Author: Stephanie Murillo

     Who is the wisest person you know? Scripture tells us that wise people think and act in ways that make life work.  They build others up and have a deep, reverential respect for the Lord.  Wise people live out the principle that obedience to His design is what re-creates what was lost when Adam and Eve made that foolish choice in the garden. Might you be a wise person? 

     One of the wisest ladies I knew, lovingly etched the wisdom she had learned from God into my hungry little nine-year-old soul.  Her name was Belle Standridge and her words of wisdom still sing a beautiful song in my life to this day.  Belle was kind enough to offer her big, burly upright piano to me for practice since my family had no instrument at the time.  She would patiently listen to me mangle scales and produce torturous versions of the notes written in my piano books, promising me a special time with her if I endured that endless half-hour of drudgery.  After I had done my duty to my piano teacher, I stayed around to meet, in Belle, my own version of “Lady Wisdom” (Proverbs 1:20-33). Belle had been burned in a kerosene fire as a child and received none of the care that would have reduced the massive keloid scars that contracted her arms and hands into a sort of basket.  How she made such glorious music at her piano with those deformities was absolutely miraculous.  She would twirl her piano stool, sit on it, put me on her lap, and invite me to rest my arms on hers as she played one Gospel hymn after another.  I rode those arms, feeling the nuance of every lick she laid down on those keys, absorbing her technique right through my little-girl muscles.  Not only did she teach me to play in-between and around the notes, she wisely taught me about Jesus through that music.

      When Belle explained how the lyrics of those old hymns connected to Scripture and God’s love for me, God was the One speaking. God was holding me as I sat nestled in the embrace of her scarred arms. God was loving me as I leaned against Belle’s 70-something heartbeat and heard words like “grace,” “forgiveness,” and “love” as she sang.  God’s wisdom came through Belle as she shared God’s plan of salvation while teaching me to play “Amazing Grace” and “Love Lifted Me.”  I remember her saying, “Stephanie, play the words, not the notes.  Play your heart and God’s heart.  Let this piano be your altar and your sanctuary.  Let your hands be instruments of praise.  Someday you will offer your musical gifts in church, so don’t forget to pray before you play.”

    As I matured, Belle shared with me how she became so wise.  She immersed herself in God’s Word, often chewing on a thought from Proverbs like a dog works a delicious bone.  As a result, that precious woman lived each day to please her King of Kings, and to love the people God gave her.  I was blessed to be a recipient of the treasures of wisdom God gave her. 

     All of us can become more insightful if we value wisdom as much as King Solomon (1Kings 3:9-12).  Like Solomon, we are to ask God for His wisdom, which is “pure, peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere” (James 3:17).  Put some skin on this incredible wisdom and we discover Jesus as “the wisdom from God” for us (I Corinthians 1:40).  All the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in Jesus (Colossians 2:3).  If we accept this, to seek wisdom is to seek Jesus Himself. 

     Belle personified the “Lady Wisdom” we meet in Proverbs 1-9, gently introducing me to the principle that walking in wisdom would keep me out of all sorts of traps and snares (James 3:13-18). I am slowly learning that true wisdom is found in obedience to God’s loving design found in His Word (Hebrews 13:5).  I have also learned my intellect is woefully inadequate to meet the demands of reality, so I must ask God for His Wisdom (James 1:5). At present, I am re-visiting Proverbs to chew on some the same “bones” that nourished my beloved Belle and made her “Lady Wisdom” to me.  

     The next time you dip into the book of Proverbs, take time to read the first nine chapters and get acquainted with the voice of “Lady Wisdom.”  Then you will be ready to read the wisdom of the elders in chapters 10-29.  How amazing that in the book of Proverbs we can see God supercharging human insight with His vast wisdom!  He certainly supercharged Belle.  Might He supercharge you?

