The Sylvr Pen

Just making known why I’ve been absent from the blogosphere lately. My dear computer is ailing. I think it has narcolepsy. It “goes to sleep,” and the screen goes dark, and I can’t navigate. Today, wonder of wonders, it’s letting me get this whole message typed and published! But it will be  some time before I will be able to publish posts. In the meantime, God bless you all!

So I did what Oswald Chambers said:  “Watch where God puts you into darkness, and when you are there, keep your mouth shut… listen, and God will give you a very precious message for someone else when you get into the light…” And he was right. 

When hard questions jump up out of the blue, or off the black and white—in life or your Bible reading—what should you do? Shove them under the carpet? Pretend they don’t exist? Give them a platitude answer to try to shut them up? Or write them down, ask God, and watch and wait till answers come?

I have learned to choose the last. At times I’ve kept a special notebook of what I call UAQ‘s. Un-Answered Questions. Atop a page I write the question. Then I skip a few pages before recording the next “UAQ,” leaving room for notes from scripture, life experiences, and other sources that shed light on it.

The visible questions help keep me alert for any relevant information God might provide.

I do all that because it’s from the dark place of nagging questions that my deepest spiritual learnings emerge, where my faith and understanding really grow.

“Unto the upright there arises light in the darkness.” -Psa 112:4

Those answers don’t usually emerge fast. Some take weeks, or months. Some take years! But once in a while, I “happen” onto something that opens up a whole new understanding rather quickly.

Of late some unanswered questions have stuck hard enough in my mind that I’ve needed no reminder at the top of a page—especially since troubling scriptures (in Job) echo troubling life experiences and observations.

I’m elated to say that just a couple of days of being quiet, like Oswald Chambers says above, considering carefully what God has brought to my attention in His word and elsewhere, and voila! Light is already gleaming!

Not that I’ve got all of Job sorted out! There’s much in scripture beyond my feeble mind. But what I’m gaining is so helpful I hope to pass at least some of it on in future posts.

Meanwhile, I need more time drawn aside from blogging. (I’m still doing what Oswald Chambers said.) In this lull, you might like to visit Denise Hughes’s mini-series on Job here, or join in on the chronological Bible read-through she and a group of others are doing (details here).

The main lesson I’ve learned about hard questions is this: Don’t be afraid to ask them—because… 1) That’s only being honest to God. 2) How can we expect answers if we don’t ask for them? 3) In the process of waiting and watching, we gain more than answers: We grow in the strength of looking to God, experiencing more fully His words, and His ways, and eventually, His presence. 

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Then there are the times when no black print stands out against white page, shouting your answer,  when in the gray place you can’t “sense in your bones” any explanation, or even a clue about which way to go.

The seeming eons of not knowing stretch out bleak. The situation swirls with no solution. Questions, questions, questions get no answers. Life’s sky only darkens.

I finally get back to it, to reading right through, all together, the whole of that uncomfortable book of Job.

Yes, it’s full of wisdom and truth,  but the wisdom is mostly painful and the truth-telling mostly cruel, much of it composed by false friends who hang around to blame and argue, rather than to hold a trembling hand.

One thing about the book that gets me is its dragged out length! You think you should by now have reached the turning point and the conclusion, and behold! So many chapters  still lie ahead! Then the misery and the badgering, like punches on bruises, only grow more vindictive as the account proceeds.

And isn’t that the way of it, more often than not, when you can’t find answers in your own life?

Since I’ve read Job before, in erratic bits and pieces, I know ahead of time that Elihu will finally put in his two cents, which have more balanced wisdom than the others’, and God will finally put an end to the abuse.

Yet…

Unanswered questions still remain.

But I’m not talking about Job now. I’m talking about my own life. And alas, I am no Job. I don’t have his patience, in and of myself. I can reach the end of my rope while I still have health and home and family… when just one dark, unanswered issue jabs, jabs, jabs at me like a burr in my shirt, under my winter coat.

What do I do at times like these?

I ask myself this question, ask God this question, and then just happen to pick up the old copy of Oswald Chambers’ My Utmost for His Highest lying on the table before me. Just curious to see what his entry for this date might be, I read:

“‘What I Tell You in Darkness, that speak ye in the light…’ (Mt 10:27)

“At times God puts us through the discipline of darkness to teach us to heed Him…

“Watch where God puts you into darkness, and when you are there, keep your mouth shut… If you open your mouth in the dark, you will talk in the wrong mood. If you talk to other people, you can’t hear what God is saying. When you are in the dark, listen, and God will give you a very precious message for someone else when you get into the light…”

-Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest,  Feb 14 , “The Discipline of Heeding”

So. More practice of silence. And listening.

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How could he know?

“I feel it in my bones,” he said yesterday. “Tonight will be our coldest night.”

And just look at this!

We never  had a reading like this. And no, the thermometer’s not broken—although on first glance I thought it must be!

He’d heard no weather forecast. He “just sensed it.” And he didn’t mean “in his bones” literally; no arthritis gives him pain clues. Yet this man often forecasts better, by his “sensing,” than the hard-figuring, high-tech weathermen.

Why?

Because he’s very present in the weather here, in this little odd pocket, day after day. You could say he abides in it, he’s intimate with it.

He’s like the fishing boat captain who always awed my dad by how he knew exactly how to get to port from a spot way out there in that ocean, under full cloud cover with no clues in the waters my dad could discern. That man could sense the right direction from having spent so much time abiding in those waters, growing intimate with them.

Which brings me to spiritual discernment.

Sometimes choices confront me where no clear black-and-white anywhere in scripture defines “this” as right and “that” as wrong. Sometimes it’s not even a gray area, but just a desire for God’s best preference.

