The Sylvr Pen

Five Minute Friday‘s prompt word this week is FOCUS.

So, go:

I love stereographic pictures. You know the ones I mean, where there’s a second picture hidden in the one you can see naturally with your naked eye?

To see the hidden object, you have to focus beyond the obvious, look through and past the easily recognized pattern as if you were peering up the highway through a dirty, rain-spattered windshield (avoiding focus on the window but peering past it to some point up the road instead.)

Once upon a time I couldn’t see those hidden things at all, when everyone else in the room said they could. I don’t know why, but in recent years when I picked up one of those books at Barnes and Noble on a coffee and dessert night out and tried the exercise, it worked! “Wow!” I kept saying as new views, one after another, would appear on successive pages. A whole new world was emerging before my eyes.

All excited about what I was seeing, I tried to get others to look, too. But no one in the family seemed interested but me.

This reminded me of my experience as a new believer in Christ. Before that I’d read (parts of) the Bible and had thought I understood what I was reading, just in obvious practical terms. But afterward, suddenly I was seeing beyond the obvious, and exclaiming “Wow! So that’s what that means!” But at that time there didn’t seem to be anybody around my life that was interested in that view!

All this in turn makes me think of Colossians 3:2 and of the song “Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus.” When you focus there, “the things of earth will grow strangely dim.”

Please give that me far vision every day, dear Lord!

“Open my eyes, that I may see wonderful things…” (Psalm 119:18).

~~~~~

Do you make a to-do list? If not on paper, then in your mind (as in, “I’ve gotta _____, and _____, and _____, and soon!”) It seems almost essential, doesn’t it?

But… do you have another list, recorded on paper or unwritten, of your hearts’ real desires as to time use? If so, are the two of them friends, in sweet harmony—or battling rivals?

This is the weekday I’ve dubbed To-do’s-day, and after the last post I published, my mind is mulling over the threat of to-do tyranny. As I go through the hours, checking item after item, I’m simultaneously checking off thought after thought… things I want to share here, with whoever might find them enlightening or helpful.

One thing my thoughts scroll back to is an interesting exercise I once did: a to-do-list scrutiny.

I had triaged tasks and activities like many people might, having rewritten the list in three separate sublists: “Musts,” “should’s,” and “would-like-to’s.”

[At this point you might want to stop and quickly categorize your own list, written or mental, and maybe add on a few things that would fit each category—and not read anything more till you do.]

…After I categorized all the items, then sat back and looked at the whole arrangement, I was struck with what it revealed. If I didn’t laugh, I should have. Although maybe it was more sad than funny. What it revealed was… well, maybe a little ridiculous.

Shortly before that exercise I’d been learning about Jesus’ priorities which He put before His disciples as guides to navigate their lives. What I was now seeing was how inverted the priorities of my lists were! What I’d called musts were mostly trivialities, with usually very fleeting, rather than permanent, results. The should’s weren’t much better. It was only in the “would-like-to” list that I found myself approaching His triage of importance.

In a coming post, probably the next one, I’d like to share what a word study on “first” in the New Testament is revealing to me. Especially telling is what Christ called first priorities—and how they fit, or don’t—with the typical American to-do list, and how they fit with the earnest desires of my heart… and just possibly yours.

~~~~~

So I’d asked myself, those twenty years ago [as my journal of that date reminds me], “If you were one of the churches of Revelation 2-3, which would you be?”

Which description did I recognize immediately as…
“Oh, that’s me! O, woe is me”?

The first one.

Ephesus. The exhausted, overburdened, yet persevering one, laboriously pressing on, getting all that growing mountain of stuff done, zealous for truth and righteousness and worthy accomplishments and good ole Yankee work ethics (before Yankees existed).

Yep, that was myself at that time in my life, for sure.

That might look noble, but it isn’t, not out of balance like that. Just take a gander at what it can lead to: “You’ve left your first love.” Wow.

Ongoing exhaustion, or sideline preoccupation, can do nasty things in one’s life, especially to relationships. It was killing the Ephesians’ relationship with the Lover of their souls!

Likewise with mine!

I’ve heard this verse, Revelation 2:4, misquoted often. So let’s get this straight (I emphasize to myself): It doesn’t say “ You have lost your first love.” It says “you have left” it!

Left, as in wandered away. Strayed off from. Drawn aside, then down the embankment!

I’d gotten sidetracked, long-term. I’d been trying, trying, to “do it all” and a little more besides, to be the perfect homestead wife and home school mom and Christian woman and helpful church person and house remodeling co-worker and… all the rest of it. And I knew my love for Christ wasn’t gleaming like it once had.

I don’t know that I recognized overwork and overemphasis on accomplishments as a crucial factor at the time. Merely cutting down on work(s) wouldn’t have solved the love problem anyhow. I just knew my experience of God was not what it had been.