Prayer:

Jesus, thank You for being willing to share the treasures of Your mind and heart with me.  Please supercharge my insight, so that my actions reflect the love You brought into the world.  Help me be wise enough to obey You and build others up. Help me stay within Your guardrails so that I also can be a type of “Lady Wisdom” to others.  Amen.

“In her deep anguish, Hannah prayed to the LORD, weeping bitterly.” ~ 1 Samuel 1:10

 “My soul is in deep anguish. How long, LORD, how long?” ~ Psalm 6:3

“During the days of Jesus’ life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with fervent cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission.” ~Hebrews 5:7

     What are you longing for right now?  What strong yearnings for what is out of your reach might you be experiencing on this part of your journey?  What is to be done with these aches that sweep over us from often unexpected directions?

     Our longings can open deep spaces within us to the hesed, the incredible mercy of God if, and this is a big if, we learn what to do with them.

Lean In  

     The first step is a big one!  Lean into that longing. Despite the initial pain, admit that your yearning is there. Denying that longing can tie you in knots!  Embrace the idea that you and everyone else were wired for the Garden, but here “east of Eden,” we are feeling the loss of God’s perfect ideal. We were not created to know, lack, or live in conflict with those around us.  We were not created for broken promises and shattered dreams.   We were not created for chaos, shame, and barren lives.  But we were created to enjoy a perfect sense of identity in Christ as we stay within God’s loving, fruit-bearing, bringing-order-out-of-chaos design for us. We were made for more than mere survival, so what do we do with that yawning space between real and ideal?  Hope rises in us when we face those aches because we can invite God to inhabit the gap between what is and what we sense ought to be.  With God in our gap, we can experience longings with hope and without bitterness and shame.  We can cry out our lament without embarrassment, to Jesus, the Man of Sorrows, who understands our broken dreams.  We will be received with His hesed, this mind-blowing ability to love even His enemies, give unexpected favor to the undeserving, and surprising grace to the ungrateful.

Love those Longings

     The next step is to learn to love our longings because those yearnings can draw us to God and a deeper understanding of His original intent for us.  With time, prayer, and good counseling, we can discover where our longings for the Garden became obsessions and addictions.  When we own and appreciate our longings, offer them to a faithful, good God and risk vulnerability with safe others, we take the first steps out of the shadows and into God’s light. Our longings can open our ears to God’s whisper and open our hearts to His comfort and healing.

      The Bible is a treasure-house of stories in which people like Hannah and David leaned into their longings. Instead of burying their heartaches, they gave voice to them in prayers and poems.  You and I can do the same.  We can face the fact that none of us get a pass from the reality that life hurts and unmet yearnings ache. But we can bring our longings to God, crying out our protest that life is not as it should be.  Like Jeremiah, we must lament until we are spent, for that is the moment we will finally make room for God’s hesed. 

Praise     

     The good news is that God lives with us in our raw reality and He does not abandon us out here in the tumbleweeds. Despite not having what ought to be, Jeremiah came to a place of praise when he declared, “Because of the Lord’s great hesed we are not consumed” (Lamentations 3:22).  God’s incredible compassion can help us overflow with the kind of bruised praise that only comes from lament.  Don’t be afraid to lean into your longings and lament, for this act of worship can lead you to praise no longer hindered and tainted by self. This praise-after-lament rises from our broken places making room for a new reality: our Immanuel (God with us) who sees our tears, hears our hearts, and enters into our suffering with us. 

Jesus is still saying, “I will not leave you as orphans.  I will come to you” (John 14:18). 

Your Turn: What do you need to lament?  How willing are you to lament until spent, trusting God to meet you where you are? 

Song for Inspiration:

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”
[Matthew 11:28]

     What do you think Jesus means when He says He will give us rest?  I was surprised recently to read that the Hebrew word for rest is nûaḥ or noach.  Does this name sound familiar?  Noah, anyone?  The idea of rest in the Bible can include the following wonderfully calming phrases: to settle down in a place and remain, to repose, to be quiet, to receive comfort, to be calmed, and to be allowed to let down, and to be granted rest. 

