A Negative Book Review

My friend Dan’s recent post about all the ways a word like “not” can actually be positive, rather than negative, made me chuckle. I’ve recently finished his second book, “God’s Wisdom in Proverbs”,  (published in a single year, alongside The World-Tilting Gospel, but who’s counting) and have found myself describing it almost exclusively with the word “not”, albeit in a positive way.  Namely:

 

1. It is not a desert-dry, academic, straight textual commentary (praise God).

One of the main challenges I have with single-book commentaries, especially Old Testament ones, is the way their authors place themselves at a distance from their material. It’s as if they’re holding the book at arms length, unwilling to be personally engaged by it.  Not so with this one. Dan writes both pastorally, and personally. He has the academic chops to wield Hebrew phrases and argue historical issues with the best of them, and it shows. But none of that is an end in itself. Dan writes like a pastor who wants to use every tool at his disposal to see his readers not just engaged by God’s wisdom, but changed by it.

 

2. It is not a typical cutesy moralistic devotional (praise God). Dan spends a full 160 pages laying down foundational concepts about Proverb’s authorship, the proverb as a literary genre and its key idea- “skillful living in the fear of Yahweh.” He continually shows how that theme’s context is set in the rest of Scripture, grounded in the truth that God’s wisdom is only available, valuable, and essential for those who have been adopted through faith in Jesus.

  

3. It is not simple read – because Proverbs is not a simple book (not matter how many people write about is as if it is a magic instruction guide for Your Best Life Now ™). This came as somewhat of a revelation to me, and a relief, to be honest. It’s the simplistic treatment of Proverbs as a collection of pithy sayings for all and sundry that has frustrated me. The early ground work that Dan lays down reveals why a simple reading of Proverbs yields a simplistic understanding of it.  But…..

 

4. It is not a difficult read, either. Dan writes in the lively, witty, personal style to which his loyal blog readers are accustomed. (See also point 1.) Make sure you you’ve swallowed your coffee before you read the section on one of his applications of godly wisdom in marriage relating to resolving disputes about the location of the toilet seat.

 

5. It does not embrace typical arguments about Prov. 22:6 being a promise.

How many parents have wrestled with guilt over their real or perceived inadequacies and how they will surely spiritually maim their child for life, based on their belief that this verse is a guarantee? Dan frees all such parents from their guilt by examining various common interpretations of this verse, and stacking them up against the Hebrew text. Ironically, Dan’s careful exegesis reveals the warning that does exist in this verse – that a child left to his own way will be trapped by it, but a child taught by loving parents to live skillfully in the fear of Yahweh will thrive.

 

7. It does not speak to one particular audience. More scholarly types expecting a typical crusty academic tome might be surprised (hopefully pleasantly so) at the way Dan interacts personally with the text. Lay readers might not be sure of why Phillips spends the length of time he does dealing with issues around authorship (although they likely will after they’ve read the answers, and will hopefully have learned why it was a good question to ask in the first place!). And even though Phillips is clearly modeling a pastoral approach to teaching the book as he writes the book, the final appendix on how to teach Proverbs should be required reading by current and aspiring seminary students. In fact, I can think of no better application of for this book than as the text for a Sunday school class, taught by a young, teachable seminary student. The class will be blessed, and so will the teacher.

 

8. The Epilogue guarantees that you will not read the book just once.  I do confess that as I dug into the section on skill in godly child-training, I began to feel that familiar weight of guilt over my many failures as a mother. Solomon’s admonitions to parents are many, varied, and urgent. No doubt that is why Dan chose to save my favorite part of the book, the Epilogue titled “A Word to the Wise” to the end. In it, Dan, like the pastor he is, anticipates the burden of someone feeling, on this first reading, that she can never, ever measure up to all God lays out. He then shows clearly from the rest of Scripture how Jesus was and is the one who measures up to God’s standard on our behalf, and how our trust in Him makes God our Father, who speaks to us as a Father about how we are to live as His children. Suddenly, instead of running away from Proverbs, we want to run back to it. Dan says it will prompt a second reading. I think it will prompt a lifetime of them.

 

I guess that’s my “negative” way of saying – get my friend’s book and read it ; you will not be disappointed, and you will not be unchanged. 

Closing Spidery Thoughts….

