The Sylvr Pen

“But now ask the beasts, and they will teach you.” –Job 12:7 (Part Two)

It’s true what Spurgeon’s devo said a few days ago: Any good that happens in or through me, it’s God Who does it. The mess-ups, I admit it: they’re mine, not His.

So I need to be like Dog (last post), bonded and yielded, spirit-through, to my Master, sensing His wishes, meshing my soul with them, in complete unity with Him. Moved to do His desires.

But I keep thinking, “God, what DO you want me to DO?”

I can’t conceive/ receive/ believe that all He wants me to DO is only activity that mainly supplies and benefits myself and one other person. Yet that’s about all most of my exertion around here orbits right now. And I am simply not getting any other WORKing orders from Him—either because something in myself is blocking my hearing, or because He is simply not giving any.

I was once so BUSY. (Admittedly, too busy, but…) Now I feel laid off, side-lined, or—now that time is stretching out long—permanently fired? tossed out spiritually? dumped in the Kingdom trash can? It seems as if He doesn’t want me WORKing for Him.

He has left me such abundance—of tools, materials, abilities, and bodily health, even eyesight restored in fairly good measure—and now I also have time. But for what? Because here I wait, after waiting long, waiting still.

But not still. My mind whirls about…

My thoughts shift…

All over its pages, the Bible portrays God’s people as sheep, rather than dogs…

What can a sheep DO for her Master, her Shepherd? What could our sheep DO for us when we had them?

Nothing really! As wool sheep they produced wool, but that wasn’t WORK. It was just BEING a sheep, whose very sheepness produces wool. They could DO nothing to make their wool better, except just graze the good pasture their overseer provided. They could make it worse, by running off, presumptuous or rebellious, returning later through brambles and burrs! But that’s just as Spurgeon says…

Any good thing a sheep produces is nothing for her to brag about, “Baaaaa.”

So what if it isn’t DOing but BEing my Lord wants? What if He, the Good Shepherd, just wants me to BE His sheep?  If so, how does this WORK? 

Dogs CAN DO things for their masters: fetch a newspaper, round up sheep, guard the house, lead one who’s blind. And I must say their tasks appeal to me more than a sheep’s non-tasks. Yet the Bible tells me I’m not a dog, but a sheep.

Yet even Dog, who appeared here that day, what endeared him to me? The JOBS he did? No. I never tried, once, to get him to guard, or fetch a paper or a shot duck—even though he was a retriever. (I don’t shoot ducks, anyhow, just like to watch them quack on the pond…)  It was because of the way he more than obeyed, how he yielded, meshed with my mind, incredibly!

It was the evident bonding, meshing with me that did it. In his short time here he made himself mine.

As last post said, that was Dog’s lesson to me, not DOing busy-tricks.

It’s the sheep’s lesson, too: Just BE His, not running off, only to return all confused and covered with burrs and dirt.  Just BE His true and loyal sheep, and let how He made me  produce what it will, in His time.

“No longer do I call you servants… but I have called you friends, for all things that I heard from My Father I have made known to you.” -Jhn 15:15 

…

“But now ask the beasts, and they will teach you.” -Job 12:7

He spied it trotting down the road, approaching our drive—black dog, red collar— saw it reach our drive and trot right up it without a pause, as if aimed here all along.

I noticed it from the upstairs window looking out on that drive. Silly me, I tapped on the window, pushed down its sash, and (incredibly) said, “Hi!” It stopped short, looked up, and wagged and wagged its tail.

Just like that, to a dog. What made me do that?

Well, the neighbors had a black dog, were away for two weeks, and my eyes weren’t working too well then… But I think I knew it was a different dog…

I went down to it. I know: Not recommended in hot August, stray dog. And, turned out, he had no tag.

Friendly he was. A gentleman dog. Welcomed a petting and a hand holding his collar, panted a dog smile, looking up to me all the while like he’d known me all his young life. Sat just like that, snap, when I quietly said, “Sit.”

I guessed he belonged at one of those houses back in the direction from which he’d come. I’d seen a black Lab with red collar like this… But why was he so skinny?

We gave him water, a handful of cat food. He gobbled greedily, poor ribs sticking out. Then Husband got the truck, and I helped now-leashed Mr. Dog up past the high running board and into the cab with a rear end push. He balked at sitting in the seat, maybe trained not to, curled on the floor. They took off, to look for his owner.

I waited. Time passed. What was taking so long?

At last the truck returned, turned—dog still inside, now happy on the front seat.

They’d visited seven houses, directed from one to the other. Everyone loved him, none owned him.

So there we were.

He was too nice to turn in to the warden, and maybe end up dead.  He sat,  he heeled, he jumped for joy, but not on us. We’d have to report we’d “found” him (though he found us). We’d have to look hard for his owner. Secretly I started hoping…

Leaning sideways toward him as he sat beside me, I murmured, “Could you be a seeing eye?” I thought he could.

Yes, Dog came trotting up that drive that day, and right into my heart. I never thought I’d lose my heart to a stray dog, but I did. In less than an hour—and lost it more in all the moments with him thereafter.

It was more than his pleasant personality, more than his good behavior. Exceptionally well-trained he was, but it was more than that.

