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February 13, 2018

Love Lessons From Jail

“First Corinthians 13…”

I’m opening a small Bible that I brought to give to one of the inmates.

“Where is that?” Jessica asks.

“It’s right here.” I push the Bible towards her, keeping my finger on the page.

Kara glares at her from across the table. It’s her Bible after all. I just gave it to her. Jessica grabs my pen and starts to mark the page.

“Do you mind if I make a little mark here? Just so I can find it?” Jessica doesn’t even look up.

Kara leans forward, starts to say something but stops. She looks exhausted, her hair is a matted mess like she’s been sleeping in the woods, but I catch a little fire in her eyes, then she sits back, shaking her head. She’s too tired to care. “No, it’s alright,” she says softly even though Jessica has already underlined the chapter number, a small mark that she won’t ever look for.

I want to check my watch but I don’t want them to think, no, to know that I am tired too. I stand and walk back over to the whiteboard.

Love is patient…

The topic is Love tonight at the jail. I picked it – it’s February after all. I realized scrolling through past lessons that I had picked Love last February too, but I can’t remember how it went. Better than this, I bet. It’s an off night. Only three came out, for reasons I can never understand, and sometimes that works for the best. A small group is less intimidating, the girls can open up more and God will help me. But tonight it’s two new girls and Gail, an older woman who I swear lives here. Her sentence stretches out past the horizon, due to frequent trips to the hole. Someone told me she lived on the streets with “her man.” But it’s been a while.

Love is kind…

I draw two big hearts side by side and write WORLD over one and GOD over the other.

“Tell me what kind of love the world gives,” and I watch their faces twist up in confusion so I reset it. “Ok, what kind of love does God give us?”

“Unconditional,” the girl with the matted hair says flatly.

“Good!” I write it inside the God heart, then write Conditional in big letters in the other heart. Now they get the game. The God heart fills up with Freedom and Forgiveness and the World heart fills with selfishness and shame. I feel like this is too easy so I throw in some Greek.

Eros. Phileo. Agape.

“Agape sounds Indian,” Gail says.

“No it’s Greek,” I correct her, feeling the foolishness of this conversation. I can see her bumming money at the bus station. Hey do you want to hear some Greek? As soon as I tell them that Eros means sensual or sexual love they completely regress to somewhere around fourth or fifth grade. I sit back down, feeling defeated and a tad disgusted.

Love never demands it’s own way.

I’m praying under my breath as I try to rustle the last shreds of my lesson together. Gail senses my despondency.

“I can be mean sometimes,” she says.

“Well, I know you can be sweet sometimes too Gail. ” I’m touched by her honesty. “And I can be mean too.” My words settle like pretty snowflakes.

Then Gail says, “I wish a was a bird. A big bird.” I wonder where she’s going but I want to think of David writing a psalm about flying away.

Jessica starts to laugh at her. “So you can escape?”

“No, so I can poop on everyone who’s pooped on me.” By now Jessica is sputtering and turning red, and falling into Gail.

Love bears all things…

“Then you want to be a horse!” as she demonstrates the size of horse manure with her hands. Kara is silent, her face expressionless and it occurs to me she may be withdrawing form something. Or very medicated.

“Ok guys, back to love.” They stop laughing and look up. I feel like the kind of teacher I couldn’t stand. Dull. A droning voice. Even my notes wonder what I’m doing.

Jesus made a point of showing us over and over that what we thought we had was beside the point. Five fish. Two mites. Or should we just call down fire and toast them all? I remember one time when my husband and I were pastoring that I confessed to my mother that I felt like telling everyone to go to hell. She thought that was terrific. But it wasn’t – it was a screaming indication that I was spiritually bankrupt. I was sitting at the piano smiling every Sunday, embracing women I considered faithless and teaching their little demons about Jesus in the cold basement. Apart from me you can do nothing. (John 15:5) Oh yeah, I forgot. Again.

An exasperated Jesus asks his disciples, “Are you being willfully stupid?” (Matthew 15:16, MSG) They weren’t getting it. Neither was I, trying to love what i thought was worth it, with a small love that I manufactured for my own benefit. And here I was again; a teacher trying to teach something that I understood but didn’t really know. I forgot AGAIN.

