sometimes miracles take time

[7 minute read]

I forgot to include this music video as a benediction to my previous post so I’ll just sit down (!) and write a new post. <Smile> You may recall I referenced the passage in Hebrews that has been ministering to my soul these days, “As things stand right now, we aren’t seeing all things subjected to Christ’s reign, but we see Jesus…” (Heb 2:8,9, my paraphrase). This song has been getting a lot of background play as I wait on the Lord to (how shall I put it?) unburden me from specific burdens I carry daily.

Full disclosure: the biggest burden is me. The unfinished me. The Scott who requires a lot more fine-tuning. Sanctifying. Paul prayed for the Galatians that “Christ would be fully formed in them” (Gal 4:19) and I’ve been asking the Holy Spirit to do the same for myself. It’s been a stretching season, to say the least, but Christ has been an ever-present help through it all. The ironic thing is during this burdensome season I’m also seeing a crazy amount of answered prayer in many other areas.

The Father keeps reminding me of the scene by the seashore in John 21. Jesus tells Peter that he will have a rough but rewarding life of following him, but compels the disciple to trust and follow him anyway. The Master is certainly worthy of it.

Peter turns and considers John for a moment then asks Jesus, “What about John? Is he just going to traipse off to heaven on flowery beds of ease?” Who among us hasn’t fretted about our assignments once or twice?

Why don’t they ever seem to struggle?

Why does she always get her way?

Why does everything turn out fine for him?

Why do I always have to take the high road?

Why does John get all the love?

Why, why, why. There’s probably a reason “why” starts to sound like “why-ning.” (Lord, make me/us better.)

This morning Sandy remarked that our journey has often asked more of us than others’ journeys do of them…or so it feels. [Truth bomb: faith > feelings] We know in our hearts that God is for us, his ways are perfect, and the payoff in following Christ is worth living — and suffering — for.

we know in our hearts that God is for us, his ways are perfect, and the payoff in following Christ is worth living — and suffering — for.

Sometimes miracles take time. I just got off the phone with a very dear ministry friend, a faithful reader of this blog, who is in AFib and requires a pacemaker to control his heart function. He was told by more than a few that he would “feel like a new man” with his pacemaker, but, days later, he’s still not feeling it. He’s waiting for a miracle.

No one likes being told to wait. Waiting almost feels like delaying the inevitable the same way a streetwise child hears a parent say “We’ll see.”

In Practicing the Presence of God, Brother Lawrence tells of someone who “would go faster than grace” (she was impatient to become holy) and I hear that same caution in my life today. I’m so eager for God to get everything sorted out I’m not surrendering to his meantime mercy. While we’re waiting for our miracle, God is busy doing a thousand other things for us.

while we’re waiting for our miracle, God is busy doing a thousand other things for us.

God not only has the last word, he has the next-to-last word, too. And all the words that come before that. In a later psalm of David, he praised a God who knew every page of his life, start to finish. How wonderful! This means that the Almighty is just as engaged in every minute of our days (good and bad) as he is committed to our telos (finished product).

Miracles take time sometimes. And sometimes, if we’re being honest, they may never see the light of day — at least not in the way we hoped. There are rebels who adapt to the far country just fine and never come home. Some diseases aren’t cured. Marriages fall apart no matter how often we pray and fast and hope against hope they don’t.

I don’t remember where I heard this, or read it, but I’ll tell it as I remember it. Most of us know that Charles Spurgeon, for much of his life, suffered with deep, dark depression. Sadly, he lived with depression the rest of his life. He saw himself as a lonely lighthouse, beaming the light of the gospel out to the hopeless souls lost at sea, though he himself remained in darkness. Not the darkness of being lost, for he carried the gospel light within him, but the darkness of never being healed from the oppression that plagued him. Even still, he embraced his ministry with gladness, knowing countless others were rescued and set free.

I’ve often prayed to walk again, but I will keep trusting and living onward and upward; I’ve got thousands of other healing stories anyway. I happen to be in the middle of one right now.

Sometimes miracles take time, and sometimes they get unexpected upgrades. When I, a permanently disabled man, prayed for a wife, I had no idea how blessed my life would be. My idea of a miracle was to get married at all. God’s miracle was Sandy. Yahtzee!

sometimes miracles take time, and sometimes they get unexpected upgrades.

I’ve written about this before, but my lifelong dream was to see the Grand Canyon. It would take a miracle to get me there at all, what with all my health problems and near-death experiences. But God gave me my miracle…and upgraded it to the best road trip ever…with some of our dearest friends…witnessing the grandeur of the canyon after the most beautiful snowfall…a picturesque sunset…dozens of dazzling photographs…and a thousand-and-one other grace-happy moments to relish and treasure.