     God has been giving rest from the beginning of creation. A little bit of digging into a concordance can help us unpack the earliest origins of the word, “rest” or “noach.”  Genesis 3 tells us that the ideal rest for Adam and Eve was to remain where God had planted them in order to receive His wisdom as they matured. God offered them the unforced rhythms of working the garden, naming the animals, and partnering with Him to rule over His creation as they grew into the responsibilities God wanted them to assume.  What a wonderful plan!  God did the heavy lifting of defining good and evil, making the rules that ensured the goodness and beautiful working of life, while the man and woman had only to stay or rest within the spacious places of the garden and revel in the life God made for them.  But the moment Adam and Eve failed their test-after-rest, by defining good and evil for themselves, “rest” morphed into “stress.”  Those extra hissing “s’s” are courtesy of a crafty serpent who did not want to see the full potential of this beautifully cultivated place ripen or see Adam and Eve mature into magnificent bearers of God’s image.  Like these two gardeners, we face our own test of loyalty to our Creator.  We can easily be seduced into trying to make our own rules for life, defining good and evil for ourselves, and leaving God out of our personal equation.  Playing God like this is exhausting, leaving us no energy for bringing His good love into this wilderness place.

     The kind of rest God gives can be seen in the lives of Noah, David, Solomon, and Joshua, to name a few.  Each of these men were given a time of rest because they needed to repair and prepare for the test that lay ahead.  Noah rested in the ark before assuming the role of a new type of Adam in a new creation after the flood. David was given rest from His enemies so that he had time to think about building God a beautiful house.  Solomon was given rest before he took on the enormous task of raising up the Temple.  Joshua led the Israelites to a place of rest in the promised land before they faced the major battles that lay ahead.

    Are you tired? Weary?  Burned out?  Your Abba is offering you rest in His embrace.  In that space, He wants to remind you that He has already completed His plan to rescue you and someday bring you back to Eden.  You don’t need something novel; simply go back to His original design and let His life flow through you.  In His embrace, we can learn to rest as our definition of truth changes from a doctrine we chase to the simple reality of being with Jesus (Ephesians 4:21).  As you rest your head against God’s heartbeat of love for you, listen for His whisper.  He is reminding you that your permanent address is heaven, so you don’t have to dwell in your feelings, strivings, failures, misgivings, and unfulfilled hopes.  Abide in Him, for He has already secured your life for you and you can rest your faith there.  Rest and regroup with Jesus, for life’s tests will keep coming.  Just stop, breathe, and receive all that He has for you, for God knows what lies ahead and wants to prepare you to rise to the challenge.  Rest in His embrace; ask God for a discerning heart; then get up, go out, and take the overflowing love-gifts of your time with Him to others.

A Restful App: https://www.pauseapp.com/

Restful Verses:
Psalm 62:1
Psalm 103:1-6
Psalm 112:7
1 Kings 8:47-50
1 Kings 3:9
Deuteronomy 30

They will be called oaks of righteousness,
a planting of the LORD for the display of His splendor.
[Isa 61:3b NIV]

The Bible uses the most beautiful Eden imagery to describe growing in Christ. Oak trees are incredibly evocative because these massive organisms grow from such humble, tiny acorns. Before they can push up that first tender sapling, acorns must first send down a robust taproot deep into the soil in order to absorb the rich nutrients below. The Apostle Paul must have been aware of this fact when he reminded us that we are to be “rooted and established” in the fertile soil of God’s love for us (Ephesians 3:17). What a glorious image! However, not everyone is on the same page about our growth to be more and more like Jesus is to proceed.

Grace, Truth, and Time

     John Cloud and Henry Townsend write in their book, How People Grow, thatGod’s primary nutrients for us as growers are grace, truth, and time. These three elements, processed in the relationship, must all be present to make healthy growth possible. We need to root down into the grace of God’s love before we can even begin to face the hard truth of what needs to change, and we need time to train with others in order to learn God’s healthy strategies for growing into “oaks of righteousness.” 

