Living Story Grace

We are at the beach. Pensacola Beach, to be precise. We had this week scheduled for our yearly tradition months before anyone knew tarballs would be due to clutter the beachside on our check-in date.

Last night, after working vigorously through the day to load and unload all of the Powerades and Mojo bars and beach towels and other provisions it takes to get our family through a week at the beach, my husband and I rested on the balcony. We had the odd joy of not only watching a thunderstorm roll in, but feeling ourselves in the middle of it. (The truth is, we refused to concede our cigars, so we kept moving around the deck to escape the bits of rain that found us as the wind shifted.) I wish I could make a fancy slideshow w/ IMovie and post it, but, after all, I am at the beach, writing this poolside, where the closest internet access is:)! Instead, I will post a few of the pictures from beginning, middle, and end of the story. My kids always tease me about my propensity to look for and proclaim signs in all sorts of circumstances. But the sign in the next to last photo is undeniable, and, I will remind them happily — BIBLICAL:)!

Let’s keep looking for beauty in darkness:

“And God said, ​“This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: 13 I have set c​my bow in the cloud, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. 14 When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, 15 And​ I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh. And the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. 16 When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember e​the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.” 17 God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth.” Genesis 9:12- 17

Oh, my dear friends — so many have written or called this week to ask how we feel as the oil moves closer to Pensacola Beach.  Many, many answers.  Depressed.  Grieving.  Angry.  Hopeful???

It has been a rough week in the ongoing pursuit of the ever-elusive mother-and-wife-of-the-year-award.  Not only have I blown it pretty big time with my husband and children, but I have been aching with the pains of a friend’s illness and the sorrow of hearing the latest oil scuttlebutt.  It is heavy stuff.  So where do I go?  Many places, but one place that centers me is Heidelberg, question #1.  It’s not magic, nor a mantra.  These words proclaim the story I believe.  Listen to them, say them, fill in the blanks for where they meet you with the story of God’s sovereign grace in your broken world.

What is your only comfort in life and in death:
My only comfort in life and in death is that I (my friend, our beach) am not my own, but belong body and soul to my faithful savior Jesus Christ.  He has fully paid for all my sins (every unkind word spoken, every unkind thought thunk) with his precious blood, and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil.  He also watches over me in such a way that not a hair can fall from my head (not a drop of oil can touch our land??) without the will of my Father in heaven.  In fact, all things (broken bodies, broken relationships??) work together for my salvation. Because I belong to him, Christ, by his Holy Spirit, assures me of eternal life and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.

So, how am I with the oil?  Ready.  We head to the beach this afternoon for our yearly summer week there.  I will sit high above, watching from the balcony, and instead of just searching for signs of oil, I will search for signs of hope.  Hope for restoration.  Hope for shalom.  Because I believe it is really, really true.

Back to this week’s theme.  As sin-wrecked shalom pools around me in many stories, from the global — oil creeping its way toward our white sands, to the personal — a soul-shredding tone creeping into my voice in moments of stress — I am reminded again by Bierma, of the marvel of restored shalom.  My emphasis.
“The marvel of the new earth, promised in Isaiah and 2 Peter and Revelation, is this:  God is not giving up. The heavens and earth, soiled as they have been by sin, are not a failure, not a wreck, not irretrievable.  The shalom – the heavenly wholeness, the right alignment of everything – is not beyond recovery.  God, it turns out, has a holy stubbornness, a refusal to accept ruin.
Christianity is the only religion in which God reaches down to human beings and stoops to our level. Other religions worship a god whom humans must continually try to please, try to impress, try to elevate themselves to earn his favor and approach his level. God is the only god in all of human religion who lowers himself, as a way of exalting himself.  (56)

“Shalom’s repair is achieved by reversing the process, with the improbable demotion when God becomes human.” (56)

“Nature itself will be free from sin.  Not just souls, but also soil.  Not just people, but the theater in which God performs for them and reveals himself to them.”

Nathan Bierma, Bringing Heaven down to Earth

It’s not really so surprising that neither the author of the guest post nor I had very shalom-y days yesterday.  Shalom, sadly, is wrecked in our world ever since the Fall, but thankfully, that is not the end of the story.

In Bringing Heaven down to Earth, Nathan Bierma talks about how we become too accustomed to shalom being violated…

At its root, the word violence relates to “violate.”  And violate means to cause something that shouldn’t be.  This nuance is often lost when we hear the word over and over in news reports.  To us, violence means the use of weapons and t resulting destruction of places and people.  Its numbing regularity gives us the illusion that violence is one of the natural rhythms of the w world.

But it is not.  It is the opposite – violence and sin are awful, agonizing, bloody, evil interruptions and perversions of the natural rhythms of the world.  Sin, says Plantinga, is ‘the culpable disturbance of shalom,’   the interference with the way things are supposed to be.  Sin makes a mess of what God made to be right and good.  Sin can only be understood in terms of what it distorts and destroys: shalom.

What  we need instead is a holy awareness—what psychologists call cognitive dissonance – of the fact that we are living in a world that is in many ways wrong, a world that is different from what was intended, what was established.  The results of the sin that started when humans invited disorder into t he world – the pain and injustice that we see around us – are not just too bad, they are wrong.  They shouldn’t be.”  (Nathan Bierma, Bringing Heaven Down to Earth, 54)

For reflection:

What violated shalom have you come to expect as “normal,” or “to be expected”?

What do you do about this kind of wrecked shalom?  (Shrug your shoulders, rant, bury your head, weep, pray, work toward restoration?)

What do you do with a day filled with things that are “not the way they’re supposed to be”?

Today, as promised, guest post from Jane Gilbert, from Compelling Grace blog…
“The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.”  Luke 1:28
I had the privilege of spending the weekend with Elizabeth Turnage where we spent an intensive weekend looking at God’s Story of grace, how it interprets all the stories of our lives, and how our stories help to tell that big, beautiful, glorious Story.  Shalom, peace, is the description of every diverse aspect of life (people, environment, dreams, relationships, activities, etc.) existing in perfect harmony and being enjoyed.  We say we exist to glorify God and enjoy Him forever, but He has to ask us through Paul, more than on one occasion, ‘What has happened to all your joy?’

So I have gotten to spend a weekend looking at broken shalom and hoping for the restoration of a fulfilled shalom beyond any tastes of it I had before I noticed it was broken.  I’m not going to attempt to re-create nor cover all the varied thoughts from this exploration.  But here is what stuck with me about my elusive shalom: I am worried and upset about many things (the uncleaned house upon my return, the desire to have a thoughtfully engaging summer for my children, the need to create order among all my papers, to work hard to serve and protect our little church, to connect with friends I’ve missed throughout the year, and so on…).  But as He calls me out of the kitchen to sit with Him, Jesus gently reminds me that He has not asked me to “make the most of the moment”, because He already has.  He has not put the burden of shaping my children into His image on me but upon Himself.  He has not asked me to connect with every person I like or would like to know more, just to love those He has set before me and will set before me in the course of the days He designs for me.”

To read the rest, visit http://www.compellinggrace.blogspot.com