I know, lots of believers don’t bother about this, figuring whatever we choose beyond black-and-white is okay. Maybe it is “okay,” but I’ve wasted too much earth time meandering around the land of “okay”—and have learned not to trust my own heart (Jer 17:9 ). Besides, “okay” equates with mediocrity. My King deserves more.

So, at times like these, I’d like my directions blazed across the sky, or shown by some unquestionable arrow sign popping up to indicate which “y” to take up ahead (or a stop sign halting me right where I am).

But God doesn’t do such things often. And even when He does, uncertainty still can plague the seeker’s heart. I think of Gideon. Of Moses…

Yet this I’ve noticed in this year of AWARE: Drawing close to His presence, coming aside from all else, helps me immeasurably to sense more clearly what will please Him best.

It’s like the way you get to know your spouse’s or best friend’s preferences from having gotten so close in their life and intimate with their heart. Or, like the man often “abiding” out in the local weather’s “presence” subconsciously “reading” its little nuances you or I would never notice.

As he “just knew” sometimes with the weather, I realize sometimes I’ve “just known” with the Lord—when I had been abiding, when I’d been looking to Him alone, having come aside from all the earthy clues.

In fact, in choosing between two options, I’ve often found that when I was much “in the world,” and listening to its mindset, I inclined toward one option, yet while settled quiet with God, His word in my lap or just His Spirit around me, my mind and heart all-focused on Him, settled in Him, the other option left me peaceful as I inclined toward it!

Yes, I must know His printed word and search it for particulars, but I need as much to know Him, His “heart,” to best discern what option moves in sync with Him. To do that I must spend both quantity and quality time very present with Him. Then I can (sometimes at least) sense it “in my bones.”

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Very Useful Appendix

How George Mueller Determined God’s Will in Any Matter

 1. I seek to get my heart into such a state that it has no will of its own in a given matter. When we are ready to do the Lord’s will—whatever it may be—nine-tenths of the difficulties are overcome.

 2. Having done this, I do not leave the result to feeling or simple impression. If I do so, I make myself liable to great delusions.

 3. I seek the will of the Spirit of God through, or in connection with, God’s Word. The Spirit and the Word must be combined. If I look to the Spirit alone without the Word, I lay myself open to great delusions also. If the Holy Spirit guides us, He will do it according to the Scriptures, never contrary to them.

 4. Next I take into account providential circumstances. These often plainly indicate God’s will in connection with His Word and Spirit.

 5. I ask God in prayer to reveal His will to me.

 6. Thus, through prayer, the study of the Word and reflection, I come to a deliberate judgment according to the best of my ability and knowledge. If my mind is thus at peace and continues so after two or three more petitions, I proceed accordingly. I have found this method always effective in trivial or important issues.

-From his authorized biography

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When you get repeatedly snowbound and sub-zero discouraged from travel, you start doing funny things. Like looking at tracks in the white stuff. And photographing them. And letting your mind follow them along, pondering… 

Which set of tracks above would you say best represents your movement through life? (Take a moment to consider.)

Some people’s track record lies pressed hard forward with heavy purpose, and stands firm.

These folks. get. things. done. And they seem to know just what they’re doing. Decided, definite, determined.

Others travel along traditional lines, or in the general trending of their time, each in her own slightly different course, not necessarily in anyone else’s exact footsteps,  but

still pretty much in parallel with the rest of the herd.

Others cross the life tracks of others, and only briefly, going their own way.

Then there’s this:

When I saw that track and snapped the photo, I laughed. I thought it might well represent my own oft-confused and convoluted pilgrimage.

And yet…

Which would represent repentance?

Yesterday, around here, we talked about repentance: what it is exactly, who says to do it.

Strongly emphasized was turning: turning from, and turning to. Turning from error,  turning to God.

One scripture person who said to do it was John the baptizer (Mt 3:1-2). He prepared a path for the coming Lord and instructed others how to do the same: by “Repent!”ence.

And when He, the Lord, came, what did He preach? “Repent! For the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Mt 4:17).

Is repentance just a one-time deal, done and done, for good and all? Or do we need to make periodic course corrections, even 180 turn-arounds when we’ve steered way off course? Another definition for repent is “return,” says Strong’s Expanded Dictionary, citing the Prodigal Son as clear example.

At this point yesterday, I remembered Sallie Edwards Turoczi of Trans World Radio speaking of repentance at a women’s retreat, as both the necessary base of a Christian life’s figurative pyramid, and the mortar it needs for all its upward steps to hold together and cling fast to the base.

That made sense to me, for I knew that even with the best intentions I sometimes wander off-course and need drastic course correction—even though it will look like that last track above:

Ridiculous. Laughable.

I also remembered a fellow blogger’s  long-past post in which she told how a view in her rearview mirror reminded her of repentance, and prompted her to make some kind of light-hearted sign, saying “Repent,” which she placed somewhere on her church premises, I think in the building’s basement (though I can’t find that post to verify this). Anyway, wherever she placed it, it drew sour and heated responses! (Maybe the blog post did too, and so she repented writing it? I’ll keep her anonymous, in case.)

However, why would church people, presumably Christians, get so upset about this word?

Methinks it’s because we don’t like to admit error, misstepping. It’s embarrassing. And so is the track record left by such drastic course-changing.

Nevertheless, I read of Paul telling the Christians in Corinth and Galatia to do some repenting, to return to the right way of going, and Christ Himself, through John the Apostle, calling nearly all the seven churches of Revelation to some kind of repentance (Rev 2:5,16,21-22;3:3,19).

So… what if it does leave a silly-looking track record behind? After my snowbound path pondering, I don’t feel as bad about mine.

How about you? Is repentance hard? Embarrassing?

Happy tracking anyway, this winter-wonderful day!

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You might also enjoy reading this related post

Wrong Way!

(Talk about embarrassing!)

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