Whenever I tell the story of my faith journey (sorry, couldn’t resist) to people, the same kinds of questions come up. To close things out (so that I can finally get on to other important topics like what I’ve been doing, and what I’m hoping to do next), here are those questions, with some, as short as I can make them, answers.

Q: I know what (college/church) you went to. Are you honestly saying that you didn’t learn these things there?

Well, no. But also, yes.

Not hearing something because it wasn’t said, and not hearing something because you weren’t paying attention, are two very different things. It’s absolutely possible that my immaturity closed my ears and eyes to what was right in front of me.

But….

(Warning: Tricky, potentially self-sabotaging, honesty alert:)

In the years since I left, I’ve listened in on numerous chapel talks and sermons given at both places. To this day, in both places, I still hear a lot more about what we are to do for God, than what God has done for us in Christ. And it wasn’t until I more clearly understood the latter, that I began to be clearer about how the former is even possible. It’s a little like playing a piece of piano music, where one hand carries the melody, and the other the accompaniment. It’s one thing to play all the notes in the right sequence. But if you don’t apply consistent extra weight to the line carrying the melody, the melody gets lost. Where I was, the gospel line was played. It just got played with less emphasis than I needed. The law line, on the other hand, was deafening, at least to my ears.  That’s still the way I hear it played today.  Maybe that’s because my hearing is off. Maybe a lot of people really like hearing it that way, or need to hear it that way. I’ll leave it to my betters to sort and measure the implications of those things.

Q. Isn’t it possible that you just weren’t really saved until a few years ago??

Of course! There was such a delta (to borrow an old-life marketing term) between my thinking and doing before this happened, and after, that I’d be remiss not to consider it. But I have to say no. Even though I can’t think back to my college years without mentally cringing in shame at how immature I was, a more objective assessment of how what I loved and hated changed tells me otherwise. Two examples: Before I was saved, I hated to sing about God, and I neither cared to read the Bible, nor was able to understand it. After that fateful day in my dorm room, both of those things changed. I loved to sing about god, and suddenly the Bible made sense. It made sense enough that when I was, at one point, dating an unbeliever, and knew I was hardening my heart against repenting and breaking it off, I refused communion one Sunday. I knew from God’s Word, I was in deep spiritual doo-doo.

That’s not the heart of an unbeliever, IMHO. Just the heart of an immature one, desperately needing help, but not knowing what kind of help she needed. That thought has huge implications too, ones that I will come back to write about one day. We are all immature, and in need of spiritual help, every day.

Q. So, are you some kind of closet Charismatic, just putting on a happy cessationist mask so that Dan doesn’t unload a giant bazooka of Bible on you? What’s with the ecstatic experience??

Well, first, it wasn’t ecstatic so much as kind of heavy and overwhelming. But as I said in the post, I didn’t walk away hearing or believing anything that wasn’t already in Scripture, had I had the good sense to look for it or study it. But I wasn’t sensible. I was physically exhausted, and spiritually malnourished. And God was merciful to point me, in a somewhat atypical way, to where nourishment and rest, truth and power, could be found:

In God’s Word. In His Spirit. And in all that is mine because my life is hidden in His Son.

Here’s what’s interesting, and hopefully, the right note on which to end:

 

Before this happened, I hadn’t prayed for it to happen.

And, to this day, I haven’t prayed for it to happen again. Or rather, I have prayed for it to happen in a different way. Why? Because in the years since, as I have grown in my understanding of who God is, of what His Word is, of all that is mine in Him, I haven’t needed to. Do I pray expectantly each Sunday? Oh, more than ever. Do I even pray specifically for the Holy Spirit to move powerfully in my life or in the life of those I love? Of course. Paul prayed that way. So I pray that way too.

I’ve learned I don’t have to stand on top of God’s Word as a means to some higher, more supernatural experience. I simply have to stand under God’s Word, sit under it, rest under it, and take it into my soul. And that’s a lesson I’ll never need to unlearn.

