I Know Why the Old Ladies Cry

When I was young, I would see old ladies at church cry during songs about heaven and wonder what was so upsetting that they would actually cry about it. Do you know what I mean? Whenever we would sing or hear songs about heaven and seeing Jesus—songs like “Until Then” or “I Bowed on My Knees and Cried Holy” or “When We See Christ”—the tissues would come out and the tears would come down and they would be boo-hooing somethin’ awful. Which left me completely puzzled.

I didn’t understand what the big deal was back then. They’d have tears streaming down their faces and I’d be looking on in amazement. I’d think to myself, It’s just a song. It’s just a pretty song about a pretty place that we’ll all go to someday. No need to get all worked up about it.

Until recently. Now I’m one of the old ladies.

I went to a funeral this morning. The father of one of my best friends died suddenly a few days ago so we had a beautiful memorial service for him this morning at our church. My friend’s brother and her husband (who is also my pastor) both delivered tender and eloquent messages of love and grace about a well-lived life. Between their presentations, another friend, our worship pastor, sang “I Bowed on My Knees and Cried Holy.” And at the end of the service we all sang “Until Then”:

This weary world with all its toil and struggle

May take its toll of misery and strife;

The soul of man is like a waiting falcon;

When it's released, it's destined for the skies.

But until then, my heart will go on singing;

Until then, with joy I'll carry on;

Until the day my eyes behold the city,

Until the day God calls me home.

By the end of that song, I had a tissue out (which I fortunately found in my purse) and was trying to clean up the mess my tears had made with my mascara. I was boo-hooing with all the rest and the best of us old ladies.

So now I know why.

When you’ve lived on this earth a while--long enough to get “old”--you get weary. You learn what “toil and struggle” are like and your soul becomes that “waiting falcon.” You get tired of going through the same struggles over and over and over and over . . . you get the picture. Whether it’s physical pain or emotional difficulties or financial problems or whatever, life is just plain hard. For everyone.

But that’s not why we’re crying.

We have something to sing about in the meantime. "Until then” we can “carry on” . . . with joy! The fact that someday God is going to call us “home” gives us a reason to keep pressing on while we are in this foreign land. Our citizenship is in another Kingdom and we serve a God who loves us and has purchased and empowered us through the blood of His son, Jesus Christ.

Jesus said to his disciples, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in me. My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. You know the way to the place where I am going” (John 14:1-4).

So we get a little homesick for that place. And that's why us old ladies cry.

The Master Magician

I love to watch a skilled magician. Many of them call themselves illusionists. They can hold my attention for hours as they challenge my perceptions of reality and defy me to explain their sleight of hand and amazing tricks.

One of my good friends, Terry Hedges, is a master magician. He is brilliant with card tricks but he really freaks my mind with his tricks where you think one thing is happening but it’s really something else entirely. For example, he was showing me some of his coin tricks one time and, before I knew it, my wristwatch was on his wrist! I never knew it was gone!

So how did he do it? Terry was able to remove my watch from my wrist and attach it to his own by getting my attention on something else. I’m just thankful he’s my friend so I got my watch back!

There are other things in life that work the same way. They get your attention focused on something so much that you miss out on other things entirely.

Worry works just like that. As a form of fear, worry works just as a magician would in our lives to distract us and get all of our attention focused on the “what if” and “could be” while we are completely missing the “right now.”

One of the biggest things I learned (mostly because my wise mother told me) when I was going through some major storms in life is to do what’s right in front of me. It’s amazing what happens when we do that . . . when we stop looking down the road at things that haven’t even happened yet and instead focus on what’s right in front of us to be done and cared for and completed.

To get back to me and my friend Terry . . . if I had been watching my wrist the whole time the master magician had been entertaining and distracting me with gold coins and playing cards, he wouldn’t have been able to sneak that watch off my wrist. I would have known the second he started unfastening that buckle. (I think I could have spotted him . . . Terry’s an exceptional magician so I’m really just trying to make a point here!)

“Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own” (Matt. 6:34, emphasis added). To apply this better to our lives, we might translate the word “trouble” in our minds as “responsibilities.”

