Comfort or Clangers

I thought I knew what a chord was. I can play arpeggios on my cello, which I figured just about covered it. No. Turns out there’s a lot more to these clusters of notes than I thought. Relative minors. Added on notes to convey a depth, an emotion. Patterns, numbers, theory.

Sheet music for modern praise songs generally come with no bass clef written in. Just the treble, with the tune, and chord changes for the guitars noted on every bar.

For years I’ve shied away from joining in on those songs. Or I’ve played the melody. Or occasionally just chugged away on the note named for the guitars. But I long to let myself go, to express my worship to God in a creative way and just somehow sing out a countermelody or a harmony. And to be confident that when I do, I’m not going to play a cringing clashing clanger.

That’s where a bit of study of chord theory seems a good idea.

Trying to find words to comfort a bereaved friend, I find there is no line prepared for me. I have to draw a deep breath and silently pray as I fumble for words that will console. I’m afraid of uttering a clanger that will sound heartless or cold. I rely on listening more intently, hugging, expressing my sorrow for her loss.

Sometimes life’s melody is in such a sad, minor key that it’s hard to find any way to harmonise. That’s when a strong bass note comes into its own, perhaps. The only note that can offer real comfort is the name of Jesus.

Spiritual Superfood

Outside the window, clusters of ripe red berries rest in golden fingers of rowan tree leaves. Yellowing larch needles sway in the gentle breeze. Cows which bellowed an hour ago, desperate for food, are now calmed and resting, the farmer having arrived with the daily ration of hay. Though they inhabit a fertile field, that season is past and no green grass is growing.

You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.

In some seasons of life, we recognise just how dependent we are on the provision of the Father. He feeds us spiritual superfood, restoring our strength and giving us hope. Today I lift my head to the loving Lord who sits at the table with me, in the presence of my enemies. All I see is Jesus.

Compost Bin Minuet

Last week, we performed the annual compost bin minuet. For months, we dump raw food and plant waste into the plastic stacking bin, and when it finally reaches the top, we turn to the neighbouring heap mouldering beneath black plastic sheeting. As we pull back the plastic, we find that over the months, what was decaying and smelly has transformed into a black tilth-like material which, when dug into the vegetable patch, enriches the soil. When that mound is gone, we shift the plastic layers very carefully off of the undigested plant waste. We cover that hill with the black plastic and are back in business, ready to make a new mound of organic waste.

What was no good for our digestion – egg shells, potato peels, etc – breaks down into great nutrients for the garden.

Some things in life are no good for our digestion. Illness, abuse, poverty, loss. But, placed into a divine compost bin where God can work on them, they can transform into a rich material the Holy Spirit can use to enrich the soul.

And when the time is right, God can dig that rich tilth, formed through our experiences and suffering, into the lives of others.

Where there is darkness, God speaks light into being. Transformative light. Powerful and full of life and hope and joy.

No Masks

In the America of the 1950’s, at least in my corner of the States, every kid dressed up at the end of this month, pretending to be something else. Not everything was scary. When I was 3 I was Little Bo Peep, but the pull-along lamb I had could no longer bleat as I had fed her far too much paper…

One year my costume included a rubber mask. I still remember the clammy heat beneath that awful mask, which clung to my face like a jellyfish, making me sweat and desperate to get it off.

Not sure if that’s the reason, but I just do not like masks. Menacing or not, they disguise the truth of who someone is.

It’s hard to go through life without a mask of some kind, though. Feelings of inadequacy, of guilt or shame all contribute to the gradual construction of a caricature of our faces and personalities which disguises and distorts the person we really are. Once the mask is on, it undermines our true potential and may prevent us from flowering into the beautiful creations God has made and loves.

That is why I am so proud of my dear daughter Mhairi. She has torn off the mask and can now blossom. Jesus came so that we would have life, life in all its fullness. He is the truth, and he is the light, and he calls us to live in the truth and the light. No masks. He loves us for who we are. And it turns out, so do other people.

The Saviour

One of the drawbacks to warm summer days is the number of fly spots on the windows. Open doors, open windows, hundreds of yellow spots polka-dotting the glass. They don’t really obscure views but once one is aware of them, they certainly spoil the vision.

I thank God that I have been blessed with a big, wonderful family and a group of amazing friends. Recently, there have been situations in the lives of those close to me which have spotted my view of Jesus. Each spot represents a moment when I thought it was up to me to ‘fix’ something. To say just the right words to heal. To give the perfect advice. To do the right thing. To pray the right prayer.