Love hopes all things..

“Do you want to know why I’m here?” They are silent. “I’m here because I love you.” The words come out soft and I am as surprised as they are. Yes, that’s it.

“I’m here because Jesus loves me. I don’t deserve it, but He does and He’s put His love in me. That’s why I’m here. Because I love you. And Jesus loves you.”

Kara looks up from the table, her eyes searching. Jessica and Gail are looking straight at me, and I know I saw just a small flash of hope, like a shooting star.

Love rejoices in the truth.

As I drove home that night I prayed for Kara and Jessica and Gail. I knew that despite my dumb lesson in Greek, that the Holy Spirit was able to take my notes and breathe upon them – to feed 5,000 with two loves of bread, to feed three women with the feeble prayers of another woman who knows what it’s like to be held captive, without hope, then set really free. And He is still able to teach an old teacher a new lesson in Love – even when I’m willfully stupid. It just takes a spark, a small spark of humility and a flash of hope. That’s all He really needs.

Love never fails.

*** All names have been changed, except Jesus.

(All Love scripture from 1 Corinthians 13, NKJV)

April 4, 2016

Surrender

Dear friends,

Please forgive my blogging vacation. I am finally writing a book and making reasonable progress, so I have approached a few of my favorite writer friends to be my guests. This one is from my favorite writer/friend and my precious big brother, Bob. He asked if it was “too personal”, but to me, a quest for God is never too personal, although it is what makes us each as different as snowflakes from the next soul. It is, in my opinion, the only thing in life that matters, and if we can’t be sometimes painfully honest in our journey, if we can’t say, “God, where are you?” then we have stopped searching and have settled for recliner religion.

So here it is. Thanks Bob, and your little sister will continue to pray, will love to pray, for you to know God’s perfect will, and of course, to meet Jesus face to face.

Church eclipsed by Empire State Building
(Photo by Bob)

Surrender

When both of your parents die – if you have been lucky enough to have relatively sane and loving ones – you lose more than those dear souls who have seen you from cradle to who you are now. You lose the only sources of unconditional love you have on this planet.

Your mother and father, though they may judge, will never stop loving you no matter what mistakes you make, no matter what you’ve done, what level of depravity you’ve sunk to, who you’ve hurt, how much damage you’ve done to yourself and others.

My mother is still living though she ceased to know who I am some years ago. When she was cognitive there were doubts about her sanity and even about the extent of her unconditional love for her children. Her famous line – that she had trotted out many times for at least my sister and myself – was:

“I don’t even like you.”

Those words, though, were belied by her tears and worry when we were in trouble. I felt, underneath it all, unconditional love. I felt it from my father too though his fear often caused him to cover it with anger.

My father died in 1980 of esophageal cancer. My mother suffered several strokes in the last ten years, which has left her as a little child with no understanding of her own children or their lives. Good thing I haven’t needed unconditional love in the past ten years, except…I do right now.

I also needed it thirty years ago – though I didn’t know it at the time. I was sick and depleted from drinking a bottle of Jack Daniels a day. Every day I could somehow get by, working as a pantry cook and drinking myself into unconsciousness at night, but I was sleeping on the floor of my brother’s abandoned apartment and I was thirty-three years old. That is the point that my mother came to visit and told me she could not bear to lose me and that I must either get myself to AA or she would commit me to a hospital.

Love. The bonds of love are all we have. I believe I was put here with the sole purpose of creating and maintaining those bonds. Strange, but at the time my mother expressed her unconditional love and the good people of Alcoholics Anonymous expressed their kindness and support, I became open to another source of boundless affection and caring. It was at once like a distant memory and an old friend.

I have heard many times from friends, from TV, from articles on the web that the only people who believe in God are those that are raised – ‘brainwashed’ – in a religion or those who have suffered such a crisis that they believe God is the only solution – a ‘crutch’ for the lame.

The crutch theory makes perfect sense to me. Only those that need God, see God. My atheist friends mean the term to point at a sort of hallucination of necessity but it fits me well. I only seek God – see God – when I am desperate.

