Seeing God in Everything

I read this poem in my devotions recently (while sitting on the couch in damp workout clothes, nursing Esther, and pausing to explain a math problem to Micah . . .) 

“SEE GOD IN ALL THINGS, great and small,

And give him praise what’er befall,

In life or death, in pain or woe,

See God and overcome your foe . . .

Life will, indeed, a blessing bring,

If we SEE GOD IN EVERYTHING.”

A.E. Finn

As I read this poem, I couldn’t help but wonder: why don’t I see God in everything?

The heart-honest truth is this: it’s hard to SEE GOD in the day-to-day “pain and woe” of midnight feedings, bad attitudes, sibling spats, failed homeschool days and hurtful words spoken in stressed-out-anger.

During weary mothering moments, I’ve preached to myself: I don’t see God in everything because I’m blinded by selfishness!  

But even after preaching “don’t be selfish, don’t be selfish . . . ” through out the day, I still fall into bed at night body-weary and soul-weary.

Then a couple evenings ago, while our kiddos ran around the back yard chasing bouncy baby crickets, I chatted with my neighbor, Jana. As we chatted, I sat in a green lawn chair patting Esther’s back. Watching my hand pat-pat-patting, Jana said, “I think mothering is the most unselfish thing you could ever do. I mean—you give up sleep, food, money, hanging out with friends, and all to raise a kid.”

I replied: “Yes, good mothering requires selflessness, but I’ve found mothering shows me over and over again how selfish I really am—I don’t like giving up sleep, time, or brain cells!”

But as Jana and I watched our kiddos run red-faced through the grass, as we listened to high-pitched-squeals of delight when they snagged a kicking insect leg, when they ran with wriggling insects between fingers to where we sat on lawn chairs and stuck kicking bugs under our noses saying: “Look! A cricket!” a verse popped into my mind:  “He has made everything beautiful in its time.” (Ecclesiastes 3:11b).

My heart-eyes opened as I realized:  I’m trying to see God by focusing on Self! All day long I preach “don’t be selfish” and I miss the God-Beauty around me because I’m still the focus!

My focus must be outward and upward rather than inward!

My children—in spite of bad attitudes, screaming fits, and messes—reflect God’s beauty! They reflect his beauty as they catch insects (and let them loose all over my living room floor!), as they fight over who gets to feed baby Esther her bottle, as they learn a new concept in school, as they chase each other round the playground shooting each other with “super-hero” lasers.

Beauty: Three Boys Feeding Baby Esther

And there’s soul-purifying beauty in midnight feedings and newborn fussiness because there’s Beauty in focusing on the needs of my little girl rather than whining about my lack of sleep or inability to complete my tasks.

So, to change my focus from Self to God, I must bend my knees and pray this:

“One thing I ask from the Lord,
    this only do I seek:
that I may dwell in the house of the Lord
    all the days of my life,
to gaze on the beauty of the Lord
    and to seek him in his temple.” (Psalm 27:4).

God is Beauty and his temple is everywhere!

Lord, grant me the eyes to see Beauty—to see You—in everything, especially the hard things.

Above: More Beauty: Boys Hunting For Crickets Below: Catching Crickets

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In Hard Times--Lean

“Who is this coming up from the desert leaning on her lover?” (Song of Songs 8:5).

Micah “sent” me a note last night—sealed it in an envelope and handed it to me while three-week-old Esther wailed on my bouncing thighs. “I saw you cry, Mom, so I made you this,” he said. Patting Esther’s back with my right hand, I opened the white envelope with my left and pulled out the note written in green marker and accented with a smiley face and wavy lines: “be Happy even in hard times.”

It had been a hard afternoon, for sure. The hard part started when I picked up Micah from school. Micah stood on the curb, forearms extended with palms up, like a monk in deep meditation. His teacher said, “Micah was quite the vigorous monkey-bars climber today. He’s got some pretty bad blisters.” I stared down at Micah’s palms—yellow flesh hanging loose over raw, red skin. “It stings, Mom,” Micah said, grimacing.

“Well, I’ve had blisters like these, and they healed nicely. We’ll bandage them when we get home.”