Fuzzy Slippers and Toxic Spider Spray (Part the Second)

I’ve been wrestling with how to describe accurately how God rescued me by showing me what I’d been missing about the gospel. You see, it wasn’t one thing, so much as a collection of things, initiated through one (seemingly) subjective experience, and two books. So if you’ll forgive the fuzzy (ha! I made a funny!) chronology, here’s what happened:

A bathroom stall and two books

One Sunday, we loaded up our (at the time) little family of four for the thirty-five minute sojourn to church. Some of you are blessed to sit under teaching that makes the weekly battle with carseats and morning tantrums and barking shins on stubborn strollers worth the fight. Suffice it to say, at that time, we weren’t. I’d taken to praying silently on the way up for God to give me one moment – one song, one sentence, one word with a friend – that would give me something true and hopeful to hold on to. And in His goodness, He would.
This particular week, we sang a song I’d not heard before, an old hymn set to new music:

Before the throne of God above,
I have a strong and certain plea,
A great High Priest whose name is love,
Who ever lives, and pleads for me.
When Satan tempts me to despair,
And tells me of my guilt within,
Upward I look, and see Him there,
Who made an end of all my sin.

What happened next might make some of you firm cessationist friends a little twitchy, so move the beverages away from the laptop, ‘K?

As we sang, my mind and heart was utterly overcome by the reality of what we were singing – that God loved me, and that He was for me.

I was so overwhelmed that I began to sob, right there in my usual pew not far from the front. I didn’t sob loudly, of course. I didn’t fling myself onto the floor – I was a Baptist, for goodness’ sake – we have rules about these things. But I did flee the main sanctuary, for the sanctuary of the ladies’ restroom. And for the next twenty minutes I sat, where it is customary to sit in such places, and I wept.
I wept under what felt like an enormous weight – not the usual weight of despondency and frustration, but this time, the heavier weight of an astounding, cosmic contradiction – the perfect love of a perfectly holy God – for me.

I felt the weight of that truth, not so much lifting my burden, as covering it, then crushing it, until it was gone.

After some time, I gathered myself and headed to the infants room, where leaning over and nursing my daughter provided time for my blotchy face and swollen eyes to recover, as well as offer an easy excuse to my husband for why I’d been gone so long.

When we returned home, and the kids and Phil were doing what they did each Sunday afternoon (napping semi-peacefully), I did what I usually did – headed to our office to find a book to read. This week, the one that caught my eye was R.C. Sproul’s “The Mystery of the Holy Spirit”. I pulled it off the shelf and settled in to our well-worn recliner.

To be clear, I did not think for one minute that what I had experienced that morning had anything to do with the Holy Spirit. Being the faithful graduate of an evangelical school and mega-gelical church that I was, I’d spent very little time studying Him at all. I ‘d learned that focusing too much attention to Him would produce unorthodox and potentially damaging fruit in my life – too much saying “Jesus”, instead of His real name (“The Looord”), and hand raising – especially hand raising. I remember hearing the Holy Spirit described in one chapel as “the key in our spiritual ignition – He starts us up, and we put our foot to the pedal and drive.” But that seemed to be my problem. I wasn’t driving anywhere, at least, anywhere good.
Thanks to another “unusual” turn of events, everyone in the house slept extra-long, and I finished the book in one sitting. After everyone woke up, I peppered Phil with so many questions that he finally said, “You need to read one other book.” And he handed me one written by one of his college professors – David Needham’s “Birthright”. I sat down after dinner and read that in one sitting, too.

And it was reading those two books, and many more that followed, that marked the beginning of, first, a rediscovery of the gospel, and, equally important, the beginning of the changes in my heart and life that had been so missing before.

I’m in the Exterminator business (because my Father owns the company)

Before, I had thought of Christianity mostly as a series of intellectual and behavioral transactions. You stopped thinking one way, and you started thinking another. You stopped doing sinful things, and you started doing righteous things. God had got the ball rolling, but it was your job to keep it going. But what David Needham and R.C. Sproul taught me was that Christianity is first and foremost an identity built around Jesus, not me. It’s a literal and eternally permanent transformation of what it means to be a human being. It is about who I am, before it’s about what I then do (because of who I am).

Repenting of my sin and believing in Jesus had not just been an intellectual transaction!