We bonded, Dog and I. That was the thing. If I walked brisk, he trotted brisk, happy pink tongue hanging sideways out. If I slowed, so did he. If I stopped by a field just to stand and gaze he stopped right by me and gazed out, too. It was as if his canine heart drank in the invisible intentions of my human one and walked them out or stood them out or sat them out or lay down still if that was my desire.

That was Dog’s lesson to me. I do well to really learn it!

Bond with the Master. Mesh with His Spirit. Walk with Him, stop with Him, treasure what He treasures. BE HIS.

There I saw Obedience in its shining trueness.

I miss Dog and his trueness. We had to part, but he remains with me in the lesson he left: of how my relating with my tenderhearted Master is meant to flow and grow, so bonded.  About the obedience my Master wants: not slavish doing of dismal duty, but loving, trusting oneness with His spirit.

 *****

Why? Why should this come crashing down on me so hard this time? It’s but a straw!

And such a pile lies rotting, hard upon the center of my life.

What they say about the broken back, though, seems come true. So much worse has dropped before, yet now I lie, suddenly immobile under weight accumulation, crushed where life flows through the backbone of my existence. I am left numb, immobile but for the inward squirming of my trapped soul, flailing about.

It hungers, that soul, famished, for something lasting left by life. Craves, after long existence spent with intention, yet somehow still misspent—to find one gift of permanence, to offer back to its incomprehensible, true-through-all Lover.

It finds but empty hollow rotting straws.

…

Sometimes He makes us empty so we will seek what He has to fill us.

Sometimes He lets us writhe with the question so we’ll strain for the answer, grip hard when we find it.

Sometimes He will bring our life to nothing so on its carte blanche the message He paints gets all our focus, to see unhindered the beauty-truth and hear the prescript purpose…

I see a tree once promising magnificence, now but a stump, cut off dead. Then from one ring, just one, one sprout grows a sapling of life. And it leafs! And it fruits!

It is a painting, but speaks like a vision.

It rings!

And this soul, it quiets beneath the rubble. Which suddenly seems lighter.  It ponders.

I think I feel a sprout…

Saplings grow in surprising places, cut right through rock, push out and up with strength uncanny, toward air and heaven and light. The pile of straw, could it be but compost, making humus to feed… growth? And good fruit?

I just read the word humility comes from the same root as humus. Low down ground.  From humus-low humility comes God growth. And leaves that don’t wither. And fruit without fade.

And here is hope.

[Yes, the photo shows a sproutling maple, and maples seem to have no fruit. But maple, it has fruit within itself, the sweet gold liquid that becomes sweetest syrup.]

Thanks to Shelly Miller at Redemption’s Beauty for her Surrendering to Sabbath post this week and its many valuable links, especially (for me right now) the one to Laura Boggess’s post at the Wellspring, thanks also to Laura for her words and the Scott Erickson video—all of which God used together to inspire this post, and this hope!

*****

Dawdling, Dad would have called it. The times we shared over soapsuds, Mom and I.

But no. It was tarrying together. An important thing to do. 

…

As I came to the end of the five-minute write about what made my mother mine, it flashed into my head (and oh, the wonder of it!): that it’s the same with my Love, my Lord. This is how I know I belong to Him, and that He is mine!

I share with Him what I share with no one else, and He can understand as no one else can.

He lets me know this. He tells me His heart, through the words of His love, his Letter, through repeating uncanny coincidences, and He presses the sense of it deep into my own heart…

This, I come to realize, is probably why so many have loved “In the Garden”…

They understand “…as we tarry there…”

“As we tarry.”

It was in the tarrying that we, Mom and I, saw each of ourselves as belonging to the other, ties of confidences binding soft, warm, and safe.

It is in the tarrying that I rediscover I am His, bound to His heart, dearly loved and safeguarded, and that He is mine.

May you find the precious time, friend, to tarry with the Lover of your soul today.

*****

Linked to

It’s different today at Five Minute Friday.

 Lisa Jo doesn’t give the usual one-word prompt. This week she asks a question instead:

“Where is your memory buried?

In just five minutes. Tell what your mama did that made her yours.”

…

So… go!

She told me her heart. Between the soapsuds and the soppy towel strokes and the songs we harmonized by the kitchen sink. Dad would look around the kitchen door and say he could have had those dishes done in half the time we’d already taken, and that showed he plain didn’t understand. To us this wasn’t washing dishes time, it was sharing life and love and heartache and laughter and secrets and fears and trials.

She told me more, I think, than anybody else. When we reminisce, my brothers and I, they listen rapt when I tell what she told and they never knew. I’m  not revealing things she would not have wanted known, only acquainting them with the heart that beat beneath the flour-dusted apron.

That’s what made me know she was mine. She shared her secrets with me. The hidden hurts that sometimes I didn’t even want to know, the tales of long before.

We did crazy things, singing those songs, dancing Russian Cossack kick-in-a squat dances, laughing silly.

Those things made her mine and only mine, because they were things neither of us did with anybody else. Mine then, and still mine now, while I mine the memories…

Stop!

How about you? How would you answer that question?

*****

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