I am desperate now. It has been awhile since I talked to God. My voice is hesitant and unsure, “Excuse me…Are you there?” and my prayers are pathetic “God, I need you to love me”.

I am almost 64 years old. I wear jeans to work, my co-workers are young and hip and my office is in the heart of ‘Silicon Alley’. I can almost forget that I’m well…old. The church pews of the cathedrals on Fifth Avenue are spotted with the dim forms of the elderly, the ones long missing their earthly sources of unconditional love. Who is there to love them now? And this is what I think, who is there to love me now?

My dear sister says God will love me, has always loved me. She has offered me up in a prayer but though deeply moved I imagine the answer is something like “You, beloved Robin are doing my will…your brother, well…”

I can almost see the path I was meant to take over these last five years; it is barely visible trail plotted with bright points: do not put drugs into your body, turn your attention to those you love, learn to be a worker among workers, keep your life an open book so that those bound to you may read it. There it is, steady and straight beside the one I took, the path of secrets, fear, and arrogance.

The prayer I make in the full confidence of desperation – they call it the ‘gift of desperation’ in AA – the one I ask right now on the train to Katonah is simply: “What?” The answer is: “You are beloved; you are on my path.”

*************************

You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart. Jeremiah 29:13 ESV

January 10, 2016

Good Courage

Buried treasure

“Treasure” the neatly penned label read. I scanned the pile of boxes stacked against my desk. Something made me label this one box, besides the occasional urge to organize my life. When I sit at my desk, I can reach all the things I love; pictures of husband, kids, grandkids, changing with the calendar – and faces of those that are gone now, framed memories. My dad smiles, tan and shirtless from a beach, my brother Timmy and I arm in arm in front of a green canvas tent at a campground, and Spence to my right, his little Cambodian sister Jade smiling from atop is shoulders, his face focused, not smiling but not sad, the gaze deep and searching. A corkboard above is covered in sheathes of photos, scriptures I must never forget, a note scrawled by my granddaughter, “Hello I hope you are not feling lonely – hope you r filt wif joy”, and some of Spencer’s prayers he wrote to God alone.

I smiled and pulled the Treasure box out from under the pile. Whatever it was, was important, I mused. As I lifted the lid, I saw letters and cards, and as I thumbed through each one, I remembered those who dared to love me, reaching deep into my pain 14 years ago this month. I had culled the best of the best and named them appropriately; Treasure.

The cast of players was peculiar. There were letters from my sons, including Spencer, from my husband, encouraging me to live again, from the assistant DA, and a copy of a letter from Samuel Rutherford, a brazen Scottish preacher from the 1600’s who reached into my heart with his council to a young mother who had lost her daughter. Lining the bottom were Kina’s letters to my mother, written 50 years ago after my brother Timmy’s death. There was also a letter from Elisabeth Elliot, who went home this past year. She very promptly returned my correspondence twice when I wrote her after Spence died. I told her she was my spiritual mom and she thanked me for that. Then a letter from another spiritual mom, Marian, a woman who touched my life when I was in my 20’s and left a lasting imprint.

Marian was married to my grandfather’s first cousin and neighbor, J.G.. My grandfather left home for good as a young man and became a doctor. J.G. was also educated, but decided he loved raising cattle, children and pecan trees along the airy marshland of Edisto Island. Marian was a teacher from the mountains, inquisitive, a traveler and the hardest worker I ever met. She loved J.G. with an amused sideways glance, and they were both the first real Christians I ever met.

They took me into their lives and loved me, a free-range poet from New York City who landed on their porch in a jet stream of cocaine and Jack Daniels. There, side by side with this couple in the ebb and flow of farm life and the raw wild of this coastal island, I learned that God was among us, in the field, in the storm, in the broken down trucks. Marian showed me patience with humor, grace with humility. She held up a mirror and showed me Christ’s reflection before I could even put a word to it.

I pulled the yellow folded papers from the box, the familiar scrawl, hands that must’ve been 80 and arthritic; hands that worked and loved the energy of life and dirt and things that could grow. She had loved Spencer too. “A note from Marian Murray “ was at the top of the stationary with a birdhouse on it.

