will be sensitive to others in their pain. As I've been mulling over this, here are some thoughts that come to mind: Don't lump a suffering in a single category. The sorrows of life in a fallen world are not the same as evil being perpetrated by sinful people. Don't put suffering on a scale and be the judge of who is suffering more or less. Be careful of an unbalanced view of God's sovereignty such that the categ...

"And there arose a great storm of wind, and the waves beat into the ship, so that it was now full. And he was in the hinder part of the ship, asleep on a pillow: and they awake him, and say unto him, Master, carest thou not that we perish? And he arose, and rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea, Peace, be still. And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm. And he said unto them, Why are ye so fearful? how is it that ye have no faith?" —Mark 4:37-40. Many of God's children get on very well so long as they have no trials. They follow Christ very tolerably in the time of fair weather. They fancy they are trusting him entirely. They flatter themselves they have cast every care on him. They obtain the reputation of being very good Christians. But suddenly some unlooked for trial assails them. Their property makes itself wings, and flies away. Their own health fails. Death comes up into their house. Tribulation or persecution ariseth because of the word. And where now is ...

It's my turn again at Out of the Ordinary: You may be wondering why I chose this post title. The King James version of James 5:11 commends Job's patience, not his friends'. But that's the point. Job's friends weren't very patient, were they? To their credit, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar started out well. When they heard of their friend's tragic loss, they joined him in his grief and sat silently in the dust for a week. (Job 2:11-13) But when the week was over, they opened their mouths and inserted their feet. I don't think they wanted to add to Job's wounds with their words. I'm sure they wanted to help him out of his distress by offering the best advice they could, but they made things worse. Now it's easy to criticize Job's friends, but I don't know if I would have done any better.  Read the rest of the post here. ..

I am Out of the Ordinary today writing on the hope of the resurrection even in the midst of Alzheimer's. I sometimes imagine what life was like in the Garden of Eden. There was perfect harmony with God and between all of creation. There was no illness or death, which is hard to fathom. Yet this was the reality of the state of innocence before the Fall. But that reality is no more. Once sin entered the picture, a new reality took hold. What was once whole and healthy is now broken and dying. Even if you never had a single sick day in your life, the rate of decay is going to eventually outpace the rate of cell growth. Surgery may be able to nip this and tuck that. Medical research may provide new treatments, but there is no fountain of youth. There is no elixir of life. The sad prognosis of this present reality has been on my mind quite a bit lately because I have a family member with Alzheimer's. The disease is still in its early stage, and I'm very thankful for the...

I'm posting at Out to the Ordinary today: This past Sunday, my pastor continued preaching through the book of Genesis with Joseph's ongoing saga in Egypt as the text. After being nearly killed and then sold into slavery by his brothers, he is bought by Potiphar and eventually put in charge of his master's household. It looks like Joseph's situation is taking a turn for the better only to have his master's wife repeatedly harass him and falsely accuse him of rape. Then he's thrown into prison for a crime he did not commit. I had read the account numerous times, but I had never noticed until Sunday that the writer deliberately makes the point that the Lord was with Joseph and showed him steadfast love  in the prison .  If I was writing the story, I would have him exonerated of all charges and released immediately. Wouldn't a happy ending be a better demonstration of the Lord's favor? But putting him in prison for an unspecified period of time and...

Inheritance of Tears: Trusting the Lord of Life When Death Visits the Womb by Jessalyn Hutto, Cruciform Press, 2015, 108 pages. Children are precious gifts from the Lord, and we are filled with anticipation from the moment the test comes back positive and we hear that first heart beat. We eagerly watch their growth via ultrasound, and then the day comes when we finally hold our beloved babies in our arms after nine long months. But tragically, not every pregnancy ends in joy. How do you comfort a mother when "death visits the womb?" How do you minister to her grieving heart? I have not had a miscarriage, so I would not even know where to begin. But Jessalyn Hutto does, and she has written Inheritance of Tears out of her own experience. This is a very moving and personal book as Jessalyn shares about her two miscarriages and her struggles to make sense of why God would allow this tragedy. But at the same time, this is a very accessible, theologically sound book bec...

We don't know much about Peninnah in 1 Samuel 1:1-8, but the little we do isn't nice. Perhaps she was jealous of Elkanah's love for Hannah, but regardless, she used the family's annual visits to Shiloh to remind her rival of her childless state while surrounded by her own sons and daughters. So year after year, Peninnah rubbed salt in the wound to Hannah's great distress. The text doesn't say what went on at home, but I can't imagine it was any better.  It would be easy to say, "What an uncompassionate woman! I would never do anything like that!" Or would I? Before we condemn Peninnah too readily, we should perhaps reflect on the way public worship can indeed become a time for the raw exposure of our past sins, our failings, and even our struggles with the abnormalities of life. What should be an occasion of joy for the worshipper can become a time to be reminded of how one's life has been a series of disappointments. It is a frequent occ...

Here is a brief summary of the main points from Pastor Ryan's sermon on Job 4-14.  So far, this series has been excellent and given me a lot to ponder. This sermon (which should be available today) and the previous ones can be found  here . I highly commend them. 1. Suffering is not always the result of personal sin. Job's friends made an assumption that was not absolute. Yes, people do suffer as a direct consequence for their sins, but God never charged Job with sin though his friends did. The sun and rain fall on the just and the unjust. Sin, either his own or his parents, was not the cause of the man's blindness in John 9. Rather it was for the glory of God. 2. We must know God, His Word, and His people if we are to counsel well. If we don't know God, His attributes, character, and Word, we will give misguided counsel.  Our understanding of the Word must be systematic because one doctrine interweaves with another. If we hold up God's justice above His...

"My times are in Your hand!" Psalm 31:15 Our times of  adversity  are also in God's hand. As every  sunbeam  that brightens, so every  cloud  that darkens, comes from God. We are subject to great and sudden reverses in our earthly condition. Joy is often followed by grief; prosperity is often followed by adversity. We are on the pinnacle today; tomorrow at its bottom. Oh! What a change may one event and one moment create! But, beloved, ALL is from the Lord! Afflictions  do not spring from the soil, nor do  troubles  sprout from the ground.  Sorrow  cannot come until God bids it. Until God in His sovereignty permits — health cannot fade, wealth cannot vanish, comfort cannot decay, friendship cannot chill, and loved ones cannot die.  Your time of sorrow — is  His appointment.  The  bitter cup  which it may please the Lord that you shall drink this year, will not be mixed by...