It was a Spirit-ual one, too. Jesus had taken all of my sin (even the sin I had committed as Christian, even that which I would one day commit), and given me His righteousness. And because of that, God now loved me like He loved Jesus. His love was not conditional on what I did, but on Whose I now was. And beyond that, because I was His, I had (and had always had, from the moment I first repented back in college, even if I didn’t know it) His Spirit, to be in me and with me, to remind me of who I was. He is not just the key to my spiritual ignition; He’s the fuel in my spiritual engine. His power can never and will never run out. He reminds me of my new identity, and continually teaches me about what it looks like, and what it means to walk in it.

And part of my new identity means seeing sin the way He sees it, and treating it the way He does.

When God saw sin, He killed it. He didn’t cuddle it.

And the power He used to do it was the same power He’s given me.

I’m not a superhero. The power to kill sin doesn’t somehow emanate from my fingertips like the Iceman. It comes from Him.

It’s not the ineffective whacking away with the law that kills it; it’s the divinely-given, supernaturally potent, and gloriously fragrant gospel.

And if you belong to Him, then you have it too.

So, use it. Because of who, and Whose, you are.

Next time, I’ll finish up with the cornucopia of questions I’ve gotten when I’ve told people my story. Feel free to add yours.

Fuzzy Slippers and Toxic Spider Spray (Part One)

As scary as it was to spy that so-not-cuddly spider over the doorway of my living room, the scariest moment by far was watching it go from “dead” to not dead so fast. I had watched my mum wield her slipper like a pink fuzzy sledgehammer, pounding that thing into the carpet until it was so flat you could practically see through it.  But the minute the piece of paper touched it, up it sprang, with nary a limp in any of its eight furry legs to be seen as it raced to safety under the couch.

In hindsight, I should be thankful that we had some bug spray in the house and mum knew where to find it. If she hadn’t, who knows how long that spider would have taken up residence under there? If I hadn’t been leaving on a jet plane the next morning, I would have happily solved the problem by simply never going into the living room ever again.

Had that actually happened, it would have been a pretty eloquent metaphor for the early years of my Christian life. My understanding of what it meant to “be” a Christian was about as two-dimensional as that spider. I’d come to believe that God really did exist, which meant that the Bible was true, which meant that I was a sinner, which meant I needed to repent and believe in Jesus.

So, I’d done that.

And now I was doing the things that people who’d done that were supposed to do next.

I was reading my Bible (sometimes), praying (sometimes), going to church and Christian college, serving, and working as hard as I could at not sinning and being holy. (And especially looking holy. That was really important, particularly if you wanted to be marriageable, which I did.)

What with my PK upbringing, my degree from the Christian college Joseph and Mary would have sent Jesus to, and my ten years of almost seven day a week involvement at the big brand name evangelical church, I’d been filled nigh unto bursting with doctrine about the evils of sin and the importance of holiness. Kill sin! Be holy! Memorize Scripture! Stop watching bad things on T.V. and dating pagans! Serve serve serve! You can do it! You’ve repented and believed, so off you go and get to work! Righteousness! Holiness! Whack whack whack!

And, just like sometimes a fuzzy slipper does actually kill a spider, it worked, after a fashion. I did memorize Scripture. I did stop dating pagans (sometimes) and watching bad things on T.V. (sometimes). I did serve. And my efforts bore some fruit. Some surface sin patterns did stop. Some godly (looking) patterns did emerge.  And eventually I married a really godly guy and had a baby, which is, as we all know, the ultimate stamp of approval from God that you are a Godly Woman ™.

But for every surface sin or visible attitude I whacked at with Scripture, twice as many invisible sinful attitudes like pride, discontent, selfishness, a desperate and ever increasing need for human approval and achievement, rose up in their place. Many I didn’t recognize – it felt downright “natural” to mourn the loss of my old life and self (meaning, mind you, my single, independent, highly compensated and recognized life).  Many others I embraced. Some that I saw I kept hidden, but many that I didn’t recognize were surely out for everyone else to see. I’m sure I must have looked to God a lot like Alfred Molina did in the opening action sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark – unwittingly walking around with what felt like a warm furry coat. Only it, y’know, wasn’t.

Slowly I began to collapse under the weight of all that God required of me, of how utterly incapable I was at it, of how much of it I hated, how much of myself I hated.

I was beginning to see what God saw and it literally mortified me.

Which was exactly God’s plan.

Because then, and only then, would I truly begin to understand the beauty and power of the life-giving, sin-killing, Cross.