When we spend all our time worrying about the “might be” we miss the “right now” of life. And many of those things that are in the “right now” are precious. They need tending and protecting and nurturing today, and we can’t do that effectively if we’re caught up in worry about things that haven’t and might never happen.

Pay attention to what’s right in front of you. Don’t let that old master magician Worry steal the watch off your wrist. He’s no friend . . . you might never get it back.

That's What You Got?

Have you ever walked out of a movie theater with a friend and asked, "What did you think?" and been utterly stunned at their response? When they said something like "I didn't like the music," or "I've never liked Hugh Jackman," or "The color of the whole thing seemed too blue...I hate when they do that." And you just want to scream, "Really? That's what you got?!? We just sat through two-and-a-half hours of movie time and you were stuck on the soundtrack??? Do you even know who Martin Scorsese is?"

I haven't written on my blog for several weeks now...very busy and not feeling especially well. But also nothing has particularly inspired and/or bothered me. Until this past weekend. Easter weekend. And now I've got something to say...still busy, not feel very well, but have to write about this.

I actually heard an ad on the radio that said, "Of course Easter is in the spring...it's the most beautiful time of the year!" What? Did someone just say that? Did someone have the audacity to say that our Lord Jesus was crucified and rose from the dead in the spring because it was prettier to do it then than, say, sometime in September?

That just brought to the surface a frustration that was building in me over the preciousness associated with Easter this year. I don't mind the pretty flowers and bunnies decorating everything in celebration of spring. It really is a beautiful time of year as everything is in bloom and the energy in the air is contagious and invigorating. But there is a line that we need to be careful not to cross, and that ad on the radio just jumped (or hopped) all over it.

I imagine Jesus walking through one of our stores--say, Wal-Mart or Target--and into the Easter section, and saying, "Really? That's what you got? I died on the cross, overcame the powers of death and sin, and rose on the third day, and this is where you take it?"

Of course, we could explain to him that we use Easter eggs to symbolize new birth. We could explain that the Easter bunny is...I don't know...I really don't have a clue how to explain that one. And we could point out that it's a celebration of springtime. 

And then we would tell him to just show up on Easter Sunday morning and listen to our church service...that he would be really impressed with the music then. 

Here's my bottom line: We Christians have been making a huge deal lately about keeping Christ in Christmas. How about we keep Christ in Easter? 

We know he is risen indeed...let's remind the world!

I'll Take Door #3

Years ago when I was teaching school, I was sitting around with some fellow schoolteachers trading stories about our classroom experiences. One of my friends taught kindergarten and told of a first-day incident with a very precocious kid. They had just returned from lunch and as soon as they walked back into the classroom, this little boy walked over to the center rug and lay down on a comfortable spot. My friend walked over and knelt down beside him, quietly whispering to him, “Honey, what are you doing?”

Without moving a muscle, the boy responded, “It’s naptime. I’m going to sleep.” My friend suppressed a laugh, and then said, “Sweetie, you’re in school now. We don’t have naptime.” The boy’s eyes opened as he looked at her in disbelief. She said, “Really. So go ahead and go back to your seat."

Reluctantly, the boy sat up. After a few moments of reflection, he slowly stood up. As he walked away, my friend could hear the child muttering, “Well, I sure didn’t sign up for this.”

And don’t we all know that feeling?

I’ve had times in my life that I’ve wished I was a contestant on Let’s Make a Deal, bartering with Monty Hall, Drew Carey, or Wayne Brady. I’ve wished he would say, “So, Lynn, do you want to keep your current life, or do you want to trade it for what we have behind Door #3?” And I’ve known I would pitch it all in for Door #3 in a second! To walk away with a pool table and a hanging lamp would be such an improvement!

All week, our Tennessee roads have been icy and our yards have been blanketed in snow. Our children have been out of school an entire week! In Tennessee! This is the South, for heaven’s sake! And it would be charming if we were hearing “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas…” on our radios, but it’s approaching the end of February and we’re getting tired of this. We did not sign up for this!