And all of us born again brothers and sisters. What upgrade did we get? We didn’t just get our sins forgiven; we got eternal life, the indwelling Holy Spirit, the mind of Christ, a new spiritual family, new mercies every morning, ongoing sanctification, answered prayers, hope in our suffering, power for living, grace for dying, a heavenly Father, a heavenly home…and (drum roll) Jesus.

If I may, I’d like to pray for us, knowing a post like this affects us all in varying degrees. Each of us carries the “yes, but not yet” reality like a counterweight to our fixed eternal hope. I’d like to ask God to avert our eyes from the circumstances of our day-to-day burdens to the Living Christ who has overcome.

Father of mercies, we confess that we are often so focused on our predicaments we miss the importance of waiting. We find ourselves in the waiting room once again and ask for grace to prove faithful in this uncomfortable season. All our fountains are in you, Jesus, and we eagerly wait in hope for your promised outcome. It will be glorious, we know, because you are an Artist and everything you do is perfect. May you receive all the glory from us and in us in this season and always. In the name of Jesus, we say Amen.

Selah, beloved.

Call Me Ephraim

Genesis 41:51-52

Joseph named his older son Manasseh, for he said, “God has made me forget all my troubles and everyone in my father’s family.” Joseph named his second son Ephraim, for he said, “God has made me fruitful in this land of my grief.”

First off, let’s recognize the great white whale in the room.

Life is unfairly hard.

{Agreed.}

Yet God is deliberately good and kind.

There’s a well-known story in the Written Word that goes like this: a younger son is lost in a far country and father dutifully waits for his return. At long last when the day of reunion comes, father falls on his long-lost son’s neck and weeps for joy after which a grand family party ensues.

You know the tune.

Or at least you think you do.

This particular plot is found in the Old Testament not the New. It’s about Joseph, who, by character and demeanor, is a far cry from that other young son who actually chose the far country.

Let’s briefly recap Joseph’s story in the light of that famous chestnut ‘bad things happen to good people’ as it easily applies here.

Young Joseph has a quality his sibling brothers do not share and their father recognizes it and dresses him in a special robe. The Hebrew doesn’t have to mean multi-colored, it can mean long-sleeved. At any rate, it was fit for a prince among tribesmen, and the brothers hated him for it; that, and those self-serving made-up dreams.

They concoct a scheme to kill him off, but Judah steps in and, ostensibly out of some measure of mercy for the lad, edits the storyline to look like a killing when, in actuality, they sell off their brother to a migratory tribe. The final nail involved dipping the blasted coat in animal blood and – Oscar-worthily – presenting it most forlornly to their inconsolable father.

Meanwhile, Joseph, after being sold yet again, lands on his feet by the sheer grace of God. He gets a gig managing the household of the head-dude of Pharaoh’s security detail!

Now, if I’m writing the story, I’m going to exact poetic justice right away. I’m going to have Joseph quickly rising through the ranks and becoming da man in Egypt. His brothers would be sorry, especially when Emperor Joe sent an insertion team into Canaan-land to extract his siblings and throw them at the foot of his throne of justice.

But that’s just me.

We know that God holds the pen, however, and He’s got some things to redeem out of Joseph before He can move on with His ultimate plan.

God doesn’t want Joseph to even toy with the ideas of retribution and payback. He can’t have His man gloating or dismissive. He needs him to be His savior even to the very ones who despised him!

That’s how God writes it.

Joseph’s very cush world gets upended when the boss’s wife cries “rape!” after her repeated (re: daily) attempts to seduce the teenage boy go unrequited, and he suddenly becomes the target of the adage hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

Hello hell-hole prison.

For thirteen long, dark, harrowing years.

Forsaken? Forgotten? For what?

▶️ The good son.

▶️ The trusted employee.

▶️ The innocent charge.

You’d think he’d emerge from prison poisoned by bitterness with bloodlustful payback on his mind. Or, at the very least, go to his grave with unyielding unforgiveness brewing his tempest in a teapot. And you’d guess wrong.

Case in point (and I’m skipping over a lot of really cool poetic justice here): Joseph, sentence miraculously commuted, settles into life, settles down with a beautiful bride, and starts a family. Life’s good.

He is given two sons, and the very naming of them speaks volumes of his understanding how life is supposed to work when trust trumps blame and compliance bests complaint.

Joseph insists his firstborn be called “folly forgotten” and his second, “fruitful hardship”. Imagine! James M. Boice points out the order had to be thus for

“no one can really be fruitful until the past is forgotten in the proper sense. If we are living in the past, whether that is the past of unconfessed sin, hurts, suffering, or even old blessings, we will never be completely fruitful in the present. We must let the past be the past, forgetting it, and go on with God.”

It’s the name of the second-born (Ephraim) I’d like to comment on because it’s so my own story.