 

(….to be concluded)

 

Pet it, or Kill it?

When my kids were smaller, I was able to keep our home pet-free with the “I Can Only Handle One Pooping Creature At a Time” excuse. But once our littlest was, well, taking care of business all by her big self, that defense wouldn’t hold. So, several weeks ago, we welcomed little Coconut the hamster into our home. She’s the size of my palm and has bright beady eyes and soft fur. She seems to live to sleep, nibble on things, and run around her wittle hamster enclosure. And thanks to this ingenious, only-in-America, cage enhancement, the cleanup hasn’t been bad.

Prior to Coconut’s arrival, the last time I remember having a palm-sized, beady-eyed, fast-moving  furry creature in my house was December of 1989. I was packing my suitcases to emigrate to Ahmelleeka from the wilds of Melbourne, Australia. I was in the living room, mid-shirt-folding, when out of the corner of my eye, I spied… it. I shrieked in terror for my Mommy (or, er, Mummy, given my accent back then). Bless her heart, Mum recognized the unique timbre of my scream and came a-running, pink fuzzy slipper firmly in hand. Spying the furry creature, she proceeded to whack on it with the ferocity of a defensive mama, rapidly rendering what was once a three-dimensional creature, two-dimensional, in no time, um, flat.

Until, that is, she went to remove it from the carpet by upending a glass over it and sliding a piece of paper underneath. This is a pretty effective technique for removing slimy dead pests from your home without getting their slimy deadness on you. But it’s not so effective when what you presume is dead is only… mostly dead.

The minute the edge of the paper touched its seemingly expired body, the little pest resurrected itself. It literally went from flat back to furry in less than a second, and skittered at lightning speed to safety under the couch. Cue more screaming, now accompanied by jumping and arm flailing.

My mum raced to the kitchen, came back with a giant can of Napalm-derived bug spray, and proceeded to baptize the critter until it was undeniably and reliably dead. At least I think it was. By that point my Mum was too tired to pull back the couch to confirm its demise and removed the little so and so. She said she’d deal with it in the morning, and I never asked her because the next day I simply hopped on a pest-free airplane and left the country.

Problem solved.

Now at this point you’re probably thinking a variety of things, like:

1. Dang, that’s one tough mother.
2. Bug spray kills rodents? Who knew?
3. What kind of sick and twisted family slaughters cute, big-eyed, palm-sized furry wittle creatures by smashing them with slippers and then soaking them with noxious chemicals??? I am so unfriending you on Facebook.

To which I say in reply:

1. Oh, you have NO idea,
2. It doesn’t and,
3. Well, um, ours.  Call us sick and twisted all you want (and you’d be sooooo more right than you know), but, like most Australian families, we think that these furry little creatures don’t measure so high on the “cuteness worthy of living” scale:

CLICK.

You too? Yeah, thought so.

What made me say “AAAAAAAAAGGGHHH!!” instead of “awwwww” was a Brown Huntsman spider, and when I say it was palm-sized, I’m just referring to the size of its body. Each of its legs was the size and length of my finger.

Huntsman spiders aren’t common in America (praise be to God), but they are in Australia. The claim is that their bite won’t make you die, it’ll just hurt like you’ll want to, and also make you really, really sick. Which, in my book, merits the full pink slipper/death-inducing chemical treatment.

Every time.

I hadn’t remembered the Mum vs. Arachnid story in a while, but my friend Dan’s post today, and the ensuing lively dialog, refreshed my memory in a hurry. To wit, sometimes we treat sin like it’s a hamster, instead of a Huntsman spider. If we belong to Jesus, we ought not to be taking evil little creatures that can kill us, and give them the sequined carrier and velvet leash treatment.

They need to die.

He’s right.

But my other friend Terry raised an objection, of sorts. Namely, there’s not one person who’s truly capable of doing that.

And he’s right too.

Is this some kind of impossible-to-reconcile argument?

IMHLO*, I don’t think so. In fact, that seeming dichotomy is what the gospel is all about.

To be continued….

*In My Humble Layperson’s Opinion)

“…the pestilence that stalks in darkness (Conclusion)”

Well, no, of course I wasn’t just going to stop everything, pray some imprecatory prayers over my girls’ wittle heads and believe that God would miraculously deliver us.

