Ok, so I know I went all Cave-time on you. Please forgive. I do not know how to rest. I think of myself as above the laws of physiology (or whatever laws govern the firing of all your physical systems). I apparently do not know how to let go, snooze, and worry about That (whatever that is) another day. All this to say that I sorta overdid it earlier this week and paid the price in pain and exhaustion midweek so I did like a 48 hour stretch of can’t get out of the bed and now I’m all “let’s try this recuperating thing again, shall we?”

I had my first post-op visit with Doc during which we received the good, bad, and ugly news of my offending body parts. Long story short–good thing we got ‘em out of there when we did BUT no more worries! Save, of course, taking it easy like I was originally instructed. Seriously, there has to be some sort of big life lesson in all of this for me because I am REALLY having trouble with that.

Onward:

I received an comment notification today from Mickey. (Hi Mickey) I do not know whether I want approve your comment or not. Here’s the thing…criticizing me is one thing, but you also had to list all those other recovery blogs in the comment as “FALSE PROPHETS” as well. I could edit your list I suppose… But also there was that minor annoyance of no other remarks. Obviously you have the idea that recovery bloggers in general (the names I recognized from your list are all recovery bloggers) are leading people astray…but you do not say why you believe this to be true. You do not support your labeling me/us as false prophets. Basically, you just drove by to yell a name in my general direction.

I am open to dialog, Mickey. Truly I am! I take my calling to write about my relationship with God and my recovery seriously (see this post where I talk about those called to teach/serve in this way). But I know that not everyone is going to agree with everything I say. And I am certainly not saying that I have arrived and know all there is to know about God. But I’ve got to have more than a mere name-calling to dialog with you on this topic.

So, for now, you comment sits awaiting moderation. If you have truly read my site and feel I am a false prophet, let’s talk about the why of it, civilly and with great respect for one another. Ok?

Groovy.

*This post is part of the Blogger Small Group reading the book of James. To read other participant posts, head over to Run’n Like a Vagabond. If you want to read my previous posts for the group, click here.

James 5

Warning to Rich Oppressors

Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming upon you. Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. Look! The wages you failed to pay the workmen who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered innocent men, who were not opposing you.

You know, the other day I was flipping through the channels and I landed briefly on one of those “fabulous life of…” shows. I think this particular one was focusing on The Hamptons in general, not one particular person. As I watched and listened to the sheer amount of money spent not just for the land and the houses, but for the furniture, the “help,” the atmosphere but also just for the parties (thousands upon thousands spent PER GUEST???? are you kidding me?)…my stomach turned. I’m not exactly saying that rich people make me sick, though. I know a lot of people who do wonderful things with their money, and still live an insanely luxurious and self-indulgent lifestyle. I think I’ve heard both Angelina Jolie and Bono refer to how much money they have as “ridiculous.” But at least there is something socially redeeming about the fact that they choose to spend so much of their energy/time/effort/and money on matters of great importance….Right? Well, I don’t really care if you agree with me, that’s kind of how I feel about it.

I think a lot of people may interpret this passage as a blanket condemnation on riches. But I don’t think that is what James is getting at. Riches in and of themselves shouldn’t condemn a person. But how a person handles their money? How the person came about that money in the first place? Those are matters of utmost importance in the eyes of God. I’m sure I’m missing out on some sort of contextual knowledge of this particular passage that could shed a brighter light into my interpretation. But from what I read of the scriptures, it’s kind of like a “to whom much is given, much is expected” thing. And one I have not taken lightly as our income has risen over the years. Even on that relatively small scale, I find myself cringing sometimes at how much money I can drop now WITHOUT feeling the pain of it, whereas five years or so ago it wouldn’t have even been possible. I want to feel the pinch I used to feel, so that I can make wise and generous choices elsewhere in my budget. Do I need that 500th book RIGHT THIS MINUTE? Or could God bless another through donating that amount? I certainly desire to avoid this particular judgment.

Patience in Suffering

Be patient, then, brothers, until the Lord’s coming. See how the farmer waits for the land to yield its valuable crop and how patient he is for the autumn and spring rains. You too, be patient and stand firm, because the Lord’s coming is near. Don’t grumble against each other, brothers, or you will be judged. The Judge is standing at the door!