Courage is the basic virtue on which all others depend for vitality and life.

As I reread the words, I retraced the surprise I felt nearly 14 years ago. Amid a flood of flowery Hallmark sympathy notes, the word Courage had leapt out at me, and I wasn’t sure I liked it. Courage? But it was Marian so I had held the message tighter.

Of what use is wisdom if one hasn’t the courage to act wisely?

Of what value is love is one hasn’t the courage to love?

Of what value is truth if one hasn’t the courage to speak it?

Of what consequence is faith if one hasn’t the courage to embrace it?

There was no signature, no wrap up, no “praying for you” or “May the Lord etc. etc.”.

Then on a page stapled to this were three scriptures.

We are pressed on every side by troubles, but we are not crushed or broken. We are perplexed, but we do not give up and quit. 2^nd Corinthians 4:8

Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go. Joshua 1:9

There was that word again – be courageous. I was intrigued. Then lastly,

I waited patiently for God to help me; and He listened and heard my cry, He lifted me out of the pit of despair. Psalm 40:1-2

Rereading this unusual sympathy note now, I realized how deeply these words had directed my path. She was taking me by the shoulders, and in an amazing act of love and rescue, shaking me and pointing upward. She was correcting my posture.

In a journal I kept after my son died, I wrote this over a year later, starting with Kina’s words to my mother:

“Courage is more than just grim determination – hanging on.” Real courage is stepping out into His “fullness of joy” when all of your sensibilities tell you to stop and hover at the edge of darkness, in the shadows of sorrow. I could live there always and I’m quite sure it is a place I will visit often. I don’t miss Spence any less or feel less sad that he’s not here. But my eternal life seems to start where I want it to. I can wait until I die, or I can meet God here on this side, and ask for the fullness of His joy – His joy strengthening me. I still stand at the edge and weigh this out. October 18, 2003

Marian came to visit me in June 2002, 5 months after Spence died. Her knees were bad but she would only let me help her down the stairs. She had never been to Cape Cod; maybe even Massachusetts. We drove along the Old Kings Highway, comfortable with silence, distracted by the rambling roses and lilacs. I was still stunned and exhausted with the daily work of grief. She was in her eighties, her presence there was all that had to be said. I drove her to Logan airport at sunrise. I don’t remember if we ever said “I love you” but watching her disappear into the airport, small and frail, I knew she had to love me a lot. Less than a year later she died peacefully, pneumonia finally overtaking the “lousy lungs” she endured since childhood.

“ I don’t know if I’m more of a grandmother, or mother or just friend to you,” she remarked once while we picked tomatoes in the full Carolina sun, sweat dripping off my face onto my dusty hands.

“Maybe all of them,” I suggested, and we laughed, an easy laugh that Marian taught me. A laugh that is not afraid.

I gently laid the note on top of the rest of the letters and cards and shut the lid.

January is a month of shadows, of hovering at the edge of sorrow in my life. Orion appears in the sky, sword drawn, signaling a time of year that is tough for me; an anniversary, a birthday. But I know God wants more than just a posture of grim determination. He wants to see me reach up past Orion, and touch His throne. He wants to hear me sing.

I could add to Marian’s message:

And of what use is life without the courage to really live it?

Be of good courage – for the Lord, your God is with you, bringing treasure.

You will show me the path of life. In your presence is fullness of joy. Psalm 16:11

November 1, 2015

The Next Step

Saying goodbye

Sunday morning. I swung the back door open, the door Rosie always used, but this time she circled the car three times, stopping at the door for a few seconds then looking up at me, and walking away. I knew what it meant. But the last time she circled she took a small jump into the car, dragging her back legs. As I picked her up, she flopped over onto her back, and looked at me, like Now what?

I grabbed her around the waist and pulled her up off the floor, enough for her to get enough leverage to climb up on the seat. Seventy pounds – my back was straining. I was talking to her the whole time, forgetting that she can no longer hear.

