Covenant.

Noun. 

To come; a coming together; a meeting or agreement of minds.

A mutual consent or agreement of two or more persons, to do or to forebear some act or thing; a contract; stipulation.

In theology, the covenant of works, is that implied in the commands, prohibitions, and promises of God; the promise of God to man, that man's perfect obedience should entitle him to happiness. This do, and live; that do, and die.

The covenant of redemption, is the mutual agreement between the Father and Son, respecting the redemption of sinners by Christ.

The covenant of grace, is that by which God engages to bestow salvation on man, upon the condition that man shall believe in Christ and yield obedience to the terms of the Gospel.
In church affairs, a solemn agreement between the members of a church, that they will walk together according to the precepts of the Gospel, in brotherly affection.

I've been thinking about this word quite a bit lately. It's four months and a week until I make the biggest promise of my life. And I'm scared. I'm going to be promising to love when I'm empty, to give when I'm hurting, to see when I'm blind, to hear when I'm deaf, to be strong when I'm weak. The depth and breath of this vow of marriage overwhelms me slightly....I am but slight and frail. I am afraid of failing, of twisting love into some knarled and cracked, dying root. 'What's if there's a drought?', my heart queries in subtle desperation. Or not so subtle desperation, depending on the day.

I place myself under the covenant of works..... 

.....forgetting that my heart has been set free in the redemptive covenant of grace. 

Covenant of grace? The eternal plan of redemption entered into by the three persons of the Godhead.

Fear has no place in this covenant of perfect Love....For Love Himself has promised to be faithful unto me. And in this Love, my weakness is enveloped in His strength. My ears have been awoken to the music of His mercy. My eyes have been pierced by the rays of His light. He has given His very self into my hurting, fearful soul, healing my wounds with every morning. And because of this, I am free to pour out all that He has poured within....Love has called me to Him, to empty my very self....so that I can be filled to overflowing. So that I may walk in the good news. That I might dwell in the promises. That my fragmented being might be pieced back together into the mosaic that Love alone knows how to create. That I might be able to love in return. This is the God I can trust in.

'Let us hold unswervingly to the Hope which we profess, for He who promised is faithful.'

-Hebrews 10:23

A Glorious Reminder.

Today was a beautiful, glorious reminder of what it's all about.

Good news. Jesus.

We, as a wee little family here in this city, got to witness four people being baptised this morning. I was overwhelmed with the majesty of the story in which I find myself. In which we as a church find ourselves. To see these four people, such dear and true friends, stand up and share their journeys - so varied and powerful....was full of heart-deepening beauty.

Jesus? You are present and living and dwelling in our midst. Why do I so often forget this?

Do I live as if You hold all the ages between Your fingertips?

I greatly fear that I do not.

But then I see Your eyes. So full of grace and truth. And I see sights like today....hearing stories of healing and wholeness, of hope and a future. We hear of another thread in Your story-tapestry, all the way from Nepal. We hear of the ministers there, the miracles which abound....and my faith slowly rises - like an engine that's been stuck out in the cold. We open our mouths and sing of Your great deeds.

You are so good. Thank You for not leaving me where I am at, but always and ever calling me 'further up and further in'.

I know this video might be a 'tad' on the pretentious side...but it challenged me a few years ago, and I managed to find it again. What does good news look like to those dwelling amongst us? 

YOUR HOPE from blaine hogan on Vimeo.

P. S. I swear I had this almost finished on time....:)

Unscribable days.

Ah! Forty minutes to write this and I'm so tired. But knowing my incessant and utterly annoying need to stick to my word, I shall post. I will not be defeated!! Though, I regret to inform you that today, I shall only be inscribing a few brief words. I've been up hills all day long....

And I guess there are some days that are best left unsaid....

Even if I wish I could put them into words and remember every last detail.

Days so full of joy and sunlight....and friendship.

And love.

God is so good. And He is present in all of our days....though, I think He's present in a special and unique way during these unscribable days.

'They said, "Rabbi, where are you staying?"

         "Come," He replied, "and you will see" '

                         (John 1: 38-9)

Let's dwell with Him in all of our days.

Communion.

Communion

Brushstrokes on the soul of someone else,

This fearless touch unclothes bodies

Unwinding the knotted ribbons of my thoughts

And permeates the clattering clutter beneath

Late, I have come, drawn to your side

By some unknown force of subtle magnitude.

The foolish winds of fancy, I have long believed

Fall away, struck down by the silence of love.

My being, a skylark in dawn, rises

From the rubble of plaguing insecurities.

No more through cafe windows do I gaze

But soaring, sailing, scaling, I venture.

Deep delving closeness draws

And the ivory papers of my heart flutter

Your breath warms my salty cheek;

Caressing the breakable mosaic of me.

This red wine, the bread, enfolds me

Within you, you within and without.

The paradox, the oneness of grace

Confounds, perplexes, radiates.

A Pen's Justification.

I'm being forced to pause.

I don't like this.

I have to write now.

Why is it so hard to focus, to make myself do what I love?

I fear I'm riddled with fear.

And then I want to give up altogether and go bake a cake. Or wish for the umptienth time that I didn't have to worry about not being in full-time employment. Or go worry about something else insignificant. Or look at pretty blogs.

I realised, at about 1:00 am this morning (as you do) why so much of my journaling feels fake to me. It's cause I hide. I hide what occupies my brain the most. And most of the time, it's fears. Donald Miller mentions that Jesus commanded us over TWO HUNDRED times 'Do not fear'. And still I succumb to its paralysing voice.