Brothers, as an example of patience in the face of suffering, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord. As you know, we consider blessed those who have persevered. You have heard of Job’s perseverance and have seen what the Lord finally brought about. The Lord is full of compassion and mercy.

I think James shifts to the oppressed here, but the lesson is for us all. No matter what circumstance is trying our patience, we need to remember that the Lord’s coming is near. Firstly, I believe Jesus has us in his heart to the point that He feels (not just KNOWS, but FEELS) our suffering. Whether it’s physical, emotional, spiritual…doesn’t matter. Our High Priest has us in His heart and I truly believe that He feels for us. And because He is our great deliverer, I believe He will deliver from any suffering. I do not believe we always know in what form that deliverance will manifest itself (the skilled hands of a surgeon? a supernatural healing in answer to prayer? some other form of healing?), but my faith tells me that it WILL come. But because our patience is thin, our ability to cope frazzled, or maybe we think we just cannot bear another day of this, sometimes we turn away from looking for Him to show up strong in these times. Why do we do that when we have examples like Job to look to?

Above all, my brothers, do not swear—not by heaven or by earth or by anything else. Let your “Yes” be yes, and your “No,” no, or you will be condemned.

This is one of those truths that we should have tattooed to our foreheads. It’s simple. It’s profound. And it’s clear.

The Prayer of Faith

Is any one of you in trouble? He should pray. Is anyone happy? Let him sing songs of praise. Is any one of you sick? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise him up. If he has sinned, he will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective.

Elijah was a man just like us. He prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the land for three and a half years. Again he prayed, and the heavens gave rain, and the earth produced its crops. My brothers, if one of you should wander from the truth and someone should bring him back, remember this: Whoever turns a sinner from the error of his way will save him from death and cover over a multitude of sins.

The answer to all of it–oppression, suffering, pain, frustration, sickness: Prayer. You want to know why the prayers of a righteous man are powerful and effective? Think on this–we can walk right up to the throne of grace BOLDLY. We can do this because Christ represents us to the Father as our High Priest. (I know, I’m big on that lately…I’ll share why soon). It’s through His position that our prayers are made effective. Wow. So then, explain to me how prayer can be anything BUT powerful and effective? Man. Even as I type that, I know the words for what I want to say are too weak. Still…there it is.

Shout out to my Recovery background: Principle 4 and Step 5 whose Biblical basis is James 5:16. I would be remiss if I did not remind you all that Step 5 calls upon us to admit to ourselves, to God and to someone we trust…the exact. nature. of our wrongs. A lot of times we have no trouble admitting to ourselves or to God, but it’s when you have to drag another human being along that we get all weak-kneed and weird about it. We dodge and cover and give only a vague idea of the nature of our wrongs. But just as the prayer offered in faith makes the sick well, confession offered between trusted brothers and sisters initiates healing. There’s so much I could say about how bringing my junk out into the light like that removed so much of it’s power. Removed so much of it’s control over me. I’m a big believer in living authentically and transparently, but I do not recommend unloading ALL your junk on just anyone. Unfortunately, there are circles of Christendom where that is just fodder for gossip and further oppression.(And in my opinion that is why we get so weird about admitting to another person our wrongs, it makes us so vulnerable at that moment.) Choose your trusted confessor wisely…look for and judge the fruit of that person’s walk with Christ. If it is not abundant, and if it is not sweet, then keep looking…

The first person I saw as I woke up from anesthesia was my lovely Mum. I think she may have said something about surgery being a success, that there was one “surprise” but nothing major and Doc said everything is A-ok. But by that point I’d found my pain-med button.

And over the next 24 hours, I developed text-ers thumb hitting that sucker. My addictive personality may be dormant, but she’s never really all that far away, I guess.

I regret to inform anyone I may have influenced that “Checking out of my life” was no where near as fun as I’d hoped. Hospital stay was easy and yes, a blurrr…but med-head doesn’t suit me and soon after my discharge I found myself irritated that I couldn’t form complete sentences. And, while hopped up on said pain-med cocktail, I found my family (those beautiful blessings!) highly irritating and loud. When did we turn into such a loud group? Geez Oh man, the volume level!!! They were beautiful blessings though…all doing their part to keep the home running smoothly (even if that meant loading and unloading the dishwasher INCORRECTLY).