Four Common Models for Growth

    Cloud and Townsend write about four incomplete models for growth that most of us encounter. Each one has essential elements of truth, but none has all three aspects of grace, truth, and time.

• The Sin Model: God is good; you are bad; stop it. This model does not include the Holy Spirit as a grace-filled source for change and does not include the time needed to process sin’s challenges and consequences with safe, godly people.
• The Truth Model: Just learn more Scriptures and doctrine, and somehow, your behavior will mysteriously change. This model points to the need for taking in God’s word and infers the time needed for change, but the support of others and God’s grace to sustain a grower are not mentioned.
• The Experience Model: Just get the pain of your life out, and you will have the power to heal and change. We do have to find out what is below our emotional water line and confess this truth, but this model does not mention supportive others, God’s grace, and time for unlearning and re-learning. 
• The Supernatural Model: God can instantly heal you and deliver you. Passively depend on the Holy Spirit to make change happen. Just get out of the way so Jesus can reproduce His life in you. God does deliver instantly, but most often, He chooses to develop us over a lifetime. This model contains God’s grace but does not make room for asking and receiving forgiveness, then digging in and training with safe others to do the gritty work that change requires.

     Which model has been the primary driver of growth in your life? Are all three nutrients of grace, truth, and time a part of your journey to be more like Jesus?

God’s Growth Model

     Our Abba, our Daddy-God, is a fantastic gardener, tending us carefully, knowing what fragile little shoots we are. His growth plan contains the grace, truth, and time we need in order to root down into His love and grow into “oaks of righteousness.”  Does the following plan feel doable to you?

• Tell God the truth about your mess.
• Ask Jesus to come to live in your heart.
  • Receive God’s forgiveness, cleansing, and acceptance.
  • Accept God’s offer of a “do-over.”
• Train with His Holy Spirit as your coach by:
  • Studying God’s Word and asking the Holy Spirit to help you understand what God is saying to you about your true identity in Christ and your true role in life.
  • Talking to God constantly about everything.
  • Asking for help to bond to healthy others yet be yourself and accept the mixture of good and bad in yourself and others during the growth process.
• Process your journey with others to receive:
  • Reality checks.
  • Love and acceptance.
  • Support and counseling.

     God wants us to grow! The people around us need all the grace and truth-wrapped-in-love we can give them. We can indeed grow into mighty oaks that pass on Jesus’ ability to provide the right response, at the right time, and for the right reason, if we receive the grace, truth, and time to grow, He is offering us. What do you say, little acorn? Are you ready to grow God’s way?

“⁶ I remembered my songs in the night. My heart meditated and my spirit asked: ⁷ ‘Will the Lord reject forever? Will he never show his favor again? ⁸ Has his unfailing love vanished forever? Has his promise failed for all time? ⁹ Has God forgotten to be merciful? Has he in anger withheld his compassion?’ ¹⁰ Then I thought, ‘To this, I will appeal: the years when the Most High stretched out his right hand. ¹¹ I will remember the deeds of the LORD; yes, I will remember your miracles of long ago.'” [Psalm 77:6-11 NIV]

  Do you know the difference between a lament and a complaint?  A complaint emerges out of a victim mindset, often talking about God being unkind or unfair. There is no forward movement with a complaint.  Instead, the one groaning pitches a tent in a swamp of pain, dissatisfaction, or resentment, waiting for someone to come along and fix the situation. Our complaints often emerge from pride, demanding that we escape any suffering.  A lament, however, honestly and humbly expresses grief, suffering, or sadness directly to God, asking Him for comfort and His energy to move forward. When we lament, we cry out with our eyes fixed on Jesus, telling Him the truth of our situation with the expectation that He will help us move from chaos to confidence.  Why this confidence?  God has promised to work all things for good, even when we don’t like our circumstances, would not have chosen them, and are lamenting them.  Jesus also promised to return and do away with all this suffering, a hope that can steady our trembling knees and keep us marching on.