At the pond, where we have walked for the last six years, I open her door, and she looks down at the suddenly steep drop from the car seat to the ground, then she looks at me, apologetically. “Oh Rosie!” I touch her head, running my hand behind her ears, caressing her soft black fur. “Okay, it’s alright.” And I shut the door, returning to my seat, realizing we would not walk together again. She flopped against the back door, leaning her head out of the window and as we drove off I cried.

Wednesday morning. It was a long night. We could hear Rosie groaning, a strange new noise, unable to move. My husband got up and lifted her, helping her adjust, in the middle of the night, and I listened to her labored breathing, my heart aching. In the morning, she will not lift her head or thump her tail on the floor. She looks up at me sideways, panting, and looks away. I get ready for work, trying to entice her with food. Nothing.

At work I am distracted, which is not good in an ICU, so I ask to go home. I call the vet. Yes, they have one appointment at five, then nothing until next Monday. I circle the house, the yard, sobbing, stopping to talk to Rosie, who lies outside now. I lift her to her feet and she staggers, looking tired but attentive. She always knew when I cried. Her tail moves back and forth. There, there now, I am here, no need to cry.

My husband is painting the house, and trying to gently reason with me as I stand there, sobbing and shaking. She’s in pain, she won’t get better, just worse. He hugs me, and then picks up the brush. I call the vet.

I rode in the back seat with my hand on Rosie, who leaned out of the window, enjoying the fall air. It feels so wrong to kill what you have loved so much. CB lifted her out of the car to her feet, but she stumbled and fell going up the one step into the vet’s. I lifted her, now sobbing, “Oh Rosie, I’m so sorry. Oh Rosie!”

The Demerol worked quickly and she fell into my lap. Her breathing was easy and she slowly closed her eyes as I stroked her head and ears, and I realized this was the best time she has had in months. The vet sat on the floor too, and as we talked, Rosie slipped away. She was warm and soft in my lap but she was gone. I gently lowered her head to the floor and we went home.

So that you know, I am not Doctor Doolittle. When my sons’ gerbils began procreating, I took them and threw them off the back porch into the woods, two by two, with a final blessing of “Watch out for owls!” I have owned dogs that I wanted to kill. Rosie was different. (Read Rosie the Rescue Dog.)

Job, in the midst of epic loss proclaimed,

“The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”

This is a posture I’ve tried to attain ever since I lost my son. I want to recognize first of all that everything that is mine is first God’s, and is a gift to me, as temporary as my own life, which he also holds in his hands. I want to love but also hold loosely. It’s a balance I strive for, knowing that I can trust my Father with this unpredictable ebb and flow of life.

And I knew when He took my son home, He would provide whatever it was I needed to survive. I couldn’t have even guessed at what that would be. But He knew, and one thing was a puppy named Rosie and nearly 14 years of faithfulness.

When we got home, I cleaned, which for me, is a crazy grief response. I bagged Rosie’s food and treats and C.B brought them to our neighbor, Will, whose two dogs are like his frat buddies. We were leaving in the morning for Maine so I packed, and cleaned some more, vacuuming up swirls of black fur and discovering two tennis balls under the car seats.

So much of life is just doing the next thing, taking the next step. We get caught and snared when we freeze. I know that sometimes the next step feels like a triathlon and every cell in your body is screaming, “Just lie down and quit!” Yet in the going is exactly where God meets us. Because the next step has another name for it: Faith.

I’ll be honest. Many of my steps in those haunting days of bottomless sorrow were more like running steps, escaping steps. I knew if I stopped it was over, that despair would swallow me whole, like the monsters I would run from in the dark as a child. So I kept running and Rosie would be beside me. As we aged together, the run turned to a walk, then a stroll and finally she had to say No, I can’t do it anymore. The Lord gives and then He takes away.

As I said when my cat died in May, I don’t do well with loss. You would think I would have a handy Rolodex, with coping skills in alphabetical order: Anger, Denial, all the way to Yada -Yada. But I don’t, it’s a big scrap pile and when I face another loss I seem to re-grieve the whole mess; my brother, my dad, my son, then the usual stuff like kids that grow up and no longer need you to help them with their Next Step. It’s tiring. I wake up to the stillness of another day and say, “Jesus help me.” And He does.