But I didn’t know what to do about it.

So I kept asking God, in desperate cries, “What should I do? What should I do?”

Why wasn’t He answering? I felt hopelessly tangled in my quadruple-knotted life.

Actually, He was answering all along.

I don’t know how long it took me to look more closely at the convicting passage and see the simple three-part answer right there, in verse 5:

1. “Remember from where you have fallen,”
2. “Repent” (Do a U-ey)
3. “And do the first works” (which several translation versions interpret as “do the things you did at first”).

Here’s where my journal of the time picked up, pondering these instructions, and looking back to the beginning of my life in Christ:

What did I do at first?

It’s interesting what I didn’t do: I didn’t go to church [I didn’t have one yet] (although I did go to Al Anon when I could, and knew some Christians there). I didn’t manage a rigid discipline of the externals of my life: time schedules, money-in-envelopes, rigid Bible study deadlines, etc. I didn’t have a formal “ministry,” nor was I involved in one.

What I gave, whether money, encouragement, intercessory prayer, or “a word from the Word,” sprang “spontaneously” from a motivation within me, there because of the presence of God—“the love of God shed abroad in [my] heart.”

What did I do that I don’t do now? Let’s see. I think I spent more private time in exclusive fellowship with God (Even [as a single parent] with a toddler, I found time). I kept a journal which recorded heart’s prayers, attempts at learning and following God’s way, and insights and promises from His word.

I looked to Him for strength and guidance—a lot. And I spent time in His word—not covering someone’s Bible study, but savoring the beauty of each gem of wisdom and truth I plucked from that vast treasure chest…

Something else I learned to do back then: praise God when things were going “wrong,” thank Him in and for everything.

So there you have it: Looking back showed the way back, and little by little, as I started  making places for the “first deeds” again, love “came back,” too, shining lovely.

~~~~~

Linked to

Random Journal Day &

So I asked the question. Asked it of myself as well as him: “If you were one of the churches of Revelation 2 and 3, which one would you be, right now? Which church description would fit you best?

This was back during the year of that “time capsule” journal I told about two posts back. It was our last home schooling year. He was a high school senior, a good head taller than I, and standing well on his own two feet, but we still did this, started off our day with something Bible.

We were exploring and pondering the first few chapters of that great apocalyptic book, using an interesting study guide from Discipleship magazine. Now we’d come to the revealed Christ’s message to the different churches, and I thought this would be a good guiding question to keep the whole study close to our own individual lives.

I couldn’t answer for him. Quite frankly, I don’t remember how he responded. But I know the answer I quickly arrived at for myself–because it troubled me, a lot.

I’ll share that answer tomorrow along with the “What can I do about it?” struggle that followed.

But first I thought I’d give you the chance to explore the question for yourself…

Seven churches were named, addressed, and described.

Ephesus, in Revelation 2:2-6

Smyrna, in Rev 2:9-10

Pergamos, in Rev 2:13-16

Thyatira, in Revelation 2:19-25

Sardis, in Revelation 3:1-5

Philadelphia, in Revelation 3:8-10

Laodicea, in Revelation 3:14-19

You can read the passages right here, in the NKJV, by hovering over the references, or in fuller context in your own Bible, or by clicking on the reference above.

Go ahead and give it a think. It may do you a world of good to consider as we embark on the second month of this momentous new year. It certainly did me good that’s lasted, right up to the present hour!

~~~~~

Quiet. Just the word itself soothes my soul, unfurrows my brow, lifts a burden from my shoulders I didn’t know was there. Quiet. How my soul needs quiet at regular intervals, preferably in long, large doses.

Now more than ever. It is such a noisy time. Chatter everywhere. So many voices competing, along with the traffic roars, the beepers and buzzers and telephone tones, the music pulsing, pulsing in stores, so distracting I can’t make clear choices and just want to flee.

It surprised me to see, in reading that old journal from twenty years back, how overloaded and stressed my life could get even in that time. I recall there was no Facebook then, or Twitter, or Pinterest, or everyman’s blogging, and though we had a computer, we didn’t even use email yet.

Now, on beyond email, the clamor is astounding. And it’s more important than ever, for me at least, to turn it all off, come aside “to a quiet place,” and give my own additional noisy head-chatter time to run down within me as well, to find my strength in quietness and rest one blessed day in seven.

This is the gift He has given. In asking us to give up and give over and give back this time in honor of Him, tithe-like, He actually prescribes just what our own needy souls are secretly panting for, and gives—“not as the world gives”—His peace.

~~~

In returning and rest you shall be saved;
In quietness and confidence shall be your strength.
-Isaiah 30:15

~~~~~

Linking with Five Minute Friday, where the week’s prompt word is… you guessed it–and Sharing His Beauty.