     One of the best strategies to keep us moving forward is to remember what God has already done.  When we look in our rearview mirrors to remember the times God has moved mountains or even pebbles in our lives, we re-fuel our faith.  Why is this?  Since God is unchanging in His love for us, and since His love never fails us, we trust that He loves us now, even if seeing His footprint in our current struggle is so difficult. 

     Psalm 77 is a wonderful template for going back to move forward.  Asaph’s song of remembrance begins with an expectant cry that God is listening (v.1-3). then concludes with God’s rescue (v.19:20).  Asaph moved from tragedy to triumph by first voicing his lament by asking five common questions that we are often afraid to voice when God doesn’t appear to answer prayer (v. 7-9).  Then he chooses to remember God’s deeds (v.10-12). After looking in the rearview mirror, He is able to tell himself that God is still the Great Redeemer (v.13-15). He then sings of God’s power at Sinai and the Red Sea (v. 16-18).  Asaph moves from a humble cry to conclude that God often leads us to safety, but that way may have to be made through a great sea, where God’s footprints are not visible (v. 19).

     There is great power in remembering what God has already done.  Taking time to list the way God has moved in your life is one way to look back in order to move forward. Reviewing that list often and adding to it can add some muscle to your faith, especially when God’s footprints are invisible and chaos is swirling.  We can all put on our lists that Jesus died for us and has redeemed us, already proving His love for us (Romans 5:8). So, remember and keep trusting that God’s love for you is unfailing and He is able to work all this for your good.

Verse for the rear-view mirror:

Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to it, ‘This is what the Sovereign LORD says: Come, breath, from the four winds and breathe into these slain, that they may live’ “[Eze 37:9 NIV].

 Then the LORD God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being [Gen 2:7 NIV].

     One of the biggest challenges in Christianity is understanding the difference between God’s job and our job.  John Cloud and Henry Townsend, in their book, How People Grow, sum up God’s job and our job the following way:

When we try to push God off His throne so that we can take a shot at creating and being the source of life, at controlling the world, judging everyone, and being the chief rule-maker, no wonder we flame out in utter exhaustion! We are not hard-wired for that amount of responsibility and stress. When we disconnect from God as the Source of Life, we are like some allergic-to-dependence, on-the-edge-of-death ICU patient, who yanks out all her tubes, only to discover she has unhooked herself from what supports her very existence.  Hurry sickness can cause some of us to be constantly on the move, no slowing, much less stopping, to catch our spiritual breath.  But God designed our entire being to function with His made-just-for-us, unforced rhythms of resting, then acting; of praying, then doing; and of receiving, then giving.

     Ezekiel 37 gives us a wonderful visual of dry bones receiving God’s CPR.  In verse 3, when Ezekiel in a vision, sees a large mass of desiccated bones littering the valley floor, God asks him, “Son of man, can these bones live?” Ezekiel is smart enough to answer, “Sovereign LORD, You alone know.” Then God tells the prophet to tell the dry bones to pay attention to His Word, for He is going to make breath come into them and bring them to life.  God calls the breath from the four winds and the dry bones are resurrected into a vast army.  Only God, “who gives breath to all living things” could speak life into those old bones.   

[Dan 10:17 NIV] 17 How can I, your servant, talk with you, my lord? My strength is gone and I can hardly breathe.”

[Num 16:22 NIV] 22 But Moses and Aaron fell face down and cried out, “O God, the God who gives breath to all living things, will you be angry with the entire assembly when only one man sins?”

[Job 12:10 NIV] 10 In his hand is the life of every creature and the breath of all mankind.

[Psa 150:6 NIV] 6 Let everything that has breath praise the LORD. Praise the LORD.

[Exo 14:14 NIV] 14 The LORD will fight for you; you need only to be still.”