But this is such a relatively small thing. Life can hand out much more complicated obstacles that we certainly didn’t sign up for…illness, job loss, financial stress, rebellious kids, and so many other things that don’t feel like something we signed up for.

So what do we do? We’re in awful places in our lives and our options don’t include anything nearly attractive as a new pool table.

Some people begin making truly stupid choices, looking for ways to make the frustration and the inner stress go away. I won’t even begin to list here all of the bad choices a person might make when life becomes complicated…I don’t have to. We see them all around us. Some of us have made those bad choices. And some of us know that those choices just lead to further complications in life.

Our best choice when life gets hard…our only real choice…is the same choice when life is simple: Follow Jesus. We should follow him in the easy times of life; we should follow him in the difficult times of life.

Why? Because Jesus is the Light. He will always show us the way.

“When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, ‘I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life’” (John 8:12).

Sign up for that.

Marked for Life

Today is Ash Wednesday. Yesterday was Fat Tuesday, also known as Mardi Gras, which many of you have heard of, associating it with the craziness that goes on in New Orleans every year at this time. 

Today also begins a forty-day season known in the Christian church as Lent. Many of you already understand that Lent is the period of time leading up to Easter. The reason for its being forty days is tied to Jesus’ time in the wilderness of fasting and praying just before he began his ministry (see Matthew 4:1-11). Christians use those forty days to prepare our hearts and minds to fully celebrate Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection—his sacrifice for our sins and his victory over sin and death.

We begin that period with Ash Wednesday. It is a day to repent…to acknowledge our own shortcomings and our need for God’s grace in our lives. It is a day to grieve the sin that continues to oppress the abused, the disenfranchised, the needy in the world. It is a day to mourn the hearts that have yet to hear the good news and to lament the times that we have fallen short of the call of God on our lives to carry the message of God’s love in large and small ways to a needy world desperate to receive that gospel.

I grew up in the Baptist church and then joined the Nazarene church when I was seventeen. Ash Wednesday was not a significant part of our church calendar throughout most of my life. It’s only been in the relatively recent past that our local church has begun having an Ash Wednesday service. It has become an incredibly meaningful day of the year in my life; the evening service has a powerful effect on my heart.

Ours is not a highly liturgical church, meaning that we do not have a formal set of rites, a traditional sense of dress among our clergy, and a given series of readings. But for our Ash Wednesday service we borrow a tradition from the liturgical churches. Following communion, or the Lord’s Supper, one of the church elders will use ash to smudge a cross on each of our foreheads. This symbolizes the death of Jesus for our sins.

The first time I received a cross on my forehead, I immediately began weeping. Weeping, by the way, is not the same as crying. Weeping comes from a deep sense of grief, and I was grieving. That cross on my forehead brought home a deep sense of responsibility and a deeper sense of connection to the one who had taken the responsibility for me.

I play one of the keyboards at my church and when I returned to the keyboard, I was unable to see the music through my tears. All I could think was, Jesus died for me. Jesus actually died for me. Oh, thank you, Jesus!

After the service was over, we all left the sanctuary silently and somberly. What I had not prepared for was the vision that awaited me out in the foyer of the church. Every forehead I saw had an ashen cross smudged on it. Every single one. This time I started crying tears of joy.

Just before he went to be crucified, Jesus prayed to his Father, “I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one—I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” (John 17:22-23).

We were all marked for life. Oh, thank you, Jesus!

Change Your Lens

Photography is amazing. I love to sit down with a National Geographic and admire the powerful images taken by some of the world’s most skilled photographers in some of the most varied and remote parts of the world. I enjoy taking pictures too, but I cannot call myself a “photographer” in comparison to the people who take the shots for N.G. and other beautiful magazines.

I use a little digital camera and rely on my computer to adjust lighting, color, and other aspects of a particular photograph. But with a more expensive camera, the beauty is in the lens. I’ve watched as a knowledgeable photographer has been shooting pictures and, in seeking a different image, has decided to change the lens. You get an entirely different picture when you change the lens.