But what I did need to do was stop acting as if this trial was somehow some aberration in God’s plan for me, as though all I needed was to get out of it as fast as possible so I could get back to my real life.

This was my real life. And nothing that’s really important about it had changed.

God was still God.

I was still His child.

And He still loved me, as much as He ever has in any other moment. Which is to say, as much as He loves His own Son.

And it those things were true, then I had to conclude that this trial itself was an expression of His love for me. There was nothing I was supposed to be doing, from which this trial was keeping me. This was what I was supposed to be doing. And as mundane and isolating and, frankly, gross as it was, if this is what God was sending to kill more of my self and give me more of Him, then I needed to receive it that way. Not in a “Whee, this is better than Disneyland!” kind of way. More of  a “Lord I believe. Help my unbelief “ kind of way.

So I stopped praying for this season to end,  and started praying for grace to make this season matter:

Grace to not give up…

Grace to know when to ask for help, and from whom…

Grace e to help the girls, and me, see this as an opportunity to learn extraordinary things about God,even in the midst of unpleasant and really ordinary circumstances…

And He gave it.

Over and over and over again.

We discovered poetry.

I didn’t (always) freak out (hugely, or out loud) each time I discovered the wretched insects were back.

I was comforted by the empathy of women who’d gone through it too, and, well, instructed by the attitude of those who (obviously) hadn’t.

I became thankful for the ordinary mundane-ness of chores like laundry and bath nights.

There were even moments, sitting out in the summer sunlight and combing through my daughters’ hair for the umpteenth day in a row, that felt more like worship than some Sunday morning services.

And if that’s not grace, I don’t know what is.

Now I’m not going to lie – it was still, to this day, the toughest season I’ve gone through so far as a mother. It was tough enough that I’ll spare you the long wearying story of how long it took, or the different things we did, to manage and, finally, praise God from whom all blessing flow, get rid of the wretched plague. It was tough enough that you may have noticed I’ve used what feels like an entire thesaurus of synonyms and euphemisms for our “little problem” because I just couldn’t bear to type the words for the longest time.

And I’ve not been so spiritual about this whole thing that my stomach no longer lurches every time I see a daughter’s finger go near her scalp, or that I’ve pretty much banned my girls from going to the movies (those cloth seats are major infestation sources), or that I don’t shudder in fear as I look at all the dressup clothes in my youngest daughter’s classroom. But, I can now honestly say this:

There are far bigger trials than lice.

Do you know what a miracle of grace it is that I can say that and mean it?  Six months ago, getting rid of this plague was the focus of my whole world.

So I’ll just say it again.

There are far bigger trials than lice.

There are financial trials, and real health trials, and marriage collapses and wayward children, and all manner of relationship crises that seem just as interminable, just as hopeless, and accompanied by a whole lot more suffering than endless laundry and a little social stigma.

But God took that relatively small trial and used it to teach me some very big and very good things about God, things that I never would have known apart from it. And so, as strange as it may sound, I’m thankful for it. Not that I don’t regularly pray that it never, never, never happens again. But still, I’m thankful.

And that’s a miracle.

And if God can do that kind of a miracle in and through my little trial, then He can do it in and through your trial, big or small.

You will not fear the terror of the night,
nor the arrow that flies by day,
nor the pestilence that stalks in darkness,
nor the destruction that wastes at noonday.

A thousand may fall at your side,
ten thousand at your right hand,
but it will not come near you.

You will only look with your eyes and see the recompense of the wicked.

Because you have made the LORD your dwelling place
— the Most High, who is my refuge—
no evil shall be allowed to befall you,
no plague come near your tent.

For he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways.

On their hands they will bear you up,
lest you strike your foot against a stone.

You will tread on the lion and the adder;
the young lion and the serpent you will trample underfoot.

“Because he holds fast to me in love, I will deliver him;
I will protect him, because he knows my name.
When he calls to me, I will answer him;
I will be with him in trouble;
I will rescue him and honor him.
With long life I will satisfy him and show him my salvation.”

Psalm 91:6-16 ESV

“…the pestilence that stalks in darkness (part 3)”

Oh, you thought I meant last Friday? Sorry about that. To be honest, some of my reasons for procrastinating on finishing this fun little series are lame and one is, as you’ll eventually see, somewhat understandable.