[Psa 37:7 NIV] 7 Be still before the LORD and wait patiently for him; do not fret when people succeed in their ways when they carry out their wicked schemes.

[Psa 46:10 NIV] 10 He says, “Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.”

[Zec 2:13 NIV] 13 Be still before the LORD, all mankind, because he has roused himself from his holy dwelling.”

LORD JESUS, MAKE MY HEART SIT DOWN!

Patient Trust
A prayer by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. (1881-1955)

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.

We are quite naturally impatient in everything
To reach the end without delay should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way
To something unknown,
Something new.

And yet it is the law of all progress
That it is made by passing through
Some stages of instability –
And that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you;
Your ideas mature gradually –
Let them grow
Let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
As though you could be today at what time(that is to say, grace and circumstances
Acting on your own goodwill)
Will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
Gradually forming within you, will be.
Give our Lord the benefit of believing
That his hand is leading you,
And accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
In suspense, and incomplete.

Amen

Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law [Romans 13:8 NIV].

         All of us are in debt! According to the Federal Reserve, the average credit-card debt of American households is $6,569. According to Bankrate, when mortgages, student debt, car loans, credit card debt, and other loans are calculated, as of September 2021, “consumer debt is at $14.96 trillion, with the average American debt among consumers at $92,727.”  As scary as this sounds, we have an even more terrifying mountain of debt: sin-debt.

     Nobody sins for free. When we do not love the way Jesus loves, our sin-debt ticks upward, moment by moment, day by day, month after month, until the years pass by, and finally, our consciences stagger under a life-threatening, soul-crushing weight of unpaid bills. Scary!

   Why is sin so expensive? One of the costs of sin is that it offends God. God is our Father. He is deeply invested in us and cares about how we live. David recognized this. After committing adultery, he cried out, “Against You, You only, have I sinned and done what is evil in Your sight” (Psalm 51:4). 

    The penalty for non-payment is not the poorhouse. We don’t get off that easily. Instead, we are condemned to death (Romans 6:23). Without someone stepping up to pay what we owe, we are “dead men walking,” only subsisting on death row until our sentence is carried out (Romans 7:24). Our sin and mess also grieve the Holy Spirit, who is working so hard to save us from the pollution of our bodies and the destruction of our relationships (Ephesians 4:30).

To make matters worse, sin cripples our faith, and the guilt we feel convinces us that God is no longer for us. In addition, sin severely wounds our conscience, making us spiritually dull and less sensitive to the cue-cards of the Holy Spirit. And finally, unresolved, unconfessed sin makes us unaware of God’s grace for a time. Just ask Jonah!

     There is hope, however! Jesus paid our debt with His life. We have been taken from death row and released into the new life Jesus purchased for us. What should be our response to this mind-blowing, utterly undeserved gift of mercy and grace? We can begin by admitting the truth of our mess, asking for forgiveness and for help to be more and more like Jesus. Then we need to ask for help to learn to live in a state of constant gratitude. What Jesus did for us is enormous! Got praise?

     Since we cannot pay God back, we can pay His love forward, which is now our “continuing debt” (Romans 13:8). You and I are neck-deep in an ocean of love and grace, so perhaps we can dip a cup into it and extend some mercy, forgiveness, and love to others. What is the evidence we are off death row? John writes, “We know that we have passed from death to life because we love each other. Anyone who does not love remains in death” (1 John 3:14). When our love for others bubbles up out of a deep well of gratitude for God’s undeserved mercy, we begin to pay back the unpayable.

Prayer:

    Oh, Father! What a precious gift of life and love you have given me! Remind me that I do not deserve this and can never pay You back. Teach me to live a life defined by gratitude, and from that gratitude and the ocean of Your grace, to give forgiveness, mercy, and love to others. Amen.

To fill your cup:

Luke 15:21

Proverbs 3:27

1 Timothy 1:5

James 2:8