There are a couple of feral cats that have been showing up more frequently in my back yard. They must’ve mistakenly thought that Rosie, who was deaf and half-blind and liked cats anyway, would hurt them. I hid a bag of cat food behind the birdseed and I’ve been filling a little plastic bowl near the shed.

The other day C.B. said, “Have you been feeding those cats?” and I hid behind my magazine I was reading. I haven’t told him that in my spare time I look at pictures of puppies. It soothes, like cello music.

I want to get another dog someday, but first I’m trying to be grateful for Rosie, to seal every good gift from above with nothing but praise. I haven’t quite mastered this yet. I’m moody, prone to tears and sometimes cussing under my breath. But before we left for Maine, I drove down to the pond in the early morning, when Rosie and I would’ve walked, and I grabbed the two tennis balls and walked just a little ways, then rolled them both down the familiar dirt path, for the next dog who is maybe helping their Person walk off some kind of loss too. Then I looked at the mist rising off of the black pond, to the woods on the other side that I walked for six years, and the clouds dipped in orange lighting the eastern sky and not for the last time said, “Thank you Jesus” and turned towards the car, taking the next step.

August 3, 2015

The Jesus Tree: A Backyard Metaphor

Grapevine climbing onto Rose of Sharon

This blog turns four years old this month and I wonder: Have I run out of meaningful things to say? Am I repeating myself? I told a friend I had writer’s block the other day, and she said I should write about having writer’s block. And I replied:

“I already have.” (A Writer’s Block-Head)

Writer’s block is like catching a cold. You’re miserable and you wonder where it came from. I just went to a speaker/writer’s conference, because I wanted to learn how to speak well, and to jumpstart my writing. At the airport I looked at the writer’s seminar outlines and took a deep breath in. As usual, I’m doing everything wrong, and I closed the book that I paid hundreds for. Did I catch it there?

I also suspect that general summer malaise has much to do with it. Having a fan blow on high two feet from your face so the sweat doesn’t drip onto the keyboard while you dream of the frozen food section at Stop and Shop, is distracting. And when it’s nice out, like when the humidity dips below 90, I want to go outside, instead of sitting hunched over in my study in front of a blank page, while the fan’s white noise obscures every sound of life.

Most people I know are in the middle of some tangled mess. Not a crisis maybe, but life has stalled or derailed. The kids are sick or in trouble, the money flow has dried to a trickle and dreams roll off towards the horizon…going, going, all gone. I watch people I love settle for so much less than what I believe God wants for them, because we just get lost and wonder, “How did I end up here?” At one time pulsing with new life straight from the vine, the Life-blood of Jesus Christ, fruitful and filled with creative spark; now the branch has withered, or shot off into obscurity, becoming frail and impotent. So we say, “Well, maybe I was a little crazy for thinking God could do that, or that I could ever be used in that way.” Like when I go to conferences. I compare myself to others, all the other women that seem to be so connected with lots of friends and published books and clever marketing tools. And I feel my branch begin to wither.

In my back yard, which I see from my purple desk with drawers that stick shut when summer comes, I watch our own grapevine sprout from a gnarled gray trunk into a magnificent plant that explodes 30 feet to the left and right. A lot of pruning the last few years has trained it to bear fruit, last year perhaps 100 lbs. of Concord grapes. Behind the fence, which holds the massive vine, is a Rose of Sharon tree, twenty feet tall, with a cascade of white flowers from each branch. And every year, right about now, the vine reaches out for the tree, latches on, and begins to merge its crazy branches into the white flowers and the strong arms of the Rose of Sharon. I call this my Jesus Tree; the wayward branches of the Vine reaching up into the arms of the Rose of Sharon, another common metaphor for Jesus. It makes me smile and remember what I need.

According to the Blogging list of Do’s and Don’ts I’ve already failed by exceeding the 500 word limit and using a blatantly simple metaphor. I should stop here but I haven’t made a point yet. Or maybe I have. Dreams…they don’t have to disappear. Just return to the Source and make them His, not yours. Nobody likes to be pruned.

Evan Hopkins noted, “The true life, that which triumphs over sin and ‘does not cease from yielding fruit’ is a life that springs up out of death.”