And while I always suspected this to be true, this past weekend has given me definitive proof: Fourthborn gets all of her energy by sucking it out of the air we breathe. Before she left with her Gran-gran this weekend, she’d exhausted nearly all of the supply–I was especially vulnerable and collapsed before she even got out the door. She’s been out of the house all weekend and my lovely Older children have come to LIFE, let me tell ya. And while they are kind enough to take themselves to the bathroom and fetch their own snacks…they have babbled nearly non-stop with me. I love it, and even felt quite perky myself yesterday, if only for a while. If I fall flat on my face within minutes of Fourthborn’s return…we shall call it the Law of Energy Sucktitude or something like that.

If the blessings that are my family weren’t enough, I also am overflowing with love from my dear friends. Food, support, help…all coming at a remarkable and humbling rate. I feel like Sally Field “You like me, you really like me!” But in all seriousness…Hubby and the kids would’ve survived had no one shown up (they really ARE capable of taking care of themselves). So it’s not life or death or whatever. And I believe that my friends knew this but stepped up anyway. (At least one did so while dealing with her own medical issue.) And THAT is what touches me deeply.

But it’s time for me to get on with it, don’t you think? At least MENTALLY, I think I should be able to write, interact, email and what not. (For those who’ve received med-head emails this past week, I truly apologize) I may not be up to a week’s worth of laundry, but I am certainly up to paying the bills and an occasional moment of mental clarity. Right? With that in mind, here is my deep thought of the day:

Today is Memorial Day. Despite my distinct lack of patriotism (have I exposed this character flaw here yet?), I do think it’s very important to step away from what this holiday has become to thank those who lives were lost in service to this country. Or better yet, honor them then thank their families. How you do it is up to you…

God is big into memorializing, too. He wanted the nation of Israel to remember a lot of things and He instituted ways and means of remembering, from all sorts of acts of the Priesthood to stone altars, to feasts. As part of the New Covenant we celebrate the Lord’s Supper in remembrance of Him. So in addition to the Honor due our lost service men and women, why not celebrate your “spiritual memorial day?” Why not take time to thank and honor God for the many ways He’s shown Himself to you? Why not take a trip down memory lane and recall who you used to be versus who God has grown you to be?

It’s just a thought…

*This post is part of the Blogger Small Group reading the book of James. To read other participant posts, head over to Run’n Like a Vagabond. If you want to read my previous posts for the group, click here.

James 4

Submit Yourselves to God

What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You want something but don’t get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not have, because you do not ask God.

So we have desires that battle within, but we cannot obtain them. That word desire indicates desire for pleasures and is the Greek word Hedone which looks a lot like hedonistic. So we are talking about fleshly desires here, not something spiritual. Right? We cannot have them…in the original language this seems to be saying that we cannot hold them. We cannot keep them. We cannot possess them. In other words, even if we held them, they are fleeting and leave us. We lack the power to maintain that feeling of desire-met, though we kill and covet to experience them. We kill and covet for the desire to stay “met” when in fact it cannot.

This phrase “you do not have because you do not ask God” confuses me then. If I ask God to meet the desires of the flesh will He do that?

When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.

Well, then, the answer to my question is no. Not if we are asking for pleasure from improper motives. Let’s simplify this a bit. If I were to ask God to have my desire for rest met, I believe He would honor that request. He knows it is a desire that I can lose myself in and become super-duper lazy…but He also knows the condition of my heart and how close to burnout I am at any given moment. Is that rest maintained? No…I do not have the power to keep rest in me. But God has the power to ordain periods of rest into my life. If I’m just being lazy, or avoiding things I don’t want to deal with (work, anyone?) then No. I do not believe God would honor a request for rest in that instance.

Another example: intimacy. Think on this, God desires to infuse my relationship with my husband with intimacy. But our “wants” might wander off the playground of our marriage at times. If we are wanting outside the confines of our vows…then we will continue to be unfulfilled (even if we met those desires for even a moment). So, bottom line: Check your motives. Ask for what falls into the guidelines of pure, proper etc…and I believe we will have what we ask.

