Trials Archives - Page 4 of 5 - call me pasturescott

The Work of the Pit

“They lowered Jeremiah by ropes into the cistern; it had no water in it, only mud, and Jeremiah sank down into the mud.”
(Jeremiah 38:6, NIV)

“The Lord corrects the people He loves and disciplines those He calls His own.”
(Hebrews 12:6, CEV)

“But God corrects us for our own good, because He wants us to be holy, as He is.”
(Hebrews 12:10b, CEV)

“It is never fun to be corrected. In fact, at the time it is always painful…”
(Hebrews 12:11a, CEV)

“…but later it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.”
(Hebrews 12:11b, ESV)

“It hasn’t been much fun, but the work that it has done in my life has made it worth the hurt.”
–from The Fire, by Deb (Jackson) Searles

“Trials are not an elective in the Christian life, they are a required course. Patience is accepting a difficult situation without giving God a deadline.”
(C.S. Lewis)

I mean, what kind of God…?

Really? When I’m already in a valley?

This pit? Are you kidding me?

Talk about insult to injury.

I repeat: what kind of God responds to the helpless cry of a person already at the end of their rope by saying “let go” only to drop them into a deeper well?

But for the grace of God, that could’ve been my attitude.

But on today, of all days, there’s something I want to say. I discovered something a few months ago. A refresher course, if you will. I learned that while I do not like the pit, I am loyally in love with the work of the pit.

As it happens, today is Saturday.

A year ago this very day, the sky was overcast with a dull, newspaper gray.

Today is bright, sunny and rife with speechless beauty.

Last year I was the sickest I have ever been in my life.

Today I am whole, healthy and spectacularly alive. Soli deo gloria!

Last year, on this day, I was in a spiritual valley. As I recorded in my journal back then, “Bring peace, Lord. I am blessed you are there, Lord, to listen to and succor me in this dark valley. I confess I am helpless without You. Without You, I am dead. You are Life. Power. Supply. Resurrection. Peace. Everything.”

(All the things I would need Him to be, in short order.)

But that was then; this is now. Today, a year later, I stand astride a mountain peak, breathing in celestial air, resurrection life, keeping the pipes hot with songs of deliverance. I’m worshipping to the song I listened to a year ago–before I fell past a valley and into a pit.

I know I’m loved
I know I’m wanted
(I don’t want to insult the cross by not believing in Your Love)
I want to stare at the Face of Jesus
Look in His Eyes once more
Worship Him with all of my heart
For His Love is pounding on my door!

Then it was an assumption, today it is proof of life. Back then it was a truth, but now it’s THE Truth I have forever.

Once upon a time it was a doctrine I would die for. Now it is a blessing I live for.

What lesson have I discovered down there? It’s pretty cool. And I give it to you for free: The work of the pit has made it possible to experience another realm of glory, a new vista that amazes; it’s like I’ve gone from analog to digital, from standard definition to HD.

And getting more HD all the time.

But that’ll probably take some more pits. Or valleys. Or both.

Sorry, George Takei. Quattron may be the television we all just have to have, but my “oh my!” trumps yours, as good as yours is.

Eye has not seen…

Yes, that’s true.

But…

“these things God has revealed to us through His Spirit”
(1 Cor. 2:10)

If we’re teachable.

If we have ears to hear.

What have you learned in your pit?

Seven Ways To Praise Him

Flecks of snow danced on the early morning sky, soon giving way to brief showers of the white stuff. The crystalline ballet was gloriously unusual for Atlanta and even more so in early February. My wife and I sat quietly in our van, parked in a hospital parking garage. I was due inside at five a.m. but couldn’t make myself shut off the engine. The very act of moving toward the door was in itself an act of betrayal to myself.

So I stole some moments, delaying the inevitable, watching the playful antics of the tiny white visitors through a defrosted window. Sandy sat very still beside me, and I know she was silently bracing herself for the long weeks ahead in which she would have to do the juggling act of all time: pulling double duty of an already excessively demanding lifestyle. I, on the other hand, was facing bed duty. For twelve weeks. Bless my heart, I wasn’t thinking of the circus act Sandy would be forced to pull off. I was sinking ever deeper, wrapped in my own trial of dual surgeries, requiring a potentially three-month stay in the hospital I was now looking at.

Sandy touched my hand reassuringly but said not a word. That tender act was all it took to release a welling of tears to my eyes. A single tear escaped from the forming pool and traced a line down my cheek. In my heart I was crying, “Lord, is there no other way?” The leaden sky was silent. No. This was my journey—and my wife’s—and since there was no way around it, I collected myself, sighed deeply and shut off the engine. It was time. Together we headed toward the garage elevator that would take me to my home away from home and church for the next dozen weeks. Continue reading Seven Ways To Praise Him

Walking In Peace (When Your Life Is In Pieces)

“I am like a broken vessel.”
Psalm 31:12

“But as for me, I trust in You…”
v14

Hold fast
Help is on the way
Hold fast
He’s come to save the day
What I’ve learned in my life
One thing stronger than my strife
Is His grasp
So hold fast
–Mercy Me, Hold Fast

Someone I know is falling apart at the seams. I have been watching them make all the wrong choices for some time and now I see them paying all the retail prices on their purchases. On a recent day my heart hurt watching them get pummeled by life. In a ten hour span of time, this poor soul could barely come through one crisis without getting sideswiped by another and their already “very bad day” culminated with the most dreaded phone call they had ever had to answer. I wince for them even now as I recall watching the emotional bloodbath they were dragged through. It was pathetically painful to watch. R-rated, even.