So as Spencersmom.com turns four, I yield my soul, my words and this blog to Him. And wait. For you, precious reader, who may be faithful to this blog or maybe brand new, I will depart by following a suggestion from the Bloggers list of Do’s – sorting out 10 of my most favorite blogs I have written over the last four years. Enjoy, dream dreams then release them to Jesus. And wait with me, dear sojourner. He is about to do something way beyond our very wildest dreams.

A summer reading list:

1. Rosie the Rescue Dog

2. Poor in Spirit

3. And Wonders of His Love

4. Grumpy Old Men

5. Bruno’s Birthday

6. Staying With Your Feet

7. Gorillas and Tea Parties

8. The Visit

9. Fear No Evil

10. True Love 101

February 25, 2015

The Fruit of Our Lips

Praise God, more snow!!!!

“He is thy praise and He is thy God.” Deuteronomy 10:21

The bright light escaping from behind the shades shook me awake and I sat up quickly straining towards the clock. Only 6:35. I pulled the shade down and it snapped up, making more noise than I wanted. My eyes were instantly assaulted so much so that I sat back on the bed and gasped. Who would guess? Who could imagine? Snow! At first glance about 6 inches of powder, glazing the trees, fences, roads in immaculate white, bringing the mounds of snow and ice beneath back up to it’s original three feet. In my pre-caffeinated state, I slowly pondered my first response. More snow. That’s just…then remembering my vow to Jesus that I would stop being such a whiny curmudgeon, I smiled at the winter wonderland and said, “Wow, that’s pretty!”

Therefore, let us offer through Jesus a continual sacrifice of praise to God, proclaiming our allegiance to his name. Hebrews 13:15 NLT

Sacrifice of praise. That little phrase has never ceased to give me pause in the 27 years I have been hearing it. It seems like an oxymoron; that sacrifice and praise should inhabit the same thought. Wouldn’t praise be natural, spontaneous and just…right? Sure, when it comes to worshiping Jesus Christ, there is no one that deserves more praise. And when life seems grand and expectant with blessing that comes from above, it is right and tough to stop praising our God in heaven. Then why is it a sacrifice?

Flip back to the Old Testament. The fruit of our labor, the first- fruits (meaning the best) was set aside for God and His holy altar. It wasn’t that He needed a bunch of lambs and oxen and turtledoves. But he wanted to see if we would trust Him, especially when things looked bad and without hope, when giving was hard, especially our best. Sometimes the best was someone else’s worst, but it didn’t matter. God was looking for trust, for bold faith.

I can be on every church outreach, leading a Bible study, paying tithes and exemplary in church attendance, but still holding my best from God. Jesus has already provided the ultimate sacrifice. He is both the sacrifice and the altar for us. Now he just wants the fruit of our lips. Words. Beautiful fruit that glorifies His name. Not rotten fruit that complains; about the pastor, the music, the temperature in the sanctuary. I stand guilty more than once on all charges. Rotten fruit, with those pesky little fruit flies flitting around. Gross.

So I decided to turn my world upside down this morning. Instead of job, school, people I want to fix and more snow at the top, I set Jesus on the altar of my heart. How? Praise. Prayer. Worship. Beyond my routine, until it felt a little like…sacrifice. And then I did something I hadn’t done in a while. I went out and knocked on a few doors and caught a couple of people in parking lots. “Do you know the love of Jesus Christ?” Some stopped to talk, some were busy. But here’s the thing. I want to give Jesus my best, not just the usual, the 99 cent special. And right now that means getting out of my snuggly warm comfort zone and looking hard at the people Jesus died for, who still haven’t heard this glorious truth. It doesn’t matter if I see results or if any one else does. It pleases the One I love the most.

Hebrews continues, “And don’t forget to do good and to share with those in need. These are the sacrifices that please God.” v.16.

Wow. So simple. Wake up and say Thanks Jesus, because with You in charge, it’s going to be good. Even if the snow piles up to the roof, if the car breaks down, the bank account circles the drain, the door slams in your face. Turn your world upside down and give Him the best seat. He is my praise, He is my God.