We’re too much alike—Micah and I—always fighting to be the toughest, the fastest, the strongest on the playground, and in the adrenaline pumping moment of competition, we numb to pain. It’s only afterwards that the throbbing begins . . . .

After Micah hopped into the van and buckled in without touching raw skin, baby Esther began her I-hate-this-car-seat girl-wailing (which Jon swears is much louder and higher pitched than a boys!) Even after I drove home and pulled her sweaty-from-crying body out of the car seat, Esther kept on wailing, face red, legs kicking.

Once inside our cool house, Esther wailed on, but Micah’s raw palms needed tending, so I placed her in the pack 'n play. While I snipped tape and gauze, my head began throbbing in time with Esther’s wails. Fifteen minutes later, Micah’s palms bandaged and taped, I picked Esther up and held her close, but she beat my chest with curled fists, as if to say, “why did you leave me?!”

With fist-beating baby in arms, I stepped into the bathroom and discovered my potty-training three year old dropping his Lightening McQueen pull up—full of poop—onto the tile floor. He’d also left a little trail of deposits round the house, just for me.

So I put screaming Esther back in the pack 'n play. As I scrubbed the three-year-old’s poop smeared legs, scooped up deposits from the carpet, and carefully wiped down the fabric loops on the green rug in the boys’ bedroom, the throbbing in my temples began pounding in tandem with Esther’s now operatic screaming.

Clean up complete, I picked up Esther’s squirming body and stuck the green hospital paci in her open mouth. She arched her back, spit green paci on the floor, beat fists against my chest, and wailed at a higher decibel.

For the next two hours, I bounced, squatted, back-patted, nursed, and changed Esther while yelling at the boys to “go in the basement and be quiet!” When every muscle in my still anemic body gave out, I sat down at the kitchen table, slung Esther over my knees and cried. Micah—unbeknownst to me—witnessed my little meltdown, and that’s when he wrote and ‘sent’ his note: “Be happy even in the hard times.”  

There’s something sweet and oh so humbling about receiving sage counsel from your eight year old son.  It’s not easy to “be happy in the hard times” because my selfish self would rather the hard times just “go away already!”

When Esther finally stopped screaming, the boys scavenged up a dinner of corn chips, string cheese and tomatoes. Then I put everyone—myself included—to bed, hoping a little sleep would help me “be happy in the hard times.”

Then in early morning light I read in my new devotional, Streams in the Desert:

God said:

Child of My love, lean hard.

And let me feel the pressure of your care;

I know your burden, child. I shaped it. . .

Even as I laid it on [you], I said,

“I will be near, and while she leans on me,

This burden will be mine, not hers.

So I will keep My child within the circling arms

Of My Own Love. . .”

You love me, [child] I know. So then, do not doubt,

But loving me, lean hard.  (Streams in the Desert, 347 emphasis mine).

All too often, just like my monkey-bar climbing son, in hard times I “vigorously” lean on Self. Doubting God’s goodness and care, leaning on my own strength, I grow throbbing blisters on my hands and in my heart.

So, the next time my son injures himself while my baby screams and my three year old poops all over the floor, (or we have a bad school day, or I feel the pain of not having a "normal" family, or __________) I pray I remember to Lean Hard on Him who holds me in His Loving Arms.

For only in His Loving Arms can I be “Happy even in hard times.”

Overcoming Shame Part 3: Seeing Jesus

(This is the third post in a three-part series. Read Part 1 here and Part 2 here )

Sitting in the sagging 1970’s green chair in my writing professor’s office, tears flowed down my cheeks. Rough copy #3 of my Spiritual Essay lay open across my lap, my tears dropping, smearing black ink. Avoiding my professor’s, “I-can-see-right-through-you” gaze, I shuffled the white papers in my lap and stared at the frayed blue carpet under my feet.

I couldn’t figure out how to end my essay on the Samaritan Woman, and I didn’t know why I was runny-nosed sobbing about it in front of my professor. (Talk about embarrassing!)  But one thing I knew for sure—I understood the Samaritan Woman, was just like her—looking for Living Water in all the wrong places, filling my water jar— heart—with good grades, guys and the affirmation of others.