So, before this story is a long as the adventure it’s about, let’s just fast forward to the moment, about a month or two after the bugs that shall not be named took up residence in my house, and had stubbornly refused to vacate, when I officially Hit. The. Wall.

I was sitting at my dining room table tearfully looking at websites like this one, pondering whether I just needed to do the all-American thing and spend a small bucketload of money and outsource the problem. It’s not like we have that kind of money just idly sitting in a corner begging to be spent on such things, but we could have managed. And I knew that I was coming very close to the very frayed end of my spiritual and physical rope.

But before I clicked “Book Appointment”, I spotted my Bible. For some reason, I recalled this post from my bloggy brother Frank, and so turned to Psalm 118. And read this:

“Out of my distress I called on the Lord;
the Lord answered me and set me free.
6 The Lord is on my side; I will not fear.
What can man do to me?
7 The Lord is on my side as my helper;
I shall look in triumph on those who hate me.

8 It is better to take refuge in the Lord
than to trust in man.
9 It is better to take refuge in the Lord
than to trust in princes.”

It occurred to me that David was a man of considerable resources when he wrote those words. He had lots of men to hide behind and protect him. He had money and armies and lots of land in which to hide. And he knew that none of those things would ever be enough, even on their very best day, to defeat his enemies, unless God was with him. It’s better to hide behind the LORD than behind resources.

And as I sat there and continued crying, I began to meditate on just who this LORD is that the all powerful King David trusted in more than all his money and military. This was the LORD who at one point, actually sent an entire swarm of tiny bugs to plague a nation. (And I will note right here that if you study the entire story, God sent and then recalled all manner of plagues to the Egyptians, but He never recalled the bugs. There’s no mention of what happened to the bugs. Wanna take a wild guess where I think they ended up??? On the heads of millions of kids, that’s where. More on that later.)

God used a swarm of bugs to accomplish His purposes in Egypt; God was using a swarm of bugs to accomplish his purposes on Torrington Ct. (And just to clarify, they were never as severe as a swarm, but that’s relative when you’re talking about crawling insects in your daughters’ hair)

So, just what were His purposes? Well, not the same as His purposes for the Egyptians, that’s for certain! And I’ll confess, that at first, I couldn’t think of any that were really, you know, great. But if I truly believe that my God is the exact same God as David’s, and that He loved me the same way He loved David, I needed to stop trusting in all these man-made methods and money and everything else, and just sit back and trust God.

And God would take the bugs away, just as surely as He’d sent them.

Right?

Because We Just Haven’t Had Enough Fun This Summer….

we’re going looking for more here. Be back Friday with the ending to my last tale of adventure with God’s littlest creatures, and probably more to follow. Mosquitoes? Ticks? What other tiny evidences of the Fall will pit their tinier little wits against one mother’s fierce mind and fiercer will and die a gloriously apocalyptic death??

Stay tuned.

“…the pestilence that stalks in darkness” (Part 2)

I don’t remember if we had plans for the Saturday we discovered we’d been visited by the lice plague, but if we had any, we cancelled them. I headed off to the store to find the most noxious, poisonous stuff on the shelf (I wanted the suckers gone – I’d deal with the damage to the girls’ DNA later). Phil began stripping beds, and the girls loaded their copious supply of stuffed animals and dress up clothes into trashbags to live in garage Siberia for the requisite two weeks.

We did everything by the book – pulled all the jackets and sweaters out of the closet, threw away the girls’ enormous quantity of headbands, brushes and scrunchies, pulled every washcloth, towel and item of clothing into hampers to be washed. After checking for and discovering signs of nits in another girl’s hair, I took on the responsibility of dealing with all the girls’ hair – the cutting, the washing, the combing, the washing again, the drying and the final checking. I’d had this, I knew what to look for, my eyes are younger and my will is fiercer than, well, almost anyone’s.

By the next morning, I was confident we’d at least gotten the girls’ hair dealt with, so I decided to send all three girls to church with Phil, while I kept the washer and dryer on overdrive. That is, until Emily, all dressed and ready for Sunday School, ran to the bathroom, then returned several minutes later declaring that she’d just lost her breakfast in the best place to lose it.

Okey dokey, then.