You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. Or do you think Scripture says without reason that the spirit he caused to live in us envies intensely? But he gives us more grace. That is why Scripture says: “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.”

I think my problems understanding this passage come from thinking of the world as the people of the world. And this would then conflict with “God so loved the world…”

But I think what James is getting at is loving the world system…the way the world runs, the defacto order of things. That is in direct conflict with what God desires to happen in this world because this world is under a different ruler. God is jealous for us…He wants our undivided attention. His Spirit inside of us desires communion with Him…and love of the worldly systems breaks that communion, doesn’t it? If we desire power, motivated by greed, then we are definitely loving the world and contrary to what God desires.

So we humble ourselves and God graces us. He graces us for the walk that is contrary to what the worldly ways are. He graces us to give to the needy, to love the unlovable. He graces us to walk out His plan…loving the people of the world without becoming a member of the worldly system.

Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.

James wants us to live a purified life. Odd that he tells us to grieve, mourn and wail. That our laughter should change to mourning and our joy to gloom. I do grieve the life I had, I mourn the trouble I’ve caused to myself and my loved ones. But my mourning changes to laughter when I think of what Christ did for me. I’m not the “beating my breast” type, anymore. I acknowledge that I, more than anyone I know, should be beating my breast for the grief I caused, but God has done so much for me that I cannot be gloomy about it any longer.

Brothers, do not slander one another. Anyone who speaks against his brother or judges him speaks against the law and judges it. When you judge the law, you are not keeping it, but sitting in judgment on it. There is only one Lawgiver and Judge, the one who is able to save and destroy. But you—who are you to judge your neighbor?

Stop talking bad about your neighbor. Everyone is your neighbor. Enough said.

Boasting About Tomorrow

Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast and brag. All such boasting is evil. Anyone, then, who knows the good he ought to do and doesn’t do it, sins.

If the Lord wills it, I will continue to write. If the Lord wills, I will continue to teach. If the Lord wills, and I can stay focused on His will, I will have the good that I ought to do clearly in mind and I will be able to do it. I do not know what will happen tomorrow. But I do know that I have been given today to do as the Lord wills.

If you are reading this on Tuesday at roughly 10 am that means a couple of things:

First, the finely skilled hands of my surgeon are finished doing their thing and all offending organs have been successfully removed from my system.

Secondly, WordPress has fixed that irritating scheduling bug.

Thirdly, I am officially “checked out” of my life for a while. And by checked out I mean that I plan on requesting so much pain medication that I’m likely to say stupid things-if I can get them out at all. Hysterically irreverent things. Likely, with all the random thoughts littering my mind, none of it will make sense, but I will find them hysterical at least and who needs the entertainment the most? ME, that’s who.

And I plan to sleep. I don’t even care if I eat, but sleep will be mandatory and drug-induced.

The hospital stay, I hope, will be a blurrrrrrrrrrrrrrr (slurring that on purpose). I do not want to remember much about the removal of my innards. The anxiety has hit (although I know that I know that I will be fine. Still. They are removing ORGANS. Organs God put in there! Oh My!). I have said this to everyone I know: it’s a good thing anesthesia is not available on the street, (or IS IT?!??) because I’m looking forward to being blissfully unaware a LITTLE TOO MUCH.

I have a partial entry done for the Blogger Small Group, but I’m behind in getting that polished so I thought I’d just bow out for this week. I’ll double or triple post whenever I wake up from this stuff.

In the meantime, and because I am such a geek, I want to align this experience with what we like to refer to as a full power down where I work.

• Nothing left in memory
• No background CPU usage
• Nothing hanging around the anti-virus cages.
• Removing outdated and blown up parts
• If they want to blow out the dust while they are in there, all the better.

I’m trusting that they aren’t (did you hear that DAK…they ARE NOT) going to install something horrifyingly inefficient like VISTA. I’m trusting that this reboot, this full power down, will clear alot of the litter blowing about and allow the channels to run more efficiently.

I may even feel a bit more creative when it’s all said and done. And I know, for the first time in a very long time I will be able to have about a week’s full of Sabbath rest. But does that really count if I have to pop pain killers in order to get it? Probably not.

Prayers for family (particularly my loving and longsuffering husband) are more than accepted and appreciated.
Love and Peace.