I desperately want to reach in and rescue them but that is a pipe dream. Could they have come through the worst of it? Possibly. Maybe. Ummmm, no. Not by a long shot. There is still a Valdez-sized clean-up ahead. A gargantuan slick on the ocean. And pieces and shards of life scattered everywhere, much like flotsam after a wreckage at sea.

(God, show them a hope. Gather up the pieces of the mess they have made and put them together again. God, get the glory. Take them to the place of Grace where peace rules and heaven is graspable.)

I wish they could have been with me tonight as I prayed with a man whose body is covered–every inch of it–with an auto-immune disease only one in a half million suffer with. There is no treatment. No cure. It must run its course, sometimes taking as long as four years. It is painful. It burns. It is horrific. I went to pray for this giant of a man of God but, marvel of marvels, he prayed for me! Tears ran down his face and swollen arms were lifted to the heavens as he thanked God for his valley! “I know Your purpose in this,” he cried out to the Lord in triumph. “You reign in me! I am Yours!” he shouted to the ceiling tiles. The man laughed in joyful surrender. Laughed!

He is a man who is walking in peace.

I wish my loved one could stand in the same faith of a woman I know who is in the hospital tonight. She and her husband were recently faced with the most difficult decision of their lives: should he stay home and be by her bedside or return to the mission field? What would you do? As in everything in their lives, they took it to the Lord. With reckless abandon, her husband is en route to their field in a hostile country where countless millions need Jesus. Did they choose ministry over marriage? Heavens no! They chose God over ALL things…

I have no doubt that her hospital room is a sanctuary of heavenly peace tonight. I just betcha that that plane ride her husband is taking, though filled with second-guessing and painful separation, is met with a grace worth the risk.

I wish, oh how I wish, this soul could have listened in on a phone conversation I had with a lady just yesterday. It was her sad misfortune to send her son away to a home for troubled sons for a full year. Next month she and her husband will be able to visit him for the first time in six months. She told me that it has only been recently that she can say his name in her home without breaking down. Now she is carried by a grace that sweeps her to peace-filled places and she smiles knowing God is shaping her son and he is finding out for the first time who he is in Christ. His letters home are a diary of the power of God to transform. Predictably, even in the Body of Christ, some have questioned her move, even gone so far as to be angry and think she has thrown the poor child away. She listened for awhile and even agreed somewhat. Until, that is, the glassy calm seas of peace surrounded her and told her to have faith. He is the One who rules the storm. You haven’t thrown him away, My Child. You have given him to Me.

There is no safer Place.

Speaking of “Place,” David gave the secret of his oft-tormented existence. In the Hebrew Hymn Book, chapter 31 and verse 12, he says of himself that he is a “broken” man. The word he uses is also used of Adam in the book of Genesis when he is told to “tend” the garden. It means to break up the soil for planting. God’s minstrel is saying that the hoes and rakes and plows of life had ripped him to clods and bits and uncovered his earthiness.

What a sad predicament, and one to which we can all relate.

But (oh, don’t you just love the Biblical “buts”?), two verses later he lets us in on a little secret. He says that when he is in such a bind, he “trusts” in God. The word translated “trust” is an active verb and it pictures a place where David runs to when he is broken to bits, scattered hither and yon, like jetsam from a dashed sea vessel. He finds a tide that will carry him to a Harbor of Refuge where he can safely winter out the storm. Or in the field of battle when the bombs are bursting in air, he is stolen away into a citadel of protection. He tells us God is a Person who shows him a Place everytime and in any situation.

The couch where my friend suffers from the horrific skin disease has become David’s threshingfloor where God shows mercy and healing (2 Samuel 24:18). The porch where my sister in Christ waits for her son’s return is her Baal-perazim (1 Chronicles 14:11) where God “breaks through” against the enemy. And that courageous wife in the hospital tonight? She’s really in Ziklag where David “encouraged himself (literally, ‘latched onto’) in the Lord” (1 Samuel 30:6) despite great loss and popular opinion.

Take a page from David’s hymnbook. Run, don’t walk, to the Place God has prepared for you in your calamity. He is there. He is able. He will come through for you.

Sad to say, my friend right now is not ready to take the way of restoration. “I’ve gotten this far without God,” they glibly stated. “I can get myself out of this too.” That’s just their pain talking. I know them well and I know that in time they too will run to Jesus. And when they do, I can predict the outcome: He will gather them up, love on them, put them aright and set them free.

I know. I have a story too.