I assume responsibility to ‘fix’ things beyond my ability. The motive is simple: I want the best for those I love, because I love them. But as long as I leave those spots there, I will never see the complete love and faithfulness of Jesus. An accumulation of spots distorts the truth of who Jesus is, polluting my understanding of the vastness of his love and his mighty power.

Jesus invites us to give him all our cares. This is so hard to do. But today I scrub the window of my soul again and pray that as I contemplate the King of Kings, I will relinquish my self-assumed duty to save my loved ones from every pain, to make the perfect decisions always and right every wrong. Jesus is the Saviour. Not me.

Much worse than a simple spider

Yesterday I equated a spider in the shower drain with unhealthy, wrong thought patterns which could creep stealthily into my mind and twist and distort my thinking. No sooner had I written that than my daughter Mhairi published her story of assault and abuse. We have talked and cried together about her experience, so none of it was a surprise to me, and yet when I read her story in black and white and looked at the picture of her sweet, lovely  face crumbling in pain, the mother’s heart inside me broke.

The spider lurking down the drain can be memories, horrific or just haunting, which we can’t deal with in our own strength. And so we push them down. Hide them away. Hope that the eight-legged monsters will just disappear, won’t hold us in their webs of pain. I suspect we all have spiders, of various sizes and toxicity, which we fight, with varying degrees of success, to suppress and disable.

There was no spider in my shower last night, so I am keeping the cover firmly over the drain. So trivial compared to trauma, but for me, a picture of a common reaction to deep, deep hurts.

With experiences which distort one’s own self-worth, it’s no good pushing the memory down and covering it over with busyness and distractions. So far, no spider has been strong enough to push the drain cover in my shower off, but with buried memories, some of them are powerful enough to keep pushing up, to keep disrupting, to keep distorting, to keep spinning webs which entangle and hinder the life God blessed us with. It’s just no good trying to keep them down, because they ultimately poison us.

Mhairi is being blessed with many words of encouragement and wisdom and support. May she be protected from some of the vitriol and hate that can appear in social media. One young woman who grew up in an abusive home has shared her story with Mhairi, advising that the only real healing comes through forgiveness. Forgiving yourself for the misappropriated guilt, but also, agonisingly, forgiving the perpetrator(s).

This is such fundamental Jesus wisdom. The only way I know to get that spider out of the drain (the swamp…) of one’s memory is to give it continually to Jesus, asking him to bless with forgiveness.

Jesus came to set the captives free. Memory can be a cruel jailer. My prayer today is that Jesus will set Mhairi, and all the others who have been so traumatised, free. Free from guilt and self-blame. Free from shame and remorse. Free from anger and bitterness. Free to forgive. Free to live, to embrace life in all its fullness.

Jesus is the master gardener who coaxes life from what looks dead. The God of the second chance, the new creation, the resurrection and the life. May he bless all who struggle today under the burden of toxic memories, shining the light of his love into every dark situation.

Spiders!

Apologies to those who like arachnids. (Anybody?)

Nearly every night, at least one very large spider is found lurking in our shower. I resist the urge to squash or hoover, and call Don to pick up and eject out the window. The window is rarely open. It’s a mystery how these guys get in night after night, unless they somehow dive through the stagnant water in the U-bend in order to reach what they may think of as Nirvana, only to find themselves turfed back outside into the cotoneaster. (Although I’m sure some of them succeed in slipping from shower to bedroom and who knows where else!)

I’m trying an experiment today. I’ve covered the drain, so we’ll see if any of my 8-legged friends revisits the shower. It isn’t that I grudge spiders space in the shower: it’s the potential of them moving into my clothes or bed which compels me to throw them out where they belong.

Paul wrote that God transforms our minds so that we can have the mind of Christ. I fall so far short of that goal, struggling with the same old bad thought patterns. Every so often, I sense I may have made some progress, only to have an unhelpful thought swim through the murk and take over my thinking yet again.

I’m covering the drain in my brain, again today: covering it with the blood of Jesus, covering it with the power of Scripture, covering it with the indwelling Holy Spirit, and every time I see a wee leg of nastiness trying to squeeze back into my brain, I think I may be justified in just SQUASHING it. (In spirit, of course.)

Because once that nastiness moves in and settles down, it has a way of derailing the mind of Christ in me and skewing all my thought processes. So grateful that in Jesus we are always given another chance, and in him we always have the victory.