So two girls went to church with Daddy, while Emily, in between trips to the vomitorium, helped me transfer and fold laundry. And in case you think I’m some kind of evil Egyptian taskmaster for having my poor sick daughter do laundry while suffering from the stomach flu, this is where I state for the first of many times what an amazing girl my firstborn is.  Emily handles stomach bugs with more stoicism and cheer than any adult I know. She’s miserable for about two minutes before and one minute after the dreaded purge, but her firstborn girl genes are incredibly strong. She says nothing, just disappears, returns and announces she feels great, and then proves it in some kind of hilarious, jaw-dropping way. In this particular instance, she proved it by cheerfully, willingly loading and folding load after load of laundry while talking my ear off. I can’t explain it; I can only be incredibly grateful for it, and remind you that all marriage futures bids can be directed to my husband.

But back to the story. By the next morning, every washable thing had been washed, every sprayable thing had been sprayed, and Emily was eating everything in sight to make up for the previous day’s, um, whatever. Which was a miracle and a blessing, because this was also the morning I was scheduled to head up to San Franscisco for the first of two days with that fancy consulting company what had been interviewing me for the fancy job. Remember them? So off I headed to the city, and off the girls went to school, and I breathed a sigh of relief that that little adventure was over and done with.

Until several days later, when I found out it wasn’t. And so around we went again with the washing and the combing and laundry-ing. And several weeks after that. And several weeks after that. Rinse and repeat,ahem, literally, through May, June, and the first part of July.

By the middle of June, I knew this was no longer a short-lived annoyance. This was a bone fide plague, a Job-ean scaled trial with no discernable end in sight. What was worse – it wasn’t exactly the kind of trial that could be offered up for public prayer at church, or pleas of help on Facebook. It was without a doubt, a trial custom-designed to hit square in the center of every vulnerability and weakness I had.

And with Phil working long hours and often travelling, it was a trial that I was going to have to handle largely alone.

Except that, of course, I wasn’t alone at all.

“…the pestilence that stalks in darkness” (Part 1)

Some Christians seem to do every day life well, only to hit the wall when a big trial hits.

Me? I’m pretty much the opposite.

Layoffs, sudden unscheduled hospital visits – those are the times when it seems God chooses to be merciful in helping me hold close to Him and my family as we move through it. It’s in the every day that the war between the kingdom of Rachael and the Kingdom of God really wages. There are seasons when the child-raising and housework and errand running and meal making began to wear at my soul like the slow but ceaseless dripping of water on a rock in a cave in the middle of the night.

I’d never imagined what it might be like if I suddenly found myself in one of those “big” trial moments, cleverly disguised as everyday life.

But I found out anyway. And the answer wasn’t what I expected.

Our story begins the weekend after I’d come home from my unscheduled hospital visit. Well, technically, the week before that. (Yes, that would be the end of April, for those of you keeping track at home.) The girls’ little two-room school had sent home notices about one of those pesky bugs that they’re required to warn you about. We’d noted it, but there’s nothing like a sudden detour to the emergency room to distract you a little.

On the Saturday after I’d come home and was holding court on the couch while dear friends from a former church came bearing food and encouragement, I noticed that one of my daughters had been missing for longer than normal. When she came into the living room with wet hair saying that she’d just taken a shower because she’d gotten some ants in her hair while she’d been playing outside, I said the obligatory “oh, well okay then!” aloud, with teeth gritted into what I prayed was a cheery smile, while inwardly I began hyperventilating.

As soon as my friends bid farewell, I took my sweet daughter out into the bright sunlight and quickly confirmed that my worst fears were true.

My girl had lice.

I tried to be calm and motherly for her sake, as she wailed at her sisters to keep away, like a miniature leper. I even sat with her, letting her lean her head against my chest and cry, as I thought about Jesus and the lepers and inwardly beseeched God to be merciful and keep the bugs away from my clothes. I’d had lice as a child, badly, more than once.  I have distant but still vivid memories of foul-smelling shampoo and social disgrace. I couldn’t believe some awful little unwashed wretch had given this to my daughter.  But he or she had, and here we were.

But, I told myself, those little bug-, um, things, had no clue who they were dealing with.

They were about to meet their Armageddon.

Or so I thought.

As it turns out, for quite a while, it appeared I’d actually met mine.