Just like the Samaritan woman, I felt like an outcast. She was a ‘worthless’ half-breed and I the naïve, homeschooled ‘nobody.’ And just like the Samaritan woman, hoping for redeeming love, I’d thrown myself into bad relationships with guys who cared nothing for my soul. Just like the Samaritan woman, I felt shame for what I’d done and what others did to me.

Just like the Samaritan woman, I longed to be worthy of love.

But as a 20 year-old college student melting down in my professor’s office, I didn’t understand how to overcome my feelings of worthlessness. I knew “Jesus is the answer” but couldn’t explain what that meant in the day-to-day of life (which is why I couldn’t figure out how to end the dang essay!).

Years later, as a 35-year-old woman, I picked up my Bible and read the Samaritan woman’s story with  new eyes. As I read her story in John 4, I saw how Jesus looked at her—with compassion and grace—and I longed for Him to look at me as he looked at her. Jesus knew everything she’d ever done: “The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband!” Jesus also saw through her feeble attempt to deflect Her shame onto Him: “you Jews . . . ,” and Jesus, knowing and seeing ALL of this woman, still offered her Himself. In offering her Himself, he offered her Life and Dignity—worth.

It was only after seeing Jesus for who he was: “I, the one speaking to you—I am [The Messiah]” that the Samaritan woman put down her water jar—the one filled with bad relationships, poor choices, hurt and pain—and accepted Living Water.

Then, full of Living Water, full of Jesus, free from shame, this woman invited other Samaritans to see Jesus: “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did!”(John 4:29, emphasis mine).  After the Samaritans saw Jesus for themselves, they declared: “We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world.” (John 4:39-42).

For the Samaritan woman and her people, the cure for shame was truly seeing Jesus!

For most of my life, I tried to “cure” shame with performance. Just like the Samaritan woman, I filled the water jar of my heart with human effort: reading the Bible, going to church, singing worship songs. I thought my efforts alone would somehow make me worthy of love and acceptance. But performance didn’t heal shame, and when I inevitably screwed up, I fell deeper into the black pit of believing “I’m just one big loser!”

For years I tried climbing out of the black pit of shame by preaching biblical truth to myself: “I’m made in the image of God, so I’m worth something!”  and “God loves me, so I am valuable!” But, as the Christian counselor Ed Welch says, merely telling yourself the truth over and over again “usually doesn’t work.” (61*).  Just knowing I was made in God’s image, that he loved me, didn’t make me believe I was worthy and loved.

Ed Welch offers this wise advice to people who, like me, were/are trapped in the pit of shame:  “Try a counterintuitive approach to escape shame. Try changing the subject so it is more about God than about your shame. The basic idea is to focus on the matchless worth of the Lord God and then get connected to him . . . . The cure for shame will always be found in how we become connected to God. ”(Welch 61, 103).

In other words, the key to overcoming shame is getting your eyes off Self and on God. Just like the Samaritan woman, we need to stop filling our water jars—hearts—with human effort and truly behold the face of Jesus.

But how do you do that?

Scottish pastor Robert Murray McCheyne, says this:

Learn much of the Lord Jesus. For every look at yourself, take ten looks at Christ. He is altogether lovely. Such infinite majesty, and yet such meekness and grace, and all for sinners, even the chief! Live much in the smiles of God. Bask in his beams. Feel his all-seeing eye settled on you in love, and repose in his almighty arms . . . . (Robert Murray*, emphasis mine)

Looking outward—towards Jesus—instead of inward, towards Self, isn’t easy. Setting aside human effort to seek and savor Christ requires acknowledging that our worthiness is found in our connection to Christ Alone. We must learn to be like Lazarus’ sister Mary, who understood, “few things are needed—or indeed, only one . . .  [Sitting] at the Lord’s feet,” (Luke 10).

When our eyes are on Jesus, shame loses its power, and we see ourselves as He sees us—Beautiful, Worthy, Redeemed. And just like the Samaritan woman, when we see ourselves as God sees us, we are free to share our story with everyone we meet because Christ covers every part of that story—good and bad—with Himself.

“Let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely,

and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, ² looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.” (Hebrews 12: 1, 2, emphasis mine)

* Ed. Welch quotes taken from his book Shame Interrupted. You can view this resource on Amazon here.

*Memoir and Remains of the Rev. Robert Murray McCheyne [(Edinburgh, 1894), 293].