Have you ever known someone who sees the world “through rose-colored glasses”? My sister is one of those. Christie sees the world filled with gorgeous light and she goes around filling the world with that light. It’s not that she doesn’t know about the dark corners of the world, but she’s chosen her rose-colored lens to view life and it has made her—and the many people who know her and her Rose Water Cottage industry—very happy.

By contrast, do you know people who see the world through a dark, gray lens—or whatever sort of lens would drain all the color from the world? They see every event as potentially hazardous and they view the people in their life as troublemakers and burdensome. They can drain all the energy and happiness out of a room just by walking into it.

They need to change their lens.

Life is hard sometimes. And that “sometimes” can stretch into a very long time. But we all choose with which lens we will view life. Will we view life through the “My parents / my siblings / my spouse never loved me” lens and allow that to color how we view everything else in the world? Will we choose the “I’m not as good-looking / wealthy / healthy / strong / popular / educated as so-and-so” lens and use that to excuse our lack of effort in every area? Will we use the “My heart was broken” lens to keep us from ever trusting to love again?

I know this may be messing too close to home…stepping on toes here. I know that because this is something I’ve had to deal with…many things I’ve had to let go of in my own life. Bitterness I held onto for way too long that began to eat away at the joy and the grace everywhere else in my life.

So consider the lens the psalmist was looking for when he wrote this:

My tears have been my food day and night,
while people say to me all day long,
    “Where is your God?”
These things I remember as I pour out my soul:
how I used to go to the house of God
    under the protection of the 

    Mighty One
with shouts of joy and praise
    among the festive throng.

Why, my soul, are you downcast?
    Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God,
    for I will yet praise him,
    my Savior and my God. 

    (Ps. 42:3-5)

This is the sound of a lens being changed. This is the “hope” lens being put into place. And when we look through the lens of hope, everything looks better.

 

Let It Shake It Off

Shake it off and let it go.

It's funny that the two biggest pop songs of the past year had titles that mean basically the same thing. And if I had a nickel for every time I heard either one of them . . .

It’s also amazing how often I’ve found myself using those same phrases in conversations with friends lately . . . only to laugh that they are, indeed, straight out of pop tunes that have lit up every teenager’s iPod the last twelve months.

Too many of my friends are carrying around too much that they need to be turning loose. Letting go. Shaking off. It’s a common problem among moms, but not just parents. Many folks with compassionate hearts tend to hold onto other people’s problems as their own. We find out that someone we love is going through a difficult time or facing an awful challenge, so we internalize that problem and begin to carry it inside until it becomes our burden too.

Loving them does not mean owning their problems.

We see this problem or challenge as something we need to solve. We worry about what will happen in the lives of our friends and family members, and we own their issues as if they were our own obstacles to overcome. We create internal lists of our many difficulties and add stress to our life as we see all of these problems as our own.

We know how to pray for each other, so that’s not the problem. Many of us are wonderful “prayer warriors” and spend many hours lifting up other people’s lives to our loving heavenly Father. Part of the problem is that when we get up from our knees (physically or virtually), we reach down and pick the problem back up. It’s as if we’re saying, “Thanks for listening, God. Now I think I can really handle this better. I’ll let you know how things turn out.”

But a bigger problem is that these are not our problems in the first place . . . they’re other people’s problems. That doesn’t diminish the reality of each situation, but we should not be considering them our own issues.

A great book came out years ago called Boundaries by Drs. Cloud and Townsend. (I highly recommend this book for everyone!) It is very important to establish personal boundaries and only own those problems that are your own.

One of the biggest reasons to stop owning other people’s problems as your own—even your children’s and your spouse’s and your parents’—is that God does not give us grace for other people’s problems . . . only as they directly relate to being our own responsibility. In other words, if God has called you to counsel, guide, support, or have some other role with another person, God will give you the grace and wisdom for that purpose. But God will not give you the grace to worry about the problem; fear and anxiety will only exhaust you.

Matthew 6:26 says, "Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?" Can you imagine if a cardinal started worrying about what a blue jay was going to eat? What if a woodpecker started putting away seed for the nuthatch? Do you see how absurd that would get . . . quickly?

So shake it off.

Prayers gonna pray, pray, pray.