In each decade since my early 20’s I’ve faced death in one way or another. Some decades brought me to the brink more than once.

Most recently I was spirited from my home in the middle of the night by EMT’s who couldn’t find vital signs. I was septic, dehydrated, losing vision, and barely responsive. Later I’d be told I got to the ER in barely enough time or we’d be looking at a far different outcome. I didn’t ask what that meant but I have a good idea.

I’m in my mid-fifties and this is the third time in this half-decade God’s miraculously preserved my life, I can only presume, for more ‘preservation of life.’¹There are still some assignments ahead for me.

As a 21-year old I prayed, “Lord, put me in a fire and don’t ever let up.” As such, suffering has been the mark of my life – AND I WOULDNT CHANGE A THING. Through many dangers, toils, and snares, I’ve found a depth of intimacy with Christ I wouldn’t have found otherwise.

Like Joseph, I want the product of my life to tell the story that I’m doubly blessed and fruitful from all my afflictions, and God has been doubly kind to allow me the privilege of suffering for His glory and name.

This is my story, this is my song, praising my Savior all my life long:

Praise God for loss.
Praise God for the fire.
Praise God for heart-brokenness.
Praise God for weakness.
Praise God for humility.
Praise God for the tough times.
Praise God for the sweetness of the fruit that grows from the soil of hardship.

If any of this sounds weird, it’s only because I’m trying to live up to my name. You can call me Ephraim.

¹ Genesis 45:5,7

He Owns The Night

Well, well, well.

As my son used to say, “lookee here, lookee here!”

A pretty cool reminder for those who think God has somehow checked out or relinquished the reins to all the crazies out there:

Psalms 74:16 –
“Yours is the day…

(Wait for it)

Yours also the night…”

(Mic drop)

Sorry, Batman. My God owns the night, not you, all do respect.

Night, by Elie Wiesel, is in my personal Top 25 of books that have most shaped me through my life. Elie, who survived both Auschwitz and Buchenwald during his teen years, having endured countless sadisms at the hands of Hitler’s Reich, wrote:

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed….Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.”

It’s no wonder such a Jewish pogrom would lead many to question the Presence of God among His chosen people. On one occasion, men were hung in public view and remained so while their fellow captives were ordered to file past and allow their deaths to effectually haunt them.

Then came the march past the victims. The two men were no longer alive. Their tongues were hanging out, swollen and bluish. But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing…And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death, writhing before our eyes.
And we were forced to look at him at close range. He was still alive when I passed him. His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet extinguished.
Behind me, I heard the same man asking:
“For God’s sake, where is God?”
And from within me, I heard a voice answer:
“Where He is? This is where–hanging here from this gallows…”
That night, the soup tasted of corpses.

There’s a line in the Gospels that could leave one as though stranded on a scary stretch of road in the most notoriously bad part of town in the middle of the night, exposed and alone, if not for the declaration which follows it.

John 13:30 ends the pre-narrative of Judas’ satanic role in the betrayal of Messiah Jesus with the refrain: “And it was night.”

That’s some chilling stuff, John.

A good story would leave go of a chapter with those four words just hanging there, suspended, leaving the reader with no choice but to turn the leaf in the book with haste.

If there were such a fresh new page, the (thankful) reader would find these opening words:

“Now the Son of Man is glorified.”

(Sigh of relief)

Read that again.

You catch it?

Now. I. Am. Glorified.

Now.

Smack in the dark heart of Witching Hour.

In one breath it’s as bad as it can get: an icy breeze hails from hades, the devil’s maw is twisted into a knowing grin, the disciples shiver, festivity is stilled…but in the next quick heartbeat we find God’s still got this. His agenda is not only unthwarted, it’s been made possible.

Oh, and it’s just getting good! Exactly one chapter (to the verse) later, THIS from the Son of Man:

The prince over this world is coming. HE HAS NO HOLD OVER ME.”
– John 14:30

I realize the Cross wasn’t a formality. Indeed, Jesus went through hell on His way to submitting to it in the Garden the night before, but all through the ordeal this resounding truth prevails from moment one:

No man, no devil, no ideology takes My life from Me. I lay it down all by Myself.”

Then He got some help on Resurrection Morning from the Other Two in the Godhead to eclipse eternal night. For good. Talk about your book with a major twist at the end!

Are you in a night?

Here’s what you should recite to your head and heart:

God’s got you. He’s as committed to you as He is the Son of Man.
He will splash all His Light and Glory across your night. Get ready.
There’s not a man or devil that will get in His way of redeeming you fully and finally.
Your story ends with resurrection, guaranteed. Tonight is Gethsemane and Golgotha, yes, but Sunday’ll be epic.

Selah, beloved.

I mean it.