Reflections

Suffering

Here’s the problem with suffering without God’s input as a means to perfection:

Suffering becomes a tool, but the tool-maker, God, is pushed out of the picture. You engineer your own perfection. Is suffering a tool? Not sure. Suffering is not something Stoics should in a feel-sorry way be grateful for.

Suffering is an absence of breaking through. When we don’t break through, we are alerted to relationships, to the fragility of life, and to the Lord as our Lord. But the suffering doesn’t do this, does it? The taking away of our props helps us to focus on God if we let ourselves do this.

The Lord is our Shepherd, in abundance and pain. The Lord can teach also through abundance, if the abundance humbles us. Often it does the opposite. What I don’t like is the means/ends emphasis statements on suffering. They keep me from living honestly. I don’t like platitudes. Life is not easy.

The one thing I need to remember is not to make plans set in stone, but to look to the Lord. If suffering comes, help me to focus on God, not my own problems and pain.

Scriptures to help

Psalm 4: 4 Tremble and do not sin; Meditate in your heart upon your bed, and be still.
“Tremble” is to be astonished, to be dumbfounded, so struck that you have no more words. The silence of knowledge and understanding. Oh Lord!

Psalm 23:2
He leads me beside still waters.
A settled spot, a home, a place of rest. He leads me home. He leads my heart to rest and restoration.

Psalm 23:1
The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want.
I shall not lack, fail, want, because the Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not fail to be where He wants me to be.

Hebrews 1: 1-2
God, after He spoke to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken in His Son.

Hebrews 2:3 How shall we escape if we neglect so great a salvation?

Jesus is the message for wanting hearts, for the not-still soul, for the Job days. Jesus and what He did and is Himself. His totality. His love. His peace. All the miracles, the stopping to raise Lazarus, being transfigured, the Sermon on the Mount, creating the world and then emptying Himself to save it, preaching in hell, ascending to heaven (but first making a fish dinner for his friends).

Jesus is the spoken. Like the Shakespearean drama that lives as an experience as it is heard in all its parts.

Jesus is aural, alive. He is manifested, shown, demonstrated, not just a river of life but the river of Life for the present moment, this now. So much better than prophets and laws and sacrifices and clouds by day and fire by night. Better than the still small voice.

He lived here as a man and grew up. He was bored and tired and hungry and full of anxiety at times, as on the Mount with his great drops of blood-sweat. But He said, “Let not your heart be troubled. I’m going to prepare a place for you. My peace I leave with you.” A joining. Rest. The pieces which are scattered and confused and at odds, come together. He gives wholeness and new life even in the middle of suffering.

Isaiah 40:31
They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength.

Wait means to twist together. Bind together. The waiting is an active bonding. Waiting in this way leads to going for it, trusting and leaning on the trust.

Job

The book of Job is a classic story of suffering.

The most precious verses in Job are Job 19: 25-26. “And as for me, I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last He will take His stand on earth. Even after my skin is flayed. Yet without my flesh, I shall see God.”

Job had a vision that he never quite lost sight of. He knew God was there, and he would see Him again. In the midst of his utter despair, his mumblings about injustice, his distaste for his friends, he knew God was watching. Job had tremendous faith and tremendous doubt. Job was me. I am Job. “I love you Lord, but where are You? Why does this have to happen? But I still see you, God.” The most wonderful fact of the book of Job is that over and over Job says he trusts. He says a lot of other things, but he is a man, and he hurts.

Oh Job. A friend for hard times. A thinker and a poet. His problem is my problem. Why do people tell me that I have to be wrong/evil or this would not have happened? Why do the most popular books laud suffering as the great teacher? I rebel against that. Suffering is the great leveler. God is not so poor though that He has to use suffering (although sometimes He does). Whatever providentially happens good or bad can mean a new direction. Openness is the key. Prosperity is a useful signal, although I hate the word useful. I hate things that are boiled down into this is what the Lord is teaching you today through this experience. It may be a hundred miles from the truth.

The important thing is to be with the sufferer. As a sufferer the important thing is to be quiet. This is what I hear from the book of Job, along with noticing this man who does not give up though his flesh is flayed.

Joy

Journal prayers and reflections

Journal 1

I’ve been sick today -- otherworldly feeling. Here’s what has happened since yesterday. I have caught myself thinking about You, Lord. In the midst of a walk, talking; I remembered you, on the inside. Your reality is reaching into my innermost parts. I have a long way to go, but this is a start. Let my soul take its rest in you. Rejuvenate me. Give me joy. I pray for overflowing joy. I want the peace that passes understanding. In the ways and byways of my life, when I can’t have what I think I need from you, I get anxious. Lord, cure me of this disease. It’s a canker. It eats up my life, those precious hours you have given me.

Sweet Jesus, I love you so much. Be with me, deep down, on the inside.

Journal 2

I am so taken up with my urgent list that once again I have set aside my personal needs – to connect with you Lord in this way.

I realize more and more that I need the natural world, to be in the natural world for my soul to take its rest. It’s probably a result of the way I grew up, or maybe you made us that way, Lord, to have a soul that craves sensuous connections with your creation. I went out running yesterday and it was very cold, bracing cold, but I felt joy. It was an answer to my soul’s need. I wished the running could have been in wide open spaces, along some quiet road somewhere, but at least I was outdoors feeling the cold air.

I think I am half-asleep on the inside most of the time. I would never succeed unless I set my priorities for the things that are urgent for immediate goals, but in this pursuit I find myself, my soul self, put aside. I am overly goal oriented. My intellect pulls me in that direction. Yet I know, Lord, that I am most happy when I let my soul’s needs speak, when I interact with my world, when I allow myself the time to appreciate the glories of your world, God.

You have made me marvelously well. You have made all my parts, so that not only do I plan and organize toward outside purposes, but I am constantly aware, if I let myself, of my capacity to plan or not to, of my soul’s needs, of this entire perspective of my life. I can make choices. I don’t have to be so driven. Joy begins in me when I allow myself space.

Journal 3

(No job, no income, no plan for tomorrow, nothing has worked)

Permit yourself to be taught. Give yourself room, flexibility. If things don’t come, act on Plan B, C, D, F.

Picture a cobwebby room with hanging plants and brown lace and bright, bright sunlight steaming through a hundred windows. Old chairs and books and toys. Some place to rest while you wait and think about the joy of the Lord deep inside in spite of everything falling apart around you.

Journal 4

Psalm 100:3 We are His people and the sheep of His pasture.

I am so glad this is a fact. That I am known, understood, and things do not just happen without Your input. I’m glad that my job is as simple and complex as to only trust. There’s the joy factor.

Journal 5

Psalm 63:3 Because Your mercy is better than life, my lips will praise Thee. v. 5. My soul is satisfied with marrow and fatness, and my mouth offers praises with joyful lips.

Praise. Do I know anything about it? I know the Lord. That is enough. Teach me to lay on the surface of my life and through and through the innermost parts this praise with joyful lips.

Menu

Home Page
Reflections
New Beginnings
The Altar
Time Capsule
About Joy
Contact

Joy Be

©2007, Joy Becker