So I check facebook (yup). I wonder what I'll make for dinner. I use the toilet. I doubt that I'm loved. I check my emails. I pop out to run an errand. I fritter away the hours.

My soul shrinks, my faith diffuses into thin air, and I am numbed. 

And then the guilt rises, as I try to justify what I've done with my day.....that never goes over well. I chide myself and I ask, 'What SHOULD I be doing?' I try harder.  

A Pen's Justification

There is a knotted thread

within my hand;

it binds my fingers together.

But my head?

It hurts for all the wool

tangled

mangled.

I try

raging

pulling

to explain, explore, the ache.

The ache of inadequacy

of confused, believed fallacy.

My perception

time and again rebuked

by a sense of duty.

Will my pen ever stop

trying to justify my being?

Do you ever try harder? To cover up, let go, sweep away, forget, to build, to create,....to justify? I look inside me for The Answer, The Meaning.

Inside me....

....and I wonder why fear seems to grip onto my heart and why I can't hear Your voice in amongst my endless babble and fretting.

Inexplicably, this morning (having woken up tense and under-slept) I finally listened to the Voice that had been whispering 'read John' for the past couple of days. And I read these verses....

'In the beginning was the Word,

and the Word was with God,

and the Word was God.

He was with God in the beginning.

Through Him all things were made;

without Him nothing was made

that has been made.

In Him was life

and that life was the light of men.

The Light shines in the darkness,

but the darkness has not understood

or overcome

it.'

John 1.

I can't claim to know what this means. What it means intellectually or for my own life....but I read it and my bones feel vigorous again. My heart somehow has courage. Life is seeping back into me. A fight is rising within....I will not stand idly by as the Story is ripped from my life. It will not be stolen from me. For the Light, Jesus, the Word is dwelling with me. Within us.

Challenge for myself? 

Let the Word of Christ dwell RICHLY within me, and then maybe the words that spill from my own pen will feel less like a justification, less of a covering up,....and more of an act of freedom, more of a joy.

The Importance Of Jumping In Rivers.

I had a pause, a breathing space, in my life this past weekend. And it was most glorious. 

I've also felt challenged.....to stop letting my days pass me by as if my life was meaningless. I remember growing up, I would always pretend that I was in a story. Whether that story was in war-time Britain, bombs dropping around me, or in some Victorian field on Prince Edward Island, or in some dimly lit, religiously fraught medieval castle on a cold and wet day. Walking about in the grocery store gathering items for my mum, in the car on the way to piano lessons, or lying in bed at night....I would depart for the Other Lands.

Yes. I was an odd child. 

But that's the rub. We are in a story.....and what kind of story am I in? I've been reading (devouring?) 'A Million Miles in a Thousand Years' by Don Miller. He writes, 'I like the part of the Bible that talks about God speaking the world into existence, as though everything we see and feel were sentences from His mouth, all the wet of the world His spit. I feel written. My skin feels written, and my desires feel written. My sexuality was a word spoken by God, that I would be male, and I would have brown hair and brown eyes and come from a womb. It feels literary, doesn't it, as if we are characters in books....there is a knowing I feel that guides me toward better stories, toward being a better character. I believe there is a writer outside ourselves, plotting a better story for us, interacting with us, even, and whispering a better story into our consciousness.'

Do I live this way? Sometimes it's easier to live in my head. To dream about a life I would desire....to let it slip by me unnoticed, like a beautiful flower growing in the crack of an old stone wall. I think we get scared, and it paralyzes our dreams and desires, our passions....and ultimately our very selves. 

When I think of one thing that scares me, almost above all others....it's being vulnerable in writing. It's so easy to go and read someone else's blog, someone else's book. Instead of picking up the pen myself. 

So this week, I'm going to try something. I am going to attempt to put some writing on the page every day this week. And see what happens. I guess it's like a muscle. Like training for a race you've always wanted to do, actually finding that recipe and making that loaf of bread, like opening that box of photos and beginning to fashion them into a story on a page. 

Here's to the plunge....

Calling Forth Strength.

I was just thinking how tired I am of 'pressing through', of trusting for a job, a flatmate. This desert, this wasteland of postponement. I'm tired of it. I ask, rather tentatively and with a slight angle of self-pity, 'have I learned this lesson yet?' Oh silly girl. And then I read these words of David, a song he wrote at the end of his life....

'The LORD is my Rock, my Fortress, and my Deliverer;

    my God is my Rock in whom I take refuge,

  my Shield and the Horn of my Salvation.

He is my Stronghold, my Refuge, and my Saviour....'

(2 Samuel 22:2-3)

I've read over and over that phrase 'horn of my salvation', and its corresponding footnote: 'horn here symbolises strength'. I thought little about it. But today, it stood out to me....Why is it that a horn symbolises strength? Why is strength tied to salvation, of all things?....And then it reminded me of something. You know in Narnia, when Father Christmas gives Susan the horn, he says that whenever she blows it HELP WILL COME.....'Trust in this horn, Susan.' In battles where one is surrounded, horns call troops together, they call forth the strength inside and out. They call forth salvation.....But I have to trust that when I call out in my utter abandoned need, He - the God of the Ages - will answer.  

For He Himself, in a strange and wonderful twist, IS my Horn of Salvation. Jesus called out with His last breath, 'It is finished'....a call that has reverberated throughout history. A call of overwhelming victorious strength and salvation.

I'm speechless in the face of this revelation. Shall we not trust?